Clean

Australian electronic music just wasn’t the same after Tom Ellard of Severed Heads entered the picture – from his early days as part of the DIY underground, to the deviant dance music he’d make in the ‘90s, Ellard was constantly both ahead of, and slyly commenting on, the game. Clean is from 1981, and it’s a self-released stew of tape cuts, found sound, plasmic drone and irradiated rhythms. The surprise, though, is in how delicate and finely wrought some of it sounds now – those tinkling synth arpeggios are cultivated with real love and an unmistakable facility for warped melody.