Ash Wednesday, T.E. Power, Thealonian Music

Ash Wednesday is an Australian musician from Adelaide who arrived at the late 1970s Melbourne post-punk scene via the proto-punk group JAB, whose tracks appeared on the Suicide Records compilation Lethal Weapons, and then via The Models, a band he co-founded with Sean Kelly that would later become a chart-topping pop group while Wednesday himself moved in a very different direction. His experimental work from the early 1980s unfolded across several parallel projects: solo electronic pieces; Modern Jazz, an improvisation group performing to randomly generated techno beats with a fluid lineup; and Thealonian Music, a collaboration with T.E. Power (Nuvo Bloc) built around the idea of spontaneous composition, with no overdubbing, no remixing, and the rhythmic foundation generated live by a programmable drum machine and sequencer running "in a rapidly impulsive, reckless manner." Thealonian Music released one cassette, Project X Chromosome X, in 1982, and a second compilation Syno Cat was assembled but never released. In 1997 Wednesday became a touring member of Einstürzende Neubauten, completing multiple world tours and appearing on their live recordings through to 2013.

This double LP with DVD (VOD131.7/8) is structured across four sides: LP1 is given entirely to Thealonian Music, drawing on Project X Chromosome X (1981/82) and the previously unreleased Syno Cat cassette plus compilation tracks; LP2A collects the Modern Jazz and Ash Wednesday recordings including tracks from the all-black "Black Tape" cassette (1983) and the Signal to Noise Set LP (1983); LP2B returns to Thealonian Music with further sessions. The music is lean, urgent, and rhythmically relentless, with synthesizer textures that bridge Australian post-punk energy and the colder logic of European minimal electronics. A genuinely obscure chapter in both Australian and international underground music history, presented here on vinyl for the first time.