Only fitting to follow a noisy guitar-dominated tune from Dunedin band Bad Sav with another, calmer, guitar-driven sonic storm from Dunedin’s High Dependency Unit/ HDU – “Lull”:
“Lull” is from HDU’s 1998 album “Higher + +” which is one of the classic NZ experimental post-rock albums. It encapsulates perfectly the dreamy astral psychedelia side of the band, usually remembered for their searing futuristic “space blues” soundscapes of walls of firestorm guitar and thunderous bass over tight patterns of crunching drums. It’s wonderful to see the whole glorious catalogue of HDU albums available on Bandcamp for new generations and audiences to discover, including the wonderous “Metamathics” recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.
Bit of a nostalgia trip with today’s NZ Music Month offering, released back in the optimistic days of 2018, and yes, it has appeared on PopLib 5 years ago but no rules about repeats here so let’s get our ears syringed with the glorious guitar noise of Bad Sav’s “Pets”:
The sonic storm-front from Bad Sav leader, guitarist and vocalist Hope Robertson’s guitar arrives at the two and a half minute mark, exploding with controlled fury and then continuing to build, forming layer upon layer of gloriously distorted noise as it turns itself into something both hostile and embracing. It’s an utterly beautiful, wrenching song that rewards being played on repeat and loud.
Hearing Bad Sav play this live was always a treat and a thrill. The structural noise filled the room, vibrating every atom as they tore a hole in the fabric of space and time, particularly with the amazing improv destruction ending to “Pets”. The way it ended was different every time, but on a great night (and most Bad Sav performances were great) the song ended like a universe of “Index of Metals”-era Robert Fripp guitar loops disintegrating as it is pulled into a black hole.
Robertson said “Pets” “is a breakup song even though it doesn’t sound like it. It was a “I don’t need to worry about this stuff because I’ve got my pets” kinda thing.”
“When I write a song if I’m so upset or angry or an emotion has gone beyond words, and just write some music and say, “Well, that sums it up”, I don’t think there’s any words necessary. At other times, words are totally necessary; if there’s an actual issue that’s happened or something you wanna discuss with yourself in songwriting then I’ll do that…”
I know I bang on here on PopLib about the current/ recent Dunedin underground scene and also how there’s so much essential music existing in the not-on-label twilight music underworld shared via Bandcamp and I’m not going to stop. Drives me wild that only a handful of people appear to be aware of music like Thorn Dells “Silicon Pink” album. Here’s “Orlando” from it:
The Koputai/ Port Chalmers, Ōtepoti/ Dunedin duo Thorn Dells is Nikolai Sim (Élan Vital, Kolya) and Lucinda King (Death And The Maiden, Bad Sav). “Silicon Pink” is a fantasia of dark hybrid electronic pop, each song a shift in time and space, mixing light and darkness, electronic pop and more exploratory sounds.
“Orlando” here is as out of character as everything on the album, its brooding guitar-dominated futurist post-punk somehow channeling some kind of imaginary post-grunge Breeders sonic mutation.
The whole album all feels majestic and epic, the kind of album you would expect to hear on a major independent label (4AD, Mute, etc.) but in the 2020s self-releasing through Bandcamp is where you will find the sound of today’s essential exploratory music underground.
Forty years ago, after the first burst of The Clean uncoiled, the Kilgour brothers recorded a low-key album “Clean Out Of Our Minds” as The Great Unwashed and referenced their hometown in “What You Should Be Now” with the opening lines: “Saw you back in Dunedin/things seems strange there”.
Things are still strange here, and none stranger than Port Chalmers institution Seafog who carry the lop-sided jangle of early Clean/ Great Unwashed in the opening track of their best album yet, “Slow Death”. Here’s “Up The Harbour”:
Seafog are guitarist and lead vocalist Robin Sharma (Jetty), guitarist Nigel Waters, bass guitarist Andrew Barsby and drummer Martyn Sadler. As they expained a while back: “Seafog are a 4 piece that have been around for a while. We play in the garage out Port, sometimes like our lives depend on it.”
“Slow Death” is the band’s fourth album. It’s got all the charms of its predecessors, but this one seems less idiosyncratic and more instantly approachable. The distinctive stream-of-semi-conscious-delerium-fuelled excursion from frontman Robin Sharma (Jetty) are reigned in somewhat and a more reflective tone pervades the album, although he still sometimes sounds like he’s possessed by forces beyond his control.
There’s something here for everyone from loose jangling songs that stand out in the crowd as being from Dunedin, through to a trumpet-led instrumental “Moa” and a whole lot of fuzzed up, Sonic Youth-styled wall-of-guitar noise good times in between.
It’s not a Seafog album unless there’s a song about a song, or a band, or an album. “Slow Death” obliges with “Warm Flows” about listening to Brian Eno: “here come the warm jets again” . For good measure the album closes with the Iggy-esque “Sick”. Can’t get more Dunedin-with-West-Harbour attitude than Seafog.
Let’s stay in Dunedin some more… it’s home! A new release from Birdation started this run of posts. As noted two posts back Birdation’s Hope Robertson is better known for being the guitarist in Bad Sav and Dunedin’s post-punk+electronic slow-motion dance band Death And The Maiden. There’s finally a new, third album coming out from DATM, called “Uneven Ground”. The first single ahead of that release is “Leanest Cut”.
Bassist and vocalist Lucinda King is the bedrock here, musical guide and storyteller. Guitarist Hope Robertson weaves swooping, soaring motifs and guitar noise to build analogue atmosphere for this alternate world. Danny Brady’s beats mix old-school drum machines with electronic tones and distortion, amniotic synths and and field recordings.
“Leanest Cut” is an blurred moment in uncertain time, washed through with psychic unease and expressing the existential uncertainty that comes with both the passage of time and symptomatic of everything we have all been through these past 5 years.
Death In The Maiden’s eponymous 2014 debut was followed by the glorious and lushly detailed “Wisteria” in 2018. “Leanest Cut” here suggests the new album “Uneven Ground” will be a step up and outwards sonically, even as the lyrics turn more inward than the epic worlds evoked in some of the songs in “Wisteria”. All the familiar elements each person in the trio brings to their distinctive sound remain intact; at once familiar, but also different, like a new skin.
There’s also a video for the song, filmed by photographer Chris Schmelz in one of the bays around Port Chalmers using 16mm film that expired in the mid 60’s and hand-processed using caffenol in the laundry of his house. The white lawn furniture submerged in the water belonged to Lucinda’s nan and the video is a kind of cathartic reverence to the swirl of grief and memories she was feeling at that time.
While you are down the Death And The Maiden rabbit hole make sure you visit Thorn Dells, Lucinda King’s music with Nikolai Sim (Élan Vital). Their album “Silicon Pink” is one of the great unheralded masterpieces of Dunedin’s darkwave electronic pop scene, and an ideal companion piece to the works of Death And The Maiden.
Let’s stay in Dunedin for the opening song from a thrilling eponymous first EP from newly-cultured noise rock outfit Pearly* – “Say Whatever“:
Pearly* are Joel Field (guitar, vocals), Phaedra Love (bass, vocals), Ryan Hill (guitar) and Josh Nicholls (drums) and this is an accomplished EP of well-constructed noisy pop songs. If you have loved the noisier side of Dunedin music in recent years (thinking of the likes of Bad Sav, Space Bats, Attack! Asta Rangu, Koizilla, Bathysphere, Dale Kerrigan et al.) then get your ears acquainted to Pearly* ASAP.
The next Bandcamp Friday is coming up in a few days on Friday 3 May, a great time to show Pearly* your appreciation and support. Also a great time to show other self-released bands and artists getting new sounds out to us your appreciation and support. If you need some more Bandcamp Friday inspiration just hit the back arrow above and explore what PopLib has been bringing to your attention in recent months…
It has been several years (8 to be exact) since the last Birdation release during which time chief ‘bird-racer’ and guitar/sound alchemist Hope Robertson has recorded a couple of Death And The Maiden albums and the exceptional been-and-gone eponymous Bad Sav album. So this new song “Haggard” is a momentous occasion:
“Haggard” is a gloriously upbeat (in a downbeat way) woozy lo-fi guitar-and-stuff instrumental woven through with dubby echoes of itself and semi-glitchy percussion and sound manipulation. It puts my head in the same space as recent favourites like the album of evocative guitar instrumentals “For The Morning” by Australian guitarist Sarah Hardiman under the alias LOU.
I could listen to a whole album of these exploratory experimental guitar tunes should Birdation ever by inclined to compose/ compile/ collate such a thing, hopefully not with an 8 year wait between each track.
[Update: Wish granted. Not even an 8 day wait for “a real handful” of Birdation tunes. Chur.]
The fourth coming of NZ music legend Shayne P. Carter as Dimmer (following Bored Games, DoubleHappys, and Straitjacket Fits) is probably the era of his 40 year catalogue that is least well-known overseas. I could start an argument by saying it’s his best era. But ‘best’ is always meaningless, subjective, caught up in judgements where the emotional resonance of music in a particular time and place for listeners rightly over-rules any attempt at objective assessment. So let’s just take a deep breath and allow 10 minutes of a live version of “Seed” which appears on the newly released double LP “Live at The Hollywood” envelope the senses:
“Seed” was one of the songs on the first Dimmer album “I Believe You Are A Star” in 2001, a revolutionary album at the time, marking an evolution into smooth and slinky groove-based futuristic soulful rock music, yet still clearly identifiable as being Shayne P. Carter.
Carter notes these live recordings: “included angles and extrapolations on the tunes that aren’t on the original recordings.”
“Seed” includes new angles and extrapolations from Carter’s Gibson SG guitar, helped by it’s 10 minute hypnotic groove locked in by original Dimmer drummer Gary Sullivan (Jean Paul Sartre Experience/ JPSE, Solid Gold Hell).
Carter also notes: “Although I stand to financially gain from the exploitation of this artefact I wholeheartedly recommend the item to the general listening public.”
I do not stand to financially gain from the exploitation of this artefact, however, I also wholeheartedly recommend the item to the general listening public.
Back in Dunedin for “Surface” by Thorn Dells. As we’ve noted here before, self-releasing through Bandcamp is where you will find the sound of today’s essential exploratory music underground.
“Surface” kicks off with an experimental churn of distorted pitch-shifting keyboards before soon bursting into a dancefloor-friendly slice of psychologically intense electro-pop. Created as a soundscape project collaboration with Pōneke designer JPalm for their SURFACE Fashion Video the song works on its own terms, possessing the same kind of cold crystalline decadence as the music of Chris and Cosey.
Thorn Dells is Nikolai Sim (Élan Vital, Kolya) and Lucinda King (Death And The Maiden, Bad Sav, Floating Island). The Koputai/ Port Chalmers, Ōtepoti/ Dunedin duo’s 2022 album “Silicon Pink” is an essential release you most likely don’t know about. It’s a fantasia of dark hybrid electronic pop, each song a shift in time and space, mixing light and darkness, electronic pop and more exploratory sounds. That something of the quality of “Silicon Pink” and also “Surface” here can be released and be for all practical purposes lost in the infinite data of the internet is both the beauty and tragedy of music-making today.
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!’
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