About

One half of a separated pair.

woolenmitten began as a duo. As teenagers in Brisbane, woolenmitten and their best friend Jim played in a post-rock band and spent their spare hours making strange electronic music with samplers, guitar pedals and a toy circuit board called The Little Floating Lizard. Jim gave that project its name: Woolen Mittens.

They kept making music together in Brisbane and London for years. After Jim died in 2009, the music went quiet. It came back in 2015 with an MPC 1000 and five years of obsessive, unrecorded practice.

In 2020 woolenmitten pressed record and chose a name for the debut: woolenmitten, one half of a separated pair.

Sixteen self-released records later, every one written, recorded, mixed, mastered and designed by woolenmitten, the music moves between trip-hop, jungle breaks, glitchy ambient and dark, cinematic score, often in the same week. Each release is built around a story: a field guide to an imaginary lizard, the wanderings of a cassette tape left unsupervised, a house that becomes a labyrinth. Call it abstract downtempo: genre-fluid and always transitioning, like the nonbinary artist behind the machines.

The earliest lesson came from their high-school guitar teacher, the late Australian composer Philip Houghton. He played them Eno, Hassell and Reich, and showed them that a score could be made of pictures, feelings and colours.

Now based in Saigon, woolenmitten records the city into the work: street vendors, sirens, 6am neighbourhood karaoke, plus birdsong and chanting from Cambodian pagodas. They are part of the beatmaker community that grew around Cipherz rooftop, and are developing a live set in which poets perform in real time.

All waveforms in memory of Jim.