Music
Legends, from instrumental duo Wilson Tanner, is a rich pastoral meditation recorded in a South Australian vineyard. By Chris Johnston.
Wilson Tanner’s Legends is an instrumental ode to the earth
The Australian instrumental music duo Wilson Tanner have a specific way of working that – in my words, not theirs – is about going outside and letting nature intervene: making the music in the outside and also of the outside. The duo have followed the dictum for three very fine albums over nine years – 69 (2016), II (2019) and now Legends.
Their debut, 69, was recorded in a Perth backyard. John Tanner – the Tanner – is from Perth, but like his Melbourne mate Andrew Wilson (aka electronica producer Andras) is peripatetic, wandering here and there from Berlin to Sydney to London. Tanner’s main outlet is his solo studio project Eleventeen Eston; his first album, Delta Horizon, was released only on cassette in 2014 before it was discovered by tastemakers enthralled by his take on spaced-out jazz, vaporwave and Balearica.
Wilson, meanwhile, has cult status in electronica and an array of pseudonyms depending on what type of music he is making or delivering: Andras Fox, Berko or, more recently for his soundtrack work, A.r.t. Wilson. His management writes that he is about “breaking and reassembling an Australian vernacular sound and identity”.
After 69, II was recorded on a 1950s timber riverboat in and around Port Phillip Bay in Victoria with a definite maritime feel – ambient seagulls! – and track titles such as “My Gull”, “Idle” and “Crossing the Bar”. The cover was a Pam the Bird-esque seabird smoking. “My Gull” in particular is a phenomenal piece of music made from looping piano and synths and scratchy field (or sea) recordings of birds, ropes and creaking wood.
Brian Eno would approve, although the music here is fuller – there’s more of it – than Eno’s fabled ambient series from 1978 to ’82. The final of the series was On Land, at a time when, as David Toop explains in his book Ocean of Sound, it was only just possible to use software to edit or alter sound or music. Eno had been in Ghana and was able to use the found sounds he recorded in his compositions, editing it back in New York, where he also drew on a cassette tape of frogs from Honduras.
Six years after II comes Legends. For this album, Wilson and Tanner went to a winery in rural South Australia. The winery gets credit but it’s not branded content or anything like that. It’s just another unusual, atmosphere- loaded location.
People doubt all this adventuring and remote recording is real and suspect that in fact the duo make their music in a windowless studio in Melbourne’s inner-north. The esteemed electronic music critic Philip Sherburne wrote of II, in Pitchfork, that Wilson Tanner only “claim” to do these things and that II’s sound was a “maritime conceit”. Nonetheless, he loved the record: “aquamarine strains of ambient music swirled with new age at its most beatific. Limpid synthesisers, nylon-stringed acoustic guitar and the occasional keening clarinet solo.”
The recording site, Manon Farm in the Adelaide Hills, is a biodynamic farm. It’s near Forest Range, quite high up on a ridge, on Peramangk Country. The band’s Instagram shows a sort of fetishisation of the noble, dirty work of viticulture – bare feet in tubs of grapes, slurry and mess, summer dirt, sheep, tractors, vats, Blundstone boots. It also shows Wilson and Tanner making music “en plein air” with – as an abridged list – a trombone, flutes, a balalaika and a rickety piano. Ambient sounds from the grape farm rise and fall and rise again, including dogs barking, flies and insects, the scraped tones of taut wire. You can feel the weather, the wind gusts, the dust, the South Australian sun.
If this recalls Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the famous pastoral symphony of woodwind, percussion, brass and strings, or Henry David Thoreau rambling through pastures seeking enlightenment in the natural world, it’s supposed to. Legends is explicitly a pastoral work, conceived and made on the land and of the land, through the lens of two youngish, experimentally minded, highly capable musicians and sound artists. Wilson Tanner is able to sustain a very certain long-form feel throughout, without drifting into less sincere ambient or folk tropes. It’s captivating and evocative.
As Thoreau wrote in Walden during his time in the wood cabin by the lake, cogitating on the meaning of it all, the bucolia all around him: “perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
Legends is Beethoven, Thoreau, Eno but also Moondog (Louis Hardin), the blind American musician who made instrumental records from 1949 until his death in the late 1999. Moondog used a lot of found, lost or primitive instruments. He rewrote pastoral symphonies, including No. 6. His songs were called “Pastoral” and “Pastoral II” for guitar or harp, or were named after rocky ledges, trees, birds, dogs, butterflies, barns and frogs. It was a very distinct, outré version of American pastoral.
On Legends, I love “Jaune” – “yellow” as in vin jaune, originally a French name for late-harvest sauvignon grapes. The track crackles and rattles around actual birdsong, but as can often be the question in the bush, what is that bird? A myna? A honeyeater? The bird sings “Jaune” alongside acoustic guitar, synths and samples. It’s very similar to “My Gull”, which has bare piano shapes over a synthy soundscape featuring footsteps, a creaking door and seabirds.
The title track “Legends” is more out there, using melodica as the lead with nylon-string guitar, just a couple of rough chords. As with the great dub player Augustus Pablo and his producers in the 1970s, the melodica is cut, edited, reversed and relayed into a frequency it was never supposed to have. The final track, “Daddles”, also plays with frequencies and electronica. It feels as if it is influenced by Eastern music at first but then opens out into a strange ambient-country track using some kind of slide instrument that turns quickly, but very gracefully, psychedelic.
The more literally named “Old Vine”, like the very winey “Jaune”, “Summer Rot” and “Bubbles”, is perhaps easier to read pastorally. Bare, antique guitars, a little medieval, more keys, more birdsong. An earthy instrumental folk song about how old things can usually be better.
Ultimately, Legends is an ode to the earth. The skies too – but mostly the earth and the plenty that it grows.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "Vintage sounds".
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