Melbourne Water was put together by David Nichols and Greg Wadley, inveterate gig-goers, movers and shakers, band members, critics and sound shapers of the local scene - both well quali- fi ed to tell the rank from the pure. What they brought to us was 24 wildly varying tracks ranging from the touchingly melodic to the excitingly abstract and noisy - each track representing a healthy tributary of Melbourne music.
A quick glance at the track list may pick out a few familiar names - Dave Graney, Love Of Diagrams, The Bites, Wagons, the Cannanes perhaps or, if you’re of a certain age, Pip Proud - he’s gone from sixties fl ower power poetry to mixing it with musicians who weren’t even born then. But that’s really the story of the compilation - there have always been people in any place, any time, who focus on the music they make, don’t choose to tailor their sound to current trends and have no fear of experimentation, fun or failure. So it makes perfect sense for Mia Schoen from New Estate to be engineering and playing music with Pip Proud, for long time contributors Shower Scene From Psycho and Harry Howard (ex-Crime And The City Solution now with Pink Stainless Tail) to slot in on the record alongside younger bands New Season and Panel Of Judges.
Melbourne Water comes packaged with art work by Mia Schoen and wonderfully bizarre, explanatory (?) liner notes by maverick Melbourne music journalist Shane Moritz.
In short - here’s the essence of the Melbourne music scene of 2004. Drink up.

Stocks available from August 2nd 2004

Risky Business is an enthralling release from 1991, a leaner and more ahem risky sound than the fuller works David has done with his ensemble. In the liner notes David defines music as "any difference that makes a difference" and these pieces will certainly make a difference. The CD has been quite hard to get hold of so we're pleased to make it available again. If you've not heard any Chesworth music this is a very good place to start, if you have you'll want it to complete your collection.

Essendon Airport began as a duo in 1978 with Robert Goodge on guitar and David Chesworth on Wurlitzer piano along with a home made drum machine bought from the Trading Post. They later added instruments to become a five piece but this CD features the pure sound of the duo. Guy Blackman released the compilation on Chapter Music a couple of years ago.

Here's the band written blurb from the late '70s:

...songs which combine many of the most facile and insipid kinds of music in a redeemingly dignified manner...creating new trivia out of old. All this takes place along with a kind of pedantic fetishism for small-repetition games - the music travels in circles, spirals and solid blocks of sameness and difference.

Composed by Andrée Greenwell with words from the novella by Kathleen Mary Fallon, Laquiem premiered at the Studio, Sydney Opera House, 1998, a Green Room Music Production. Songs of love, exploitation and grief, crossing popular, filmic and classical boundaries in a beautiful yet chilling song cycle - soprano, untrained voice, spoken voice, violin, cello, clarinet/sax, percussion & harp, featuring the voices of Clare Grant, Karen Cummings and Andrée Greenwell.

The characters in LAQUIEM - tales from the mourning of the lac women, a novel-in-progress, are skinned alive by their own history and sensitivity until it makes them speak and sing in its own voice of pain, ecstasy, the stories they tell each other of their lives. We are embarrassed (ashamed even) of our sensitivity. We mistake it for weakness, passivity, masochism, femininity, indecisiveness. It's something that's often beaten and shamed out of children. It seems to be on the verge of extinction (along with kindness, gentleness) as a useful human attribute. It's a bit like axolotl's gills or our useless appendix - a trait that has no evolutionary benefits in the contemporary world, just an anachronistic left-over from a by-gone era. It is met, understood, augmented and magnified by them as passion and friendship forces the characters to engage with each other's equally gruelling and rigorous sensitivities.

- Kathleen Mary Fallon