Though his work is new to us, Ivan Bullock has been a proponent of the Australian underground music scene for twenty years. We take the opportunity to explore his career in our inaugural feature post.
By Graeme Smith
In 2020, I had the opportunity to chat with Australian electronic artist Felicity Groom. During our interview, it became clear that the Australian music scene is quite a different beast from our own. It has its own ecosystem of stars, names that will fill stadiums Down Under but barely be mentioned in Europe.
Of course, stars are just the tip of the iceberg in the musical world, and wouldn’t exist without a vibrant and varied underground scene from which they emerge. Small venues, tireless artists, enthusiastic fans all play a part. Then there are the unsung heroes – promoters. Often putting their own finances on the line, the best rise from each loss so that they can celebrate their next triumph.
In that regard, our Antipodean friends are the same as us, and there are few who have done their bit more than Ivan Bullock. Since 2005, he has been a stalwart of the Australian underground music scene, working with online communities and putting on experimental live events.
Born in Canberra and now based in Melbourne, he’s been on quite a journey in between.
It started with classical piano and violin, two instruments Ivan took up in childhood before choosing to focus on the latter in his teens. It was perhaps the sentiments surrounding the instrument rather than its sound that drew him to it. The one he played had been hand-crafted by his father from African zebrano hard wood and its case was a startling white in colour.
A neck injury ended his career as a violinist early at the age of eighteen, but it was also the start of the next phase of his career.
That next stage took place in Tokyo, Japan. There’s no other city like it, and Ivan thrived among its unique, isolating culture. His time there birthed his first solo musical project, Mystral Tide, which saw him return to the piano, experimenting with digital recording (cutting edge in the ’90s.)
By 2001, he’d released two album as Mystral Tide – Moiety and Etchings, distributing them on CD across Tokyo’s Gothic and industrial metal scene and earning shelf space at Tower Records and HMV in Shibuya. His third album Whirlpool of Souls, was manufactured in Australia. The record was named Album of the Month by New Empire magazine and Ivan found himself with a growing reputation that allowed him the opportunity to perform in Europe as well as Japan.
His Tokyo days also led to meeting one of Ivan’s most important collaborators, Adam of Trucido. The two formed a duo and worked together as promoters in the city.
It was in 2003 that he returned to Australia, first his native Canberra, then Melbourne, and that’s where his community work really started in earnest.
A community of local artists prove to be the Enzyme
It takes a village, so they say, but when it comes to creating a vibrant underground music scene, it takes a lot more. In Ivan’s case, it took a community of artists, both locally and online, to start making something happen. An initial series of live events was dubbed Enzyme and included acts such as Cassandra’s Myth (later renamed SleepLab), a labelmate on Zeitgeist Records.
The online companion to Enzyme was DEMUS – dark electronic music underground society. It became the place to share news of releases, events and concerts, long before social media sites enacted their stranglehold. A public storefront website followed called Darkstereo.
A synergy between the two led to more live events, nineteen in total between 2005 and 2015. Enzyme grabbed its own special event at the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2010. That event produced a compilation CD which was then released by DEMUS. The combination of real-world and online presence proved to be just right in an era where we were all making the transition online.
Things change, of course, and DEMUS was sun-setted in 2010 and replaced by a presence on Facebook.
This has all made me a little nostalgic, I have to say. The early ’00s was a place where anything could happen online. At one point, we hadn’t even agreed on what the best search engine was (Ask Jeeves anyone?) Now, the web is very much a place that is homogenised. To have an online presence, you need to exist on a handful of social media platforms, upload your music to certain streaming sites, and make sure all you do pleases the algorithm gods.
Ivan’s timing was certainly right, but that’s not to diminish the work he clearly had to put into making projects like Enzyme, DEMUS and Darkstereo work, and that he was able to adapt when social media took over. In an interview with Australian Gothic Industrial Music.com, Ivan said of the transition:
Social media now filled the void that our sites once had and along with most we relocated ourselves into that realm… a realm without tedious software updates, databases, backups and endless security holes to fill. It was a sad experience at first, but it was a case of adapt or get left behind in the wake.
And it’s also good to know that the compilation CDs put out through DEMUS and Darkstereo haven’t been lost either. All are still available on Darkstereo’s Bandcamp page.
Of course, since 2020, live music has taken a knock worldwide. The aforementioned Felicity Groom also took time to explain how coronavirus lockdown impacted Australia’s music scene, which was thankfully not as bad as most given the country’s decision to prevent travel in and keep things relatively open for residents.
But it wasn’t anything like that that brought Enzyme to an end. Rather, for Ivan, it was a case of time, age and a desire to work in the studio instead.
Enter Minorarc
Mystral Tide made its swansong as an act in 2009 through the dark classical album Isle of Narrows, but Ivan was far from done. Instead, a new project blossomed: Minorarc.
Including last year’s Inclusions, Ivan has released four full-length albums as Minorarc over the last decade. It follows a self-titled debut released in 2010, concept album Untold, and its “side-dish” album Overburden. The move from Mystral Tide to Minorarc was prompted by him wanting to change his sound or, in his own words: “strip down the ambience, and take things up a notch to a more raw and aggressive level.”
Electronica gives way to metal and post-rock with Minorarc, and Inclusions is the perfect case in point. Its moody opening A Drizzle’s Vagrant I immediately offers something severe, building atmosphere through urgent keys and elements of classical-infused metal.
The whole album is clearly the work of a seasoned professional, one who is able to draw new listeners in without oversimplifying things. In fact, the compositions on display across Inclusions have plenty for those who love to be challenged, and its more epic moments like Seven Times Burnt and Three Times are wonderous in their complexity. The former is driven by a lingering guitar melody in its opening before going heavy with the riffs. The latter canters along through its first movement before becoming an expansive and atmospheric highlight.
Elsewhere the album gives us some dizzying experimentation and seething violence in the form of Meet The Blade. Bleeding Facet contrasts etherealness with heaviness to great effect, giving us a nuanced journey that always keeps us guessing what will come next. Triclinic has overlapping layers that nicely tie in with the album’s themes of flaws in perception before things are rounded off by the haunting vignette A Drizzle’s Vagrant II.
Through Inclusions, it’s clear that Ivan puts as much effort into his own music as he has done promoting the works of others. The sound is niche, granted, but there’s an advantage in that because niche sounds often have the most devoted fanbases and, when supported, the tightest-knit communities.
Ivan is current working with bassist Brendan Henriques, and violinist Eric Shek to make Minorarc a live proposition. The project isn’t Ivan’s only iron in the fire either. This year, he also joined ex-Ikon vocalist Michael Aliani in Melbourne’s Gothic band Chiron as a guitarist and once again he’ll be hoping to join forces with the Melbourne Fringe Festival to continue the good work promoting Australia’s underground music scene.
And Mystral Tide has been fully consigned to the history books. A 25th Anniversary Edition of the projects first official album Whirlpool of Souls is being planned for release in 2026.
One eye on the past, one on the future
As a musician and a promoter, Ivan has had an incredible career to date, and I’ve certainly enjoyed getting to know all about it. From dalliances in Tokyo, to being a proponent in the Melbourne underground music scene, he truly has lived a life worth living. His compositions, too, have proved well worth the time to get acquainted with.
At the heart of the music industry, like all creative pursuits, are stories. Stories are the only things our minds really engage with, not BPMs, engagement statistics or genre titles. Here in York, we’ve got lots of them, historical and modern day. We too have our tireless promoters, innovative performers and audiences seeking out their next story to get lost in.
Thanks to Ivan and Minorarc, we now have a new one from the other side of the world.
It’s a story that’s far from over too. Spending three years focussing on recording albums has given him a zeal for performing again. His experience has taught him that it needs to be done with the right people and in the right way. Some initial reservations about combining neoclassical, electronic and metal music on stage need to be worked through.
When Minorarc does become a live proposition, we can be assured that audiences will be in safe hands. Hopefully, one day, we’ll be able to count ourselves among those audiences.
And no matter how the years roll by, Ivan’s ambitions seem to never fail him. He’s always looking for the next thing, attempting to recapture the magic of the old days to support a whole new generation of artists. We can be certain that the good work done with Enzyme, DEMUS and Darkstereo will return in some form or another.
In fact, since 2021, the Darkstereo website has returned, by popular demand, acting now as a news site for Melbourne’s burgeoning underground scene.
And with one eye on the past, the reissue of Whirlpool of Souls is going to be something. An album that was pieced together through loaned kit and ’90s digital technology is long overdue a 21st century overhaul. Ivan has been studiously at work rescuing the original files, re-recording what he can’t, and fixing in post-production to ready the record for a modern-day auditory palate.
For now, it’s okay to take a moment and look back with a nostalgic smile. In discovering Ivan’s story, I’ve certainly rekindled aspects of my own that had been lost to time and memory. Those of us who lived through the ’90s and early ’00s felt we were at the vanguard of a digital revolution. It was one that very quickly overtook us. I, for one, puzzling over Tik Tok and Instagram, feel very much in its wake. The quaintness of online communities run through message boards now feels like a old-fashioned refuge.
All we of a certain age can really hope for is that we made our mark when we had the opportunity, and continue to do so when given the chance. For Ivan Bullock, that’s certainly the case.
You can stay in touch with Ivan’s Minorarc project via its website and get hold of digital or CD copies of each of his album’s via his Bandcamp page.