- Being at the front of Sydney’s indie-pop scene circa 2009, Jonathan Boulet, hasn’t stopped moving. Releasing a number of equally lengthy and eclectic bodies of work since that sound played itself out, Boulet’s exploration and experimentation has now wormed its way into yet another project, Party Dozen: a tastefully rambunctious duo of texture, groove and loose improvisation.

Teaming up with fellow multi-instrumentalist Kirsty Tickle, Party Dozen’s album The Living Man takes the most potent cues from the free jazz of the '60s, the heavy experimentalism of Mike Patton and the modern culture smashing of Death Grips to form a sound that is wild, weird and intoxicating.

Opener Food Play sets the tone for the album: dense and distorted, dissonant and distended. The pre-programmed parts work as an anchor for Boulet and Tickle to feed off of and interact with each other in what can become disorienting improvisations. This balance of set pieces and moments of free form expression prevails throughout.

It’s not some edgy, noise-ridden attempt to intimidate normies, though. The duo display a post-hardcore sensibility, offering sonic reprieves with tracks Information Age and Attention Age creating pensive spaces fit for sonder and dust watching.

There is an old Jazz adage which posits that you can play out until you can play in - meaning that in order for a musician to make an abstract beauty they must first know how to make a conventional beauty. Numbers like the bewildering title track which sounds like they’ve fed an M.C. Escher illustration through a prepared pianola up against the bruised funk of Puss show that the duo are not only very mature musicians but that this album is actually a very considered and tastefully artistic endeavour.

- NJR.