- Over the years I’ve become a bit suspicious of the music industry. All that money that pools up at the big end of town, grabbed in fistfuls by the major labels - how much of that gets back to the little people, the struggling artists? Well I reckon, not much. Just the other day I was surprised to learn that someone -who I wouldn’t have suspected- felt the same way; that person was Sia.

Crazy right? Well she feels strongly enough to have joined up with the mysterious ‘collective’ TorniquetX on its rip-roaring political diatribe of a debut album, Global Intimacy. There’s actually all sorts of reasonably well-known people involved in the project: Daniel Merriweather, Sirah (of Skrillex), Cormega, Kool A.D., Gabriel Winterfield (of Jagwar Ma), to name a few. The full list is about three times what you’ve heard already. Name dropping is all well and good, but what have these folks got themselves involved in?

It’s a plot that appears to have been dreamed up by one Barney McAll. A Melbournite jazz musician, McAll has previously lived in New York, also managed Sia, been a touring member in the bands of a Grammy-Awards-ceremony’s-worth of famous people, played on the records of even more, put out fourteen solo releases and when he wasn’t doing that he was playing the church organ for Baptists, apparently. Like I said, spending a long time in the industry can make anyone a little jaded, but McAll’s response to it is most unusual indeed.

Global Intimacy is more-or-less a top-forty pop / hip hop record, that can be as sugary as any of Sia’s more recent confections, but the lyrics are, one-hundred-percent, the densest diatribe against the evils of the corporate music industry, technology, fascism, capitalism and more. It’s an epic undertaking: seventeen cuts, each studded with guest-spots and brimming with invective, delivered in the form of sweet, sweet pop.

I don’t mean to be mean when I say that I reckon this is mad. A passion project of such great ambition it’s impossible to see how it could achieve its goals. What are those goals? Broadly, to deliver an immense sneak attack: get everyone who likes chart music grooving like crazy, but secretly dose them up with subversive politics.

Even without establishing a broad political movement, just achieving the record part of McAll’s project is a pretty impressive thing. The reality of it has been something I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since I discovered its existence, about a week ago. What is the audience for Global Intimacy, really? I don’t think it’s pop fans and I don’t think it’s system smashing anarchists; rather I think it’s the vanishingly small subset of people who are both. It makes me sad, but also kinda giddy: this great, ironic, glorious gesture.

I have this intuition that the songs on Global Intimacy are how Barney McAll has been blowing off steam for the last five years: every time the industry just seemed too poisonous to be a part of, he’d throw himself back in and write another chapter of his magnum opus. It’s almost like a compulsion for him and I hope, whether it is embraced, or more likely isn’t, I hope that he doesn’t give up. I further hope that he makes more records like this. It’s a bit selfish of me really, but it gives me an immensely good feeling that there’s someone in the world, doing this.

- Chris Cobcroft.