Mick Turner’s sound and vision

Mick Turner is not the kind of plodding artist who only puts on one show at a time. The ultra-productive Dirty Three guitarist and songwriter, who has also been a painter most of his life, cuts an awkward figure in the corner at Blank space, a tiny Surry Hills art gallery where his latest exhibition ‘ Beasts, Angels, Flowers, a Birth, a Death and Trips to the Ocean ‘ is currently on display.

It’s an abstracted and vibrant collection in the same vein as the album covers he has crafted for his band, The Dirty Three.

‘Semi surreal and dreamlike,’ is how Turner describes his new art works, which are an interesting melange of impressionism and ’60s pop art. His paintings recreate the Australian landscape as a wilderness where anything can happen; where even the most mundane scenes or events can astonish.

On top of his exhibition at Blank Space, Mick Turner also performed two solo sets at The Hopetoun Hotel over the weekend.

He pulled a particularly large crowd at the Friday night gig. A few strums into the first song and Turner set the pace for a brooding excursion. His spidery fingers picked their way through lonely minor notes. His musical pondering seems largely improvised without straying into irrelevance or self indulgence.

Similar to the haunting tone of his band, Turner’s solo numbers lack the searing, dive bomber violin runs which punctuate The Dirty Three sessions. Instead he records and loops himself live, freeing his hands to interject with an odd assortment of instruments ‘ a chromatic harmonica, melodica and what is probably the least gratuitous use of a violin by a guitarist. All add colour and energy to a trance-inducing set.

Mick is bolted to planet earth by Jack Wegner, a phenomenal skinsmith in his own right and drummer for Ed Kuepper.

In the last moments of the gig Turner gets a little loose, in a low key kind of way. Is it me or is he messing with low-fi hip hop vocal samples and record scratching. I begin to question whether the Hopetoun is using the wrong type of acid to clean its beer lines. But the dichotomy between his music and modern technology isn’t intrusive, it’s interesting and it works.

The only complaint was the brevity of the set by an artist who is among the ranks of iconic Australian musicians too often overlooked in favour of over-appreciated ARIA dunces.

Mick Turner evokes an ethereal type of Australia that the Cold Chisels of Australia could never muster. For me his music sounds like a warped version of Australian history; a haunting soundtrack for a colony gone mad on scurvy and loneliness. But perhaps one punter put it best when she said: ‘It’s like a soundtrack for a movie that hasn’t been made yet.’