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/

OCF 07 - Glass Aspiedel

OCF 07 – Glass Aspiedel

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

Glass Aspiedel is a one-off mail art collaboration between Timaru’s Glen Farmer and Australian producer Simon Bell. Farmer’s work consists of chopped and screwed manipulations of track from sound effects cds, and he has contributed to several key works from the Timaru scene, including Twelve Dollah’s ‘12Bux’, Moley’s ‘Buttercamp Don’t Melt’ and Smith vs Brown’s ‘Breath of the Volcano’. Simon Bell is best known as the only member of the charmingly named suckcore group MONG who doesn’t have Down Syndrome – their two albums, ‘Men Of New Guns’ and ‘My Only Night Garden’ are possibly the most fucking unlistenable things I’ve ever heard, like Hanatarash on crack. His solo work, on the other hand, is extraordinarily pretty, huge fields of Max/MSP loveliness.

Farmer and Bell met through an on-line gaming forum, and OCF 07 is the result. Farmer’s contribution will possibly be familiar to Shearwater Records aficionados – another version is a component of Smith vs Brown’s ‘Another Time, Perhaps’: an industrial nightmare of railways and factory noises, fucked up and dubbed out on an old four-track so that the trains seem to run across the ceiling, Escher-wise. (As a side-note, I assumed when I first heard this that it was an allusion to ‘Étude aux chemins de fer’, but to our mutual surprise, when I brought this up with Farmer, he’d never heard of Schaeffer. A quick point to ubuweb sorted him out nicely).

Smith then disorientates the listener further with three successive iterations of granular synthesis, abstracting the final product increasingly far from its original source. Apparently it’s inspired by the time lapse interludes in ‘A Zed and Two Noughts, and it’s terrific, finely detailed stuff, a study of the beauty of the processes of breakage and decay.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 13.7 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/16888727-bd9

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

OCF 06 - Smith vs Brown

OCF 06 – Smith vs Brown

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

I don’t think I’d be exposing any prejudices unshared by anyone reading this if I said that (Radiant Records aside) I’d always assumed that the musical scene in Timaru would be a hotbed of Top Forty pap and Classic Rock.

Not so. There seems, in fact, to be quite the active nexus of radical music hard at work down there. Smith vs Brown, brothers Andrew and Paul Jones and an assortment of friends and family, are one of its leading lights, combining cerebral rigour with an impressively aggressive sound. They’re responsible for a handful of excellent lathe-cuts, cassettes and CD-r’s, including the genius ‘Breath of the Volcano’, and Andrew writes the zine ‘Pudgy Doll’, the main source of documentation of their small and vital scene.

These two tracks display the complementary sides of their musical personalities. ‘Another Time, Perhaps’ is a collage of clattering sound effects, sine bass, a queasily panning drum loop possibly quoting the middle section of ‘Saucerful of Secrets’, and a primitivist guitar line that sounds as though the guitarist is imagining himself throttling a chook. Its companion, despite its flippant title, is a monolithic thumper that shows why Smith vs Brown have earned a reputation for bone-shakingly ferocious live performances.  Distorted drums and lolloping bass provide a Krautrock schema across which is stretched a network of heavily effected post-rock squeals, scrapes and drones, sounding like nothing so much as a desperate robot trying to escape from a burning building. It’s great stuff – a Wagnerian counterpoint to the dross of everyday life.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 11.39 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/16805401-394

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

OCF 05 - International Conspiracy of Scientists

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

bLOWFLY were a notorious “art-terrorist” band in the late 80’s/early 90’s Auckland scene, who, after starting life as an E.N.T. inspired grindcore unit, morphed into a full scale Industrial Goth performance art bloodbath, with music coming second to on-stage rituals of sado-masochism, abjection and body fear. I was lucky – or unlucky – enough to be present at their last gig in 1992. A few dozen of us were scattered across the floor of the Gluepot, and we were pelted with rotting meat, faeces, used tampons and light bulbs filled with animal’s blood before witnessing the band imploding while their drummer administered himself with what proved to be a fatal dose of heroin.

The band were apparently deeply traumatised by the incident and went their separate ways. Bassist Harriet Palmer went on to run the excellent label Vile Stories and to play, as DJ Tantrum, an important part in establishing jungle and drum and bass in Auckland. Under a bewildering number of pseudonyms she has also released a steady stream of her own music, much of it influenced by the long period she lived in Kyoto.

This release, as International Conspiracy of Scientists, is typical of her challenging oeuvre. Two lovely, beautifully textured pieces of digital musique concrete lull you into tranquillity before you’re presented with the kind of piercing drone that inhabits the outer realm of Japanese experimental music. Apparently it’s generated by the unprocessed signal from a faulty delay pedal, and, like all of Palmer’s work, it makes you glad to have lost the edge off your hearing in such elegant and blessed-out style. 

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 11.2 Mb

http://www.divshare.com/download/16750740-c16

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

Overhead Underground: OCF 04

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

In the early 2000's, Martin Field was the driving force behind Sydney’s Don’t Send Me Back To Art School. Long before morally dubious young women with fringes and their mums made ukuleles hip, Don’t Send Me Back To Art School were responsible for a series of cassette-only reinterpretations of New Zealand noise music classiscs, such as “Killing Ukuleles With Ukuleles”, “Inner-city Ukulele Perspectives”, and – one of my own desert-island disks – the hilarious and strangely affecting “Ukulele Kills”.

During the recording of “L’Ukulele Non”, Field was diagnosed with a rare blood disease which necessitated complete inactivity. He documented the move back to his home town of Hawera and the physical and emotional tribulations of recovery in his zine, “A Period Of Ill Health”.

Over the last couple of years Field has re-emerged as a recording artist under the moniker Overhead Underground, eschewing his former pranksterism for a more serious, studied approach. I’m honoured to be able to release this, his most recent recording. Like all good experimental music, it sounds just as good playing quietly in the corner as it does if you play it ridiculously loudly. Huge blocks of sculpted noise alternate with tangled webs of speech, alluding to Don’t Send Me Back To Art School’s first cassette, “I Am Sitting In The Gloom”. It may sound simple, but in fact Field is able to wring surprising sonic complexity from these basic materials.

Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 14.6 Mb.

http://www.divshare.com/download/16705382-c3f