30/70

Since the middle of the 2010s, the Melbourne-based ensemble 30/70 has woven together strands of soul, jazz, funk, hip-hop, and broken beat. Domestic audiences responded warmly, yet the group built an especially loyal audience across England through endorsements from the Rhythm Section International imprint along with BBC broadcasters Gilles Peterson and Tom Ravenscroft. Their recorded catalog comprises Cold Radish Coma (2015), Elevate (2017), and Fluid Motion (2019), each marked by the dense, layered exchanges among as many as eleven players, among them the spirited and lyrical singer Allysha Joy.

Prior to Joy’s arrival the project operated under the name Thirty Seventy and, in 2014, issued an instrumental self-titled set on its own. That recording spotlighted keyboardist Jarrod Chase, bassist Harry Hicks, and drummer Zeke Ruckman (also known as Ziggy Zeitgeist), the trio that has remained the steady nucleus of 30/70. As 2015 neared its end, the collective presented Cold Radish Coma, an episodic, near-mixtape album in which Joy functioned more as another sonic color than a conventional lead vocalist. Elevate brought her into the foreground; the 2017 album, issued on Bradley Zero’s Rhythm Section International and given a clearer sonic profile, was mixed by Paul Bender of the stylistically aligned Hiatus Kaiyote. After the subsequent remix project Elevations, 30/70 resurfaced in 2019 with Fluid Motion, their broadest and most performance-oriented statement to date. A concert recording from the Paris stop of that album’s tour, Live at La Défense, appeared in 2020.