HTRK - Annelies Monseré

"A sound at once distant and fragile that still burns in the listener's brain"

Few groups in history, recent or otherwise, elevate mood to such singular, smoldering supremacy as the Australian duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, aka HTRK [‘hate rock'].

Across two decades, their sound has shape-shifted, but it has never wavered in its poetic gravity. Rowland S. Howard (The Birthday Party) was an early mentor of the band and wrote a legendary song on his final opus, ‘Pop Crimes ‘, both for and about lead singer Jonnine, “(I know) a girl called Jonny,” on which Jonn also duets.

HTRK’s songs are often coded as fantasies. Venturing deeper into the heady expanses of dub dream and memory. They make music that channels not just the heaviness of the world or the beauty of it, but the surreal humor and inexplicable serendipity of it, too. Cataloguing desire, intimacy, and spirit like few others.

HTRK’s albums have been released by: Fire, Blast First Petite, Boomkat Editions, and Ghostly International. For their most recent full-length, Rhinestones, they founded their own imprint, N&J Blueberries. Note that HTRK developed as a 3 piece, but tragically founding member Sean Stewart passed while the band were living in London, in 2010, way way before his time.

HTRK will turn 21 in 2024.

ANNELIES MONSERÉ

As a member of Ghent’s experimental music scene, over the past two decades Annelies Monseré has slowly refined a singular approach to musicality, moving from the sparse, instrumental piano works that defined her early career, toward increasingly complex arrangements of instrumentation that offer a central place to her own voice, issued by noteworthy imprints such as BlueSanct, Morc Tapes, Stroom, three:four, and Horn of Plenty. Like her work within the widely celebrated ensemble, Luster, as well as Distels (her duo with Steve Marreyt) and Hydromedusae (her duo with Jessica Bailiff), Monseré’s solo efforts establish a strikingly beautiful and remarkably unique territory that elegantly balances between rigorous experimentalism, minimalism, drone, and folk.

Annelies Monseré’s most recent album, Mares, was released by Horn of Plenty in March 2023. It is a body of experimental compositions that taps the deep well of raw, emotive expression rumbling below numerous traditions of European folk music. Her 6th album, 'I sigh, I resign', is to be released in 2024.