Surprise Attack

The Age

Friday October 7, 2005

Sophie Best

A strange collection of religious music, blues and electronica on the True Spirit's new album is surprising fans, writes Sophie Best.

THE origins of Ambuscado, the new album by Hugo Race and the True Spirit, can be traced to a dodgy cassette held together with sticky tape.

"Bryan (Colechin), our bass player, made a compilation on a cassette tape," explains Race, who was one of Nick Cave's original Bad Seeds, the founder of post-punk swamp rockers the Wreckery and who has clocked up 10 albums with the True Spirit.

"The tape was a collection of private moments of the True Spirit from hours of material, which we'd decided was too strange for albums. We all really liked it, and listened to it all the time, but the cassette tape was deteriorating."

The source material, from home recording sessions all over Europe, film soundtracks and radio performances, was transferred to computer. "Once we had it on hard disk," says Race, "we could access those moments in time."

Those moments in time have been transfigured into a hallucinatory meltdown of down-home Delta blues and electronica on Ambuscado, a Spanish word meaning something like "ambush" - appropriately so, because it has already ambushed critics' and fans' expectations of the True Spirit as a rock-oriented band.

"It's a record that took a lot of people by surprise," says Race. "We use loops of Iraqi percussion and electronic percussion as the rhythmic basis of the songs, so it kind of avoids rock music."

The album is steeped in religious imagery and ancient texts, and rooted in the combination of the pious and the profane, peculiar to the country blues traditions of the Mississippi Delta.

"It's going back to the source of things," says Race of his fascination with blues and roots music. "There's that sense of real involvement and dynamic participation in music as a life ritual, rather than as a form of light entertainment.

"We're also driving deeper and deeper into the content of things. We're always looking to connect with that deep energy that you get in those old '20s blues, but doing it as people of our own time and our own technology. We cover gospel songs like Will the Circle Be Unbroken and John the Revelator, but we put them in a contemporary context with an acid treatment, and subvert the meaning."

Race does not have a religious background, but he is drawn to the spiritual dimensions of the blues masters. "The old singers that I come back to - Son House, Blind Willie Johnson - they were kind of schizophrenic characters," he says.

"They sinned excessively and then atoned for it by a full immersion in a fundamentalist mentality, and that's where the tension in their music comes from. The idea of redemption is very important to them, because they really felt they were going to hell."

Dividing his time between Melbourne and Italy, where he has several music, film and production projects under way, has brought Race creative freedom.

"I think it's always really unpredictable," he muses, "what happens to people when you move them out of their home. For me, it's given me the liberty to create the kind of music I wanted to do."

Hugo Race and the True Spirit launch Ambuscado (out now on Glitterhouse through MGM Distribution) next Friday at the Northcote Social Club.

© 2005 The Age

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