The Thousands

Musical dilettante Andrew Sinclair has sprinted through musical trends faster than you can say ‘the internet killed my buzz’. From the exclamatory post-rock Puritanism of Shock! Horror! to the minimal loop pedalling of Erasers, Sinclair has dipped his toes into many a genre and come off more rounded and self-assured each time. Funnily enough, the local musical scholar cum jack-of-all-trades has hit on his most interesting, forward thinking project yet under the misleadingly commonplace moniker of his actual birth name – a fact that is very much reinforced on latest release Harghada Dreams.

In entering the New, New Age of keyboard samples, media plugins and pixelated sound assemblages, he steps out of the Australian environment of debut LP Evil Summer­ and into distant exotic lands. The introlude title-track is what it might sound like had Toad from Super Mario 2 gotten high on his own mushroom magic while vibeing through the Desert Level, while Rebecca Orchard offers her own impersonation of High Places in ‘Book of Egyptian Rituals’. For a delicately linear thought-process, this all might sound a bit convoluted, but for the rest of us Harghada Dreams is one swell take on 8-Bit astral travel.