Another young Dunedin band putting their own stylistic spin on NZ jangle pop is Sewage. Their particular stylistic spin involves not using guitars and dispensing with the pop by not having songs. The only thing jangling here is the listener’s senses.

It’s free jazz, with the emphasis on free. I’ve picked “Good Friend Long Gone” because it’s the Sewage equivalent of an accessible radio-friendly free jazz standard to introduce you gently to their realm and, perhaps “take you to heaven in a handbasket.”

Lately I’ve been drawn back to some early 80s modal jazz LPs in my collection. I’d been drawn back to them after getting lost in the Rich Ruth album “I Survived, It’s Over” which takes an extraordinary journey from psychedelic space-rock through Cosmic Music, free jazz and experimental New Age music and beyond.

Sewage’s unorthodox deconstructed Avant-Garde style of experimental music is likely to evoke strong reactions. I’ve been enjoying it, admittedly with some dosage control. In the right state of mind the music of Sewage is primal, exciting and liberating.

Sewage is Ro Rushton-Green (saxophone/violin/screaming) and Gabriel Griffin (drums/ percussion) and the double album was recorded live at the Lines of Flight festival in 2017. In the words of Lines of Flight co-organiser Peter Porteous: ‘Sewage are a band that you clear your schedule to see play…. raw and life-affirming, adrenalin fire music, the spirit of Albert Ayler within…. after eight years of watching them play my initial euphoria has not diminished…. their music hits me right in the gut, as all good music should. Wild, unpredictable, joyously bracing and very free…. all hail Sewage!’