Earlier in the year, the Sydney/Eora-based artist Skeleten released Mentalized, a breakbeat-heavy indietronica record that was influenced by the tricks and tactics of television mentalists. Now, as we enter Q4 of 2025, Skeleton—real name: Russell Fitzgibbon—is back with another body of work, this one consisting of a set of demos that found their path into the world partly through a bit of social media research and development. It’s called Facility Extras. We recently caught up with Skeleten, email style, and we asked him about all of this and more. His answers—which come with some visual accompaniment—are below, as is Facility Extras.

Where does the title of this release come from? 

Skeleten: The Facility was what we called my studio near the airport in Sydney. It was up the top of this semi-derelict office building, and when it was empty it felt like a GoldenEye N64 level, but fittingly it also facilitated so much music and friendship. It’s gone now (RIP) and I’m far away, but all these songs were left over from my time there and it felt like the place really told the story, Facility Extras. 

These tracks were trapped at the demo stage until you shared them on social media, right? What was it about this body of music that made you initially apprehensive to finish it?

Yeah, they were all just songs or ideas that I had always felt attached to but just didn’t quite feel right on the albums I’ve released. I wasn’t exactly apprehensive to finish them, just life moves fast you know? I get so deep in whatever mood or sound I’m working on that when ideas fall even slightly outside of that they tend to just get left on the hard drive for only me to listen to, which I do a lot. 

I think putting finishing touches on a song for me often requires some kind of understanding of what it’s for or its context, so as soon as it drops off a hypothetical tracklist, I tend to just let it be. I posted some snippets because one must post and it seemed like people actually would like to hear the songs, so once I thought of doing this little collection, keeping them super rough, it made it easy!

Do you feel like social media can be a positive forum for musical communication?

I actually got inspired to originally post snippets of these songs by seeing mate @bigever posting a bunch of demos on a purpose built @SSDmining IG account, no frills just music that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. That felt like a good way to interact with a fraught platform. 

Ngl I do think it’s inherently flawed for music because even if you’re intentionally sharing music in an interesting way, it’s still within the most cooked attention hungry stream of aggressive information, which is pretty much built-in to the architecture of social media now. I struggle to use it properly because of that feeling, but, like, if you’re on it, why not try and make it positive as possible and just ignore how they want you to use it.

What is “Stay Useless” about? How are you staying useless? 

I was thinking about how THE SYSTEM wants humans to be useful, productive, you know? I feel like as soon as you got a use you got a user, really humans wanna be helpful to each other, not useful. I’m not saying do nothing, just more like it sucks to spend a life as a tool making money for rich fucks killing everyone, so stay useless in a war machine etc. I’m staying useless every day by making music. :)

Your album Mentalized was influenced by 1990s television “mentalists.” What is influencing this new release? What have you been watching and listening to lately?

When I put these demos together and listened back they felt kinda quaint and simple and a bit naive and I liked that. And the fact that they fit together I guess shows that I’m always essentially thinking about the same stuff. Maybe just processing how beautiful and brutal everything is? I’ve been pretty deep into various long speculative fiction series, fantasy and sci-fi over the past few years, and they all seem to be connected by these shared ideas of ecological consciousness. It’s great, I swear I gotta write an essay or something. Most recently The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. But those ideas are definitely packed roughly into these songs. 

Also recently got obsessed with the album Cold House by Hood, that’s proper ahead of its time, thanks to my friend Lily for putting me onto that one.

What was it like playing at the Sydney Opera House? How did your music work in that room?

It’s always a genuine thrill to walk out to the Opera House, even after a long time I still feel that little shot of tourist hype. So I remember feeling magnified as hell when we did our show there. It’s lovely, during Vivid Festival the Studio (which is down under the sails) hosts proper local promoters and music programmers so I think I and a lot of people feel pretty welcome and at home there now because there’s been some great parties over the years. That space can really transform, so it felt like a classic show but with extra buzz ‘cos everyone can just duck outside to smoke and look at the harbor twinkle. Hard to imagine how I would work in the actual concert hall, but I saw Arca and Underworld in there last year and they both really worked IT so who knows.

How’s the scene in Sydney feeling right now? In what ways have you seen the city change in the time that you’ve been making music?

I could talk about this for hours. I feel like Sydney (we often say Eora or Gadigal Land) has faced the same challenges as a lot of big cities, predatory development, cynical licensing policy, rapidly increasing rent prices, you know the deal. I think the hard part is because it’s actually quite small population wise, and the music scene especially, there’s not much of a buffer there and stuff can get pretty dire pretty quick as venues close. On the flip side though I think that’s led to the scene becoming really tight knit and pretty supportive on the whole because there’s not really much to be gained by having a big ego or anything? It’s a small scene but everyone doing it has really gotta want to be doing it, ‘cos there’s not much external validation, and I think that’s why the quantity is low but the quality is wild. The best thing in recent years is seeing Western Sydney music become much more visible and connected with heaps more crossover. Guitars and Wubs both having bumper years.

Without giving away any secrets, can you put us on to one secret weapon piece of gear in your studio?  

OK, fr this is a genuine secret but life is good so I’ll spill. I’ve been moving around a lot so without a proper physical space I had to find some new toys on my computer and my new favorite is this Spectrasonics drum groove plugin from like 2004 called Stylus RMX. If you want a chemical break, that thing has you covered.