A drastic left turn from NM label head Simon J Karis, following some notable 2024 output. The manic jubilance of both last year’s ‘Thrash’ (his collaborative effort with UK experimental/club royalty Actress) and his hugely evocative, slightly foolish solo full length ‘So Little Sorrow’ (accompanied by a book of 50 watercolour paintings by legendary ambient musician and visual artist Andrew Chalk) commanded new ears and scratched heads further across the globe than Karis had enjoyed prior. 

So with that, he flings us the first documentation of his ongoing live performance project ‘Smashed Platitudes’, a rough-hewn collage of recordings on stages and in hotel rooms across Australia - a constant work in progress, auditing itself in real time in front of intimate audiences. Karis’ creative process in these takes is indeed a collage approach in itself; a fractured and intuitive rearranging of concrète recordings captured in travelogue, some particularly jagged synthesis and lashings of noise interruptions to break up this constant jawing;

Because most notably, Karis’ voice is the constant thread throughout; we hear him speaking clearly and closely, sometimes wilfully obscured and surprisingly, often singing. His words are chosen immediately before us in the workspaces we’re let into, through automatic writing, both as pen on paper and incanted into the air. Though in moments where he finds himself nudging the diaristic, devout crypticism will slither in to wash our attention over into the next movement. Reflected in the information overload of the track titles, Karis wants audiences to suspend the idea of needing to understand what they’re witnessing whilst presented with a great deal of description, urging them to instead simply cherish whatever non-literal profundity might come to heart by the end of the affair. It’s in this sense that he is attempting to join the audience, leaving the performance as much to his subconscious as is possible - by then auditing what comes out, a sort of open air feedback loop is created, fuelling its auto-cognition.

Keen ears will hear brief live renderings of material from ‘So Little Sorrow’ encrusted in the final throes of ‘Smashed Platitudes’, blasted into the red as confrontational noise tantrums. It’s a means of highlighting the dramedy which Karis goes to pained lengths to express in all his output to date, disparate though it may look whilst juxtaposed with his previous work over the last 5 years; the acid techno malfunctioning of ‘Thrash’, the assured synth melodrama of ‘So Little Sorrow’ and 'Piovve' and the stoned warblings of ‘Cassowary Paint’.