Paradise Daily
ELA STILES - Molten Metal LP
$28.95
Highly recommended by Strangeworld.
"Stylistic confusion might as well be Ela Stiles’ calling card and all of this may be even stranger if you have a passing acquaintance with her previous releases. Although still a member of Sydney art-rockers Bushwalking she's been making her own stuff for quite a while and her first solo record, on the redoubtable Bedroom Suck Records, mainlined acapella vocal harmonies that split stylistically between a handful of folky fragments and ten minute drones.
A move to the uncompromising Paradise Daily resulted in a two track EP, Preparation, in 2015, which was sort of similar, but even more lo-fi: a folk-revival fragment, quickly lost in darkness. Two more tracks under the title Black Metal in 2016 weren’t half as fragmentary, each checking in at a hefty ten minutes and more like two halves of a single, twenty minutes of drone, if a quite melodious one, bookended by more lo-fi folk revival sounds. It’s funny that the more lo-fi you make that stuff, the more it sounds like some terrifying field recording of the theme song from The Wicker Man.
You can hear many of the sounds that create Molten Metal coming together across the length of Ela Stiles back-catalogue, including the expansive title-track, which is a reworking of one of those ten minute behemoths to include a beat, a huge amount of texture, timbre and a tuning-up of that folky outro to sound positively hifi. Nothing about Stiles’ previous output could lead you to expect the volume and diversity of what’s on offer here. It’s like she’s finally -after all these years- arrived, delivering her first truly substantial, solo release." - Chris Cobcroft, 4ZZZ
"Stylistic confusion might as well be Ela Stiles’ calling card and all of this may be even stranger if you have a passing acquaintance with her previous releases. Although still a member of Sydney art-rockers Bushwalking she's been making her own stuff for quite a while and her first solo record, on the redoubtable Bedroom Suck Records, mainlined acapella vocal harmonies that split stylistically between a handful of folky fragments and ten minute drones.
A move to the uncompromising Paradise Daily resulted in a two track EP, Preparation, in 2015, which was sort of similar, but even more lo-fi: a folk-revival fragment, quickly lost in darkness. Two more tracks under the title Black Metal in 2016 weren’t half as fragmentary, each checking in at a hefty ten minutes and more like two halves of a single, twenty minutes of drone, if a quite melodious one, bookended by more lo-fi folk revival sounds. It’s funny that the more lo-fi you make that stuff, the more it sounds like some terrifying field recording of the theme song from The Wicker Man.
You can hear many of the sounds that create Molten Metal coming together across the length of Ela Stiles back-catalogue, including the expansive title-track, which is a reworking of one of those ten minute behemoths to include a beat, a huge amount of texture, timbre and a tuning-up of that folky outro to sound positively hifi. Nothing about Stiles’ previous output could lead you to expect the volume and diversity of what’s on offer here. It’s like she’s finally -after all these years- arrived, delivering her first truly substantial, solo release." - Chris Cobcroft, 4ZZZ
