“Dear ___ ” (Horse Doctor Remix) – Death And The Maiden

Dunedin software-wizard Horse Doctor (John Glasgow) has remixed Death And The Maiden’s “Dear ___ ” and it’s the most radical remix of anything I’ve ever heard. Ever.

It was so radical it (almost literally) took my breath away. There’s barely enough of the original essence of the song to recognise it from its original album form.

Vocalist Lucinda sounds dislocated, trapped in a resin mold and spinning through space on an alien craft controlled by a malfunctioning short-circuiting computer system. It’s brilliant.

There’s a bit in Simon Reynold’s book “Retromania” where he laments the lack of genuinely new forms of music utlising technology and non-traditional music instrumentation and conventions to craft new exploratory styles. Horse Doctor is the future he imagined was possible.

In this remix – and in the other works assembled on the Horse Doctor Soundcloud – the striking feature is the seriously complex multi-layered Frankenstein Monster re-assembly work. But it goes beyond just looping samples. The first 4 minutes is weird enough. But it really takes off at around the 4 minute mark and goes into a time-distorting, gravity-defying worm hole of sound.

There are many looped micro-samples layered so they form glitchy polyrhythms and then these looped micro-loops are layered with other looped sound into a weird and exciting kind of extra-terrestrial orchestral music, as if performed by a vast orchestra formed by a species of hyper-intelligent space-ants.

“i think i crashed acid pro about 500 times for this one” says Horse Doctor, confirming the diagnosis that this pushes the boundary of music software, and perhaps even sanity. Anyway, it takes a few listens to get into this because it is so different. Yet it is music of great skill and unusual beauty, bearing as much relationship to its orginal re-mix subject song as it does to any notion of pretty much anything else I’m used to.

“All These Conditions” by Govrmint

“All These Conditions” is a sweetly dislocated slice of ambient glitch sound-collage from Dunedin ensemble Govrmint.

Dunedin’s experimental/electronic music underground is a clandestine world of of it’s own. A new generation of sound-makers operate as Charisma Collective. The Charisma Collective Bandcamp page is where I stumbled across Govrmint’s “Pipe DRM” but Govrmint also have their own Bandcamp.

The whole album is wonderful. A familiar reference point may be Boards of Canada, but Govrmint operate like a futuristic laptop glitch advancement of that kind of oddly dislocating (mis)use of sound and samples. Check out the glorious “Altnow” for another poke in the third eye.

‘Wellsford Video’ by Moppy

Day 14 of the NZ Music Month daily NZ music madness is ‘Wellsford Video’ from the dark imagination of Auckland sound-charmer MOPPY.

This from Muzai Records Bandcamp page: “Moppy (a.k.a Thom Burton) produces wonders of glitch and IDM that take their cues from the ambient works of Chris Morris and the soundtrack to television classic Jaaaaam. Cultivated through a period of fasting in a tin-foil hat, with a brief period of time working with Cute Banana (who appeared on the single “Big Bad Wolf” from his first album, Mokai), Seconds is more than mere electronic music and EDM.”

No idea what any of that actually means sorry but I do like this Moppy album. ‘Seconds’ reminds me in places of early Eno (eg: Music for Films) and Boards of Canada and in other places of the experimental side of Broadcast. But there’s also a lot of musique-concrete & avant-garde sound manipulation going on here too which means it is hard to pin it down to being any one thing.

It’s all very exotic yet accessible while also being fresh & a little challenging. Which pretty much sums up the modus operandi of Muzai Records really.