Ollie Olsen with Andrew Duffield & Bill McDonald – Last Recordings LP

Ollie Olsen was a radical creative force, an artist who could command a room with pure sound and presence. He was a genius artist with a rare gift for drawing out the best in his collaborators.

In these Last Recordings, we hear Ollie alongside lifelong friends Andrew Duffield (Whirlywirld, Models) and Bill McDonald (Max Q, Paul Kelly, Drive Time), to create what would become a final body of work before losing his fight with MSA.

These Last Recordings reveal a purity of intent: free-form improvisations, rooted in decades of restless experimentation, distilled into something elemental. Ollie found ways to extract sound from his synthesisers that were entirely his own: deep FM tones, feedback bursts, drones and tangled frequencies.

These are not gestures of constraint, but of essence: the bare, direct communication of a mind committed to sound as a radical and searching practice. What we hear in Last Recordings is the culmination of that practice, sound reduced to its most direct and uncompromising form. While his body was failing, his sounds remained fiercely alive.

Recorded live by Andrew over scattered Fridays between June 2021 and October 2022, mixed by Bill and boldly mastered by Casey Rice, these sessions were sustained by the love and devotion of Ollie’s partner, Jayne, who stood beside him as his condition advanced. In the studio, aware of the limited time left, the trio met week after week to improvise.

Out of this urgency came music that is both fragile and unrelenting. There is stillness and noise vying for space. A perfect analogy of Ollie’s often contradictory ways. Each piece reveals the purity of Ollie’s ear, his uncompromising approach to electronic sound, and the deep bond shared between lifelong friends.

The recordings also bookend Ollie’s last public performance in Melbourne, where Andrew and Bill joined him to give friends, collaborators and fans one final chance to experience a live performance. These recordings carry that spirit: intimate, raw, playful & unguarded.

Ollie passed away from MSA in October 2024, leaving behind a legacy as one of Australia’s most important underground voices.

To hold and release these works is an immense honour. They stand as the final statement of one of Australia’s most important underground voices: innovator, agitator, and enigma, whose influence extends across decades of music and culture. That he made them with lifelong companions Andrew and Bill, equally vital figures in the Australian music canon, only deepens their significance.

Together, the three return to sound, stripped of song and expectation. Uncompromising, unadorned and profoundly alive.