I Wonder What It Was

I Wonder What It Was

It's Happening Again - Music From Broken Realities Leaking Through

It's happening again. 

There is no explanation. 

The inexplicable music of alternate broken realities began breaking through into our shared collective audio reality in the mid-2020s. 

Nobody could stop it. 

Some did not want to stop it. They revelled in its captivating chaos, new sounds and freaked up rhythms.

Some like me. 

We can only try to replicate and imitate the brief sonic glimpses we are granted in dreams and daytime hallucinations. 

.  

'Never Say Everything You Know'

'Never Say Everything You Know' by Darryl Mason

I made the below piece of generative music the old fashioned pre-A.I. and digital media way, by layering tape loops playing at different speeds. Some of the oldest samples and loops in this are from TV shows I recorded in the late 1970s by holding a tape recorder up to the TV's speaker. I have no idea which cartoons or TV shows or ads I sampled back then. 

I always wondered why I'd held onto those audio cassettes for so long. I'm glad I did. You can't replicate the fuzzouts and random glitchery of ancient tape recordings, particularly ones exposed to direct sunlight sitting on a bookshelf for ten years (oops).

I have no problem discussing when or where I used Generative A.I. Music technology, but this noisefest is all mine. I am going to 'recast' this piece at some point with Gen A.I. to see what results and what new realms I can take it in, beyond my own synths and keyboards.

I used to tape record everything in my teens, when I had tapes. And a recorder. 'Never Say Everything You Know' includes the first time I ever picked up a guitar and tried to play a solo. I can't play now, so why would I care if anybody knows I couldn't play in my teens? 

The most recent sample in there is a grab from the theme song of the U.S. Space Force agency. It's one of the worst theme songs for anything I've ever heard. So I had to include just a bit for the paranoia and authoritarian vibe.

Yeah, I think I am going to remix this with A.I. 

Never Say Everything You Know on YouTube

Never Say Everything You Know on Apple Music

Never Say Everything You Know on Spotify 

Never Know Who'll Show At An Aussie Backyard Party

A.I. came up with a better guest list for an 'Ultimate Australian Party (According To Americans)' than I did.

Mad Max, Humungus and Crocodile Dundee chilling

Max Rockatansky, Michael J Dundee and Muriel Heslop

Mick Taylor eyeing off Babe The Pig

Australian backyard parties can sometimes include kangaroos and koalas, if they want to show up 

If there aren't Queen Of The Desert drag queens and random ferals playing video games in your bedroom, is it really an Australian party at all? 

Now you've seen the 'Realistic' stuff, let's get into some real A.I. Slop gathering together "Australian Movie Stars" or "Australian Icons." 

I'm not going to name them all, but I will add some notes.

Instead of replicating the faces of Mad Max and other characters from 'The Wasteland Saga', A.I. instead chose to create "impressions" of those characters. So this is supposed to be Max, The Gyro Captain and The Feral Kid. 

An 'Impression' of Wez from Mad Max 2/Road Warrior having trouble making cocktails 

Like some awful magazine thing from 1990s

Again with the weird 'impressions' of Max & Muriel

Hello Steve. Also, wasn't it thoughtful of A.I. to put Nemo and friends in a tank?

                    

Not the worst tourism bait ad I've seen for Melbourne

Australian BBQ 2030

 'Australian BBQ 2030' by Darryl Mason

Project Almost, New Music by Darryl Mason

Part One of Project Almost

Skyward view from inside an Australian 1870s convict-era prison

This photo, looking skywards from inside an Australian convict-era prison cell, inspired the music. I sat in the cell for an hour, listening to how the sounds of nature, birds and wind and waves washing over and crashing on the rocks nearby, were all bent and distorted by the structure I sat within. And yet, somehow, all of those sounds were both muted and amplified, into a softly pulsing rhythm that I tried to capture on synths when I got back home. 

Before I left the prison cell, tourists arriving and leaving in the headland carpark nearby blasted radios that sent snatches of modern music into the mix entering that sandstone tower.  I tried to capture that, too, particularly in Project Almost Part 2 & 3, which will follow soon.  

It's meditative music. But you will find the rhythm as you listen.

Part Two and Three of Project Almost will follow. 

Australians Don't Want To Hear New Australian Music Anymore

"Australians don't want to hear new Australian music anymore" is a statement of fact, as far as streaming stats and radio plays go, but it's not the full story. 

Australia's live scene isn't totally dead yet, and new Australian bands and artists are still building their local audiences and breaking through internationally, mostly via YouTube and Spotify playlists.

But meanwhile, the biggest radio stations remain in Retro Mode, clocking up more plays for 40 year old songs from INXS, Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil than any new Australian music released in the past few years. 

Why? 

Primarily because they're all trying to play it safe now and most of their audience is 50-90 year olds, and they mostly only want to be reminded of the songs that were important to them, when they were young.

Just wanted to make that clear up front.

From The Music: 

"For the second year in a row, an Australian single failed to top the ARIA charts.

Indeed, just one homegrown hit reached the Top 10 – Dom Dolla’s Saving Up spent a solitary week at number 10 in February.

ARIA’s Top 100 for 2024 features five Australian singles, led by Vance Joy’s Riptide at number 24. It spent an impressive 39 weeks in the Top 40. The only problem is … it was released in 2013."

Full Story From The Music Is Here

But Australians, as always, are still listening to an enormous amount of music, generally, and still buying new CDS and vinyl:

The Australian recorded music industry posted its sixth consecutive year of growth in 2024, with wholesale sales rising 6.1% to $717 million.

New data released today by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) shows the industry growth was fuelled by both physical and digital sales, with total digital sales outpacing physical at 6.5% compared to 2.1%. The digital market now represents $656 million, or 91.5% of the total market.

Subscription services continue to be the dominant force at play, increasing their market share by another two percentage points to represent 71.0% of Australia’s total music market, or $509 million, a figure 8.9% larger than 2023. Ad supported streaming models slowed dramatically however, from a 15.3% jump in revenue in 2023 to just 1.9% growth in 2024.

And yet, for all the huge audiences and numbers here, Australian music is not topping our own charts regularly anymore, and international artists get the majority of attention from young Australian music lovers. 

We had it good, so very good it turns out, in the 1970s-1990s. 

The once reliable live music circuit of 1000s of pubs, clubs and other gigs that stretched all across Australia is mostly gone now. Radio stations like JJJ and MMMFM that once played new singles by The Baby Animals or Spiderbait 30 or times a week, now try to "break" new Australians acts with maybe 10 plays a week, or 20 if they're really lucky. That doesn't work. The songs don't get into peoples' heads and become a part of their life.

Australia had a thriving live music scene, and very healthy music sales, for decades, because bands had the enormous number of gigs to get good; they had passionate radio station support; a huge network of hype-friendly music media and many, many young people who wanted to travel 1-2 hours to a gig on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, regardless of the weather. 

I don't know what the solution is, or how Australian music gets back what it once had, but it's a subject i will return to here. 

I wrote a set of lyrics on all this and demoed a bunch of tunes from my words and thoughts with Suno and Udio.

"Australians don't want to hear
new Australian music anymore
Just 40 year old songs from INXS
Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil

Radio don't care about the new bands
Or any of their songs
This retro repeat nightmare
has been going on too long

It's been 40 fkng years long"

Version One: 

The AC/DC-Angels Intersection, with John Brewster

Australian rock rhythm guitar master John Brewster improvises a piece, in the below video, after being asked to explain where his band The Angels and their Alberts label mates (and friends) AC/DC crossed paths in sound/style in the mid-1970s. 

Rhythm guitarists John Brewster and Malcolm Young jammed together in motel rooms on the TNT Australian tour, with Young being so impressed by 'The Keystone Angels' he and his brother Angus recommended them to Alberts and their producers Vanda & Young.

When AC/DC left Australia in April 1976, The Angels bought the amps and some of the guitars AC/DC played on the TNT, Dirty Deeds and High Voltage albums, which The Angels then used them to record their chart-rocking, pub-packing Face To Face and No Exit albums.

Considering the global musical impact of AC/DC and the direct influence of The Angels (Angel CIty) on 1980s L.A. hard rock and Seattle's grunge, I sometimes think that two year period when AC/DC and The Angels intersected was ultimately more influential on 1990s-2010s rock and metal music than the punk era that was beginning to unfold at the same time in the U.K. and the U.S.

And it all began in some of the cheapest, grittiest motel rooms in South Australia in 1975, with both bands fighting to find The Sound that would electrify brutally drunk and unforgiving Australian pub rock crowds and make them cheer instead of throwing glass ashtrays and full beer cans.

Both bands found their sound. And their own levels of success and fame. 

What If Australia's Breakout Band Of 2025 Is Named 'Worst Album Ever'?

Australia's 'Worst Album Ever' band

A completely unappealing band name; an extremely shite live album; a Top 100 Countdown of 'AI Music Slop' that lasts half a day; experiments in so many genres it's impossible to say what kind of band they even are (which is, of course, half the point) and still Australia's 
'Worst Album Ever' Band has clocked up 10,000s of YouTube views in a few months, with no marketing.

Incredibly, those numbers make them a 'Rising Australian Band' according to the grim realities and statistics of the Australian Music Industry, where bands of any kind are becoming scarcer.

It's going to be strange indeed to see a song by 'Worst Album Ever' listed in the ARIA Top 100 next year, or bottom of the bill on a festival. And funny, too, I suppose. 

The Worst Album Ever 'AI Music Slop Top 100 Countdown' begins here. Lots of rock and metal abound, and not all of its AI-generated. There's Real Human Music slipped in, too. 

How far can this really go? 

Follow 'Worst Album Ever' Band on YouTube here

Follow 'Worst Album Ever' Band on Twitter here

Wild Magpies Singing & Rocking Out

Wild magpies were regular visitors to my garage recording studio at Wakki Beach, NSW. They'd invite themselves in and sing along to crazy stuff I was playing on synthesizers

Climate Change Exhibition At Sydney Museum, 2009

A selection of images from a Climate Change Exhibition at Sydney Museum in 2009. 

About 70% of Australians supported actions to lessen climate pollution and to degrade the intensity of what most scientists, news media and people generally thought was coming.

That was 2009, the year of this exhibition. Then the fossil fuel lobby and the billionaires business lobby and the Liberal Party and National Party, and Labor, and their partners in Australian news media all decided that Nope, We Won't Do Fk All, And We'll Keep Opening Mines And Polluting.

With the decade, the public support for 'Taking Action To Halt Or Degrade Extreme Climate Change' was fractured and soaked in conspiracy theories. 

Now? Climate Change doesn't get mentioned during elections.

The polluters and all their lackeys won.

Australian UFO History: February, 1947: 'White Egg-Shaped Objects Moving At Incredible Speed'

'WHITE EGG FLYING OBJECTS' REPORTED IN AUSTRALIA IN EARLY 1947

What a surprise. There is no mention of UFOs, spacecraft, aliens or flying saucers in this Australian newspaper story from February, 1947 about mysterious 'egg-shaped' objects spotted in the skies.. The term "Flying Saucers" hadn't been invented by newspapers yet. 

People saw something strange in the sky at night, in Port Augusta, Australia, shortly after the end of World War II, they reported it, newspapers wrote it up. There was no speculation that "aliens" were involved, or that the objects were from another planet, because people had not yet been trained by news media to think of unusual objects in the sky that way.

The below story is from early February, 1947. The Kenneth Arnold sightings that saw American newspapers popularise the term 'Flying Saucers' didn't happen until June 1947.

Text: 

"PORT AUGUSTA, Feb. 6, 1947.

While working in the yard at the Commonwealth Railways work-
shops yesterday morning Mr. Ron Ellis and two workmates claim to
have seen five strange objects in formation pass across the sky from
north to south.

The objects were white or light pink, and were shaped like an egg.

Mr. Ellis said that he could not give an accurate estimate of the
size of the objects, but they were casting shadows, and judging by
his experience with aircraft in the RAAF during the war he considered they were about the size of a locomotive.

Although the objects kept on a direct course at a height of about
6,000 feet they appeared to be quivering, he said. Owing to their great
speed they were out of sight within a few seconds.

Any question of the phenomenon being an optical illusion was dis-
pelled by the fact that a few minutes later both Mr. Ellis and his companion gave an identical description of what they had seen.

Their description was verified by another member of the workshops
staff who said that he had also seen the objects."

------------

Fascinating, isn't it? How such stories were once reported?

Supposedly reliable witnesses with flying experience, who saw something they didn't recognise in the sky. They rejected suggestions they had seen an optical illusion, but they were not accused of being "crazy" and nobody suggests they might be from another world. They didn't know what it was, and neither did the newspaper. 

That was it. 

Big difference to just a few years later, when anything that could be whipped up into 'Are Aliens Watching Us?!' and 'Flying Saucers Attack!' headlines became the Fear standard.

The objects that couldn't be explained should not induce wonder or mystery, but Fear that Earth is being threatened.

Note: I predict a 'UFO Researcher' will take my research and the news clipping I found and reproduce it on a popular YouTube or podcast episode without credit by late October, 2024.