David Bridie first made a name for himself in Australia in the early Eighties with his band Not Drowning, Waving, an endeavor that spawned music best described as Papua New Guinean world beat. Later came the side project My Friend the Chocolate Cake, the whimsical chamber pop of which has been lauded far and wide in Australia. Now his first solo album, Act of Free Choice (Nettwerk), released Down Under nearly two years ago, is making waves on American shores.
“It’s simple, piano-based songs placed over some loops and drum rhythms and different textures,” says Bridie. “I took a lot of time to place my musical sounds in the background to form a bed underneath the songs.”
There aren’t many songwriters out there making Bridie’s brand of introspective, storytelling music without sounding clichéd, and his use of found sounds — everything from short-wave radio signals to conch shells — creates lushly layered images of a land in which hope dies hard in the crackling air.
“A lot of the static and the shortwave sounds come from idle evenings in a tropical climate,” he explains. “Shortwave radio is multiculturalism at its best. You just flick, turn your finger two millimeters, and you’ve got a totally different language. And it fades in and out, so it’s very piecemeal.”
And also very ephemeral, something Bridie captures nicely while gently telling stories of hardship set in the Australian outback and Papua New Guinea.
“I very much wanted to capture a sense of space, something that Australia and the United States share … that big sky.”
This article appears in March 15 • 2002.