The extraordinary Milan-based experimental music resource Soundohm has been a great support to my work and Shame File Music for a few years now. Both of my recent collaborative releases “Steady State” (included in Soundohm’s Best of 2025 as well) and “Yarrow” are now available from their excellent online store, and so accessible at much more reasonable shipping rates for those in Europe and the UK. These are actually the last copies of “Yarrow” (sold out here in Australia). Soundohm also stock a good amount of my back catalogue and Shame File Music releases as well.
This week, Soundohm’s newsletter included an in-depth and thoughtful feature on these two releases. It’s rare someone who has obviously listened very deeply to my music writes about it, so I thought I would share the article with you here:
Clinton Green’s aluminium resonances and organic soundscapes from Australia
Having already had a stellar year, the Australian experimental imprint, Shame File Music, winds down toward the end of 2025 with two brand new astounding drops, both honing in sonic explorations of Clinton Green: “Steady State”, his third collaborative outing with UK born, Melbourne-based composer Barnaby Oliver, and the first to be pressed on vinyl, and “Yarrow”, an overwhelmingly beautiful handmade cassette edition, marking his first duo with the New Zealand born, Australian based musician and artist Allanah Stewart.
Serving as deep and prescient dive into the low rumbles of the underground scene, nestled within an already bristling context, each respectively unfurls knotted and highly distinct manifestations at the borders of minimalism and noise, producing immersive and understated soundscapes imbued with the distinct characteristics of each artist’s highly refined sound.
For decades, Australia has been a hotbed for experimental music, producing countless singular artists and trajectories of creative exploration that have shifted the sense of what is possible within the context. Initially founded during the 1990s as tiny cassette imprint, for more than 30 years the Victoria based imprint, Shame File Music, has occupied a crucial place in this story, producing more than a hundred releases dedicated to documenting both the contemporary and historical output of Australia’s thriving experimental music scene. Earlier this year, we had the privilege of exploring asome brilliant releases on the label by Ian Andrews – as Astasie-abasie – and the trio of David Brown, Tony Buck, and Magda Mayas. Now, rounding out 2025, Shame File casts the light on its own roots, delivering two killer collaborative full-lengths involving Clinton Green, the quiet hand who has run the label all these years: Steady State, the return of Green’s longstanding duo with Barnaby Oliver – issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 100 copies – and Yarrow, a killer cassette edition – hand-labeled and housed in a hand-made pouch, with dried botanicals sewn in – comprising two sides of sonic convergences between Green and the New Zealand born, Australian based musician and artist Allanah Stewart. Each resting at incredible junctures of sound art, noise, and electroacoustic practice – further illuminating Australia’s remarkable contemporary context of sonic experimentalism, neither of these are going to sit around for long. Grab them while you can!
| Clinton Green & Barnaby Oliver “Steady State“(Limited LP – 100 copies) |
| Clinton Green first emerged onto the Australian experimental music scene during the 1990s, harnessing unconventional approaches to guitars, turntables, Walkmans, dictaphones and found objects within an understated, brilliant body of solo work and collaborations with fellow sonic travellers like Scott Sinclair, Ernie Althoff, Ren Walters, Michael McNab, and Ian Andrews, in addition to numerous dancers, theaters, and performance artists and his extensive efforts as a curator, facilitator, writer and researcher. Back in 2020, Green delivered The Interstices of These Epidemics, a killer full-length, created as a duo with the UK born, Melbourne-based composer Barnaby Oliver, sculpting “a restricted palette of gestures and sound sources” into an engrossing pair of improvisations. Having proved to be an endlessly rewarding collaboration for Green and Oliver – in fact dating back to 2005 when they worked together on the latter’s Wall of E guitar orchestra – Steady State is their third full-length, and the first to receive the vinyl treatment. |
| Illuminating the roots of the two works that comprise the sides of Steady State – Steady and State – Green explains: “This album’s origin goes back to a concert we played in August 2022 at Melbourne’s Tempo Rubato. That concert was in itself the culmination of several years’ focus on developing a minimalist yet subtly expansive musical dialogue centred around my bowing of heavy aluminium bowls, with Barnaby playing various instruments including violin, bowed banjo and piano. Playing acoustically in that space, with the 102-key Stuart & Sons grand concert piano for one piece, encouraged us to return to the venue one Sunday morning a couple of months later to record the same two pieces from our concert. We recorded them with the vision of two vinyl sides in mind.” The two sides of Steady State are both deeply conversant and distinct. Steady is fantastic intersection of tonal and textural minimalism, comprising sheets of shifting resonances and timbres produced by Green’s bowed bowls penetrated by Oliver’s sparse interventions on piano, delivered like water drops into a sea of sound. Strikingly emotive within its abstract sensibilities and marked by an aching sense of beauty, across its glacial evolutions each artist meets the other with a striking sense of poetry and restraint. The album’s second piece, State, encounters Oliver leaving the piano behind, and thus the kinds of temporal marking, tonal contrast, and percussiveness encountered through his playing on Steady. Here he meets Green on his own ground, producing a similar sonic palette on violin and bowed banjo to the bowing of heavy aluminium bowls. The outcome is remarkable, intertwining the hallmarks of ambient music and noise, while subtly recalling certain meditative states produced by Indian classical music. Howling, deep, masterful, and intricate, shifting the dynamic expectations of improvised music to hone in on interjections at the microscopic level, it’s an immersive journey that reveals further dimensions with every return listen. We’ve been following the collaboration between Clinton Green and Barnaby Oliver since it first reached our ears back in 2020, and Steady State might just be our favorite of their releases to date: a stunning, understatedly expressive immersion into their sound-world. Issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 100 copies on Shame File Music – beautifully mastered by Joe Talia – this one isn’t to be missed. Clinton Green & Allanah Stewart “Yarrow“ (Handmade Cassette – 30 copies, only a few available) Collaboration is clearly a central focus within Clinton Green’s practice. Of the many full-lengths that he produced over the last 20 years, only a handful encounter him entirely solo. His latest outing, Yarrow, created with the New Zealand born, Melbourne, Australia, based experimental musician and artist, Allanah Stewart, follows suit. Active on the scene for more than a decade, Stewart is known for her work in experimental and sound art projects, often using handmade and collected objects to generate sound. In addition to collaborating with other artists – notably contributing vocals to Green’s 2024 release, A Conduit – she has worked steadily within the trio Lime Works. What becomes quickly apparent when approaching Yarrow, Green and Stewart’s first outing as a duo, is that the pair prefer to let both the object – an artfully handmade cassette edition incorporating botanicals – and the sound it contains, speak for itself. They provide no background, nor indication of sound sources or process. Fair enough. Sounds and objects can definitely do as much. Comprising two tracks that respectively clock in at just under twenty minutes – White Yarrow and Pink Yarrow – Yarrow emerges as a murky, swirling expanse of sonorities, creaking and rattling among low rumbles and textures that seemingly nod to some deeply organic primordial landscape with a deft sense of imagism flickering within its abstractions. As the first side progresses, the open sense of improvisational discourse between Green and Stewart gathers momentum, focus, and destiny, verging on the rhythmical without ever fully indulging that impulse. The second side’s piece – Pink Yarrow – continues this destiny with an almost minimalist sense of restraint, somehow imbued with a greater sense of location connected to the physicality of the two performers. Imbuing the idiom of noise with a deep sense of restraint and intimacy, rather than the relentless onslaughts so often associated with the realm of creativity, Green and Stewart continuously travel through a shadowy world together, delivering carefully considered interventions in response to what is placed in their way. Wondrous in every sense of the word, Yarrow presents a world to be explored and unlocked over time, feeling as immediate and direct as it does mysterious and understated: artful construction created through the real time dialog between deeply sympathetic minds. Issued by Shame File Music in a highly limited, hand-made and numbered cassette edition of 30 copies, housed in a hand-made pouch, with dried botanicals sewn into them by Stewart, its beauty and singularity as an object is perfectly met by the sound that it contains. This is one of those rare offerings that makes you get on a plane and explore the sounds of Melbourne’s underground experimental music scene in real time. Needless to say, with an edition this small, we don’t have many and they’re likely to fly. Grab one of these little works of art while you can! – Soundohm |
Clinton Green 