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