OCF 10 - Alfriston Spires

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

Alfriston Spires – OCF 10

Anyone who lived in central Auckland in the mid 90’s will remember the D3kkB1tchz, a notorious group of, frankly, wigger university students who spent their time tagging, posing, organising terrible house parties , and trying to start turf wars with the local KC’s. David Morton, the man behind Alfriston Spires, was one of those guys. The others have gone on to become tattooists, managers of barbecue reggae bands, gallery curators and small-time drug importers: Morton is now a counsellor in Wellington. He’s been in a wide range of bands over the years, from bad taste rock (the Bruce Lowell Motion), dubby psi-trance (Psilent Canister) to creepy proto-hauntology (the Wait-for-Me Kitten), and is also the author of several books on the life experiences of people with various mental conditions: bipolarity, autism, OCD. His best known book is ‘The Idiot’s Guide To Global Developmental Delay’.

So, a clever man, multi-talented, something of a smart-arse.

In mid-2010 Morton received a Foster Award to fund working for six months full time on his solo sound art project, Alfriston Spires. What eventuated was ‘The Extra-Ordinary Ear’, an attempt to replicate, for the average listener, the experiences of a sufferer of the aural variant of Dabrowksy’s ‘overexcitibilities’. This is a controversial, little-known but not uncommon condition, in which a particular sense is heightened or magnified to a degree which is often overwhelming, sometimes debilitatingly so, most often found among the autistic and the gifted. Ever the over-achiever, Morton, who identifies as having tendencies toward the visual and tactile variants of this condition himself, produced an abundance of material, much of which is unreleased.

Here are three examples of his work. Morton’s straight-forward titles reflect the plain, unvarnished sound of close-miked ordinary objects – cd cases, screws, knives, bottle caps – which drone, mutter, screech and mumble and rattle as though they were acting in a Greek tragedy. The ‘extra-ordinary ear’ is the microphone which catches their cries, and which is bowed directly as well, producing a sound exactly like burning harpies flying up the cable and out your speakers. Suddenly, you can hear the voices of the world of sound that constantly occurs just beyond the nerve-ends of our hearing.

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

http://www.divshare.com/download/17176608-13d

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

OCF 09 - Cloaking Device

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

Cloaking Device – OCF 09

I fricking love this gorgeous records, which makes it even more frustrating I know next to nothing to tell you about the band that made it, other than that they’re a couple of chaps for work for a West Auckland IT company and who are clearly big fans of Oval and Flying Saucer Attack. Well, what else? West Auckland seems to exist in the popular imagination as an extension of Australia, a working-class paradise of beer, mullets and James Hetfield’s vocalisations of his constipatory problems. It has a whole other history, of course, and a winter’s drive through the back end of the Waitakere ranges will take you through a seemingly endless palimpsest of mist and hills, behind which are hidden ghost houses, high-walled compounds of esoteric cults, apparently purposeless giant metal structures, secret railways, rail tunnels, secret pits, secret ‘storm-water drains’ that lead to nothing or to enormous underground silos, abandoned half-built housing tracts with signs in strange languages, abandoned air-strips… If you stopped at a particular point near the end of the Scenic Drive, you used to be able to see a huge concrete wall in the middle of the bush, and behind it a group of office buildings, lights and satellite dishes. Cloaking Device provide the soundtrack for this moment….

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 11.83 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/17044463-06d

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

OCR 08 - Conni Stadft

Conni Stadft – OCF 08

People who used to know me in Auckland will probably remember my friend Theresa Stadft – she lived round the corner from our house in Ponsonby and came with us to the first Big Day Out. About the same time, she formed the duo Conni Stadft with her girlfriend, Jane Conni, and fifteen – no, Jesus, eighteen – years later, they’re still going strong. I’d actually lost touch with the two ladies after I shifted to Mt Eden – the last time I saw either of them was at the party at their house in Tutanekai St which made it onto the front page of the Herald – and it was with real pleasure that we found each other again through that most 21^st century of social interactions, the Facbook reconnection. Since then, Theresa has been sending me a steady stream of cd-r’s of their past work, and it’s really cool. Most is sadly unreleased, and it ranges from completely immature Casiotone jokes albums with titles like, ‘Songs about Farting’ – through to heavy chunks of plunderphonics and tape music. Their four-piece psychedelic off-shoot, StarCat1000AD, had a couple of student radio station hits in the mid 200’s.

In the last few years, Jane and Theresa have been producing more serious, electro-acoustic based work which explores the tension between contemporary music’s origins in the body and its movement, and its status as the end-point of a mechanized process. If this sounds too rigorous and academic for listenability, the reverse is actually true. Their present work – and OCF 08 is a great example – is sparse, elegant and moving. In fact, I’m pleased to able to say that I actually appear on this one. A few months ago they asked me to send them a couple of recordings of the most organic sounds I could manage that were not connected to urinating or defecating, or were sexual in any way; so, the samples of breathing and (I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this) toe-nail clipping on the first track are me. It’s set against a background of pure sine-wave prettiness, as are the heavily effected Eastern European vocals on the following two tracks. A lovely, atmospheric release.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 15.37 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/16986953-3a9

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