Cold Hands Warm Heart – Luxury Bat [LP]

"Luxury Bat is the new album from Cold Hands Warm Heart, a Naarm-based collective linked to Eastmint, a local artist-run studio, event space and label. The album's six tracks blend structured songwriting with improvisation to create fluid, open-ended soundscapes connected to the natural world.

In a recent interview with Jazz Feldy of Good Fortune, Genevieve Fry of the group explained: "I like to think of us as quite a slow band... things evolve in their own time." Compositions grow gradually, sometimes over years, with Fry bringing initial lyrics and chordal structure to the group before they collectively expand on them.

The recordings were made over three days at Super Melody World, a studio set in a 19th-century schoolhouse within the Macedon Ranges. Surrounded by nature, Genevieve along with Georgia Harvey, Esala Liyanage, and Travis John tracked these new songs, capturing them primarily in single live takes.

Field recordings further ground the album to place. Cicadas and frogs heard during hikes along Mount Tarangawa and Mount Murul, for instance, would later appear on Quartz. Blue whale vocalizations also feature - sounds originally gathered for artist and researcher Jessie Boylan's project The Smallest Measure which looks at climate change impacts in the Antarctic."

Eastmint, 2023