Across T4’s 49-minute runtime, you are going to get lost, because anything less wouldn’t satisfy Sydney artist Banjo Ulysses. It’s a reminder: this is a paradoxical world, and there is comfort in uncertainty, solace in acceptance, and forward motion into the unknown.
Banjo creates music that glows with a deliberate ambiguity. T4 is a progressive exercise in entropy: as it advances, it moves from more traditional compositions towards wild experimentation. Not even Banjo knows what to expect, ‘“What’s right, what’s left? What’s now, what’s next?” he croons on ‘Boring’. These questions embody the gentle curiosity that T4 nurtures. Banjo flows between starkly distinct sounds so effortlessly, it becomes not just hard to remember exactly how you got there, but hard to care.
The song ‘Window’ serves a clear purpose: a portal between the (relatively) straightforward, poppy songwriting of the early tracklist and the bizarre, free-spirited compositions to come. Banjo extends an open hand, “I suppose this window could fit two, does that resonate with you?” By the time we get to ‘T3’, Banjo has moved through a haze of glitched-out ambience into plucky funkpop, new jack swing and eventually shimmering, early-Drake-sampling balladry.
T4 is Banjo on a midnight stroll; never rushing, he periodically turns to make sure his new friend hasn’t drifted too far behind. The thread is there from start to finish. It’s a record that says “Yes, on this road you might end up somewhere strange and disconcerting, you can’t control what comes next. But don’t hide from the movement of the world - welcome it with open arms. Welcome it with me.”
Words by Mateo Baskaran