artist: Shinjuku Thief country of origin: Australia style(s): Ambient, entho ambient, cinematic, industrial  essential releases: Bloody Tourist (1992, Extreme) The Witch Hammer (1995, Dorobo/Projekt)

Founder of the Melbourne-based experimental ambient label Dorobo, the prolific Darrin Verhagen has recorded under many different guises over the years and drawn from a highly eclectic range of sound worlds including industrial, ethnic and techno music. His two Shinjuku Thief albums released in the 1990's now seem like a side project compared to his main techno concern Snog, but both albums are classics nonetheless. The music is informed by a wide array of thematic sources; the Middle Ages, Japanese culture and German expressionist cinema are particularly telling. Most intriguing are his comments on the relationship between cinema and the consumption of modern ambient and eclectic music. "I think 20th century cinema has done much to acclimatise people to hearing disparate elements as a whole", he told Ambience Magazine. "Once you set up the perimeters at the start of a disc as to the world into which you've thrown the audience, people tend to accept what they're hearing in that context".

Those perimeters are almost imperceptibly wide on Bloody Tourist, both a brilliant concoction of ethnic, rock, orchestral and atmospheric synth sounds and a sly dig at politically correct notions that quoting music from Third World cultures amounts to theft. Asian samples including some spine-chilling chants are blended with distorted beats, brass, silky smooth bass guitar and sundry other sounds to create an album that's by turns raucous and restrained, amusing and awe-inspiring.

The Witch Hammer shows Verhagen's affinity with film music and plays like the soundtrack to an old gothic horror film, with touches of electronica that only make the experience all the more visceral. The 1992 German expressionist classic Nosferatu lends a significant flavour to some of these tracks, and in its blending of orchestral arrangements and sound effects within a gothic theme the album recalls another brilliant Australian release from this time called The Violet Flame (1993) by film and TV sountrack composer Peter Miller. Verhagen's opus, though, sounds somewhat more dissonant is certainly more genuinely menacing. Praised by the underground music press (among The Wire magazine's Top Ten for 1995) it's a darkly beautiful and thoroughly compelling piece of work.

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