Drone - Drone (1989)

Debut album from late-80s Auckland minimalist avant-garde art schoolers Drone. Not what I expected when I discovered them around the turn of the century, my post-Free Noise sensibilities presuming heavy electric drunge.

This is not that: instead it's sombre and sober, astringent acoustic strings with vocal harmonies and scant samples, detuned chimings and chants braided into unison rhythms. Rich and thick (like good American ketchup or bad American presidents), sensitive and affecting, very smart yet from the gut.

The marching piano on second track 'Carcass' bounces like an obscurely perky This Kind of Punishment, while 'Music for Guitar + Piano' could be a Terry Riley-led Abel Tasmans painting a McCahon. Other tracks call to mind a synth-less Marie and the Atom, stripped down or vigorous as in knotty ‘pop’ tracks like ‘Lofty’ by Out of the Compost, or ‘Black Thoughts’ or ‘Ethiopian Dream’ by Thin Red Line. 

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This Carcass I Beg To Slaughter

A David Watson Decade (1986 - 1996)

Co-founder of the Braille Label in 1984 and curator of the first altmusic festival in 2001, ex-Wellington improvisor David Watson has lived and worked in New York since the late 80s.


David Watson - Reference (1986)

An album of low-key beauty recorded the year before he left for NYC, Reference is what it says on the tin: a catalogue raisoneé laying out Watson's pluralistic thing. 'A Code' starts off with a lo-bit From Scratch-style sampled bamboo rhythm and a squall of squealing riffage multi-tracked with back-masked guitar drones. 'To Read A Cipher' follows, skipping between snippets of Fahey-like and Donald McPherson-esque acoustic noodling, while its counterpart 'To Write...' bellows Bailey-ish and bell-like with clockwork zithers. Side Two's ten minute epic 'The Arithmetic Symbol 0' opens with amp feedback and drastically stereo separated signal/delay, sidesteps into acoustic improv then on to microphone-on-strings, atmospheric slide and distant rhythms with rusty hinges. The urgent 'To Unravel' plays ping pong with bowed drones and volume swells, with hypnopompic bass and insistent muted-string-strumming snowballing into the reverb and squeaks of a background basketball gym. Pensive but never po-faced, there is a playfulness inherent in its experimentalism, much in the manner of Greg Malcolm. 

John! Just... leave those things alone. 

David Watson - Ribbons of Euphoria (1996)

This CD was produced by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1996 for inclusion in its short-lived Midwest magazine. It includes four tracks for 3x bagpipe ensembles, for which Watson was commissioned by the DPAG to celebrate their relocation to a new building in the Octagon. Having worked in the centre of Dunedin for more than a decade I've gritted my teeth through entire weekends of competing pipe bands, but there's definitely dramatic power in what Watson describes as the 'real savagery in the sound of the pipes'. Ten years on from the earnest and retrospectively tentative charms of Reference, Watson's potent multi-tracked solo electric guitar works are more fully developed and realised, all serious and exciting, academic and musical. Tracks 'Delicious' and 'Candy' pit Tony Conrad vs Robert Fripp, while the expansive 'Steak Knife' is all that's great in his earlier works advanced with all that he's learned from his Downtown collaborators like album contributors Ikue Mori and Otomo Yoshihide. Includes scans of his interview with Midwest. 

forward moving elliptical motions