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/

OCF 12 - Another Ordinary Day

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

Another Ordinary Day – OCF 12

Now, if you’re reading this you most probably know all about the supergiant ‘Improvised Music from Japan’ collection, and you may be interested to know that the germination of the project that has blossomed as Shearwater Records occurred when I illicitly obtained a copy it in digital form six or seven years ago. Flash forward to the present time and many, many iterations later, I can only hope that the results have been decorating your hard drives and aural cavities.

Why is this relevant? This week’s release is by two genuine Japanese musicians, who have genuinely been in Japanese bands – and now they are resident in a crazy Stepford Wives gated set-up in suburban Raumati.

Their names are, apparently, Yoshimi Youthcult and Akira Youthcult, and they met – I love this – as teenagers on exchange to Australia at a Birchville/Sandoz gig in Sydney. Akira Youthcult comes from Japanese avant-garde aristocracy (his father having played in Group Ongaku), and he’s been a key player in such bands as 10 Lips Strike, Xerokillerx and Pig Fuck Pig. Yoshimi Youthcult was a member of Alice Sister, a group of young women who rejected the machismo-bound nature of experimental music gigs in their home town and preferred instead to make home recordings and play in small, salon-style situations in each others’ living rooms and apartments. (Pundits may note that one of my favourite artists, Yuko Nexus6, comes from a similar scene).

The two have played together as Another Ordinary Day since meeting, and have received very strong reviews for their previous self-releases on their label 2 Plum Dogs: this is their first release on another label, and also their first one since moving to New Zealand in 2010. Their earlier work combined Yoshimi’s manipulations and reworkings of 80’s pop tunes with Akira’s aggressive Gameboy-generated Techno: this sound is now long-gone. Instead the couple have consciously attempted to place themselves in the tradition of Japanese experimental music. A spinning coin introduces a gorgeous, shimmering field of sine tones, underpinned by off-kilter percussion, mysterious bass pulses, Kaosilator blips and heavily vocodered vocals. It’s one of those great recordings where time seems to stop and the sound floats out of the speaker and pools in the corners of the room. A lovely little release by a band destined for great things.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 12 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/17580935-9b3

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

OCF 11 - Digital Edit

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

Digital Edit – OCF 11

In the year 1998, notorious Wellington record collector Simon Mossman gave his autistic younger brother Julian, who was still living with their parents in Levin, a computer with some cracked audio software and a soundcard. Julian immediately began to experiment with making loops of whatever came to hand: found sound, advertisements, commercial radio, TV themes, his parents’ Boston Pops Orchestra and Gilbert and Sullivan records. Simon hooked him up with French label l’Elefante, who released two albums of Julian’s material, ‘Songs of Sincerity and Pain,’ (2000), and ‘Unpardonable Regret’ (2001).

Hans Grüber was a guitarist in a decade’s worth of Dusseldorf punk bands, the best known of which was Die Elektrische Haus. Around 2000 he did what many of us were doing back then, and made the big shift to improvised music, employing a style heavily influenced by Derek Bailey’s ‘non-idiomatic’ guitar playing. In 2001 Die Elektrische Haus disbanded after the tragic death of their charismatic singer in a car accident. At the same time, Grüber bought a copy of ‘Unpardonable Regret’, and, seeking a new music project for his attention, realised that Mossman’s sparse, hiccupping cut-ups would fit exactly with the sharp, semi-random attacks of his new-found technique.

Grüber wrote to Mossman, asking him if he’d like to collaborate, and include a cd-r of three tracks which Mossman immediately sliced to pieces. The Digital Edit sound was born, which the pair have pursued ever since with monomaniacal intensity. They’ve become something of a minor legend, famously having never met in the flesh – in fact, still knowing next to nothing about each other on a personal level. Grüber, for example, only discovered that Mossman is fifteen years his junior when he read it in the Wire article about them, and they only realised that they’d been living ten minute’s walk from each other when in London for two years when Mossman casually mentioned in an email to Grüber that he’d moved back to New Zealand.

Over the decade of their existence, Digital Edit’s sound has remained entirely unchanged. They are what it says on the box: Grüber hacks and slashes at his long suffering Ibanez, and the result is digitally edited by Mossman chopping and slicing the notes in virtuoso displays of the audio knife-master’s art.

Here are two examples. The first dates from 2001 and is an out-take of their first album ‘The Return to Torque, Mistaken’, and the other

was completed by Mossman only three weeks ago. Feel your ears re-opening.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 12 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/17441280-957

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

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/