Ecotone

Cream vinyl.

Jonnine Standish of HTRK returns with a gorgeous fourth solo album, a psychedelic conjuring of a childhood summer spent by the sea. Threading field recordings through impromptu songs captured on a portable 6 track, the album plays like a series of scent memories that flip the mood in a heartbeat – quite impossible not to fall under their spell.

Jonnine has soundtracked our lives for 15 years at this point, her songs – solo and for HTRK – some of the most evocative in recent memory. HTRK’s last album ’Rhinestones’ revelled in a bare-boned aesthetic, and – in turn – ‘Southside Girl’ finds Jonnine fully exposed in her thing, nothing much to hide behind: no tricks, just pure feeling. Insects and bonfire sparks draw us in on ‘December 32nd’, as Jonnine considers the “lethargic limbo” of Boxing Day to New Year’s Eve, deep in the Australian summer. Over in moments, it draws a faint outline around the album as she winds around clock chimes – nagging themes of time passing, ushering us into the mystical ‘Spring’s Deceit’. It’s a callback to ‘Maritz’, Jonnine’s last album, where she used a broken metronome for percussion. Here, that lopsided tick intensifies into a volatile ensemble that’s lulled by Standish’s choral incantations. A schoolyard bell, nightingale wails, splitting out the pomp, operating to a dream logic with an orchestra of household objects.

‘Ornament’ is reduced to light powder; Standish sings over Maria Moles’ hollow, rickety drums, shrill birds pierce the room. “I tell you, I’m magic,” she murmurs. The framework is mirrored on the title track and ‘Sea Stuff’, memories evaporating into the tight, untreated recording space. In fact, the album’s most spellbinding moments are even more unbound from reality: Standish plays recorder into the wind on the fairytale ‘Wrong Instinct’, abstracted into billowing gusts.

On the closing track ‘The Bells Chime’, we fall into a pealing echo before waking up, anxiously trying to remember if we’re weeping for sorrow, or for joy.