Mess Esque are a duo featuring music and instruments by Mick Turner and words and voice by Helen Franzmann. Their self-titled album is a beguiling travelogue of restless, somnambulant wanderings. Perhaps best known as one of the Dirty Three, Mick's been playing guitar and making music with many collaborators for forty years. Around here, we love his paintings too -- but revere him especially for his solo music -- since 1997, we've released four of his albums, plus an EP and an album of the Tren Brothers (Mick with percussionist and fellow Dirty Threeite, Jim White) and two EPs featuring Mick as the Marquis de Tren with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. Mick's last record was 2013's "Don't Tell the Driver", a work that found him departing from his traditional hermetic instrumental template by employing a rhythm section and brass charts and even collaborating with a vocalist. After all the purely instrumental music he's made with Dirty Three and solo, a singer is now part of the sound he's hearing in his head these days; while demoing new material, he realized that he was again writing music that needed lyrics -- and for that matter, someone other than himself to sing them. In 2019, he was introduced to Helen through a mutual friend who'd produced her last album. Under the name Mckisko, Helen has released three albums over the past 12 years, working and touring with a range of Australian musicians along the way. Her music has been described as numinous and transformative. Her most recent album "Southerly" saw her moving into a more expansive sound which led to an openness and excitement around further collaboration. Helen lives in Brisbane; Mick in Melbourne. They started sending ideas back and forth with a plan to get together somewhere or another in 2020 and make a record. Then everything else happened instead, so they continued to collaborate from a distance, pouring meditations from their individual isolations into the greater whole. 2021, and the album's done, and they've made a band in the process, but Mick and Helen still haven't met face-to-face yet! Listening to "Mess Esque", you'll never know it. Their collaboration has an intimate feel to it, a shared space. Through patient cultivation of improvisations and musical certainties and a focused pursuit of something that didn't appear to be there in the beginning, Mess Esque have willed themselves and the world around them into verdant, lustrous being.