To mark the release of Lost Frequencies, we've stocked a couple of classic Primitive Motion LPs. Between 2014-2018, Primitive Motion released their defining trio of albums on Bedroom Suck. House in the Wave was the final instalment, a drifting work of piano-based reverie:
Anwen Crawford, The Monthly - Primitive Motion, a duo from Brisbane, have a damp, dissolving sound. Their songs are evocative of paper left out in the rain, or the shells of abandoned buildings – things once intact now left to sprout holes. Sandra Selig and Leighton Craig favour informal recording set-ups; House in the Wave, their newest album, was recorded piecemeal over a period of almost two years, at Selig’s home studio. Bird call, along with tape hiss, leaks into several tracks, so that the songs also become impressions of the environment in which they were made. The music is mostly improvised, with some overdubs.
...Selig, who does most of the singing, has a glassy voice well suited to the music’s liquified and occasionally scintillant feel; the piano, especially, adds sparkle. “Small blue flower,” she and Craig sing on “S.B.F.”, from the new album, alongside a descending, four-note piano melody. The tempo of the singing is slow enough to smear the words into a kind of paint. One thinks of errant wildflowers by the roadside, or a fallen petal in the garden, or other fleeting, incidental encounters with a material world that we may apprehend but not fully comprehend. Such a world might best be depicted in impressionistic ways.
Vaporous, environmental music goes some way to describing the effect and purpose of Primitive Motion. But they also retain a connection to the pop song as a distinct form. Their music oscillates generatively between a thing that recedes into an undifferentiated background and things – songs – that claim one’s attention as discrete compositions. Selig, also a practising visual artist who makes site-specific installations, has described her interest in the “formlessness of form”. That seeming paradox, which points to the ways in which shapes change through our perception of them, serves as an excellent description for Primitive Motion, too.
Bedroom Suck Records, 2018