DU by Down Under

Down Under began in 2018 after Cinta Masters expressed an interest in playing drums again on the internet. Serial punisher and Peter Dutton stunt double Tom Lyngcoln had spare time after all of his long term projects Harmony, Pale Heads and The Nation Blue took functional hits and he was looking for something new.
A long time admirer of Cinta's work in Useless Children and with Stina Tester, Lyngcoln organised a jam with Masters and asked Treehouse / Mt Trout member and fellow Tasmanian ex-pat Jon Ainslie to play bass.

The trio jammed sporadically for 18 months with no consensus or cohesive agreement on what Down Under was or should sound like. With everything recorded always, Lyngcoln poured over the endless minutes of moments caught in digital nets. But his powers of deduction and reduction were severely compromised by decades of caving his own skull in during TNB shows and night after night he would fall asleep in the thinking chair with nary a thought. 

The only obvious essential ingredient was the rhythmical relationship between Masters and Ainslie. Lyngcoln had, over the course of many hours jamming, somehow phased himself out of the band. So Down Under recorded these skeletons of songs (147, Down Under & Joanna) in Windsor in early 2019 with the hope that something would stick with the guitars and vocals one day down the track.
In course of finding something not abhorrent Lyngcoln spent countless lunch breaks recording sprawling improvisations and weirdo alien guitar pieces that would eventually find their way onto a split with Bonnie Mercer; perhaps the best guitarist in the country. 
This release led to the realisation that Bonnie was the missing ingredient and Mercer was asked to join the band. With the weight of Bonnie’s playing and the free form noise and intensity that blanketed the tense rhythms of the bass and drums, the spectrum was full. Lyngcoln tinkered around the edges and tried to find a vocal delivery that worked. 
Then Mercer had a near fatal stroke just before Covid hit and everything changed. Down Under was the furthest consideration of anyone for quite some time. Having to learn how to walk again was daunting enough let alone remembering how to play a guitar. 
In the depths of lockdowns a childhood obsession began tapping on the financial dispensary of Lyngcoln’s solitary thoughts. He combed the online world and found perhaps one of the most offensive looking guitars available to humanity. Even to someone in the full blown throws of a mid life spiral, a transparent fluorescent green BC Rich Mockingbird is an audacious purchase. As a musician who had spent more time with a guitar pressed against his increasingly blunted head, the pandemic delivered one more idea to Lyngcoln that assured his role in Down Under. 

With the help of Ethan at Metta Audio Devices in Brisbane, a microphone was 3D printed into the pickup cavity of the acrylic green beast and what was once just a disgusting guitar was now a pointy, cumbersome and unfortunately extremely heavy vocal microphone. Now singing through pedals and his amp, Lyngcoln found a sonic range that complimented the ferocity of Mercers guitar. 

Bonnie was not only back walking and talking but beginning to play guitar again. Relearning and reconnecting the pathways to a heavy back-catalogue. Down Under became a proxy therapeutic framework for playing music again. But more than that it was starting to gel into a sprawling and cohesive trip.

A bunch of new songs sprung forth (Hell, All Ords, Don’t Dwell, Functional Living, Zone and Heavy) and the band were asked to play in QLD and played their first ever show in Ipswich in August of 2022. Two more recording sessions at High Street and Dangertone Studios under the careful watch of Luke Walton produced the final elements of Down Under’s debut album titled DU. A compilation of 11 pieces that span either side of pandemics and strokes and documents the wrangling of disjointed threads into something.

DU is out Feb 29th through Solar/Sonar.

Down Under are launching DU at the Gem Sunday 10th March with Frenzee from Greece.

Solar/Sonar is a Melbourne based Tasmanian obsessed mining company.



Headshot by Moodwar.