I GAVE MY LEGS TO A SNAKE

TRACKLIST A1. FADE OUT A2. WALK LIKE A3. FLAWED A4. VACATION A5. LONER 3 A6. FENCES INFO Mahne Frame (pronounced mah-nay frame) brings his pan-pacific rave pop back home with a divergent-sounding EP on a new label with Berlin™s Monkeytown Records. The Australian musician and producer had spent the last four years developing his kitchen-sink electropunk aesthetic with his own 21 N FUN entity for ideas in Japan, where lyrics of disaffection were dragged through grainy bedroom productions echoing his big beat and post-industrial influences. Taut with repressed rage and isolation, those two EPs traced Frame™s travels, from a final show as touring drummer for avant-pop performer Kirin J Callinan in Tokyo to border closures that left him stranded and restless in the East Asian megacity. The results were 2019™s Kiss My Ass, Death and 2020™s Mad World, where the ambient gloom of the former™s eulogy to Prodigy™s front man on šRIP KEITH FLINT› meets the bitter rumbling of the latter™s šSOMETIMES I TRY NOT TO CARE (feat. Tohji).› In finally returning to his tiny hometown of Katoombažnestled in the scenic Blue Mountains, and located a hundred kilometres inland of Sydney, AustraliažFrame™s latest release, I gave my legs to a snake, loosens its grip on its resentments and eases back into the comforts of wide-open space and geographical isolation. Tracks like šFLAWED› and šVACATION› shift gears from his earlier shades of beats-laden speak-singing to a more folk-inflected song-writing reminiscent of Yung Lean™s turn to fragile crooning as jonatan leandoer96 or Dean Blunt™s collaborations with Joanne Robertson. But far from following the globalized trends of the underground, Frame™s is simply a response to his environmentžtrading the noise and compact mobility of his scooter in a densely-populated Japanese metropolis for the unbothered acoustic explorations of a guitar in the seclusion of the Australian bush. Lead single šWALK LIKE› takes full advantage of the extra room for self-reflection by ruminating on the irony of being an introvert, only to pursue a very public-facing career as a musician and performer. šI spent two weeks making the stone of attention,› says Frame, about the huge rock-shaped sculpture he carved for the track™s accompanying music video. šThe idea was that pulling it would be punishment for attention seeking, only to transport it on the back of a ute [Aussie slang for pickup truck] and realizing that the stone just attracts even more attention.› Perhaps, solitude is one of the more constant and adaptable states that ultimately allows Frame a form of connection through art, whether produced from a cramped apartment in pandemic-stricken Tokyo or the vast bushland of Australia™s majestic Blue Mountains.