OCF 18 - Microgiants

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the eighteenth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

OCF 18 - Microgiants

To anyone familiar with Sydney’s rich but little noise micronoise scene, the venerable name Microgiants will need no introduction, as the band pretty much wrote the rule book. The trio of Peggy Burgess, New Zealander Alan Caldwell and Peter Fittle met in the early nineties when they worked at the Library of the City of Sydney, and soon formed the absurdist pop band Solid Face and the Air Girls. Microgiants began as Caldwell’s solo project, but soon involved the other two as well, and Solid Face and the Air Girls fell by the wayside. Microgiants’ initial sound, as documented on their early 7”s and their debut album for Schmatch Records, ‘The End of the Domain’, was a mess of clangs of feedback, according the familiar template set by ‘AMMusic’ and followed by experimental bands ever since.

A series, however, of noise control incidents prompted another aesthetic rethink, and in 1997 the trio unveiled a new sound, based on contact miking and close miking everyday and domestic objects and playing them with the smallest possible gestures. An enthusiastic following ensued, and Microgiants found themselves hailed by a tiny but knowing group as progenitors of a new sound.

In 2003 Fittle left to pursue his academic career in the UK, and Burgess and Caldwell, by now a couple, carried on with the name as a duo, adding tape manipulations and synthesiser bleeps to their sparse sound. They’ve gigged sporadically in the years since, touring the States in 2007 and playing a couple of reunion shows with Fittle in the UK in 2010. These were documented in the amazing live album, ‘Cut Trees Down’.

Here are two tracks recorded by Burgess and Caldwell in the home on the outskirts of Sydney. They are spare soundscapes populated with little sounds, scrapes and whispers, a detuned piano sample, played with controlled perfected: a masterclass on how to give an eloquent voice to the ordinary tools we use in our day to day, quotidian life.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 12.54 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/18567706-9bb

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

OCF 17 - Instigate TXA

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the seventeenth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

OCF 17 – Instigate TXA

As you may remember from OCF 11, Hans Grüber is the German guitarist from excellent, under-rated duo Digital Edit. When I was first arranging their Shearwater release, I mentioned in an email to him that I’d been mucking around with that excellent example of vintage emulation that’s now old enough to be vintage in itself, ReBirth. He emailed back to say, coincidentally, that his niece was doing the same thing, passed my address on to her, one thing has lead to another and – hey presto – here are two tracks that she recorded one afternoon especially for your delectation.

It turns out that Grüber’s niece Anita is quite the rock star herself, having been the teenage prodigy guitarist and vocalist  in Industrial band Wölfe in Flammen, and in the extreme Noise duo with Maxine Hannke Egbern, unbekanntes Flugobjekt. Their album, ‘Objekte im Spiegel näher erscheinen als das wirkliche Leben’ was one of Purse magazine’s albums of the year.

Instigate TXA is Anita Grüber’s electro solo project, based on her work in Fruity Loops and in ReBirth. Rough and ready beats are matched with 303 squelches from Hell, squeezed through steadily pulsing filters and delays. It reminds me of Crude around the time of ‘Best ov Tekno’ (whose work I was happy to introduce her to) – the same Noise sensibility brought to bear on software intended to make you throw your body around in regular, rhythmic movements. Noisy it may be, but can you dance to it? Shit yes, you really can….

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 9.22 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/18481096-d58

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

OCF 16 - Old Man

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the sixteenth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

Old Man – OCF 16

For a certain generation the Venn diagram of computer programming, experimental noise music and the extreme left of political activism overlapped at one point: role playing games. Nerds on drugs, basically – and you, you reading this, you may stare well at the ground, shuffle your feet, huff and puff a bit…. Admit it, this is you too. You’re a nerd on drugs, and you like it.

So if you know who says, “"Borag Thungg, Earthlet" or the difference in the use of a D12 and a D20, then Black Inoru would probably have been the band for you. They started life in the mid 80’s as a wargaming club at Wanganui Collegiate, and like all rejects of a particular order, moved on to marijuana and records habits as soon as they reached 6th form. Their band, named after a Witch Goddess in an Ian Livingstone book, evolved over time into an almighty dub-prog soundclash, a mixture of King Tubby and This Heat. In 1998 they moved to the UK, and did quite well for themselves, playing Glastonbury, influencing Radiohead’s sound around the time of ‘Kid A’, and being in the slightly astonishing position of being sampled by Aphex Twin in his track ‘Doppermin Trildren’. This was subsequently used in a Japanese cellphone commercial, and earned them a small chunk of royalties.

In the mid 2000’s the band petered back to New Zealand and have played sporadically ever since. Guitarist Rob Forscutt was with the band from the beginning, surviving several line up changes and two global relocations. For the last few years he’s lived with his partner and children up the coast from Timaru, and has been an active participant in the scene of everyone’s favourite south Canterbury town. He’s lent his distinctive guitar-picking style to at least half a dozen of the loosely coordinated collectives that make up the bands down there, featuring on recordings such as Momrath’s ‘Goat Healer’, Ebephim Code’s ‘P4126’ and Sorrell Pelusilium’s ‘In-Crowd On The Half-Screen.” He’s also had some more mainstream success with this indie-folk duo with his daughter Jillian, as Little Painted Dog.

Old Man is the name of Forscutt’s solo project, under which he’s released a slew of small runs of recordings, ranging from Birchvillesqe ambient drone to Japanese sparseness. These two tracks fall somewhere in the middle, sounding like Roy Montgomery covering This Heat’s ‘Paper Hats’ before disappearing into a beautiful digital smoosh. A fine, cleverly made record that rewards ongoing re-engagement.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 9.53 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/18400891-400

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

OCF 15 - Caregivers

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the fifteenth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

Caregivers – OCF 15

Active since the mid-2000’s, Caregivers were a band from Martha’s Vineyard who were originally lumped in with the New Weird America. Certainly, they had both social connections and some points of aesthetic convergence – loose, jammy, improvised song structures, varied instrumentation and membership, ritualistic live performances, and an overall feel that put them on the darker side of the psychedelic experience. That said, there was always a bleaker and more electronic edge to their music that meant they were more likely to soundtrack Solaris or Silent Running than The Blair Witch Project.

A notorious tour in 2009, promoting the album Pensublie Bloc, saw them play a series of narcotics-fuelled descents into chaos in construction sites, parks, empty warehouses, silos and abandoned factories that culminated in a show in a half-built nuclear power station in Wichita. A two year hiatus followed.

In 2011 they returned to public life with the release of the excellent Simone Gold’s Poison Chalice. Several members had been shed, and the remaining core trio of Nick Johnstone, Daniel Drake and Ngu Yen Gi moved to a more industrial, sample driven sound, combining loping basslines with ethnoforgery and sheets of electronic noise. A recent show by the three at New York’s Pale Turd club apparently terrified a reviewer for Pitchfork into (appropriately enough, given the name of the venue), literally shitting his pants in public.

Here’s two examples of their new sound. Primitivist Velvets style bass underpins keyboards, sampled Japanese drumming and – on the first track – a vocal loop that sounds like PJ Harvey having her teeth extracted. On the second track a recording of Ngu Yen Gi’s aunt’s traditional singing floats serenely over his band-mate’s chaos. A new Caregivers album with live tracks and a jam with deconstructionist sax player Turner Blake Miles will be released on UK label Roadscape in a couple of months.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 9.53 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/18002675-a9b

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

OCF 14 - Union of Sleep

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the fourteenth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

Union of Sleep - OCF 14

A few months ago we went for a long drive up the line with my in-laws, looking for unplundered op-shops to scavenge. We ended up in pretty much Whothefucknowswheresville, a tiny town we’d never heard of with a dairy, two pubs, a primary school, a junk shop in what had clearly been the post office, and a small group of disaffected fourteen year olds in really peculiar clothing, with an old-school ghetto blaster rocking the Futurians’ ‘Spock Ritual’. What…the…….POXRIDDEN FUCK we said, and went over to be like, ‘Hello’, and, ‘That’s our friends’ band’, and ‘This is quite odd!’. They turned out to be the local teenage weirdos, and – as all Futurians fans are – they couldn’t have been nicer people. They also had a band of their own, called Union of Sleep, based on YouTubed No Wave videos and the records that Aiden, one of the guitarists, had inherited from his grand-dad. His grand-dad (who had been the local high school art teacher) had been some kind of ginormous hipster in the Little Band scene in Melbourne in his youth; his pristine copy of ‘Confusion is Sex’ was their favourite record back in their last year of PRIMARY SCHOOL. PRIMARY SCHOOL.

We found this out all in about five minutes; we exchanged emails, and in the course of time they sent me a link to some recordings they’d uploaded. Here’s some I’ve picked more or less at random – cheap guitars, cheap bass, a cheap laptop loaded with drum samples because a kit is too expensive, played through cheap amps – the sound of a group of people in the first throes of discovering the fact that, when you don’t know any chords, the music that you make is far more exciting that the lame shit the rugby-heads around you listen to.

The other kids at their school hate them and pretend that Genevieve, the bass-player, must be a boy; their parents are mostly confused. But I love their crazy, beyond good and bad music, it’s beautiful and hilarious and joyful and pained, just like adolescence… and I’m really, really stoked to be releasing this, my favourite of the whole OCF series.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 11.9 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/17814491-244

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

OCF 13 - Obsidion Gaze

Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the thirteenth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.

Remember when your noise friends went metal? We grew beards, dressed like Ringwraiths, and were in bands that sounded like burnt tree stumps slowly being lowered into pools of lead. Those days are gone now, and the rate of cultural change has accelerated to the point where the memory of them is only faintly distant...

Well, some of us have remained true believers, and here’s something for those of you who are sick of being fed with that happy clip-clap yip woot crap…. Because, frankly, there’s nothing more satisfying when winter finally breaks and the weather is pleasingly grim than providing it with a commensurately grim sound track. For your severe weather warning, I give you Obsidion Gaze. The band formed in 2007 when founding members B. and M. met in Christchurch and bonded over M.’s Metallic Corpses t-shirt. A few years later they followed the gold dollar to Perth, where the weather is not grim exactly, but still unendurable. Since then, they have also played, together or separately, in a host of such other bands as From The Mouths Of Ill Men, Snake Priest, Blasted Exhumations, Bloodraven and Purity Raised From Ashes, but, along with the addition of Malaysian guitarist R., it’s as Obsidion Gaze that they’ve become mainstays of Perth’s virulently unhealthy Doom scene. They have toured Europe and South Asia a couple of times, playing Dutch squats, Filipino tea-houses, and once in an otherwise empty soccer stadium to a small group of enthusiastic Basque skater punks.

Despite all this activity, they have until now remained unrecorded, so I’m very pleased to present this, their first official release. Huge swathes of black despairing guitar and synth are layered over your ears for eternity. I don’t know about you, but I love this kind of thing: there’s always something gratifyingly calming about borne along by music which is so stripped of everything except its essential intent. This is great stuff – for fuck’s sake, someone call Southern Lord now!

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 12.8 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/17635185-908

This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/

Here you go, to make up for my slackness recently in getting Shearwater product to your hard drive: ‘37.2 degrees le matin’, an entire album by Conni Stadft. You may remember that they’re a duo from Auckland who have been making small scale sound artefacts for a couple of decades now. Until recently their work was split neatly into two – what they called ‘poohbum’ music, scatological satires on a range of alternative music styles, and plunderphonic collages called, after Nerys Treacy, ‘innappropriations’ – the theft of art of dubious nature detourned to your own purpose.

This is in the second group, a melancholic, atmospheric re-imagining of the soundtrack to that early 90’s shocker of French art-film misogyny, Betty Blue. Apparently the pair would, as pseudo-Bohemian early twenty-somethings, obsessively play the oriiganl after imbibing industrial amounts of poppy tea. Stadft  freely admits that they had an ‘unhealthy identification with the self-harming and extremely shaggable female lead. Oh well.’  Some considerable time later and after finding a copy of it in a thrift store, they were disappointed to discover that, straight and as adults, the music is actually diabolically banal. Hence this, an attempt to regain the wasted beauties of their early youth.

You can download it here: http://www.divshare.com/download/17587309-94a

 And it’s on the website, here: http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/