Andrew Wilson is like the friend who’s always blasting you with obscure Wikipedia articles, each one more baffling than the last. He brings a propulsive yet ambiguous energy to his new-age releases as A.r.t. Wilson and his catchy ringtone-funk jams as Andras Fox, lending these records a mysterious air through cryptic titles and vibe-heavy instrumentation. Of particular fascination to Wilson is the baggage that comes with his hometown of Melbourne: “I like teasing out small contradictions in how Australians record and present music,” he told DJ Mag in 2020. “For example, why use the call of the common Eurasian loon bird within studio tracks, when we have the greatest diversity of songbirds anywhere on Earth here in Australia? Why call our music Balearic when we have over 50,000 kilometers of unique coastline of our own?”
To this end, his latest release as A.R. Wilson, Old Gold, takes a deep dive into a specific quadrant of Australian history: The Victorian gold rush of the 1850s. For Australia, this period is generally attributed with placing Melbourne on the global stage; the colony’s exploding economy brought roughly 90,000 new immigrants each year at the boom’s beginning, and confirmed Australia as the gold-producing juggernaut that it remains today. In Wilson’s hands, the gold rush is not a simple tale of colonial prosperity; he shifts the focus to the starvation of the panhandlers on the plains and the wrongful displacement of Aboriginal groups. He spins this yarn using the most barebones palette imaginable, all lonesome MIDI banjos and artificial crickets chirping, plinking his way through a history lesson one Casio vignette at a time. It might not be Wilson’s most developed music, but it makes up for it in sheer imagination.
Above all, Old Gold is an exercise in world-building, a task Wilson takes to like a LARPer to a foam sword. “Moonlight Flat” canters along on a metallic, twangy stomp that conjures up images of Final Fantasy coal mining towns, while tracks like “Raisins” and “A Long Day In The Saddle” could’ve come straight off the Oregon Trail with their comically fabricated acoustic guitars and Spaghetti Western castanets. There’s an undeniable kinship between Old Gold and recent online micro-genres like comfy synth, especially in the way that they both use cheap bedroom instruments to sketch out playfully juvenile scenes. Like much of the work that comes out of the comfy synth/dungeon synth communities, Wilson’s songs have a goofily medieval flair to them, as on “Metal, Want, Die,” which starts out as a sad ragtime piano roll before shifting into a weeping Renaissance-Faire-ready guitar lament. Rather than building into any kind of climax, Wilson simply lets his melodies waver in their lo-fi languor, like a digital music box caught on a twinkling loop.
Clearly, Old Gold is not for everyone. It wouldn’t have hurt for Wilson to vary his palette a bit (even if only to add detail to this miniature picture of 19th-century Australia), and there’s an inescapable sense that you probably could have made this music yourself. Depending on your point of view, that simplicity could either be a turn off or a refreshing embrace of DIY pluck. Either way, it’s hard not to be charmed by the silliness of Wilson’s vision, as well as the nuanced approach he takes to understanding this period rather than purely romanticizing it. If nothing else, the record is certainly a whimsical addition to Andrew Wilson’s eccentric world.
