Secret Teeth: New Common Era

It was inevitable that Michael Sill and Blake Conley would make music together at some point.

During the COVID pandemic, the trans-Pacific duo struck up a kinship over experimental and outsider culture. In between their respective creative endeavours, Sill’s label, Ramble Records, facilitated Conley’s 2022 droneroom album, The Most Gorgeous Sleep and has since dispensed more of the project’s good oil in last year’s Rustic Lung (with the help of Athens, Georgia label, Echodelick).

Despite an ocean’s divide (Sill, based in Melbourne; Conley now in Tacoma, Washington via Las Vegas, Nevada and Nashville, Tennessee), the pair joining forces as Secret Teeth.

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With their debut long-player, New Common Era, the pair find solace in long-form noodling that stretches the mind. Sill, who released two excellent albums in 2023 under the Man from Atlantis guise (Blues for Archie Shepp and Golden Light), finds a kindred spirit in Conley, who himself – as readers throughout these parts will know – is a constant wheel in the new music machine (his latest droneroom release, …Nothing if not worrisome follows his second 2024 release, Barstow Deluxe).

Four ten-plus minute compositions inspired by space and how it can offer the best results in a world that barely affords us any, on New Common Era, Sill and Conley effortlessly wander through the sonic haze that really has no end point.

Beginning with Naïve Apples, Conley’s deep wanderings and vibrations of sound reach forgotten land, as Sill’s primitive guitar features high in the mix. With tweaks and twangs that create a scene for quiet space and contemplation, it’s music that requires your presence both in body and mind. If truly locked in, this is something that captures the same emotional response as Conley’s 2023 collaboration alongside Cincinnati experimental guitarist, Pete Fosco, as Rabbit Hash.

While Sill dominates the first track, it’s Conley turn to guide his collaborator through the miasma with Some Distant Horizon. With more of that whirring free movement that’s been the hallmark of the droneroom experience, here the pair blacken the tone with something even more brooding. It’s like the soundtrack to those dark moments demanding to be lived.  

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At one apiece, we arrive at Longshoreman vs. Seagull – exactly the trade-off its title suggests. A good old-fashion United States vs. Australia to-and-fro that ends in a cosmic rush of distortion, jolting bleeps and sweltering drones. For all the emotional intensity of the preceding two compositions, this is free-wheeling experimentalism where both artists are just having fun.

Normal services resumes on closing cut, The Light Just Radiates. As Sill takes the baton, Conley shapes a sequence of eerie soundscapes for his antipodean cohort to slowly pick at his guitar whilst gazing at the sunset from the back porch; Sill’s methodical movements up and down the fretboard creating a juxtaposition between the darkness and light both artists have spent their careers oscillating between.

It’s not so much as finding a common ground or the space between both, but rather the push and pull between both musicians who create a nervous energy that mirrors this life. And that’s the biggest takeout on New Common Era. While the title also suggests the realities we are faced with every day, through the borderless journey of sound, Sill and Conley harness these truths with something meditative, bare and fragile.

New Common Era is out now via Ramble Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.