Essendon Airport began as a duo in Melbourne in 1978, formed by David Chesworth on Wurlitzer electric piano and Robert Goodge on guitar, accompanied by a homemade drum machine. Their music embraced minimalism, repetition, irony, and experimentation, and soon became a defining presence in Melbourne’s underground music scene. Their 1979 debut EP Sonic Investigations of the Trivial captured this approach—“songs which combine many of the most facile and insipid kinds of music in a redeemingly dignified manner”—while the early ’80s expansion to a four-piece with Paul Fletcher and Ian Cox led to the 1982 album Palimpsest, an eccentric post-punk classic of dry vocals, flailing polyrhythms, and playful appropriation. They soon grew again to a five-piece, with Barbara Hogarth on bass, embracing funk and becoming one of inner-city Melbourne’s premier live attractions before disbanding in 1983.

Reuniting original collaborators Paul Fletcher and Barbara Hogarth, and joined by pedal steel guitarist Graham Lee (The Triffids, KLF), the quintet will perform music from their new album MOR, re-engaging with their early minimalist work and revisiting songs from the Sonic Investigations era in expanded full-band arrangements. The result is a lush, elegant update of these beautifully hypnotic and meditative compositions, full of atmosphere and melody, but still imbued with the band’s trademark off-kilter sense of experimentation and wonder.