Dirty Three

Since 1992 · Australia

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Ocean Songs (1998)

Ocean Songs lets Warren Ellis's violin do most of the emotional work, keening and wailing over Mick Turner's spare guitar and Jim White's understated, shifting drumming. "Sue's Last Ride" builds slowly around a mournful violin melody that never resolves into anything as tidy as a hook, the tension staying unresolved by design. The album's folk and blues roots give it a rawness that most instrumental post-rock of the era avoided in favor of pure texture. It remains one of the most purely emotionally direct records in the genre, despite containing no words at all.

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Dirty Three

Ocean Songs · 1998

Dirty Three formed in Melbourne in 1992 around the unusual combination of Warren Ellis's violin, Mick Turner's guitar, and Jim White's drumming, building entirely instrumental compositions that draw as much from folk and blues as from rock. Ellis's violin, more likely to wail or keen than to play anything resembling a conventional melody, gave the band's sound an emotional rawness that set it apart from the more textural, guitar-centered post-rock being made elsewhere.

Ocean Songs (1998) is generally considered the band's defining record, its compositions built around long, slow-building arcs that let Ellis's violin carry most of the emotional weight while Turner and White provide a shifting, often understated foundation underneath. Ellis went on to a long-running collaborative partnership with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds alongside his Dirty Three work, and the two projects have continued in parallel for decades, each drawing on a different side of his playing.