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.
This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment