Darla Records

The desert is a lonely place. Sounds come and go, but don’t linger long. Nature in all its emptiness reigns supreme; you can’t help notice the apparent nothingness. A clever and cunning beast, nothingness is merely a façade, deceiving us to believe in the contradictory nature of its so-called existence. Far more is lurking beneath the sand, amongst the wind, in the jeans of the cowboy that you or I could ever imagine, sending futile words, such as nothingness, into oblivion. Stripping things back can be complicated. Margins was a challenge thought up by a bunch of guys all in loud and abrasive bands. The task seemed simple: make pretty instrumental music. Avoid epic build-ups! Don’t play quiet all song, only to finish in a seething, ear piercing, blaze of sound! It was easier to come up with parameters and paradigms rather than actually making the music. After the first meeting of minds, the entire project was nearly put into the too-hard basket. The lineage of the band had gone a long way to create deceptively strong and restrictive boundaries. Previous and continuing marriages to The Nation Blue, Blacklevel Embassy, Ricaine, Hardware, Rhythm Bell and Warped (amongst others) resulted in a prolific amount of riffage and rock beats, but rarely what one would call ‘pretty music’. Thankfully, with ideas bred determination, and a few months down the track, what could loosely be described as ‘songs’ were emerging. With intentions of creating a film soundtrack (minus the film), Margins set about creating music with space; music where the comment “don’t play there” was just as, if not more important, than the actual playing; music that allowed the mind to wander, to tune in and be entertained, then to wander again at will. Margins aim to create sound where that illegitimate term ‘nothingness’ becomes something. The 40 minutes of sound to be released as a debut album contains moments of subtlety, joy, intensity, simplicity and intricacy. Recorded literally under the streets of West Melbourne by Barry Stockley, mixed by Matt Voigt amongst the cows in Harkaway, and mastered by Bob Weston in Chicago, the final product resonates with the desert: complicated.