Minorarc (Australia) — Inclusions
Retrospective Album Review
Review by Infectious Unease Radio — Voice in the Void
There are albums that arrive quietly, almost slipping through the cracks of crowded release cycles—only to grow heavier with time. Inclusions, the 2023 full-length from Australian project Minorarc, is one of those records. A slow-burning monolith of progressive metal, dark classical textures and electronic unease, it stands today as Ivan Bullock’s most fully realised statement: inward-looking, restless, and emotionally coiled beneath immaculate composition.
Operating between Canberra and Melbourne, Bullock builds Inclusions almost entirely on his own terms—handling guitars, bass, keys and programming with the kind of precision that only comes from long isolation and obsession. This is not a showy technical record, despite the complexity. Instead, Inclusions breathes like a fractured dream sequence, shifting between lush neoclassical calm and sudden metallic violence, as though serenity itself can’t quite be trusted.
From the opening “A Drizzle’s Vagrant I,” the album establishes its language: drifting piano motifs, synthetic haze, and tension that never quite resolves. It feels like standing in fog just before something catastrophic happens. That unease blooms fully in “Seven Times Burnt,” a towering seven-minute centrepiece whose spiralling guitar lines and rhythmic pivots feel engineered to destabilise the listener. There’s a surgical coldness to the production—clean, detailed, yet emotionally distant—mirroring the album’s recurring themes of despair and internal fracture.
“Meet The Blade” stands as one of the album’s defining moments, cutting clean through the surrounding haze with a sharpened melodic core before collapsing back into fractured rhythms and shifting time signatures. Bullock lets the track breathe and mutate, guiding each passage forward with quiet authority rather than technical grandstanding. Every transition feels deliberate, every detour purposeful—progressive in the truest sense, driven by movement rather than excess.
Tracks like “Three Times” and “Triclinic” stretch outward into more abstract territory—layered synth passages rubbing against downtuned guitars, rhythmic patterns folding back on themselves, moments of near-ambient stillness interrupted by bursts of mechanical aggression. It’s this push-pull dynamic—between beauty and abrasion—that defines Inclusions and gives the album its lingering weight.
Short interludes such as “A Drizzle’s Vagrant II” function almost like breathless pauses in a larger psychological spiral, before “Blue Cold Mess” closes the journey with icy restraint rather than bombast. It’s a fitting conclusion: unresolved, introspective, and lingering long after the final note fades.
What makes Inclusions resonate in retrospect is how deliberately uncommercial it feels. There are no easy hooks chasing algorithms, no genre compromises. Instead, Bullock stitches together progressive metal, darkwave atmospherics, neoclassical melancholy and electronic dread into something singularly Australian in spirit—isolated, vast, and rich with atmosphere and slow-burning emotional power.
The limited CD Digipak edition—thermally printed and carefully packaged—mirrors the album’s ethos: tactile, thoughtful, created for listeners who want to live inside the work rather than skim it.
Nearly two years on, Inclusions reads less like a debut-era experiment and more like a cornerstone release—an album that announced Minorarc as a serious underground presence and hinted at a much broader arc still unfolding. It rewards patience, deep listening, and late-night immersion. Best consumed whole, as intended—because breaking it apart only weakens the slow collapse it so meticulously constructs.
Track Listing
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A Drizzle’s Vagrant I — 03:22
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Seven Times Burnt — 07:05
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Meet The Blade — 05:45
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Three Times — 07:26
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Bleeding Facet — 03:53
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Triclinic — 05:45
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A Drizzle’s Vagrant II — 01:46
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Blue Cold Mess — 03:35