Travelogue by Showerhead

Introducing Travelogue, the debut release from Melbourne’s Showerhead, a.k.a. Alex Clayton. A mini-album that folds Electro, IDM and Ambient into a distilled and concise package, Travelogue takes the sounds of those styles and re-vamps their 90s heyday cues into a future-facing, pastoral daydream.

There is a deft hand at play here, orchestrating these very precise meanders with an attention to balance, form and space. Indeed, it feels appropriate to place Clayton’s debut inside the expansive world of electronic music he showcases on his Warped show on Sydney’s Nomad Radio.

But it is not as if these are cold, sterile over-worked efforts – the to-and-fro feels more playful, and inspired, with a lightly melancholic shade. It’s as if Clayton’s experiments live inside the overgrown cairn of the artwork, little spirits content to their quiet delirium. You can hear them in the blubbering voices on the bullet-train opener “People Places”, a wall of distortion washing out the gently detuned synths – "Like being trapped into a fever dream with the Flowerpot Men”, says Clayton.

The more contemplative “Cill D’Fhinnein” plays upon the imaginative Acid experiments of Warp mainstays Aphex Twin and The Black Dog, but with a delicate, fluid approach bearing perhaps a distant influence of the science-turned-rave of Floating Points. Time seems to move in slow and fast-motion, with Clayton eager to zip between melodic and rhythmic passages that weave and duck with an athletic command.

Where “Sibling Track” reveals its “big-moment” calmly and assuredly, “Stratocumulus” seems to sneak up on the listener, and delightfully so, too. Snaking synth melodies dip and flow into one-another as drum-breaks and percussion cycle through permutation after permutation, and a grander scale and dimension opens up.

Travelogue is a cohesive debut, demonstrating Clayton’s unfussy and unpretentious attitude towards constructing fanciful electronic music.

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