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(Ais; US: 26 May 2009; UK: 6 May 2009)

Martin Kennedy, an Australian musician, is not widely known, though he’s been steadily working behind the scenes – soundtracking local TV shows and working here and there with Steve Kilbey (of the Church) and Graham Lee (of the Triffids). All India Radio is intended to be his “experimental” project, though over the course of the band’s five albums since 2000 its experimentalism has taken more the form of downbeat instrumentals, whose electronic wizadry is hidden in the form’s slow-evolving, big-sky atmospherics. It’s music out of time and seems architecturally constructed to retrieve memory. “Lucky” is like this, landing on a note just to have it refract into echoes. The woozy guitars and echoing drums of this music all run together after a while. Occasionally, the hypnotic vision is crystallised—as on “White Satin”, a standout track built off a plaintive trumpet riff. But much of the rest of the time, attractive and evocative though the music is, A Low High drags, ever so slightly.

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Dan Raper has been writing about music for PopMatters since 2005. Prior to that he did the same thing for his college newspaper and for his school newspaper before that. Of course he also writes fiction, though his only published work is entitled "Gamma-secretase exists on the plasma membrane as an intact complex that accepts substrates and effects intramembrane cleavage". He is currently studying medicine at the University of Sydney, Australia.


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All India Radio - "Solstice"
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