Meanwhile back in Dunedin Bathysphere released a gem of an album in 2021 that you may not have discovered yet. Here they “Lay Out” their Dunedin post-noise-rock sound:
Bathysphere is made up of a who’s-who of the Dunedin music underground, including Trace / Untrace Records founders Julie Dunn (Asta Rangu, Mary Berry) and Richard Ley-Hamilton (Asta Rangu, Space Bats, Attack!, Males), with Josh Nicholls (Koizilla, Space Bats, Attack!, Asta Rangu, Fazed on a Pony, Pearly*) and Peter McCall (Fazed on a Pony).
The music is kind of noise-rock, kind of post-rock, kind of shoegaze. Unconsciously it somehow provides echoes – if you listen carefully – of elements from each of the past four decades of that distinctive low-key understated noisy Dunedin guitar rock. In particular there’s something of the spirit of Bad Sav in the songs on this album and the way the guitars construct the sonic structures that give these songs their shape and atmosphere, but with some added dissonance.
Dunn’s introspective vocals are submerged in the mix, which has the disorienting effect of providing subdued contrast to the guitar-wrestling noise and also drawing the listener in to get enveloped in the whole band sound.
Yesterday’s New Zealand music post was Beastwars imaginative cover of Superette’s “Waves”, so here’s the original track from the band’s (only) album “Tiger”:
It’s such a lovely tune if you don’t listen to the lyrics, which are about a rural murderer contemplating his own death: “Waves, I don’t wanna live today/ Ocean, ocean blue take me away”.
“Tiger” – originally released in 1996 and on Bandcamp as an expanded edition with tracks from their first EP “Rosepig” and demos for an unrecorded second album – is the work of former Jean-Paul Sartre Experience/ JPSE guitarist/ vocalist/ songwriter David Mulcahy, drummer/ vocalist Greta Anderson and bassist Ben Howe.
It’s notable for being one of a small handful of great mid/late 1990s albums by the third or fourth wave of bands released on Flying Nun Records which were/are never accorded quite the same love and attention here and overseas as those 1980s first/ second-wave albums.
As one of three songwriters in JPSE Mulcahy presumably had a full songbook of tunes that were not elevated to album status in that band. So the expanded “Tiger” includes “Rosepig” EP songs “Slide” and “Disappear” originally written for JPSE. Pretty sure I heard “Slide” played live not long before the band split up in 1994 – that chorus kiss-off is hard to forget – while “Disappear” also had a life as a JPSE song, a 1992 demo version included as one of the extra tracks on their “Into You” CD single in 1993.
Today’s little offering of New Zealand music goodness is not a new song in the contemporaneous meaning of the word “new” but it may well have been a new song for Dunedin noise-pop stars Mr Biscuits way back in 2011.
Mr Biscuits recorded – and released – one of the Great Lost Dunedin albums. “New Song” is on it. Had they survived their fights and meltdowns Mr Biscuits could have (should have) signed to Kill Rock Star records and been a hit all over the world. They also released one of the great lost Dunedin live albums too.
Mr Biscuits were vocalist Sarah Ley-Hamilton, guitarists Richard Ley-Hamilton (Males, Asta Rangu) and Adrian Ng (Trick Mammoth, Mavis Gary) and drummer Sam Valentine (Males, Trick Mammoth).
Back at the time Mr Biscuits explained their inevitable brevity: “The dynamic is unstable, and there is a lot of existing tension from old issues. We used to hang out a lot but lately things have been much more difficult. We’re simultaneously each others best friends and worst enemies. We love each other but there have been heaps of fights and meltdowns. We’ve even broken up more than a few times but that’s part of what we are about. Without the tension you wouldn’t get the passion that we hopefully convey.”
“New Song” is also on a forgotten compilation of 31 mostly Dunedin musical jewels released in 2011 by the Dunedin Comic Collective as the official musical accompaniment to DUD: the Dunedin Comic Revue, issue #02, which is the embed shared here. There are all sorts of weird and wonderful compilations featuring New Zealand music hidden in plain sight on Bandcamp if you know where to look for them. In future, digital music archeologists will study them for signs of new scenes forming in the detritus of the old scenes. Or maybe they will just be forgotten, like digital dust.
Friday night is alright for jazz. Here’s the exuberant Latin grooves of the opening track “Bones” from the extraordinary album “Spirits” released by NZ jazz ensemble The Circling Sun on UK label Soundway Records last year.
“Spirits” features lush and sometimes Cosmic/ Kosmiche astral jazz elements as well as spiritual/modal jazz and the Latin rhythms here. The album is recommended if you like Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane, or the more contemporary and funky Jazz Is Dead series of albums for that matter, but also very approachable if you are a novice to this particular musical world.
Been playing a lot of jazz this past year since the portal back to that earlier part of my music listening timeline was blown wide open by the Rich Ruth album “I Survived, It’s Over”, so if you dig this check out Rich Ruth too. “Spirits” hits the spot.
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.
“Look Alive!” is from “Under The Bridge 2”, a further volume of a compilation reuniting groups and songwriters who had once recorded for cult UK label Sarah Records in the 1990s. Jetstream Pony here link back through vocalist Beth Arzy to the band Aberdeen (from Los Angeles, confusingly) who released two EPs on Sarah Records in 1994.
Jetstream Pony are Beth Arzy, Kerry Boettcher, Shaun Charman, and Hannes Müller. Self-described as post punk and indie-pop but it’s not all the buzz-saw guitars on display here on “Look Alive!” If you check the well-appointed Jetstream Pony Bandcamp site you will find much fine music to explore, with hazy shoegaze guitars and dreampop melodicism represented as well.
“Under the Bridge 2” is a double LP containing 20 new tracks, set for release on 5 April 2024 on Skep Wax Records. The tracks range from dark chamber pop to shoegaze and indie-pop. New combinations of familiar names from Sarah Records era bands appear, including The Gentle Spring (a new project by Michael Hiscock of The Field Mice), Vetchinsky Settings (a collaboration between James Hackett of The Orchids and Mark Tranmer of St Christopher), and Mystic Village (which features new songs by Robert Cooksey of The Sea Urchins).
Familiar names are also here – Even As We Speak, The Orchids and Secret Shine – bands whose line-ups have remained mostly unchanged since the 1990s. While the music on the album is new, and the present and future is more important than the past, the shared history also gives a shared aesthetic and ethos which continues to tap the same vein of independent uplifting pop.
When I posted a track by The Circling Suns in December I was trying to remember other wonderful and unusual avant-garde jazz albums created in New Zealand. It’s not a crowded field, but the glorious CL-Bob has now popped into memory again. Here’s “The Beginning of The End” from their excellent 2002 album “Stereoscope”
“Stereoscope” was the band’s second album and the New Zealand Jazz Album of the Year in 2002. They say they were aiming for some kind of Scandinavian groove-based minimalism. Sure, there’s some of that. I also get a lot of sultry Miles Davis “Sketches of Spain” melodic vibes at times and much more besides.
What stands out most is the fearlessness to bypass convention and go wherever their imaginations take them, which is frequently in directions not associated with mainstream modern jazz. That may have something to do with having initially formed in 1994 to play a surrealist party in Wellington. So it makes perfect sense for a tune (eg: “Titicaca”) starting out as the gentlest purest classic modern jazz to descend (or ascend?) into a musical bar brawl, then tip over into an interlude of musique-concrete, before finding it’s way back to the initial melody and mood.
At other times CL-Bob veer into Henry Cow/ Art Bears experimental avant-rock territory, working dissonances, rapid unexpected shifts in dynamics, layers of electronics, slabs of noise into the groove of the music. Even at it’s wildest extremes it’s more fun than fury, and always finds its way back to a melodic and magical heart.
I think the band at this time was Nils Olsen* (saxophone, clarinet, flute, vocals) drummer Steve Cournane (The Alpaca Brothers), two guitarists Simon Bowden and Chris Williamson, trumpet and keyboard player Toby Laing trumpet, keyboards and bassist Tim Jaray.
[*As a bonus musical connection Nils Olsen plays saxophone on“In Dreams” from The Puddle album “Playboys in the Bush”].
The 2023 self-titled debut from House of All – redemption songs by survivors of The Fall – was what we in the trade call “A Grower”. The thrill of two thundering drummers (Paul Hanley and Simon Wolstencroft) and the gravitational pull of those neutron star bass riffs (Steve Hanley) underpinned a collection of exuberant and irreverent songs fronted by (totally) wired guitarist/ poet/ singer/ exhorter-in-chief Martin Bramah that became more and more joyful and memorable the more times they hammered into the listener’s skull. At the time of its release Bramah hinted there was more to come from the group. Here’s the first offering from second album “Continuum”, called “Aim Higher”.
House of All leader Martin Bramah (Blue Orchids, Factory Star) was a founding member and style-creator of The Fall from 1977 to 1979 and the only sacked member (there were lots of those) to rejoin The Fall (for the “Extricate” album 1989-1990) and then be sacked again by Mark E. Smith.
The best way for survivors of The Fall to pay tribute to the late curmudgeon Mark E. Smith is to do something he would disapprove of (House of All), but to do it so well that, were he still alive, he’d be even more enraged about not being part of it.
For reasons best known to Bramah the chorus of “Aim Higher” appropriates the chilling phrase “step we gaily, on we go”, the opening words of Sir Hugh Robertson’s appropriation/ re-writing of John Robert Bannerman’s 1930’s song “Mairi’s Wedding” (also known as the “Lewis Bridal Song”) with his own faux-traditional lyrics. The garbled language of this opening line comes across as something that might be uttered by a deranged Celtic Yoda. To add insult to injury, in 1959 James B. Cosh devised a Scottish Country Dance to the tune, thereby blighting the life of many a child during the 1960s and 1970s bizarrely forced to dance to it and other Scottish Country Dances at school in New Zealand and possibly other parts of the Anglosphere world as some kind of weird colonial cultural conditioning.
Anyway, I digress. Despite the triggering connotations of the phrase, Martin Bramah’s regular exhortations to “aim higher! aim higher!” crack the manic music master’s whip, and the crew of fellow recovering ex-Fall members power their way through another brilliant hard-edged pop tune with expressive storytelling from Bramah. “People thought I was off my head!” he shouts in this song, typical of the chemistry of the infectiously enthusiastic weirdness and mischief of House of All.
For House of All completists there’s a fun live/ re-mix album as well called Bay City Pistols “including the crowd fave Wet Leg / Can cover, “Ur Mum” / “Uphill”, which lasts over 10 minutes”.
…is generally at the beginning. But I’m going to start this story in the middle and work forwards and backwards from here.
I’ve been putting off starting a ‘music blog’ for several years. What the world doesn’t need is another music blog. Even one by someone who has been listening to ‘weird music’ from beyond the mainstream for more years then he cares to remember. Someone who used to write about music for years. Someone who started a record label – www.fishriderrecords.com – because music he wanted to hear wasn’t being released. What a fool’s errand that has turned out to be, by the way. Not that I regret a moment of it though, don’t get me wrong.
But someone recently said ‘start a music blog and save a musician’ or something, which is a cool way of saying that those of us who are still excited by music, and who still value the creativity of crazy people driven to make and release unpopular pop music, need to do something to help other music lovers find it. Telling people ‘you have to listen to this’ is what I’ve been doing most of my life. So this is that.
Why ‘Pop Lib”?
‘Pop Lib’ was the title of the very first Puddle EP on Flying Nun Records in 1986. Pop Lib is a kind of motto for what I imagine I do with Fishrider Records… the liberation of “pop” music.
What do I imagine “pop” needs to be liberated from?
Well, it should be liberated from dependence. Dependence on the plastic formula created by anonymous artificial taste-makers. Dependence on large corporate record labels driven by the desire to maximise shareholder profits at the expense of listener experiences. Dependence on the narrow conventions of mainstream media who dictate and prescribe the limits of what you are informed about and what you listen to.
Popular music should be made by the people for the people. There are no rules – just the common desire to warm the heart, nourish the soul and enlighten the mind. And a whole lot more. This blog may feature some new stuff some obscure stuff and will also revisit some old stuff too. There’s a decade or so of album reviews and interviews I did in a previous life as a music writer. It might be fun to revisit those. It might not. Watch this space…
The cover of ‘Pop Lib’ by The Puddle, released on Flying Nun Records in 1986.
Pop Lib 