About Barrage

Who?
What?
Where?
Why?
How?
When?


Who or what is Barrage? Is he a hero or merely dirt? In both music and life, the songwriter cuts an ambiguous figure; that of a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious and unforgivable sin in his past. Whatever the sin is, he never tells, but neither does he deny the legends of wildness, evil and debauchery that have grown about his name. The heroes of his chansons - all thinly disguised versions of Barrage himself, of course - are generally brigands performing heroic feats of love and compassion. In life, however, the artist is short, badly sighted and projects a gloomy outcast. The dichotomy of his personage is that of stalking-horse and devil's advocate.

What?

Barrage's songs are biographical in function. You'll notice that whatever the ventriloquism adopted, he always remains in the first person. It is this close presence of the artist behind the work - opining and attitudinising, carping and shrugging - which makes the duality vital. With Barrage, we have always to reckon with the man's conceit of himself as raw material to be satanized. The songs are a biography and the biography is a loose conspectus of how it feels to be Barrage. His performance, one suspects, helps mitigate his self-concern and functions as a means of endowing himself with preternatural colour. He reminds us of those people who 'hate scenes' yet make them daily, who find hysteria and dynamic indignation conducive to their special brand of spiritual ease.

Barrage says: "It was rage that first made me an artist, and from then on a need to be vivid and spectacular in my own eyes has kept me going." He will forego all inner peace for the sake of an unceasing external show. To try excluding the man is eventually to discover that little of the music can stand-alone and, if it is made to, seems like fragments from the hands of various pasticheurs. The main pleasure with him is the contact with a singular, though divided personality. It is not a silly pleasure either; the music returns to us with illumination and no little shock after we have heard our weaknesses, poses, aspirations and manias made-over by his schizophrenic temperament.

Where?

Barrage's debut album 'Hero or Dirt?' - released April 2005 on Sydney's Feral Media - is intended as a showcase for the songwriter's uniquely theatrical take on electronic pop. The album gathers into one volume sixteen selections recorded over a period of two years, recorded at both Barrage's moving home studio, The Snug, and the SBS multitrack studios, Melbourne.

Listeners may expect buoyant melodies, incisive lyricism, Morphean electronic textures and a general sonic spirit of jubilant exhaustion. On the recording of the album, Barrage remarks, "I wanted to make a record for those evenings when black moods descend on you, when you go to bed early, lingering before your music collection in search of something that will console you and at the same time reinforce your bitterness; a record that tells of boredom and heartache that is similar to my own, but one that by comparison is soothing."

Despite the excess of dark colours in his sonic palette and acute figuration of heartbreak rendered in his lyrics, 'Hero or Dirt?' paradoxically manages to elicit pleasure in listeners. Always maintaining an attitude of cool despair, Barrage gives us the constant illusion of having an advantage over him, but in fact this is a deliberate plan, a well-considered therapeutic method, a ruse intended to make us overcome our own indigence. Sexual jealousies, the vertigo of the infinite, the insults of poverty; Barrage shrouds it all in the darkness of his sensibility, as if in the darkness of the grave.

Why?

"The primary reason I write music at all is to document and preserve what I consider effective and functional pieces of aural research. It's making mementoes for myself and reference sources for other people who might be interested," Barrage says.

Barrage's style, marvellously cast to highlight the nervous communicability of sensations, is the product of a misappropriation of several different influences. Listeners are as likely to compare his melancholy, electronic tones with the sounds of crucial dance groups Cabaret Voltaire, Severed Heads and the Human League as they to compare his lyrics with those of the romantic Scott Walker, Leonard Cohen or Morrissey.

How?

Barrage utilises a scarcity of equipment and instruments in composing his songs (i.e. everything at hand to him). The selections on 'Hero or Dirt?' incorporate synthesizer programming, tape manipulation, guitar and microphone recording and no little laptop production. All vocal recordings were cut in SBS Multitrack Studios, Melbourne, with additional instrumental production by Feral Media label-head Danny Jumpertz and SBS sound engineer Dave Ashton.

When?

For information on upcoming gigs click here.