Music For The Mind

J Walker is a musician's musician capable of rendering those in the know a gushing mess of superlatives that almost always include something about creative integrity. He's a darling of the critics too, a producer, a member of Paul Kelly's touring band and a well known composer for film and television; it's no wonder his eighth Machine Translations record has been six years in the making.

“It took a lot longer than I thought it would but look, it's nice to have something out of mine again because I've sort of become more and more of an agent of people's creativity…” says Walker from his Gippsland studio on producing records for artists as varied as C.W. Stoneking, Tiny Ruins and Paul Kelly.

In between raising a family, illness, renovations and his many varied musical roles, Walker noodled away at The Bright Door over the years, whittling the final cut down to a tracklist of ten songs that share a thread of heavy themes.   

“It's a cliché, but great art is always either about sex or death, so they say… During the time that I was making this record I lost a really dear friend and we had our second child, and those two things were actually pretty close together so there's definitely a period of time when that sort of stuff is happening where you become very aware of what it's all about really…” he chuckles quietly.

It's amusing to hear the word cliché coming from Walker considering The Bright Door – and indeed the entire Machine Translations back catalogue – cannot be tidily filed under folk, rock, pop nor any other genre. Accompanied by instruments old, broken, modified, detuned, delayed and sustained, an often imperfect but always thought-provoking vocal is delivered across rhythms both languid and purposeful on his latest effort. It's a challenging listen that stimulates both intrigue and unease, a point that Walker is all too happy to make.

“It's kind of a little niche that I've carved out for myself; there's plenty of people making easy music out there and some of it's great and some of it's shit,” he says matter-of-factly. “But my thing's always been to try and find new ways of articulating the sort of ideas that I get. To satisfy myself I have to at least make a pretty big effort to go beyond a set of basic ingredients of songwriting. I like my lyrics to have a bit of depth in 'em, and musically I dunno, it's just my thing; I've always loved the more experimental side of pop music and that's sort of where I like to go naturally. I contradict myself because I love simple rock 'n roll as well, but for the sort of places I like to go musically, it's gotta feel different and in some way it's gotta feel new…”

Walker suggests it's also gotta speak to the mind.

“Music can have so many different roles; you wouldn't put my record on if you wanted to have a boogie, that's for sure…” he laughs. “But if you compare it to say books or literature, some of the literature that I've enjoyed most in my life over the years it's taken me a fair while to get into it, and sometimes it's taken me ages to read the book and it's dense and complex and makes you feel stuff, and you're not sure if you really want to go there, but that's really rewarding – that's stretching your mind a little bit. I mean, you don't want it to be like a chore to have to go through that process but there's definitely a place for that stuff as well as – like I was saying – the dumb rock 'n roll that makes you smile, that's good too. It's an interesting time. I think of it in terms of where we're at culturally when you watch Channel Ten and you see how dumbed down everything is and you see how cheap everything's becoming just in terms of shiny, shiny [content] with no substance and short attention spans and all that shit. I 'spose part of me on this record is just like, 'Well fuck that, I want this to take time'. The songs are long but they take their sweet time to go where they've got to go, so that's almost a reaction to that whole cheapening thing that's happening in our culture.”

Walker's not bitter though; he'll just keep on doing his thing using neither fame nor fortune but something far simpler as the impetus for the next chapter of the Machine Translations' story.

“You need just enough encouragement that you can move onto the next part.”