Mess Esque

Description

Mess Esque is a duo comprising Mick Turner’s music and instrumentation and Helen Franzmann’s lyrics and voice. Their self-titled album is a fascinating travelogue of somnambulant wanderings. Perhaps best known as a member of Dirty Three, Mick Turner has been playing guitar and making music with many collaborators for forty years. Since 1997, Drag City has released four of his albums, an EP and an album by the Tren Brothers (with Jim White of Dirty Three) and two EPs with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. His last record was 2013’s Don't Tell the Driver, a work that saw him departing from his traditional hermetic instrumental model by using a rhythm section and brass and even collaborating with a singer. After all the purely instrumental music he has made with Dirty Three and solo, singing is now part of the sound he hears in his head. In 2019 he was introduced to Helen Franzmann through a mutual friend who had produced her last album. As Mckisko, Helen has released three albums over the past 12 years, working and touring with a wide array of Australian musicians. Her music has been described as numinous and transformative. Her most recent album Southerly saw her moving to a more expansive sound, which led her to an openness and some excitement for future collaborations. Helen lives in Brisbane; Mick in Melbourne. They started exchanging ideas with a plan to meet up at some point in 2020 and record. Then the world got turned upside down, so they continued collaborating remotely. Helen took Mick’s tracks, a mix of guitars, organs, bass and drums, to sing over, which altered their meanings, and hearing them again, Mick was inspired to make revisions, to which Helen responded again. And so the music took shape. In 2021, the album complete, they decided to form a band, but they still haven’t met face to face! Something impossible to guess when listening to Mess Esque. Their collaboration has an intimate side, a shared space. Helen’s words are carefully chosen, her phrasing responding intuitively to Mick's looping guitar figures with her own vocal repetitions. Often, Helen would record her vocals in the middle of the night, seeking that 2 a.m. flow, a time of greatest isolation through which to trace her melody with fragility and strength. This crystallises Mess Esque’s intent: to wander the sleepy drift through the fuzzy edges of the day… Contemplating from afar the immense peace of this planet when its world of ghostly spirits below – the madness of crowds, people passing in the distance in the night – are finally at peace. Patiently cultivating improvisations, musical certainties and a precise pursuit of something that didn’t seem to be there at first, Mess Esque became, with the world around it, a verdant and shining being.