OCF 07 - Glass Aspiedel

OCF 07 – Glass Aspiedel

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

Glass Aspiedel is a one-off mail art collaboration between Timaru’s Glen Farmer and Australian producer Simon Bell. Farmer’s work consists of chopped and screwed manipulations of track from sound effects cds, and he has contributed to several key works from the Timaru scene, including Twelve Dollah’s ‘12Bux’, Moley’s ‘Buttercamp Don’t Melt’ and Smith vs Brown’s ‘Breath of the Volcano’. Simon Bell is best known as the only member of the charmingly named suckcore group MONG who doesn’t have Down Syndrome – their two albums, ‘Men Of New Guns’ and ‘My Only Night Garden’ are possibly the most fucking unlistenable things I’ve ever heard, like Hanatarash on crack. His solo work, on the other hand, is extraordinarily pretty, huge fields of Max/MSP loveliness.

Farmer and Bell met through an on-line gaming forum, and OCF 07 is the result. Farmer’s contribution will possibly be familiar to Shearwater Records aficionados – another version is a component of Smith vs Brown’s ‘Another Time, Perhaps’: an industrial nightmare of railways and factory noises, fucked up and dubbed out on an old four-track so that the trains seem to run across the ceiling, Escher-wise. (As a side-note, I assumed when I first heard this that it was an allusion to ‘Étude aux chemins de fer’, but to our mutual surprise, when I brought this up with Farmer, he’d never heard of Schaeffer. A quick point to ubuweb sorted him out nicely).

Smith then disorientates the listener further with three successive iterations of granular synthesis, abstracting the final product increasingly far from its original source. Apparently it’s inspired by the time lapse interludes in ‘A Zed and Two Noughts, and it’s terrific, finely detailed stuff, a study of the beauty of the processes of breakage and decay.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 13.7 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/16888727-bd9

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

OCF 06 - Smith vs Brown

OCF 06 – Smith vs Brown

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

I don’t think I’d be exposing any prejudices unshared by anyone reading this if I said that (Radiant Records aside) I’d always assumed that the musical scene in Timaru would be a hotbed of Top Forty pap and Classic Rock.

Not so. There seems, in fact, to be quite the active nexus of radical music hard at work down there. Smith vs Brown, brothers Andrew and Paul Jones and an assortment of friends and family, are one of its leading lights, combining cerebral rigour with an impressively aggressive sound. They’re responsible for a handful of excellent lathe-cuts, cassettes and CD-r’s, including the genius ‘Breath of the Volcano’, and Andrew writes the zine ‘Pudgy Doll’, the main source of documentation of their small and vital scene.

These two tracks display the complementary sides of their musical personalities. ‘Another Time, Perhaps’ is a collage of clattering sound effects, sine bass, a queasily panning drum loop possibly quoting the middle section of ‘Saucerful of Secrets’, and a primitivist guitar line that sounds as though the guitarist is imagining himself throttling a chook. Its companion, despite its flippant title, is a monolithic thumper that shows why Smith vs Brown have earned a reputation for bone-shakingly ferocious live performances.  Distorted drums and lolloping bass provide a Krautrock schema across which is stretched a network of heavily effected post-rock squeals, scrapes and drones, sounding like nothing so much as a desperate robot trying to escape from a burning building. It’s great stuff – a Wagnerian counterpoint to the dross of everyday life.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 11.39 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/16805401-394

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

OCF 05 - International Conspiracy of Scientists

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

bLOWFLY were a notorious “art-terrorist” band in the late 80’s/early 90’s Auckland scene, who, after starting life as an E.N.T. inspired grindcore unit, morphed into a full scale Industrial Goth performance art bloodbath, with music coming second to on-stage rituals of sado-masochism, abjection and body fear. I was lucky – or unlucky – enough to be present at their last gig in 1992. A few dozen of us were scattered across the floor of the Gluepot, and we were pelted with rotting meat, faeces, used tampons and light bulbs filled with animal’s blood before witnessing the band imploding while their drummer administered himself with what proved to be a fatal dose of heroin.

The band were apparently deeply traumatised by the incident and went their separate ways. Bassist Harriet Palmer went on to run the excellent label Vile Stories and to play, as DJ Tantrum, an important part in establishing jungle and drum and bass in Auckland. Under a bewildering number of pseudonyms she has also released a steady stream of her own music, much of it influenced by the long period she lived in Kyoto.

This release, as International Conspiracy of Scientists, is typical of her challenging oeuvre. Two lovely, beautifully textured pieces of digital musique concrete lull you into tranquillity before you’re presented with the kind of piercing drone that inhabits the outer realm of Japanese experimental music. Apparently it’s generated by the unprocessed signal from a faulty delay pedal, and, like all of Palmer’s work, it makes you glad to have lost the edge off your hearing in such elegant and blessed-out style. 

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 11.2 Mb

http://www.divshare.com/download/16750740-c16

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

Overhead Underground: OCF 04

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

In the early 2000's, Martin Field was the driving force behind Sydney’s Don’t Send Me Back To Art School. Long before morally dubious young women with fringes and their mums made ukuleles hip, Don’t Send Me Back To Art School were responsible for a series of cassette-only reinterpretations of New Zealand noise music classiscs, such as “Killing Ukuleles With Ukuleles”, “Inner-city Ukulele Perspectives”, and – one of my own desert-island disks – the hilarious and strangely affecting “Ukulele Kills”.

During the recording of “L’Ukulele Non”, Field was diagnosed with a rare blood disease which necessitated complete inactivity. He documented the move back to his home town of Hawera and the physical and emotional tribulations of recovery in his zine, “A Period Of Ill Health”.

Over the last couple of years Field has re-emerged as a recording artist under the moniker Overhead Underground, eschewing his former pranksterism for a more serious, studied approach. I’m honoured to be able to release this, his most recent recording. Like all good experimental music, it sounds just as good playing quietly in the corner as it does if you play it ridiculously loudly. Huge blocks of sculpted noise alternate with tangled webs of speech, alluding to Don’t Send Me Back To Art School’s first cassette, “I Am Sitting In The Gloom”. It may sound simple, but in fact Field is able to wring surprising sonic complexity from these basic materials.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 14.6 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/16705382-c3f