“The Last Time I Saw You” Sewerslvt as Sydney Artist
“exactly what you would hear if you microwaved a PS1”
After having spent my life shuffling about Sydney, I’ve spent the last six months studying in the city of Reims, France. It’s dozen of layers of post-war reconstruction, catholic hegemony and eurosnobbery. My blonde mop feels out of place, and I find myself pining for home through art, sport and Streetview.
Some usual suspects include Courtney Barnett and her half-blazed existential meanderings. The modest Melbournian drawl of Pedestrian at Best stands in stark contrast to the rarified air of the town’s towering cathedral. A UNESCO world heritage site, no less. Another regular is Brett Whiteley and his Archie winning Self-portrait in the studio 1973. A print of the piece has hung in my mum’s bedroom since I was in nappies. These are blunt instruments of nostalgia, harkening to the harbour, the pub and the kookaburras. It’s touristic, where-the-bloody-hell-are-ya imagery. It does a job.
But one artist has unexpectedly struck me as Sydney personified, Sydney as beige brick apartment blocks, endless rows of Asian restaurants and train lines out west past the pig-iron entrepôts. Sydney as seen through a haze of stimulants. That artist is Bandcamp breakcore darling Sewerslvt.
Sewerslvt (also known as Jvne) is an Australian electronic artist who broke big in the underground with 2020’s Draining Love Story.
The album is, as one commenter opines,
“exactly what you would hear if you microwaved a PS1”
DLS has no composure and no nuance. Its overcompressed amen breaks and atmospherics scrape the walls. Edgelord anime samples (“wrists are for girls, I’m slitting my throat”) waft in and out. It’s like watching the most fantastic sunset of your life while someone scrapes your arm with sandpaper and blasts tinny homebrew beats out their iPhone.
DLS is an angsty album; it amalgamates the techno rhythms of Underworld with blinding Dutch hardcore. Jvne samples import adult-swim cartoons and Japanese voice inflexions alike. It’s the cultural deluge you pick up when your national history is as a colonial side character, an oscillation between east and west. There is no cultural canon to draw from or rebel against. It’s distinctly Australian.
A year later, Jvne would quit the game with the release of we had good times together, don’t forget that.
The album is indulgent and introspective, 89 minutes long. The odorous samples are no longer pop zingers, but vocal snippets warped to be as poignant as they are incomprehensible. This album feels like a teenage Burial record, Dionysian and immature but impossible to ignore.
The album (and artist) closer, simply titled goodbye, runs 17 minutes long. It’s best experienced in conjunction with its music video, a requiem to the Sewerslvt fever dream. The video is an amalgam of Jvne’s previous motifs blurred into black and white – pulsating from link-rot like a rug-pull NFT.
At the 14 minute mark, the drums disappear, and the synths wash from ear to ear. Sydney’s Hyatt Regency is briefly explored on Google Streetview. It’s a building that holds significance for me. When seeing my close family was a thrice-a-year affair, they would stay here. For Jvne, it’s even more bitter.
goodbye is a eulogy to Jvne’s lover Angel, whose passing Jvne attributed to the failure of NSW’s mental health infrastructure in a now-deleted Patreon post.
Whilst Australia’s mental health budget increased by 87M to 1.9B AUD in 2020, this increase in investment pales in comparison to what is necessary. 1 in 2 Australians aged 16–85 will experience a mental disorder during their lifetime[1].
Suicide rates among young Australians began to climb in 2009, a trend I’m sure is in no way related to the turn-down of their economic fortunes post-GFC. Yet, in 2016, the Baird government scrapped funding for the Early Psychosis Youth Services (EPYS) program[2]. It’s a decision 2010 Australian of the Year Dr Patrick McGorry claimed would almost certainly result in more lives and futures lost[3]. In 2020, suicide was the leading cause of death among young Australians[4].
Sewerslvt is Sydney with beauty and blemish, lock-out-laws and harbour parks, Lentils and its lack of funding. She is a flawed artist in a flawed city, where we both hold bittersweet memories of the same buildings. Her work reminds me why I love my home, but also of my relief that it’s an ocean or two away. That’s all I can ask of her.
[1] Independent Australia. ‘How the Mental Health System Is Failing Our Young People’. https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/how-the-mental-health-system-is-failing-our-young-people-,11913.
[2] Morris, Philip. ‘The Australian Mental Health Crisis: A System Failure in Need of Treatment’. NAPP (blog), 28 April 2021. https://napp.org.au/2021/04/the-australian-mental-health-crisis-a-system-failure-in-need-of-treatment/.
[3] Lee, Jane. ‘“Futures Will Be Lost”: Health Fears as Youth Psychosis Program Dropped’. The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 April 2016. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/futures-will-be-lost-health-fears-as-youth-psychosis-program-dropped-20160429-goi1hu.html.
[4] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. ‘Suicide among Young People’. Accessed 28 February 2022. https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/populations-age-groups/suicide-among-young-people.
Sewerslvt is from Adelaide.