Dishee

New solo album of Hugo Race. Ambient-blues meets post-rock or something totally different. Five almost instrumental tracks continue the way of Hugo from the albums like "Wet Dream" or "Between The Hemispheres". Unusual journey and story about pandemic time, demons and exorcsims.

About Hugo Race: Hugo is a native Melbournian, class of '63. A former Bad Seed, he spent 3 decades in Europe, particularly Italy, travelling the channel back and forth – where the personal and the musical collide! Hugo has released 30 albums on Glitterhouse, Sub Rosa, RecRec, Normal, Bang!, Desvelos and the Polish independent label Gusstaff Records as well as Other Tongues, Village Roadshow, Citadel, Spooky and Rampant Records in Australia.

Hugo's alchemical fusion of rock, roots, experimentalism and blues has gained him an

international audience and a network of collaborators, promoters and labels, releasing multiple albums and projects under many different names – Fatalists, Dirtmusic, Sepiatone, LDO, Merola Matrix, Gemini 4. In 2016, Hugo's first book, a memoir, 'Road Series', was published by Transit Lounge.

Dishee… what the fuq is a dishee you might ask?

It's a made-up word derived from ancient Sanskrit that can exorcise demons.

The Melbourne winter of 2020 was a reality shift and my reality unfortunately shifted with it. For decades my life had been a continuum of reckless roadtrips, missed trains, packed intercontinental 747's, dispassionate, haunted hotel rooms and maverick promoters. For years, I never stayed anywhere for more than a few months. I was searching for something to distract myself.

And then I became truly distracted…

March 2020 challenged me to implode inwards instead of exploring outwards. I studied ancient spiritual techniques and locked myself away to brood, meditate and smoke – anything to ease the crushing ache of lockdown and the 20-cent coin I now danced upon. I missed my old life. Everybody did.

I examined new tools, meditational yoga and mantras, learning how to breath in the ancient Sufi ways. Mantras and breathing techniques seemed acutely relevant in a flu epidemic. I became fascinated again by music, words, the magic of repetition.

I was skeptical that meditation, chanting and searching within could produce a record. But then my son went missing and my heart went missing with him. He'd been taken over by a demon. This record, Dishee, is the exorcism of that demon from both of us.

I recorded at night when quiet reigned and I was ready to channel meditational music that I knew had to be not only transcendent but slightly fuqed as well. I thought about what I was doing as a mushroom radar dish, it's red fairytale cap pointing down at the earth, its inverted ribbed cup pointing up to receive messages from the wheeling stars and planets in space. But the signals were bleak.

I bought a new guitar from Demonic Dishee town. The guitar was made in Japan the same year I was born and like many haunted vintage guitars contained unheard-of music waiting for the right fingers to set it free. I studied ancient spiritual techniques and locked myself away to brood, meditate and smoke – anything to ease the crushing ache of lockdown and the 20 cent coin I now danced upon.

I practiced snap freezing and distorting guitar sounds then started using the same treatments on my voice, paralyzing words mid-sentence. I inserted swathes of liquid ink into every irreverent guitar slide and vocal harmony, searching for a new sound rich with sonic grit and wild unpredictability.

And then something incredible happened. During my nightly night terrors where I was looking for my missing son and he was looking for me, my Dishee murdered that child-snatching demon at a distance of forty paces with a millennium-old mantra and the practice of detachment. This record is the soundtrack of an exorcism.

Hugo Race, May 2021