Mahne Frame

Mahne 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. '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.