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/