Andrew Wilson

Melbourne auteur Andrew Wilson (Andras, A.R.T. Wilson, Wilson Tanner) soils the ‘Australian songbook’ with a collection of fragile, private and deranged songs of parrots, pancakes and gelignite amidst the Victorian Gold Rush of 1850s.

Old Gold is filled with fakes and fools, rumbling stomachs and acousmatic terrors - a lonely, self-pitying search evoked by faintly medieval folk music that sounds almost period-perfect but somehow, oddly, wonderfully spoiled.

Gut string guitars, water-logged mandolins, bar room banjos and no-fidelity piano all sound perfectly organic - except they’re not. No acoustic instruments were handled in the making of the record, including environmental sounds which were generated during a residency at Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio. The reproduction of familiar sounds via inorganic means situates the record in a moonlit, melancholy hole of its own.