No Hi-Fi Hang-Ups

Jonny Telafone is a 26-year-old who grew up by Lake Macquarie in Newcastle, spent a stint living in a garage in Canberra (“It got pretty cold in there, as you can imagine, and there were possums living in the roller door of the garage,” he recalls, “it was unpleasant, to say the least”), and now dwells in Melbourne. But that's about all the hard biography you're getting out of him, Telafone declining to discuss his day job, why he was in Frankston when he answered the telephone, or his actual real name.

“I can't tell you that, it's a secret,” says the artist-only-known-as-Telafone. “Because some of the things I say and do, I don't want it to come back and get me. I don't want people to say, 'There's that creepy guy'. Especially some of the shit I got planned. There's no way I'd want to put my real name to that, things could get a bit hairy.”

And, if you're going by the figure he cuts on his self-titled debut album, Jonny Telafone is a pretty creepy guy. Initially intended just as a 7” single for release on local 20-somethin' institution Chapter Music (featuring the toe-tapper Make Your Pussy Cum), the collaboration between Telafone and the Melbourne label grew, Chapter assembling a 20-track collection filled with recordings drawn from his entire output thus far.

“It's me, but it's not me as well,” Telafone says, of his performative guise. “It's a brave character standing up for all the lonely masturbators out there, trying to get a break in life, dealing with all the heartache. It's getting more and more out-of-hand, and people are starting to get the wrong idea about me. That I'm some kind of pervert, that I'm a creepy stalker. That's the thing that seems to have stuck with people, because people love that sort of stuff.”

As Telafone croons things like “I gotta get with you tonight,” the album shuffles through a range of lo-fi styles, from doom-laden, gothy synth-pop, to spare acoustic ache, to bedroom isolationism. Telafone grew up as a home-recorder, beginning when he was a 15-year-old Novacastrian (“it was just something to do in your room, apart from other things…” Telafone says, trailing into double-entendre). He'd been making his primitive recordings for six years before he ever played live. “It wasn't until I played a show that anyone cared at all,” he recounts.

Telafone played his first-ever show in Canberra, and fell in with Dream Damage, the capital city's way-underground blog/label/promoter hub that also works with lo-fi types Assassins 88, TV Colours and Danger Beach. As he moved from Newcastle to Canberra, then Melbourne, Telafone kept rolling tape, and his self-titled Chapter LP finds recordings spanning from 2006-2012, recorded in low-rent bedrooms across all three cities. Of course, Telafone is wary of the word 'bedroom' being used to describe his music. “When people record in studios, no one calls them 'studio artist' blah blah blah, so being called a 'bedroom artist' is weird to me,” he says. “I don't aspire to be some lo-fi guy, I'm all up for making as hi-fi music as I possibly can.”

Befitting its pieced-together nature, the album feels more like a cobbled-together collection than a singular-sounding suite; this only amplified that Telafone doesn't feel beholden to any musical mode. “There's lots of different styles of music on there,” he says. “I'd love to make some cool, of-the-moment sounding music, but it never turns out that way. Because I'm a pretty inept musician, it just comes out all wobbly and wrong. I guess it's a good thing to be defined by your own limitations. I've never been able to hear a song in my head and just put it down; the process always gets in the way and it becomes something else. I try to make a Bob Dylan song, and it comes out like Don McLean.”

Jonny Telafone will be playing the following dates:

Friday 21 December - Gasometer Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Friday 4 January - Terrace Bar, Newcastle NSW
Thursday 10 January - FBi Social, Sydney NSW