otoriously underpaid Australian music journalists often write that some band is just about to break America. Or England or Japan or some other new territory. It is hard not to succumb to the line, writers barely have time to think, let alone research new bands in between responding to PR clones. Real feature stories are all too rare; usually the pages are swallowed up by interviews and album reviews. That is a problem, it means music is rarely given more context than the fact of its release.

Cyclic Defrost, a government funded bi-monthly magazine, combines quality publishing with excellent writing on Australian music, which is why I started contributing. Originally focussed on electronic music, Cyclic has expanded its palette to include everything from banging hip-hop beats to beautiful sound art and leftfield guitar sounds.

Many DIY publishers have set up similarly styled low print run magazines—Wax Poetics, Skyscraper, and so on—however, the USA and the UK have a long history of critical comment on music. Think Rolling Stone, the NME, The Wire, Grooves. That critical culture is missed in Australia, where the Rolling Stone franchise rarely provides any analysis, other music magazines fight to survive in the cutthroat world of the newsagent, and jaded street press barely live week to week on the titbits thrown by the record company’s advertising budget. The occasional books, such as Clinton Walker’s Stranded or Bob Blunt’s eponymously titled Blunt, barely touch on electronic music.

Contrary to Australian music lore, many of the local artists profiled in Cyclic are actually better known overseas. Adelaide’s Tim Koch and Perth’s Dave Miller have recorded for an array of international labels without ever really developing an Australian profile. Oren Ambarchi’s stunning sound experiments can be found in more Prague or Berlin record shops than Australian ones, while his bands Sun and Rand & Holland, though legendary in indie circles, barely register in mainstream music media.

Laurence Pike’s Triosk are equally underrated at home, though that is changing, probably mostly as a result of their collaboration with Berliner Jan Jelinek. Pivot, with Pike’s brother Richard, feature here with “Incidental Backcloth” a piece of music whose grainy groove explodes in a blast of raw, breathtakingly beautiful breakcore jazz.

The 34 artists swing from digital dub and instrumental hip-hop to spiky punk electro, epic soundtracking, eerie sound art, broken beat and clicky house, krautrock grooves, stark electronics, stately indie rock concertos, and spectacular combinations of many of the above.

The fallout from Australia’s hip-hop explosion is well represented. Locally produced hip-hop has stormed radio in the past few years, and even if many of the artists still dream of selling 5000 copies on a big release, that success has produced an interesting musical undergrowth.

Pasobionic, the Melbourne beat maker behind the ‘multicultural Public Enemy’ Curse Ov Dialect (signed to US-based Mush Records) and TZU (Liberation/Warner), recently dropped a melancholy instrumentals album Empty Beats For Lonely Rappers. Unkle Ho, from politically incendiary Sydney outfit The Herd, recently released the super-quirky gypsy carnival of an album, Roads to Roma. Senator Jim, who often collaborates with Ho, was part of Adelaide crew Fathom and electro outfit Phonkubot.

Expats Mark Harding (Paris) and Lake Lustre (Basel) turn in beautiful pieces (down-tempo guitar beats and Coldcut-esque electronic epic respectively). The bedroom recordings of Melbourne 16 year old Francis Plagne are no doubt ready to be signed by Paw Tracks, while Ollo’s wobbly ‘80s-funk groove Some Assault will make do until their new album later in the year. Comatone’s throbbing distorted noise is, for once, worth the wave of hype it has set off.

Kevin Purdy, whose involvement in the Sydney scene back to the early eighties was recently profiled by Cyclic, contributes the optimistic “On Top Of The World.” Other highlights include Inchtime’s resequenced acoustic instruments and Dsico’s wonderful progression from cynical bootlegger to jaded Wire-influenced frontman (“My shirt’s unironed / But I still look pretty”).

Aside from the album stepping away from your favourite genre—sure to happen on any album this eclectic—the only one real misstep is courtesy Bleepin’ J Squawkins’s weak lyrics. That said this two and a half hour journey is an essential guide to the current state of Australia’s musical underground.