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 “RIP KEITH FLINT” meets the bitter rumbling of the latter’s “SOMETIMES I TRY NOT TO CARE (feat. Tohji).”
In finally returning to his tiny hometown of Katoomba—nestled in the scenic Blue Mountains, and located a hundred kilometres inland of Sydney, Australia—Frame’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 “FLAWED” and “VACATION” 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 environment—trading 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 “WALK 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. “I 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. “The 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.
