“Dark Taste” by Thorn Dells

The first great new release of 2022 is upon us, in the form of an unexpected album “Silicon Pink”, the first music from Port Chalmers, Dunedin duo Thorn Dells. Here’s “Dark Taste”.

Thorn Dells is Nikolai Sim (Élan Vital, Kolya) and Lucinda King (Death And The Maiden, Bad Sav , Floating Island). “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.

There are echoes of 90s dubby trip hop in places, as well as crystalline radio-friendly pop (the sublime “The One I Fear” with vocals from Sean Patrick Donald), and the gloriously sinister “Orlando” somehow channels an imaginary post-grunge Breeders mutation.  

The whole album all feels majestic and epic, the kind of album you would expect to hear on a major independent label (Mute, 4AD, etc.) but this is 2022, and self-releasing through Bandcamp is where you will find the sound of today’s essential exploratory music underground.

“Discontinuation” by Floating Island

Here in NZ we’ve just completed Day 30 of a COVID19 elimination lockdown. In another few days – Tuesday 28 April 2020 – the extreme lockdown is eased just a tiny bit… but essentially ‘quarantine’ continues for at least another few weeks. On 4 May NZ will achieve the noteworthy milestone of the Middle Ages plague lockdown quaranta giorni (40 days!).

Here’s the first local quarantine lockdown isolation song I’ve discovered. I’m assuming the perfectly-titled “Discontinuation” from Floating Island is a reflection on current affairs… it works as that even if the lyrics are a more general reflection on changing times.

Floating Island is “an online music work book of demos and solo explorations by Lucinda King (Death and the Maiden, Bad Sav & Denudes).”

“Discontinuation” is a glorious and disorienting solo electronic extrapolation of King’s work in Death & The Maiden. The washes of sounds, layers of ambient textures, crisp minimal beats, and especially that distressed woozy slow vibrato not-sax melody behind the melancholic voice create a wholly a complete(d) work. There’s nothing “demo” about this.

There are more excellent solo explorations uploaded just last week. Always great to have new music to discover, even more essential during a period of quarantine home detention.

“Hourglass” by Death And The Maiden

NZ Music Every Godzone Month! sign from Too Tone Records in Dunedin.

Our New Zealand Music Month song for day # 23 is “Hourglass” from Port Chalmers trio Death And The Maiden.

“Cold ocean…” intones Lucinda King as we are led into the eery, hypnotic world-in-a-song of “Hourglass”. Hope Robertson’s guitar swoops in time with Danny Brady’s subtle drum machine beats and synth arpeggios. “Collected hourglasses, filled the room up, but all that time: useless…” 

Death And The Maiden’s second album “Wisteria” is shrouded in a cool, misty ambience. It is an unusual but thrilling and muscular hybrid between electronic music and dark post-punk and an a Gothic kind of psychedelia.

“The Blueness” by The Blueness

Day 19 of the May Month of Madness Marathon for NZ Music Month comes from Dunedin’s retro-futurist space-pop group The Blueness.

Their only album “Ravendah Dream” is an excellent cartoon-colourful space fantasy, merging a bit of glam rock with a bit of spacey synth-pop.

The Blueness were John White (Mestar and original bassist for The Prophet Hens, appearing on their debut “Popular People Do Popular People”), Lucinda King (Bad Sav, Death And The Maiden), Mike McLeod (Bad Sav, The Shifting Sands) and Kristen Wineera.

The Blueness have become a forgotten footnote in Dunedin’s Pop Underground. They reigned briefly, wonderfully for a year or less in Dunedin before making it to Los Angeles in the second half of 2012 for the start of a low-key US tour, so low-key it never happened…

Anyway, that all set off a chain of events around the world, and eventually back in Dunedin. Lucinda carried on from LA to Berlin, meeting up with Danny Brady (Thought Creature) and finding the Munch sketch which provided the name for the band they formed on their return to New Zealand in – Death And The Maiden.

So… don’t forget The Blueness. This is an album worth downloading.