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Premiere: 'You Care I Know' / Matthew Hayes & Charlie Perry (feat. Aarti Jadu)

Matthew Hayes & Charlie Perry’s “You Care I Know (feat. Aarti Jadu)” is a hatching chrysalis unearthing a butterfly with wings of ambient bass guitar and soft spoken word

Set for release on November 20th, Matthew Hayes and Charlie Perry’s 7-track LP Barricade will be the third instalment of Bedroom Suck’s Private Eyes series. Ahead of the release, we have an exclusive premiere of “You Care I Know” featuring Aarti Jadu’s mesmerising spoken word poetry. This track is a droplet in the ocean of the entire record, which is a soothing alloy of ambient electronica, reflective spoken word and oozing bass guitar.

Listen to “You Care I Know” below and pre-order here

“You Care I Know” opens with mellifluously floating bass guitar licks, reverberating vocal choruses and the background chatter of conversations and laughter. The atmosphere is pungent with calmness and serenity and listening to the track feels more like an exercise in deep reflection than a dance-inducing number, like the pair have created in other projects.

It feels like a blessing to hear Aarti’s spoken word whisper throughout the track like a swelling heartbeat. Her words are ripe with olfactory imagery that hints at rot and deterioration before embracing the capacity for regrowth and renewal. As she comments “together both vitality and decay too precious…”

The electronic synth pads and harmonic movements led by bass guitar support her meditations while breathing a certain life into the track which filters it through the lens of regenerative hope.

Image captured by Adele Streete

Image captured by Adele Streete

Matthew Hayes’ bass guitar and production is intricate and transportive, enveloped by ambient sonic artefacts and feeding into a dialogue with the spoken word. While best known as a jazz bassist in projects including the 30/70 Collective, JK Group and Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange, he is no stranger to the craft of ambient productions. He has released several ambient pieces, most recently being the mellow house cross spiritual jazz record released on Black Wattle Two Steps Forward.

For Matt it seems that ambient production is a kind of rebellion to his habitual saturation in nu-jazz spheres. Keenly, he comments:

“creating ambient and freeform music is a reaction to the highly rhythmic music I spend most of my time playing”

Image captured by William Hamilton-Coates

Image captured by William Hamilton-Coates

Of course, Barricade is completed with the collaboration with spoken word artist and musician Charlie Perry, whose words float throughout the record like a grounding motif of connection. His words explore the potential for hope in the times of ecological crisis, where he aspires to understand how to create the necessary space for indigenous ideologies and thoughts in such times.

While producing the LP Matt happened to be in southern France while Charlie resided on the southern coastline of so-called Australia. This cross-continent collaboration between the duo imbued both of the artists’ respective individual sentiments and reflections on the pandemic into the record, injecting it with a solemn warmth and maturity. Clearly, their take on the last year has been one of deep introspection, contemplation and hopefulness towards a future coloured with consideration and compassion. Matt comments on the collaboration:

I think that the feelings and emotions slowly emerged out of the process of collaboration. Feelings of introspection, vulnerability, positivity - and hope!

Barricade is out everywhere via Bedroom Suck on November 20th.

Image captured by Anna Dun

Image captured by Anna Dun

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Article by Margarita Bassova (@rxtabass)


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Here in ‘Australia’,  Indigenous people are the most incarcerated population on Earth. Countless lives have been murdered by white police, white government policies and this country’s white history, institutionalised colonialism and ongoing racial oppression. Racial injustice continues today under the phoney, self-congratulatory politics of ‘Reconciliation’ and the notion that colonialism is something that must be denied and forgotten, an uncomfortable artefact of the past.

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