Marcus Whale’s Debut Album Is Out Today, Stream and Read a Track-By-Track

Marcus Whale has long been one of Australia’s most talented and forward thinking songwriters. Through his work in Black Vanilla, Collarbones, Scissor Lock and Tennis Boys, he’s pushed a music that is challenging and chromatic.

Released today, his debut solo album 'Inland Sea’ is a brooding reflection on sexual identity and colonial dispossession, seen through the lens of Australian history.

Co-produced by Nigel Yang of HTRK, the record is propelled by a soundtrack of shuddering techno beats and incorporate Whale's work as a contemporary classical and experimental composer.

Stream the album below and read a track-by-track that Marcus has written for NOISEY.

Imagine that the ‘inland sea’ exists. That vague, always-distant idea that so many Australian colonial explorers failed to find is a space, a real space, inaccessible to the colony. This is the beginning point of this album's concept: a utopia eternally beyond.

I've been reading about utopia-making. The gaze towards a horizon that never arrives. The endless looking towards other places, beyond the abject. The generative force we're granted, that desire that brims through all of our bodies. Jose Esteban Munoz's book Cruising Utopias sets out a template for our looking towards a queer utopia, creating worlds distantly, with this gaze. Somehow, I hadn't read of this until after making this album, and yet it's like I've been acting it out my whole life. And so it is, that we look back to reflect the spectres that form us.

But Inland Sea is not about history or the past as a distant place. It is about the way the threads and ghosts of the past imbue themselves in present geographies. It's about the way we make history, the way we form our identities and our bodies around future desire and aspiration. While this album more literally focuses on Australia's queer origin stories and colonial expansionism, it's the "inland sea", this imaginary utopia, that is the central energy I want to express, pulling us ever, impossibly forward, always looking collectively upwards. To the possibility that we could "bury the white man," "be a curse for the ruined state" and "dissolve like vapours into a sea".

1. Inland Sea
This lays out the thesis for the album as simply as I could possibly say. This melody and lyric was something that haunted me on bike rides for several months before I was actually able to realise it. I made the instrumental primarily out of samples of trombones from other songs, granulating and pitching them in the program AudioMulch, harking back to some of the more experimental and ambient music I used to make as Scissor Lock. I'd been craving playing with that kind of audio processing since dropping that project in 2014 and it seemed only appropriate that I bring it back for this album.

2. Is He That Man?
This draws heavily on the legend of Captain Moonlite, who appears throughout the album in various forms. Paraphrasing, Moonlite is glorified as a gay bushranger (although there's questions on both counts) who was famously illustrated as weeping over the dead body of his lover after a shootout with police. The poetic landscape of that legend for me is largely about his lover James Nesbitt's complicated experience of submission, whose subjectivity I take on in this song. But it's also about hope, the possibility of resistance, the possibility of that devotional power in the way that I give up my body can have the ability to overthrow hierarchical power.

3. Vapour

Imagine two convicts, who've travelled for a year across the ocean to Australia. “Vapour” illustrates them magically coming together as bodies of water and disappearing, transcendentally escaping the oppression of the state. There's also a bit of a clue in there, that they are vapour - a former sea. I imagine it as a kind of union from the past to the future of all queer peoples - that we're all of the sea, made from water, mimicking its mutability, its endless presence across time and space.

This was the first track written for the album. The beat was made on my friend Lavurn Lee's laptop when we were sharing a studio in my old house in Chippendale. When I hear this song I remember all the stuff I accumulated, both literally and figuratively, across the three years I lived there.

4. Vulnerable

This recalls Is “He That Man?"s glorification of men and illustrates its complex problems, offering little sense of resolution. I find my attraction to men complicated because I fetishise their power, their bodies, their every gendered features, while also, intellectually, understanding the virulent social damage that male entitlement to power causes. How can I be so viscerally attracted to the bodies of men and not perpetuate patriarchy? I don't have a satisfying answer for that question.

When I gave this to Nigel, it was a heaving mass of orchestral synths and militaristic drums without a whole lot of distinction - my sideways attempt at making doom. He morphed it into the more dynamic, evolving beast you hear in its final form. Bree Van Reyk, the percussionist, came up with my favourite sound on this song and probably the whole album. Needing a big, resonant hit for a part in the song "1888" she came up with the idea of smashing a large china cymbal on the surface of a concert bass drum covered in coffee beans. I loved it so much I recycled the sounds for this track, this time making it a showcase.

5. Arcadia

The idea of an 'arcadia' - an imaginary pastoral utopia - was crucially central to the narrative of the genocidal Frontier Wars perpetrated against the First Nations by both private settlers and the state in the 19th and 20th Century. Gradually over its first 50 years, New South Wales graduated from being a penal colony, to one dominated by free settlers and the emancipated, increasing demand for land and property. But more broadly, at the heart of colonial expansionism was a kind of spiritual drive to create new, utopian worlds through dominance. Spiritually ordained, even, a God-given right.

This song is about processing this drive to have greater and greater dominion over nature, which continues unabated, onwards in humanity more broadly as well as Australia. It's about in some way the collective denial that every piece of land in Australia was stolen. I'm under no illusions that I'm as complicit as anyone else. For me, the poetics of 'arcadia' express the way desire is not an imaginary abstraction, but rather a real, generative force, perversely and endlessly swallowing the continent in its wake.

6. 1888

This refers to a crisis in Sydney in which ships filled with Chinese labour solicited by Northern Territory industrialists were legislated out of the country by multiple Australian colonies on the back of anti-Chinese sentiment that had been growing since Chinese migration began in the early 19th Century. NSW Premier Henry Parkes, declared that the government would "terminate the landing of Chinese on these shores forever". On one hand, desiring Chinese bodies for labour; on another, othering them as invading aliens. When reading about the history of the Chinese in Australia, I loved the historical racist descriptions in Australian newspapers of the Chinese as "almond-eyed celestials" and as "incubus", a kind of exoticisation that I reverse as a force in this song. The line "go beyond and into the blood" lives, cheekily, in my own mixed race heritage.

7. My Captain

Again, this calls upon the Moonlite/Nesbitt legend. In this case, it illustrates how queerness - specifically the homosexual act - can embody rebirth, being created anew with magical, generative power. I imagine becoming destroyed, all my shame, my self loathing, and reborn into a utopian body, an identity based on resistance, against the state. I imagine this specifically in the context of a penal colony in which your identity is owned by the state, the way that this queer act can liberate you, not just from the state, but from objectified identity. I'm keenly aware of the fact that gay liberation's original goal before all that assimilation was the destruction of sexual identity politics itself by first redressing heterosexism - a kind of queering of all possible worlds. True liberation, to be truly beyond that whole rot, to be a whole, powerful, actual person.

8. Milk

Inland Sea on one level is entirely about desire. “Milk” is the key to that reading if you wish to follow it. It's about the way you look at yourself caught in desire, the way it feels like you could swallow up the earth with the obsession. I use synth horns because I'd already used a bunch of money to record instruments. This is another track Nigel spent a lot of time morphing with a thick array of sound and layers. I wanted it to feel like you were being lifted off the ground in that climactic section, the way deep desire takes over your whole body. The song was also originally written for Ivan Cheng's "Centaur Classic" and if you listen closely you can hear me, in some way, attempt to pay tribute to Eugene and Rainbow's singing styles.

9. A White Blanket

The title comes from the phrase "white blanket of forgetfulness" referring to the erasure of the Frontier Wars from white understandings of history in Australia, one which is as valid today as when it was first used. Its purpose is to remember that Australia perpetrated genocide on First Nations people, one that is systemically upheld every day, to this day, actively, by everyone.

Truganini, a prisoner of the Black War in Tasmania, is quoted in this song - "don't let them cut me up, bury me behind the mountains" - a convenient emblem, but I accept, one often elevated by self-congratulatory white leftists. I can tell I'm at risk in this song of joining their league, this anti-colonial posturing really just a display, a show of guilt, something that in my heart I truly don't want this song to be. What can I exactly speak to in colonial experience? I remember watching rappers Provocalz & Felon, supporting hardcore band Dispossessed - all leaders in First Nations resistance - serving hard truths to "allies" of indigenous liberation, reminding us that actions, being an accomplice rather than an ally, is all that matters. Remember Midnight Oil?

When we perform this song live, the audience often claps before the very end and I feel it's apt that the sense of finality of this song is disrupted, unsatisfactory.

10. Blood Moon
An apocalyptic thread runs through the album that doesn't explicitly come up until this song, one that is meant to convey the feeling of time's weight pushing at its end, like waves to a wall. The utopia spoken of throughout this track-by-track ultimately wishes for rebirth, out of the earth, out of decay. "Blood Moon" imagines the end from which that anew will spring.

'Inland Sea' is avaialble now through Good Manners Music.