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

Don't Make Noise (1988-89)

Seemingly forgotten South Island free improv, ex three staunch avant-gardists in late 80s Christchurch.


Don't Make Noise - Don't Make Noise (1988)

The trio's debut s/t cassette, with Greg Malcolm on guitar and cello, Paul Sutherland on electronics, radio, tapes, shenai etc., and John Kennedy on drums and percussion. Side A opens with an Eastern European impression -- Malcolm on cello and Sutherland on shenai -- before moving into timeless non-jazz/non-jamband Western free improv: feedback, drones, toy piano, radio and electronics, alternating with playful, artful, instrumental flourishes. By the B side, there's no dismissing their seriousness -- reductionist, lockstepped, insistent, clamorous clangour -- before revisiting Radical-Yiddish strings and rusty-hinges, shimmering cymbals and wheezing seabirds on the last piece.


pūtangitangi



Don't Make Noise - This Is The Place (1989)

Second (final?) cassette from DMN, featuring Malcolm's future Breathing Cage bandmate Michael Kime on double bass on the A-sides. Fragile and considered gauzy bits alternate with trashy rockist shuffles, Sandoz Lab-esque & Art Ensemblish 'little instruments', samples, wailing amps and hissy-crackling Moondog minimalism. Thirty minute B-side live at the Robert McDougall is astonishingly accomplished, complex and riveting -- the type of improvisation which gets audiences asking if it's a composed piece.

Aside from their short lifespan and limited small-run releases, I can only guess at why Don't Make Noise never made it into the NZ Free Noise canon. Kennedy and Malcolm both have avant-pop backgrounds or foregrounds (Thin Red Line and Breathing Cage, respectively), and there are moments which are aesthetically perhaps too Downtown jazz-ish for the Le Jazz Non compilation (let alone a few years too early). Regardless of their obscurity, the strength of material on these two tapes -- off-centre, exciting, droll and elegant, and both more serious and farther out than contemporaneous recordings by The Dead C -- merits their re-listening and reappraisal.


They called it, 'The Sound Barrier'

Free Radicals

Polarities (1983)

I'm a sucker for anything with 'Victoria University Electronic Music Studio' listed in the credits, from Mammal's discreet use of white noise wind effects to the most academic electroacoustic music. The first of these two LPs -- from collaborators composer Jonathan Besser, former Victoria University lecturer and composer Ross Harris, and Gerry Meister -- advertises precisely that, and recorded all in one day.

The eponymous track from 1983's Polarities opens the album with synthesiser and delayed and double-tracked flute, a characteristic combination from Harris's electroacoustic whakapapa (e.g., Inner Worlds' 'Fluchtig'). Midway through the track, primitive drum machine, distorted vocals, bass and electric guitar, and a much more organ-y synth, take the improvising Free Radicals into eighties Tangerine Dream territory, though perhaps with more unfettered zeal than their cold kraut contemporaries. Elsewhere they channel Laurie Anderson's 'From the Air' (on 'Space Music'), Vangelis's soundtrack work ('Summer Rain') and David Borden's Mother Mallard ('Water Music'), though all in an unbuttoned, breezy style.


You Know, We Can See Through the Roof of Your House



(i) (1987)

1987's mini-album (i) opens with what sounds like a pitch-shifted John Cousins marrying Eraserhead's Henry with Cabaret Voltaire as the wedding band. Second track 'don't ask' feels like Seventeen Seconds-era The Cure had been listening to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, while first side closer 'my lips are moving' is a sort of lime and limpid green Fripp & Eno outtake. It's altogether a tighter and more rhythmic side than the second, upon whose black expanse the opaque, capacious 'Red Shift' sits, effing with the fabric of time.


Expect the Greatest Measure of Earthly Happiness