iOTA and the Beautiful Art of Disappearing

Ten years can disappear pretty quickly. Since the release of Wolf Number Nine, iOTA has travelled through theatre, film, stages and characters, but somewhere along the way the songs were always waiting.

Now he’s returned with Hours Disappear, an album that looks backwards and forwards at the same time — revisiting music from where it all began while opening the door to somewhere new.

There’s something appropriately unhurried about iOTA’s seventh album. Hours Disappear isn’t a record that seems particularly interested in competing with the noise around it. Instead, it asks you to turn some of that noise off, sit with the songs for a while and see where they take you.

Atmospheric, earthy and spacious, the album has the feeling of music being allowed to find its own pace. Acoustic instruments sit comfortably inside the arrangements, performances remain intimate and there’s enough empty space around everything for the songs to breathe.

After a decade between albums, perhaps there was no point rushing.
There’s light and darkness throughout Hours Disappear, but neither one completely wins. Melancholy gives way to hope, introspection sits beside warmth, and even in its quieter moments there's a feeling that iOTA isn't simply looking back at what has been lost. He's working out what remains.

Part of that process has taken him all the way back to the beginning. iOTA's ARIA-nominated debut album The Hipbone Connection is no longer available, but the songs themselves never really disappeared. People remembered them, requested them and carried them long after the record became difficult to find. Rather than simply reissue the past, iOTA decided to meet those songs again as the musician he is today.

New recordings of “Home,” “Bitter Wine,” “Come Back For Me,” “Cool” and “Time” strip things back, replacing the urgency of their younger selves with something more reflective. They are familiar songs, but there's now a lifetime sitting between the original recordings and these versions.

That's what makes revisiting them interesting.
You can play the same chords and sing the same words, but twenty or thirty years down the road, you're never really singing the same song.

Alongside those reimagined pieces are new songs including “Silver Train,” “River” and “Same Three Words,” giving Hours Disappear the unusual feeling of an album where different periods of one artist's life can sit beside each other and have a conversation.
Self-produced by iOTA, the record retains the imperfections and atmosphere that can disappear when music is worked too hard. There’s texture rather than polish for polish's sake, and the arrangements seem built around a simple question: what does the song actually need?

Often, the answer is not much. A voice. An instrument. Some air around them. It's an approach that makes even more sense when you consider where iOTA has been during the years between records, because music is only part of his story. He's become one of those rare Australian performers who can move between a gig, a theatre stage and a film set without any of them feeling like a side project. 

His performance in Hedwig and the Angry Inch earned him Helpmann, Sydney Theatre Critics and Green Room awards, before he stepped into another pair of very large heels as Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show. He appeared as the Fallen Angel in Graeme Murphy's Berlin with Sydney Dance Company and co-wrote and performed in Smoke & Mirrors, another production that collected three Helpmann Awards.

Then there was the small matter of riding through the desert strapped to a wall of speakers with a flame-throwing guitar.
As the Doof Warrior in George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, iOTA created one of those wonderfully bizarre film characters that didn't require much screen time to become unforgettable.

But after all the costumes, characters, theatre lights and film sets, Hours Disappear brings things back to something much simpler.
iOTA. A guitar. And the songs. That's also how he's taking the record on the road, with a run of solo acoustic shows that will bring together new material and stripped-back versions of songs from across his career.

There’s a nice symmetry to it. After spending years inhabiting some extraordinarily larger-than-life characters, iOTA is returning to the stage without much to hide behind. And maybe that's what Hours Disappear is really about.

Time moves whether we're paying attention or not. Ten years becomes twenty. Songs written by one version of yourself eventually belong to another. Places change, people change and occasionally you get the chance to return to something you made a long time ago and discover that it still has something to say.

The hours disappear. The good songs don't.

iOTA — Hours Disappear Album Launch Tour

October 16 — Brunswick Ballroom, Melbourne VIC

October 21 — The Vanguard, Sydney NSW — New Show

October 22 — The Vanguard, Sydney NSW

October 23 — Baroque Room, Katoomba NSW

October 25 — Junk Bar, Brisbane QLD

October 30 — Fillmore's, Kiama NSW

November 13 — Trinity Sessions, Adelaide SA

November 14 — Smith's Alternative, Canberra ACT

December 5 — Dangar Island Bowlo, Dangar Island NSW

December 6 — Flamingos, Newcastle NSW