friendships release new audiovisual album FISHTANK
PRAISE FOR FISHTANK
"A reverberating opus that might be one of the year’s most remarkable releases" - Weirdo Wasteland
"FISHTANK’ is an ambitious exploration of embodied identity, self and rebirth; its individual elements respond to and wrap around each other, ultimately coalescing in this genuinely experimental project." - NME
"Bold, intellectual, and daring to go where most artists would never, friendships have well and truly found their own lane." - FBi Radio
"Offer a compelling and deeply weird vision of collaborative alignments and heavily glitched world-building." - Tome To The Weather Machine
'happyness' premiered by FBi Radio
'smokers area 19' premiered by PBS Radio
'MLG_recovery patch' premiered by RRR Radio
'was I good' premiered by RTR Radio
Experimental audiovisual duo friendships have today released their full project FISHTANK via Dot Dash Recordings / Remote Control. The record will be released physically on USB via Anterograde. Each song from the eleven track album features a corresponding video.
Nic Brown describes the concept behind the project: "FISHTANK is a concept set on a non-linear timeline between the blurring of two worlds. The physical present (your world) and an alternative present reimagined and interpreted in fantasy known as FISHTANK. The narrative follows the descent of an individual through loss of self. A cold decline of skin shedding, emptiness and despair to come full circle at rebirth. Each track and video is a movement or scene cataloging each movement on the descent." friendships' combines Misha Grace’s visual art and Nic Brown’s songwriting in their respective mediums. Their 2016 debut album Nullarbor 1988-1989 was named Album of the Week on Triple R, PBS, RTR, and FBi, winning Best Independent Dance/Electronica Album at the 2017 AIR Awards, leading to tours with Erykah Badu, Thundercat, a boundless festival run including SXSW, CMJ, Meredith Music Festival, Melbourne Music Week and a tour of China. But ultimately, things didn’t last.
After a show at the end of 2017, they quietly went their own ways. Having spent the previous few years talking every day, they’d suddenly gone eight months without talking at all.
They came back together by chance at a mutual friend’s house. Suddenly they were talking again, telling each other about what they’d been working on for the past eight months. Where in the past they might’ve created for each other, to complement the other’s work, their time in isolation had them seeking catharsis only for themselves. And yet when Grace showed Brown a video she’d composed, he put a track he’d written underneath it. They complemented each other perfectly.
Charting the descent into what it’s like to lose one’s self, each track invokes a different aspect drawing the listener through a journey of loss, confusion, and doubt. The actual process both mirrored and contradicted that theme: although Grace and Brown were working through it together again, they were more cut off from the broader community than ever. Nullarbor was conceived over years of performing, intertwining themselves with local and international influences and scenes. Rarely performing, FISHTANK developed over countless late nights talking, playing with each other’s ideas and pushing each other into new territory. Where Nullarbor was a coming together of their respective halves of the audio-visual dichotomy, now they were feeding into each other.
One example is ‘take no prisoners’, Grace’s first time appearing vocally on a friendships record, to describe the experience of inducing her own epileptic seizure. Frustrated by the lack of progress in figuring out how to treat her epilepsy, the rarest form of it in the world, a hospitalised Grace used YouTube videos to induce a seizure to give the researchers something to work with. The resulting track has Grace whispering through a grim dream as she recalls an angel of death reaching out to her during the hallucination of the seizure, offering her a choice to go with her or return to life.
With structural and thematic elements that loop back and in on each other, sounds and visuals that play off and with each other, FISHTANK is an ambitious project. It asks as much from the audience as it has to give, a bold step for the newly reaffirmed friendships.
Purchase / Stream: https://friendships.lnk.to/FISHTANK
friendships - FISHTANK is out now
via Dot Dash / Remote Control & Anterograde
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