Album Review: A Cloakroom Assembly - Movement/Time

A Cloakroom Assembly is the solo project of Sydney-based musician Michael Tee, who was a founding member of post-punk experimental noisenicks Scattered Order and also contributed to the likes of Splendid Mess, A Volatile T Shirt, Pleasant Peasants and Ya Ya Choral, from the late-'70s onwards. His work was very much based around the label he co-founded, M Squared, which existed from 1979 to '84, and released a bunch of incredible small-run cassettes and vinyl releases, that are now fetching exorbitant prices on eBay.

A Cloakroom Assembly began in the late '70s and is, in his words, “a variety of sound story projects and gentle time stands still-machines”. What does this mean exactly? Well, A Cloakroom Assembly creates a wholly immersive sonic environment. It's this quality that it shares with Eno's ambient work; it's music that softly filters into the room and changes the temperature, changes the mood.

This is a new recording which features deep ambient swirls that sound like they were made on a mixture of guitar and synth, these beguiling washes of tones that are warm enough to entice the listener and strange enough to keep them engrossed. There's a gentle nod to electronica in terms of the rhythmic work, though it never really tips over into the clean, minimal sterility of most electronic artists. Tee's ability is to create these dreamy washes of ambience that become almost ill-defined riffs. He effortlessly moves from electronica to electronic dub, to strange amorphous soundscapes that could double as film sound design.

The key to this work is its accessibility. It's weird as hell, and Tee employs multiple and reasonably divergent techniques, but the sounds are universally lush and welcome.