Remote Control

Supposedly, the one and only Remote Control EP was recorded in four hours right at the beginning of the Pandemic. It’s hard to argue. Rolling his sleeves up for a purer hardcore assault, Edmeades leans less on the alien wobbles and focuses on the sheer bludgeoning ferocity of his garage riff chops.

Such laser targets kick the most on the blistering ‘The Stain’ slathered in just the right amount of sped-up vocal ooze, and speed variables play havoc on ‘Everyone Sucks’, but otherwise Remote Control holds a much more growling, slavering little beast on chain, finally flashing a steaming slice of weird on the ‘RMTCNTRL DUB‘ just to remind you you’re in the Warttmann Inc camp.

Tee Vee Repairman

You’ll spot a theme surrounding the humble box in our list, but Tee Vee Repairman offers Edmeades another vehicle to flex some other flavours in his otherwise acrid garage brew. It’s still lo-fi, but Tee Vee wanders a more gleaming and bolder sonic peacock, whipping up some power pop swagger echoing Australia’s Boys from the early 1980s.

That cuts whizzed through on Patterns and What’s on TV? all tumble together with joyously ramshackle energy, and numbers like ‘Out of Order’ and ‘What’s the Use?’ bottle some of Edmeades’ finest ripper solos. While Edmeades may count more definitive aliases, Tee Vee Repairman is the perfect introduction to the uninitiated as to what makes his and his cohort’s swampy Sydney garage so intoxicating.

Satanic Togas

Here, Edmeades’ knack for harnessing cheap keyboards at their most rubbery and wriggling truly shines. An expanded band outfit that’s seen dates as far afield as Europe with like-minded miscreant Gee Tee, Satanic Togas dwell in Edmeades’ characteristically half-digested garage strut but spiked with fat, snarling synths in the best of the old Akron punk tradition.

Boasting the very entry to the Warttmann Inc catalogue with 2018’s Satanic Hits Live From The Grave, the demon rubber-masked garage pumellers carry The Mummies’ torch for lo-fi rock theatre that likewise shoots for the stage over a bedroom fuckaround. Holding off the total electronic saturation as heard on later entries of our list, Satanic Togas catches Edmeades perfectly at home in the world of budget rock bluster.

Set-Top Box

No other musical alias/transmission has ever captured the magic electricity that fizzes and sparks amid detuned channels and static-ridden stations. Just what can be accidentally stumbled upon is half the fun of Edmeades’ Set-Top Box moniker. Indeed, a listen to 2020’s TV Guide Test LP wields scrambled informercials, late-night porno, alien game shows, and call centre holding queues across its fuzzed-out interference.

As ever, Edmeades knows how to mangle all the egg elements together in one gloriously mangled mass. The drum machines pulse and pop, Edmeades’ stretched and discoloured underneath his gelatinous echoes, and all the broadcast intrusion mayhem to splatter over the avant-punk affair. Boasting maddening cuts like ‘*DVD__*DATA^COLLECTER_’ and the later ‘Maxx Headroom’, Set-Top Box sees Edmeades venture the farthest into the palpable heart of weird.

Research Reactor Corp

Supposedly, Edmeades and frontman Billy Reilly initially toyed with the idea of coating their Research Reactor Corp project with a conceptual gunk of comic nuclear war themes and a loose narrative lifting the radioactive comedy of Class of Nuke ‘Em High, complete with Hazmat clobber and a wry pretence of existing as a corporation.

While never propping up such an angle in totality, there’s a perennial toxic crater that smoulders throughout Research Reactor Corp’s janky garage attack. Mutoid rats and glowing tentacles rip and wrestle amid the pair’s cartoon mulch, Edmeades letting loose his expert lo-fi production and stringy guitar jab while Billy bellows a rodent-like vocal seethe caked in layers of atonal effects.

First rearing their head back in 2018 on Warttmann Inc and the two EPs collated for The Collected Findings of the LP two years later, Research Reacor Corp stands as the definitive gateway to Edmeades’ weird world, perfectly nailing his mad genius knack for gleaning hooky as hell punk from his distinctly bubbling experimental soup.