“Lay Out” by Bathysphere

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.

“Waves” by Superette

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.

“Orlando” by Thorn Dells

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.

“Up The Harbour” by Seafog

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.

“The Beginning of the End” by CL-Bob

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”].