Sydney outfit Infinity Broke may be a new outfit, but Jamie Hutchings and Jared Harrison have shared Bluebottle Kiss heritage, with the addition of Hutchings' brother Scott and long-term collaborator Reuben Wills to the line-up.   

“I was thinking of the idea of infinity brokers, like people that would deal with selling infinity – just a silly science-fiction type of idea but I thought that would be a pretty lame band name,” explains Hutchings. “I think people think it means being poverty stricken forever, and it could be interpreted in any number of ways. I kind of like the idea of it being a few different levels – maybe the idea of infinity or forever breaking in two.”

The resulting work, River Mirrors is raw, dynamic and full of jagged guitars and the character of the western New South Wales shearing shed in which it was created.

“We wanted to create, at least for some of the centrepieces of the record like Monsoon and Termites, the type of music that relied a lot on improvisation and having really hypnotic elements to it… And to be able to do it in an environment like this big shearing shed, which had no sound restrictions and where there was no noise or working hours or even telephone reception, it's quite a meditative environment. You'd wake up and it'd be dead silent and if everyone else was asleep you'd sort of walk out in your undies and sit on one of the rocks and look over all the hectares of the property. Because I live near the sea, there's always wind and to be a really long way inland and for it to be dead still or dead silent, it's got a very Picnic At Hanging Rock kind of meditative atmosphere, and I think that definitely made it's way onto the record – even though the record gets pretty dissonant and intense, there's a hypnotic quality to it.”

As talk turns to J Walker and his criminally overlooked Machine Translations record of last year, Hutchings and his compadres might just land in that similar, special category of Australian music reserved for those making challenging records that receive critical acclaim yet little fanfare. He doesn't mind.

“That was the good thing about doing the funding of this record, doing the Pozible campaign – just realising that when you've been doing it for some time that there is a lot of people [for whom] it means a lot,” Hutchings says with pride. “It's a chance for them to contact you and for them to contribute and it's not just a financial thing; it's really reassuring to know that your music has reached that far, and that is one of the special things about doing your own thing and being uncompromising and always following what is your own chosen, natural artistic path and just seeing wherever it leads. There's an audience out there for it, which is nice.”