{"title":"Hydroplane","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHydroplane is an Australian band hailing from Melbourne. With their unique blend of genres and captivating performances, they have quickly gained a loyal following in the music scene. Their infectious melodies and thought-provoking lyrics make them stand out among their peers. Whether you're a fan of indie rock or alternative pop, Hydroplane's music will leave you wanting more.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFormed in [year], Hydroplane consists of [band members' names]. They draw inspiration from various musical influences, resulting in a sound that is both familiar and refreshing. Their dynamic live shows have earned them praise for their energetic stage presence and tight musicianship.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSince their debut album release, Hydroplane has been making waves in the industry. Their songs have received airplay on radio stations across Australia and beyond. With each new release, they continue to push boundaries and explore new sonic territories while staying true to their signature sound.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"selected-songs-1997-2003","title":"Selected Songs 1997-2003","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSelected Songs 1997-2003\u003c\/i\u003e compiles some of the finest moments in the recording history of Hydroplane, the Melbourne-based indie-pop three-piece that operated alongside The Cat’s Miaow through the second half of the nineties. It’s the third release in what feels, now, like a loosely planned series by World Of Echo, documenting the music made by this group of friends in Melbourne sharehouses (The Cat’s Miaow’s Songs ’94-’98, 2022), or in the case of The Shapiros (Gone By Fall, 2023), while traversing the International Pop Underground.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHydroplane would be familiar to anyone already following these breadcrumb trails – Andrew Withycombe, Bart Cummings and Kerrie Bolton were the group’s core, all members of The Cat’s Miaow. With Cat’s Miaow drummer Cameron Smith itinerant, having moved to London, the trio used this opportunity to expand their music. It’s a subtle, but important shift. If The Cat’s Miaow was about the perfect, minimalist, two-minute pop song, Hydroplane’s music was far more open-ended, embracing the loops and drones, sampled house-y shuffle beats, the burbling of a Roland Jupiter-4 synth, all of which the trio joined, effortlessly, to their endless capacity for moving, elegant melodicism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey may have only planned to release one seven-inch single, but the sound Hydroplane created was so bewitching, so compelling, that the project’s lifespan ran for around half a decade, and they ended up releasing three albums, including a self-titled debut recently reissued by Efficient Space, and seven singles. There are all kinds of compelling things happening in the music compiled here – the hazy repetition of the gentler side of Krautrock is in here, somewhere, which also suggests Stereolab at their most intimate and disarmed; the gently drifting guitars, gauzy and oneiric, set the songs adrift and floating, each one lost in its own imagined, distracted world. Songs like “The Love You Bring” set indistinct tonal floats across dance rhythms, in a way not quite heard since My Bloody Valentine’s “Instrumental” – but with the added gift of Bolton’s gorgeous voice.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis loose coalition with dance music, and the quiet experimentalism at the heart of Hydroplane, also gestures towards peers like Hood, Acetate Zero and Other People’s Children, and releases on renegade labels like Wurlitzer Jukebox and Enraptured. Like those groups and labels, The Cat’s Miaow were reconciling independent pop music’s past – sweet melody and melancholy, chiming and droning guitars – with the futures promised by DIY electronics and nascent digitalia, the interface of indie and IDM that led to some of the underground’s most blissful, texturally swoonsome music. All that is here, but also, the poise of the melodies is pure Cat’s Miaow, though, with Bolton’s voice sailing, pacifically, over some of the most pared-down, gorgeous music made during their decade.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt was a time, too, when such music could make waves – “We Crossed The Atlantic”, one of their early singles, was picked up by John Peel, who played it repeatedly on his legendary radio show, the song reaching #13 on his 1997 Festive 50. That the song itself was a cover of a tune by 1960s Australian beatnik-pop-poet Pip Proud felt even more perfect – a group of outsiders paying tribute to another outsider, played on the radio one of the few broadcasters brave and human enough to take a chance on this music. But it was a time where everything was up for grabs, and genres were flowing into each other: folk songs went drone; indie re-discovered noise; ambient pop floated, again, out onto the dancefloor. And while they may have been sequestered away in Melbourne, Australia, Hydroplane felt core to that scene, a quietly driving force.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCompiling material from across their brief but mercurial career, this double album perfectly captures the magic and mystery of Hydroplane’s dreamlike, perfect pop songs.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"World of Echo","offers":[{"title":"Black LPx2","offer_id":50416752361803,"sku":"2046958","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Selected_Songs_1997-2003_a60162e8_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726709339"},{"product_id":"hydroplane","title":"Hydroplane","description":"\u003cp\u003eHydroplane reinstate their formidable 1997 debut of sublime guitar atmospherics, fragile lyricism and droning incidentals with an overdue vinyl reissue.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn offshoot of the now-féted The Cat’s Miaow, the trio formed after drummer Cameron Smith decamped to London, charting new territory with tape loops, manipulated samples and a borrowed Jupiter 4 in the wake of \u003ci\u003eEntroducing\u003c\/i\u003e. Adopting a handle that Dean Wareham once considered calling Luna, Hydroplane intended to only ever release \u003ci\u003eExcerpts From Forthcoming LP\u003c\/i\u003e, a single-sided 7” sonic collage, before imploding in mystery. Their label however insisted they deliver their taunted album. From the comfort of a Brunswick flat, they continued to record soaring melodies and restrained song structures to 4-track, sculpting dramatic Radiophonic Workshop cues weighted in reverb and near-perfect dream pop lead by Kerrie Bolton’s empyrean vocals.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBored of industry expectation and largely ignored by local audiences, the reluctant performers followed the way of The Cannanes and formed meaningful overseas alliances by mail and phone, securing releases on Michigan outpost Drive Inn and Broadcast launching pad Wurlitzer Jukebox. Championed by John Peel with twenty spins on his converted Radio One slot and even polling in Festive Fifty of 1997, the humble three-piece still walked to their neighbourhood shops undetected.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePreviously only available as a US-issued CD, this reminiscent late-night suite establishes Hydroplane as an everlasting ember in Australia’s beloved indie nexus.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Efficient Space","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50452669301067,"sku":"1147849","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/ac4933b9-2cc0-4d8b-afe4-c1d0645a7388_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727160188"},{"product_id":"a-place-in-my-memory-is-all-i-have-to-claim","title":"A Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim\u003c\/em\u003e is the new album by Australian atmospheric pop trio Hydroplane, the storied ‘offshoot’ formed by three quarters of independent pop group, The Cat’s Miaow. On this, their first music after two decades plus of radio silence, Andrew Withycombe, Kerrie Bolton and Bart Cummings return to the gentle, close-quarters musical world they shared around the turn of the century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA beautiful collection of drowsy, sleepy pop, humble and quiet, but resolute in its craft, \u003cem\u003eA Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim\u003c\/em\u003e is dream work in practice; a lovely reintroduction. Welcome back, then.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRecorded during 2024 in Melbourne and Ballarat, \u003cem\u003eA Place In My Memory…\u003c\/em\u003e picks up the thread Hydroplane set down with its precursor, 2001’s \u003cem\u003eThe Sound Of Changing Places\u003c\/em\u003e, though you can hear echoes of their other releases, too, with Withycombe noting a through-line from the group’s 1998 “Failed Adventure” single. There’s little quite like \u003cem\u003eA Place In My Memory…\u003c\/em\u003e, then or now, though. Maybe you can draw some connections between Hydroplane and their sister group, The Cat’s Miaow, while fellow travellers might include Empress, The Ah Club, and further back, Young Marble Giants, Veronique Vincent (the muffled, ticking drum machine also makes me think of Robin Gibb’s Robin’s Reign).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere’s also an umbilical to the bedroom-crafted electronica doing the rounds in the late nineties and early noughties. Hydroplane hint at this through their approach to songwriting, which often builds creatively around loops as structural devices. Through all this, the trio achieve an effortless, organic weightlessness across these nine lovely songs. Many feature Bolton’s clear singing voice, drifting along, while guitars, keyboards, drum machines and loops ticker tape away. The constituent parts fit together, but they also have a curiously detached quality – think of abstract cloud formations sharing the same sky.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHydroplane and The Cat’s Miaow often dealt in emotional ambiguity and uncertainty, and the uncertainty of the nostalgic. This was always one of the most appealing facets of their music, and \u003cem\u003eA Place In My Memory…\u003c\/em\u003e is thus named perfectly. I couldn’t dream up a better title for the album and its reflections on history, lived experience, and the inevitable tangle between these two phenomena. These reflections variously address such concerns as human cruelty, flight, space travel, adventurism and spiritualism. There’s also “To the Lighthouse”, not a direct reference to the Virginia Woolf book, but a great title, nonetheless. (They’ve always had excellent titles, often borrowed, for songs and albums.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Efficient Space","offers":[{"title":"LP. - Black","offer_id":53357400752459,"sku":"R8688-4532","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/ES046.jpg?v=1757507708"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/collections\/test_f3dc0249_thumbnail_4096_0729e4c9-e9bd-481e-88cc-2ffe0822efd6.jpg?v=1726709319","url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/collections\/hydroplane.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}