- When you get into the extremes of drone and dark ambient music, experimental is almost the wrong word to describe it. If a crushing wall of distortion is slowly pulverising your head it can all start to sound …a bit the same. Maybe it’s hard to tell with the blood that’s running out your ears. At any rate, you can never accuse NavelGaze of being dull or uniform. The Meanjin / Brisbane artist works from a most unforgiving palette of clamorous sounds, crashing, glacial in their qualities. There are, however, so many of them and she does just a little bit more with what she’s got than most purveyors of noise. That’s why, from the first moments I heard her new record who/am/i, I wanted to know some more about it.

Actually, I really do know slightly less than I would like. NavelGaze is a private person, to the point where she won’t even tell you who she is beyond her stage persona; definitely someone who’d preferlet the decibels be the topic of discussion rather than anything else. She’s been quietly working away -figuratively speaking- releasing little EPs stuffed with shards from the jagged end of music, since at least 2016. I’ve seen a blurry video of her stage setup, which included guitar, a drum-kit and a variety of synthesiser equipment, all of which get tossed into the torrent of sound at some point. That’s a lot of gear for a one-woman-band and it begins to explain some of the diversity you’ll hear in her recorded work.

So she’s got the gear to make it happen, but it’s the willingness to work in a variety of genres which really sets NavelGaze apart. This was adroitly demonstrated by the first ‘single’ from her latest release. Abandonment Girl is enormous, but it hardly outstays its welcome, feeling more like five minutes than eleven. Beginning with ambient synths that are very Angelo Badalamenti-esque, it's very much like we’ve set out for a walk in the dark woods outside the Black Lodge, before, most unexpectedly, we’re served up an arpeggiated synthwave riff, which is frisky enough by itself, but nothing next to the propulsive and syncopated electro beats that send the tempo barrelling forward. So it’s Twin Peaks by way of The Terminator and if there’s nothing new in the world of music, well not too many people have brought those two sensibilities together before.

Interestingly that shyness about NavelGaze extends to her music. For instance, she keeps adding layers to Abandonment Girl and each one is more melodic and ‘soloistic’, but paradoxically they get quieter and quieter as if NG is embarrassed to just cut sick and virtuosic. Apparently there are even vocal lines in who/am/i but they are processed so far into the background I can’t even hear them, never mind decipher them! It’s not really a problem, because, quiet as they are, all these elements contribute, subtly, to the whole, but hey, when you’ve got ten minutes, you've got to break out that badass solo for real, at some point.

Or maybe you don’t. No matter if some elements vanish into the background, who/am/i delivers a highly engaging mix of industrial noise (on Nothing), then there’s Struggle which is full of haunted modal harmonies set to -of all things- trap and bass music, scoured by an abrasive gale of dark ambient hissing. Keep You returns to the Badalamenti synthesisers, if Badalamenti had been into post-rock and doom. In a record full of grand gestures, Aria goes a step further. It has an inexorable beat on the kit, played off against a chiming and beautiful guitar melody, before a cloud of noise descends. The climax really kicks in, however, as what sounds like an orchestral setting on the synth puts us in territory as epic as a Massive Attack instrumental, remixed by Vangelis. The appropriately titled Goodbye has some cheeky cheesiness delivered via a soft-rock beat, incongruously matched with more post-rocking guitars, before the beat trips over itself and the key modulates off a cliff into a sea of Xanax, letting you know that this has all been NavelGaze’s little vaporwave joke, as a parting gesture. My goodness that’s a lot, but this record makes such an effort to hold your attention: no quarter-hour track here was ever going to bore me.

NavelGaze goes out of her way to give props to her mixer/masterer, Amy Sergeant, “she’s honestly the main reason that any of it sounds good” are the very self-effacing words she chooses and, to be fair, who/am/i is a huge step up in the hi-fi stakes compared to her previous releases. Some records sound right when they were recorded in a garden shed, but others really benefit from proper studio treatment and this is one of them. I don’t mean to detract in any way from what NavelGaze has achieved here: diverse, subtle, intellectually satisfying and, of course, thunderous; and it’s that much better to be hear it with great clarity. Ironically, at the end of who/am/I I’m not much clearer on who NavelGaze is, but that only makes me keener to hear more. Believe me when I say I listen to a lot of heavy, weird, electronic music and this is one of the better records I expect to hear this year.

- Chris Cobcroft.