Fresh Cut: The Townhouses - ‘Diaspora’

Nov 13, 2012 by PORTALS    1 Comment    Posted under: Albums, Featured Sounds, Sounds  

We are very excited to share with you a full album stream of The Townhouses‘ brand new album Diaspora which is due out on Yes Please next Tuesday, November 20th! The Townhouses is the melting pot solo project of Melbourne artist Leigh Hannah. Diaspora features a handful of collaborations with the likes of Guerre, Giorgio Tuma, Wintercoats, Rainbow Chan and Felix Weatherbourne. This album’s definite highlight is the overall quality of production and also the fact that it’s disseminating something powerful, while still allowing the listener a few breaths here and there. Diaspora blips, drips, moans, and howls all the way to it’s very end. Here are a few of Leigh’s words about our favorite tracks.

“Geography is a story about the power of television. Whilst I don’t own one, I’ve been fascinated lately by how mainstream Australian TV is really aimed at teenagers/young adults, however (generally speaking) the demographic that spends a lot of hours in front of the television is normally a much older one. I became really interested in the consequence of this misjudgement and decided to write a pretty open ended short few lines on an old man who watched something like Man vs. Wild and thought he too was confident, invulnerable, indestructible. I’ll be old too one day, so maybe that’s not such a bad thought.

Tokyo, and even Our Trees Will Grow, were really the beginning of this record. The chord progression and mallet parts in Tokyo are almost three years old, however the song really took shape in a new way when I tracked the live drums about a year and a half ago. I was listening to a lot of Everything Ecstatic era Four Tet and really wanted that chaotic kind of live sound over some contrastingly smooth electronics. From there the album went in a whole bunch of different directions - but for some reason I always kept coming back to that sound and couldn’t bring myself to leave it off the release. It kind of stands on its own in the album, but most of my favorite albums have those tracks.

Diaspora was an emotional song to record. It’s made up of questions as an open letter to refugees coming to, and currently living in, Australia. The victimization of asylum seekers by the Australian media and political institutions is a deplorable smudge in an already tainted history of ‘tolerance’ in our country. I could go on for a really long time talking about even just the use of term ‘tolerance’ in Australia and the many hypocrisies it carries when used in reference to both Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers, however I want this really to be seen as a hopeful song. A common argument over here is that we shouldn’t dwell on the past, however that doesn’t mean we can’t acknowledge what has happened. I want my people to, ensure the pain of leaving what refugees devastatingly left behind is not amplified due to our own reluctance and ignorance, to provide an inclusive supportive community, and to learn from our past mistakes. I chose to ask questions rather than make statements in this song because I truly believed I had no right to make statements about people. I only had questions, and as an Australian, I had to ensure those questions contained an acknowledgement of the past. When your questions have that acknowledgement, they form pretty naturally.”

Enjoy the full album stream below!