Suffering Jukebox

This morning's episode features an interview with No Hoper vocalist Daniel Tuite. No Hoper, a Naarm/Melbourne based noise-rock group, recently released their self-titled debut album through Undunn Records and they have a Meanjin/Brisbane show booked at Season Three Space in May of next year. You can find out more about No Hoper (and purchase their music) here; https://nohopermusic.bandcamp.com/music

Nick's Pick of the Week is Aicher's Defensive Acoustics, which was released on November 7th. You can hear it in all the usual places, or purchase it here; https://aicher.bandcamp.com/album/defensive-acoustics and my review can be read below.

Aicher: Defensive Acoustics (Downwards)

Released November 7th 2025

Liam Andrews is best known as the bassist for My Disco, the Melbourne group he formed in 2003 with his brother Ben Andrews on guitar and Rohan Rebeiro on drums. My Disco built their reputation playing angular post-punk, before transitioning to an experimental form of über-minimalism that reached its zenith on their 2021 record Alter Schwede. With My Disco currently on hiatus, Andrews has been busily exploring a multitude of sonic possibilities with his group Eros, as a member of Big|Brave and now —with his first proper solo project— Aicher.

Andrews first encountered the Old-Irish word aicher —meaning sharp or bitter— in a line from an anonymous 9th-century poem which read, “Is aicher in gaíth innocht,” which translates to, "Bitter is the wind tonight.” An apt inspiration for a record heavy on frosty atmospherics and industrial atonality birthed from a 2024 performance in an abandoned Japanese pharmaceutical store. 

Aicher’s first full-length, Defensive Acoustics, comprises seven relatively short pieces. To call them songs would be misleading, to label them movements, equally so. Instead, this is an album of fragments, culled from recordings of noise and feedback emitted by Andrew’s bass guitar, and assembled into a dark and screeching babel of sound that is most fully realised on the album’s cacophonous and penultimate title-track.

Defensive Acoustics’ first three tracks (Ascertain, Harness Pleads and Servitude) all feature contributions from Rebeiro —flickers and shimmers of percussion that do little to keep time, but add an aura of mechanised decay. Elsewhere, An Exhausted Image, with its programmed drum beats and murmured vocals, emits a demented disco vibe, recalling images of darkened hallways filled with shadowy strangers, sliding past each other like ships in the night. 

Followers of Andrews’ later work with My Disco and Eros’s most recent album, Your Truth Is A Lie, are unlikely to be surprised by the direction he has taken with Aicher. As an artist, he has demonstrated a knack for experimentation, a hunger for exploration and a willingness to push his creative instincts to their very limits. Defensive Acoustics exists as a unique example of sonic constructivism, a cold and detached soundscape that echoes our current state of social decay.

Nick Stephan