Selected Songs 1997-2003

by Hydroplane

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Robert Bloemkolk I guess the vocals keep me listening. Beautiful, dreamy, haunting. Such a nice find. Favorite track: You Were There.

SHAUN Hauntingly emotional selection of songs that rival and may even supersede the output of the previous incarnation The Cat's Miaow. Favorite track: Failed Adventure.

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
gatefold dbl LP
black vinyl
edition of 800
artwork by Matthew Walkerdine

Includes unlimited streaming of Selected Songs 1997-2003 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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Purchasable with gift card

£26 GBP or more
Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

£9 GBP or more
Limited edition dbl LP w/ poster
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
gatefold dbl LP
black vinyl
w/ A2 poster
edition of 200
artwork by Matthew Walkerdine

Includes unlimited streaming of Selected Songs 1997-2003 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	We Crossed The Atlantic 03:52	buy track
2.	The Love You Bring 07:00	buy track
3.	When I Was Howard Hughes 02:47	buy track
4.	Failed Adventure 03:38	buy track
5.	Stars (Twilight Mix) 01:54	buy track
6.	Grand Central 04:25	buy track
7.	International Exiles 04:53	buy track
8.	Merry-Go-Round 03:54	buy track
9.	Radios Appear 03:31	buy track
10.	City Terminus 05:09	buy track
11.	Min Min Light 04:03	buy track
12.	Oregon Snow 03:39	buy track
13.	Cherry Lake 02:07	buy track
14.	Blackout 04:25	buy track
15.	Please Don't Say Goodbye 03:04	buy track
16.	Museum Station 04:29	buy track
17.	Blue Train 02:54	buy track
18.	You Were There 03:43	buy track
19.	Something Better Beginning 02:59	buy track

about

Selected Songs 1997-2003 compiles some of the finest moments in the recording history of Hydroplane, the Melbourne-based indie-pop three-piece that operated alongside The Cat’s Miaow through the second half of the nineties. It’s the third release in what feels, now, like a loosely planned series by World Of Echo, documenting the music made by this group of friends in Melbourne sharehouses (The Cat’s Miaow’s Songs ’94-’98, 2022), or in the case of The Shapiros (Gone By Fall, 2023), while traversing the International Pop Underground.

Hydroplane would be familiar to anyone already following these breadcrumb trails – Andrew Withycombe, Bart Cummings and Kerrie Bolton were the group’s core, all members of The Cat’s Miaow. With Cat’s Miaow drummer Cameron Smith itinerant, having moved to London, the trio used this opportunity to expand their music. It’s a subtle, but important shift. If The Cat’s Miaow was about the perfect, minimalist, two-minute pop song, Hydroplane’s music was far more open-ended, embracing the loops and drones, sampled house-y shuffle beats, the burbling of a Roland Jupiter-4 synth, all of which the trio joined, effortlessly, to their endless capacity for moving, elegant melodicism.

They may have only planned to release one seven-inch single, but the sound Hydroplane created was so bewitching, so compelling, that the project’s lifespan ran for around half a decade, and they ended up releasing three albums, including a self-titled debut recently reissued by Efficient Space, and seven singles. There are all kinds of compelling things happening in the music compiled here – the hazy repetition of the gentler side of Krautrock is in here, somewhere, which also suggests Stereolab at their most intimate and disarmed; the gently drifting guitars, gauzy and oneiric, set the songs adrift and floating, each one lost in its own imagined, distracted world. Songs like “The Love You Bring” set indistinct tonal floats across dance rhythms, in a way not quite heard since My Bloody Valentine’s “Instrumental” – but with the added gift of Bolton’s gorgeous voice.

This loose coalition with dance music, and the quiet experimentalism at the heart of Hydroplane, also gestures towards peers like Hood, Acetate Zero and Other People’s Children, and releases on renegade labels like Wurlitzer Jukebox and Enraptured. Like those groups and labels, The Cat’s Miaow were reconciling independent pop music’s past – sweet melody and melancholy, chiming and droning guitars – with the futures promised by DIY electronics and nascent digitalia, the interface of indie and IDM that led to some of the underground’s most blissful, texturally swoonsome music. All that is here, but also, the poise of the melodies is pure Cat’s Miaow, though, with Bolton’s voice sailing, pacifically, over some of the most pared-down, gorgeous music made during their decade.

It was a time, too, when such music could make waves – “We Crossed The Atlantic”, one of their early singles, was picked up by John Peel, who played it repeatedly on his legendary radio show, the song reaching #13 on his 1997 Festive 50. That the song itself was a cover of a tune by 1960s Australian beatnik-pop-poet Pip Proud felt even more perfect – a group of outsiders paying tribute to another outsider, played on the radio one of the few broadcasters brave and human enough to take a chance on this music. But it was a time where everything was up for grabs, and genres were flowing into each other: folk songs went drone; indie re-discovered noise; ambient pop floated, again, out onto the dancefloor. And while they may have been sequestered away in Melbourne, Australia, Hydroplane felt core to that scene, a quietly driving force.

Compiling material from across their brief but mercurial career, this double album perfectly captures the magic and mystery of Hydroplane’s dreamlike, perfect pop songs.

credits

released September 1, 2023

Track 1 written by Pip Proud
Tracks 2, 4, 6-12, 14-19 written by Andrew Withycombe
Track 3 written by Bart Cummings
Track 5 & 13 written by Andrew Withycombe & Bart Cummings

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about

Hydroplane Melbourne, Australia

Hydroplane came together in 1996. Our first record, "Excerpts from forthcoming LP", was supposed to be our last. But we kept going. We also play together in the Cat’s Miaow. Hydroplane is Kerrie Bolton, Andrew Withycombe and Bart Cummings.

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