Magic HandsTone
Indie

- Folktronica is such a strange genre. A sophisticated fusion of a variety of old timey singing and songwriting with lots of different noodlings on electronic equipment, suffering from all sorts of issues due to being too intellectual, too artificial, too twee and so on. Given that the sound is made out of the dismembered body parts left over from the historically bloody engagement between the forces of ‘authentic’ folk music and the merciless machinists intent on taking music into a cyborg future, it’s no wonder that it should constantly get on the goat of all sorts of music fanciers.

Yet, somehow, from Four Tet to Tunng, ever since the late ‘90s, folktronica keeps sneaking in: someone, somewhere, will sing reedily while strumming a mandolin or at least playing a sample of one on their laptop, as a tinny drum-machine bops away in the back.

So much of what you’ll hear is a throwback to those sounds from a decade or more ago. Despite the continued, fringey fascination, it’s been a long time since you could call anything folktronic, ‘fresh’.

Melbourne’s Magic Hands have changed that. A nouveau take on folktronica, bringing together, in lead cut, Tone, a boy + girl folk duo over shimmering, ambient synth, tinny snares, handclaps and thundering bass. The electronics are a mid-tempo mash of the sounds of trap and bass music with some ambient synths sluicing through, dissolving the very up-to-date electronics with folk music that is anything but. There’s nothing ‘indie’ at all about this folk (thank god), although in its lazy warmth there’s a hint of Hawaiian calypso, but mostly this is a very po-faced rendition of the 60’s folk tradition. You’ll hear that in high definition on the EP’s third track, where all the electronics are stripped away from Tone and the folk is allowed to play out pleasantly and even a little bit startlingly, by itself, in a tongue-in-cheek ‘Campfire Remix’.

In the original combination, the sound is SO folk and SO bass music it’s almost a parody. It’s difficult to believe that Lucy Roleff and Alex Badham weren’t snickering just a little bit when they created this. However, it’s very difficult to parody anything that you can’t actually do pretty well yourself, and this is very craftily put together and just pretty damn good.

The b-side, I Believe In You is similarly strong (and sounds, tragically, only a very little like the Kylie cover it is) with Alex Badham going all Bill Callahan over the vocal. Again, impossible to believe they weren’t on the floor, laughing, at some point, while recording this. The other remix of Tone, a blissed-out, ambient / easy-listening lull rounds out a surprisingly fulsome EP.

Especially with the rather risque sense of humour that these Magic Hands bring to their work, this teeters on the edge of being too twee, too generic and just plain wrong, more so than most folktronica even. Somehow however, seemingly effortlessly, this succeeds perfectly.

- Chris Cobcroft.

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