Sunday, April 29, 2018

Besser and Prosser - Dark Wind/Spring Rain (1986)

New Zealand Composer Edition: New Music For Violin and Piano, by Jonathan Besser & Chris Prosser.

Both artists have been involved with electronic music, though I've only heard Besser in Free Radicals. But this part of their practice is evident in the record's opening suite.

Extended techniques expand the timbres in the Three Impressions of 'Dark Wind': in Part One, reverberating wooden raps and clouts on bodies of piano and violin, strummed piano wires and whispery un-rosined bowing wheeze huff and heave like the sea; Part Two's tinkling keys ground the flutter and swoop of birdcalls/-flaps/-hoppings chivvied from the fiddle; whilst Part Three feels electronically augmented, with low piano strings struck odd-chiming like ring-modulation, and paper slipped 'twixt the violin strings sizzles and snaps 'midst buzzy sawtooth scything. Unambiguously bewitching.


Best Prose


Saturday, March 24, 2018

Autumnal Jumbo Fun-Pak: The Unmatchable Robert Cardy (1987-88)

Continuing our Christchurch cassette excavations: home-tapes from the bountiful Bob Cardy (Axemen, Shaft, etc.).

Traditional EnZed bedroom studio stuff in the orthodoxy of Chris Knox or Kraus, Alastair Galbraith or Darcy Clay or Stefan Neville -- like The Residents recording The Basement Tapes or Jonathan Richman's Thinking Fellers tribute act solo-recorded on the dole, all dolloped in Strapping Fieldhands' sloshed slapdashery.

81 songs on six tapes over two short years! Cheesy preset synths and sound effects, home organ, drum machine and double-tracked vocals, guitar and bass and banjo. Riffs and raffs, Velvet earworms, effortless songcraft out the metaphorical wazoo, plus jokes 'n' puns & drones 'n' gems a-poppin'.

Down- and overload on this underlooked ol' wunderkind! Unreservedly recommended.


Fat Spring Coal & Diamonds In The Lava (1987)




Lallapaloosa (1987)






Public Address (1987)







18 Milky Bar Odes (1987)




A Thousand And One Stag Nights (1988)




Gloss (1988)