Melbourne artist Barrage likes to keep listeners at a safe distance – as Lucy Morieson finds out.

Barrage Photograph: Emile Zile

It seems appropriate that we meet in a dark, quiet place. Making my way up two flights of creaking wooden stairs in an inner city Melbourne bar, I am greeted by the small, wide-eyed artist who is known to his listeners as Barrage. Meet Mark Gomes, the man behind the layered compositions of Hero or Dirt?, a recording which blends saccharine tales of love won and lost, with rich electronic and keyboard-based compositions.

Recorded with Sydney-based label Feral Media, Hero or Dirt? is Gomes’ first release under the Barrage moniker, but he’s been playing, writing and performing under the name for some time. To him, the album is the endpoint of a determined effort to get something tangible out into the recorded musical cannon. “It represents two years worth of the music I’ve been making, it’s a huge piece of me really,” he says.

When asked to define his album, Gomes brushes off any illusion of a grandiose musician, by declaring it “just a pop record full of love songs.” Not that he wants it to be book-ended by any sort of genre. In one record store, Hero or Dirt? can be found lurking in the hip hop section, while another has classified it as alternative rock. And this suits Gomes just fine: “Hopefully it’s really confusing and you can’t really figure it out. I’m not interested in fitting a mould or playing up to a preconceived idea,” he says.

Confusion reigns in the world of Barrage. Where the performer’s persona ends and Mark Gomes begins is never clear to the listener, and according to Gomes it’s something that should never be obvious. Reticent to divulge too much of his life outside of music-making, he declares it as “pretty mundane,” while the world of his musical hero, Barrage, exists “outside of life.”

So there’s a fantastical element to Hero or Dirt?, both lyrically and musically. “It’s highly stylised music. But I don’t see the point in doing realistic, documentary style protest songs – that’s just not my way. I like music that’s fully escapist and transparent.”

The album’s escapist qualities might have something to do with the production process. Hero or Dirt? was literally recorded in Gomes’ bedroom, with just the vocals and post-production taking place under the guidance of Feral Media’s Danny Jumpertz.

The affiliation with Feral Media is one that Gomes fell into after his participation in the SBS Whatever Music project, and he feels happily at home with the independent label.

“It’s an incredible, grass-roots label,” he says. “There are so many people like me; I just had a lucky break to have some one lend a favourable ear.”

While Barrage is difficult to pigeonhole stylistically, he takes his place in the line of local experimental electronica that continues to roll out of Melbourne. Yet for Gomes, the electro element of Barrage is as much a practical concern as anything else, explaining that he uses electronics because “it’s what’s easiest, cheapest at hand, the most ghetto way of doing it.”

The release of Hero or Dirt? has spawned a wave of new material from Barrage, while the gigs remain steady. Meanwhile, he’s working on refining the recording process, and audiences are beginning to become more accepting of his performance style.

Ask anyone about a Barrage show, and they’ll talk up the performance. On-stage, Barrage occupies a lot more space than his ordinarily diminutive figure. But Gomes himself can’t see anything unique in his decadent, microphone-twirling act. “I guess its unusual for someone to play solo in an electronic idiom so people get a bit freaked out by that at first,” he says of his live performances. But as usual, Gomes is self-deprecating. “Well, I doubt it freaks people out.”

And, hopefully, audiences will forget that it’s Bundaberg-born Mark Gomes they’re watching on stage, instead giving themselves over to the Barrage fantasy. Gomes dismisses the current direction in popular music towards a cultish following of personalities, hoping instead to erase any hit of realism in his performance.

“That really pisses me off about a lot of contemporary music. It’s like the ‘school of cool’ and it’s about who you are when you’re off stage as well. To me, that’s so antithetical to what I’m trying to do.”

Instead, he’d rather the record speak for itself as a stand-alone piece. “It might sound utopic, but I just want people to listen to the music.”

So what is it about the intentional split between his musical persona and his everyday reality that so appeals to Barrage? “Any good art is detached,” he says. Gomes takes a considered step back when working musically, a task he doesn’t find difficult in a creative sense.

“It’s the easiest thing because it’s the most pleasurable thing – it’s great to forget yourself. That’s what I like about good novels or good tracks; you’re not self-conscious and you just give yourself over. It’s the same in the writing process, when hours pass and you just don’t know where they went.”

When it comes to the future for Barrage, Gomes is speculative. Having made the move to Melbourne from Brisbane over two years ago, he can see himself moving again when the time is right. In the meantime, he’ll be gauging the reception of Hero or Dirt?.

Ultimately, he wants the record to challenge his listeners, but also to engage them. “Hopefully my music evokes loads of longing – the record ends and they’d like to know more.”

But getting to the bottom of the real Barrage just isn’t possible, he says. Instead, it’s a case of what you see and what you hear is what you get. “There really is no more to know. And that’s the beautiful thing about lots of music and art – it’s closed but it’s open and for the rest of your life you can think about it.”

It might sound naff, as Gomes puts it, but it’s the juncture between art and reality that’s at the heart of Barrage – and, for Gomes, at the crux of all successful creative endeavours. It’s something that he knows there’s no escaping, and it’s central to Hero or Dirt?.

“It’s something I’m aware of, so maybe I’ve literalised it a bit more than other people do. But I like that – I like to be one step ahead.”