VIDEO PREMIERE: Anne Cessna & Essendon Airport - Talking To Cleopatra

This one's for the aficionados out there, a throwback track from a compilation paying homage to the underrated titans of Australia's burgeoning electronic-music scene in the 1970s and '80s.

Talking To Cleopatra is a 1980 tune from Anne Cessna & Essendon Airport, the performance monikers of vocalist Anne Sanger and musicians Robert Goodge and David Chesworth.

By the time Talking To Cleopatra was released, Goodge and Chesworth had already released one EP under the Essendon Airport name — Sonic Investigations Of The Trivial — and decided to branch out to the hitherto unexplored world of vocals.

"As far as I can remember," Sanger recalled in a statement, "we were sitting around one night when Robert and David were tossing around the idea of recording a single with a vocalist. But who should that be? I said I’d do it. I was partly being facetious. I wasn’t at all sure I could sing. Neither were they."

Their faith paid off, though, and the Chesworth-engineered-and-mixed single went on to be something of a cult favourite among the Melburnian alt-music scene of the early 1980s.

Now, in honour of its inclusion on the track list for Closed Circuits: Australian Alternative Electronic Music Of The '70s & '80s, Volume 1, then-future band drummer Paul Fletcher has created a video to accompany the tune, and we're pretty chuffed to be unveiling it today ahead of the compilation's release this Friday, 9 June, via Festival Records.

The broader 20-track album — which will be available on CD, as a digital download and as a limited-edition two-LP set (with four bonus tracks) — features a range of underground innovators and commercially savvy breakthroughs, from Whirlywind, Voigt/465 and Scattered Order to The Dugites, Models, The Reels and The Machinations.

Closed Circuits was compiled by local music writer and historian David Nichols, driven by the singular goal to bring together "a wide range of recordings really only united by one thing: people using technology to produce something fresh".

Pre-orders are available now.