Hyper-vivid folk-rock

Cornflake Sunset is the singer-songwriter moniker of acclaimed Australian experimental poet and writer Luke Beesley. Double Portrait is his debut album.

Cornflake Sunset songs are a sort of rusty, literary folk-rock—absurd, intertextual, visual. On Double Portrait, Luke is joined by award-winning double bassist, Helen Svoboda, renowned percussionist Maria Moles and avant-jazz saxophonist Thomas Coleman Bell.

Luke has played intermittently in Melbourne for over a decade, with artists like Ryan Downey, Sarah Mary Chadwick, Nicola Watson and Grand Salvo (sometimes as New Archer, sometimes as Cornflake Sunset) but the writing of books always distracted him from recording songs. Luke is the author of four highly regarded books published by Giramondo: In the Photograph, Aqua Spinach, Jam Sticky Vision and New Works on Paper.

Critics have described his writing as ‘hyper-vivid epiphanies’, ‘language made deliciously strange’ and ‘surreal paths of flight, shaping into strange and self-referential swirls, leaving you disoriented but transformed’.

The same could be said of these strange songs that have the lyrical precision of the Silver Jews or Leonard Cohen, the wackiness of Stephen Malkmus' Pavement, the minimalist instrumentation of Bill Callahan or Aldous Harding, sung in a voice that sits somewhere between Neil Young, Loudon Wainwright III, Devendra Banhart and Magnolia Electric Co.'s Jason Molina.

Image credit: Tajette O’Halloran