- The cover to Garry Bradbury’s new album, Yakovlevian Torque, is a collage. Collages are the kind of thing I did when I was five, anybody can do collages! This is true, but doing them well is another story. Bradbury’s collages (he’s got a few, check out his Facebook feed) are intricately layered, their juxtaposition of images creating layers of carefully arranged patterns of colour, shape and implication. They’re both an intellectually and viscerally satisfying pleasure. Not everyone can do that.

The same thing is true of experimental, electronic music. It’s pretty easy to turn a bunch of tape hiss into a distorted mess and spew it back at people but from noise to ambient to found object, not everyone can be Merzbow, Brian Eno or Einstürzende Neubauten. Garry Bradbury, just incidentally, is one of the few musicians who can claim to have at least been working as long as those three. He first appeared in the turnstile roster of cultish Australian outfit Severed Heads in the early ‘80s, before heading out on his own.

Over the years, working mostly under his own name his output has been surprisingly diverse, perhaps as diverse as that of the Severed Heads collective itself. From noise to industrial to ambient, field recordings and dance beats, every time you dig up a new item from the back catalogue there’s something different.

On his latest release that carousel of styles has stopped, appropriately, on sound collage. Each track is created through a careful arrangement of sounds, many of which must be ‘found’, but they sit so deftly together that sometimes you wonder if what sounds like a field recording was actually custom created. Still, I’m guessing that Bradbury has built up quite the library of audio snippets to choose from over the years and that’s another thing that strikes you about Yakovlevian Torque: the sheer number and variety of sounds on offer. Usually, when you think a track has shown you all it’s got, some exotic noise will erupt, like the peacock of the menagerie suddenly fanning its tail feathers.

It’s a bit of a no-no amongst abstract sound artists to be too evocative in your compositions. I’m not sure that’s a feeling I share but, fortunately Bradbury cuts a fairly fine line between the abstract and the literal and does so to maximum effect. Just take opener Hair Trigger with its combination of clanging metals, running between dinner bells, fire alarms, crashing steel girders and the mighty, echoing peel of church bells. It’s deeply evocative, of what exactly I don’t know, but it’s bloody majestic.

The atmosphere of the record is diverse: the Ben Frost sound of The Ladies Of The Rope is just fearsome, the chopped infotainment salesman of Tatterdemalion Underdog Balloon is alienating and The Bisque Was A Poem is a work of reflective beauty, interspersed with vulgar hilarity. At its most unacceptably literal, His Hand Caressed Her Silken Knee is -as you may have guessed- uncomfortably sexual, as well as just plain scary.

If you think about it, ‘experimental’ electronic music is often fairly formulaic. It’s a real pleasure to run across Garry Bradbury: his big bag of sounds and his ability to transform them into such a vivid array. No track is without a refreshingly different surprise and the whole is a testament to the art of collage executed with uncommon skill.

- Chris Cobcroft.