Archive for the New Zealand Bands Category

The Dead C – Armed Courage (Ba Da Bing) 2013

Posted in New Zealand Bands, The Dead C on September 1, 2013 by noisenoisenoise

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Armed Courage is the first The Dead C record since the release of Patience in 2010.  Although both Michael Morley through his Gate project, and Bruce Russell with what seems like a million collaborations, have been keeping busy,  it’s taken a whole three years for them to get together and make a new Dead C record. Has it been worth the wait?  Abso-fucking-lutely. 

I ve been listening to this record for the past few weeks whilst I have been in quarantine because of a nasty  virus I picked up off one of my kids. My cabin fever allowed me to spend a good period of time going back through the band’s releases since their re-emergence with the amazing Vain Erudite and Stupid compilation in 2006. Armed Courage is more closely aligned with Secret Earth and Patience rather then the more difficult Future Artists. 

Armed Courage contains two twenty minute long tracks. The first one Armed is a mesmerising instrumental  swirl of droning rock guitar and primitive Sonic Youth avant noodling. Robbie Yeats drums dive in and fade out of the track at regular intervals. It may be my favourite Dead C track since Bitcher from 1995’s The White  House. The second track Courage starts out very differently with a quiet menacing ambiance overlaid with Michael Morley’s vocals which sound like a brain injured every-dude overdosed on codeine before the driving, rocked-out drone, kicks in. It is great and has moments which actually outstrip Armed.

Armed Courage  is a cracking record and it may also be the best recorded album they’ve released to date. If you have never heard the band before then this is a great place to start. These guys may just be getting better and better.

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Bruce Russell and Roy Montgomery – Split (Grapefruit Records) 2012

Posted in Bruce Russell, Music, New Zealand Bands, noise, Roy Montgomery, The Dead C with tags , , , , on April 28, 2012 by noisenoisenoise

This vinyl release is coming out on Grapefruit Records. a subscription style label in the vein of Three Lobed. On this release we find two of the towering giants of the New Zealand underground. The Pin Group’s Roy Montgomery and the Dead C’s Bruce Russell. My love of the New Zealand  avant garde music scene should be of no real surprise to regular readers but I had very different reactions to the two tracks on this album.

Lets deal with the track that confused me. Bruce Russell’s track is titled Mistah Chilton, He Dead. I’ve listened to it a stack of times. In the car on the way to the tip, through headphones on a long walk and at the supermarket and a few times after my kids have gone to sleep and the house is quiet.  There is no doubt that it is a tricky track to write about let alone come to terms with. There is a squealing, frantic quality to the sound that during its earlier stages reminded me a little of some of John Zorn’s more brutal outings. It sure as shit ain’t the Dead C. It has a bit of the lo-fi about it, it’s not exactly drone but it is not noise as many of us understand it. It has its charms (especially the last seven minutes) but I didn’t a great deal of pleasure from it. And goddamn it, if there is no pleasure in noise then what is the fucking point. I felt the same way about Russell’s work in A Handful of Dust. I just didn’t get it. I am obviously the wrong audience.

The flip side by Roy Montgomery is a very different sound altogether. This is pure chiming guitar drone pleasure. Emotional melodies float over the top to create quasi folk-like psychedelia. It is absolutely gorgeous – an avant garde take on emotion and bliss. Pure pleasure.

I am keen to read other reviews of Bruce Russell’s track. I may be missing something. I’m just not sure what it is.

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Birchville Cat Motel – With Maples Ablaze (Scarcelight Recordings) 2004

Posted in Birchville Cat Motel, Drone, Music, New Zealand Bands, noise with tags , , , , on February 26, 2011 by noisenoisenoise

Two of the first “out there” experimental/noise bands that I heard were the almight Yellow Swans and New Zealand’s Birchville Cat Motel, basically the alias of Campbell Kneale. Sadly both “bands” are now gone. They’re all still making records under different names and both bands left a legacy of fantastic records.

It’s worthwhile tracking down some of Birchville Cat Motel’s work because I think he is one of the few artists that managed to combine field recordings and drone so well that a menacing pastoral ambience is created.  BCM also straddled other genres. I’m a huge fan of his black metal/psych records like Bird Sister Blasphemy  and Astro Catastrophes but I think he did his finest work when he embraced the drone. Maybe With Maples Ablaze is my favourite record of his entire catalogue. I found this heavily discounted at my local record store a fortnight ago and I nearly wept when I found it.

Over its 10 untitled tracks Kneale creates extraordinary palettes of field recordings and drone.  With Maples Ablaze often sounds somewhere between KTL, Menche and ambient Kevin Drumm. It is superb and like just about everything BCM released now out of print. This record has inspired me to reconnect with the ten or so records of his that I own. There are some great records you need to track down but if the only thing you can find easily is Seventh Ruined Hex put your hand in your pocket. When I reviewed it a few years ago I was dismissive of it. I was wrong. As an aside – I don’t advocate this often but if you find a sneaky download of With Maples Ablaze start clicking. An important work from a band that shouldn’t be forgotten.

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Rosy Parlane – Jessamine (Touch) 2006

Posted in Drone, Music, New Zealand Bands with tags , , , on June 14, 2010 by noisenoisenoise

Last year I saw New Zealand’s Rosy Parlane play at the Open Frame Night at the Brisbane Powerhouse. For thirty  minutes his beautiful, elegiac, organic, ambient drone washed across the space which, as an aside, was a nice break from the previous act, Ilios, who tried to suck all the oxygen out of the room with his nasty oscillations. But like many things  as fragile and lovely as Parlane’s music, it took me a while to fully absorb just how great his music is. Jessamine is the most recent CD Parlane has released. He is much like many of the other Touch artists , say Fennesz and Oren Ambarchi, not exactly prolific. What you do get, like his label mates, is an extraordinary quality. Jessamine is a record that I keep coming back to. He may have fallen under your radar and that would be a shame. As good as Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Horizon. No shit.

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The Dead C – Eusa Kills (Flying Nun) 1989

Posted in Music, New Zealand Bands, noise, The Dead C with tags , , , on August 16, 2009 by noisenoisenoise

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If you discount the Merzbow posts, The Dead C are probably the band that I post on the most. The vast majority of their back catalogue have come out on very cool Siltbreeze and in recent years badabing records. This record (probably their first proper record) was released on the mighty Flying Nun in 1989. Now I have been a label whore in the past but one of the labels that I never really got into was Flying Nun. I had a friend who was though, and anything by The Verlaines, The Bats, The Chills, The Clean and the John Paul Sartre Experience were greedily snapped up by him. I always thought that a lot of the Flying Nun stuff was a bit too clever and  sometimes a little too pop for my liking. Now if I had heard Eusa Kills sometime before 2007  my opinion might have changed a bit.

This is commonly referred to as The Dead C’s pop record and if you listen to the first track you kind of get the shambolic, free form,  Sonic Youth vibe that very few bands pull off. But this the Dead C and it’s never going to be a very easy listen although maybe it is the easiest thing to get into. I also think that the Sonic Youth comparison’s have been a bit overstated. Sure there are some tracks which channel that Bad Moon Rising and Evol vibe but for the most part The Dead C  travel their own path. The highlights are the awesome Maggot which has always been one of my favourite Dead C tracks, the ultra Sonic Youthy Envelopment and the album opener Scarey Nest. They even manage to spew out a cover of Children of the Revolution but out of tune, slowed down and all over the place. The impact of a band live Deac c is indisputable. Think where bands like Mouthus would be without their influence. Eusa Kills is also probably the least experimental record they released and the closest to a rock album as they ever got. I wonder what the Flying Nun groupies thought about it at the time.

The CD of this is sadly out of print although Ba Da Bing recently  re-released it along with the Helen Said This 12″. Why no-one has re-released on CD is beyond me because more people need to hear this record. The best starting point is still Vain, Erudite and Stupid their two CD Best of released in 2007 but if you manage to track a copy of this down just buy it, you won’t be disappointed. My copy is the 1992 release which has some snappy liner notes from Tom Lax Which are pretty cool.

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Black Boned Angel – Verdun (Riot Season) 2009

Posted in Birchville Cat Motel, Black Boned Angel, Doom, Music, New Zealand Bands with tags , , , , , on July 21, 2009 by noisenoisenoise

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As some of you may know, Campbell Kneale, Mr Birchville Cat Motel himself hung up his feline moniker at the end of last year to focus on his new project Our Love will Destroy The World. The good news is that his side project Black Boned Angel continues to go on strongly. I was a huge fan of his BCM project yet had never dabbled with  Campbell’s drone-metal project, Black Boned Angel, a trio of Wellington musicians which includes James Kirk and Jules Desmond.. Fuck knows why really because I absolutely loved BCM’s Bird Sister Blasphemy. This, the band’s latest release on the awesome Riot Season, is an absolute gem. In fact it may be one of the finest doom records I have ever heard. The album itself lists three tracks but they are pressed as one continuous track. The titles references the battle of Verdun during World War One which claimed 250 000 lives. The thing I find interesting about the title is how tragic, military misadventures are a huge feature of schooling in the Antipodes and battles such as Gallipoli are etched into the psyche of most Australians and New Zealanders. Our understanding of  war is sober, without glory and critical of the folly of war.  In listening to Verdun it makes sense that the conflict is scored through crunching Sunn O))) riffs and futile drones. What lifts this above your average drone record is the addition of an operatic chorus belting out Wagnerian funereal hymns underneath the wall of crushing guitars. The effect is magic and somehow a natural fit for the horror that was Verdun. This record comes across a lot like Gorecki’s Misere on steroids. Riot Season are only releasing 1000 copies of this and you’d be smart to get one before they sell out.  One of the best albums of 2009 so far.

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Birchville Cat Motel – Gunpowder Temple of Heaven (Pica Disk) 2008

Posted in Birchville Cat Motel, Drone, Music, New Zealand Bands, noise with tags , , , on March 2, 2009 by noisenoisenoise

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Now this is a treat for the Birchville Cat Motel and/or drone fan. In term so of the  music what you get  is one 40 minute track of sublime drone/noise. I’ve always migrated towards Campbell Kneales more rock base noise projects rather than his forays into a pure, minimalist drone. Gunpowder Temple of Heaven may have finally converted me and over the next couple of weeks I’m going to re-listen to all of the BCM recods that I already own to get a sense of where this fits in. Another treat for fans of BCM and New Zealand underground music in general, is  the essay by the Dead C’s Bruce Russell that accompanies the beautiful and thoughtful packaging of this record. I’ll quote:

” Thus for me, Gunpowder Temple of Heaven is a complex cluster of metaphors: linguistic, historical and musical. the proof, however, is in the pudding. It is the psychotropic effects of listening to this carefully laminated composition which makes it clear that there is in fact more than accidental confluence of image and sound. What you see and hear is , remarkably, exactly what you get – a consciousness-capturing dose of sounds that grips your skull like an abductor’s taped-on mask. I personally recommend it.”

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The Dead C – Secret Earth (Badabing) 2008

Posted in Drone, Music, New Zealand Bands, The Dead C with tags on November 15, 2008 by noisenoisenoise

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After Merzbow, The Dead C are the most posted on band on this blog. The reason of course is that I just can’t get enough of their take on experimental, kitchen sink, alt-rock. Everything they do is disgustingly lo-fi and I’m glad to say that Secret Earth keeps up the tradition. Although my admiration of, and bias towrads The Dead C has been revealed  by this blog, the truth is that, like Merzbow I really have to be in the mood to listen to them. This may have been the reason it took me so long to post on Trapdoor Fucking Exit. It your not in the mood and your ear is not tuned in, the Dead C can be a slog. This may account for the reason that their last record Future Artists got such bad reviews. I thought it was pretty good and with some of the reviews I wondered whether they were listening to the  same record I did. Secret Earth follows on from Future Artists in that there are very few tracks, no information in the CD booklet and each of the tracks is mini-epic of The Dead C at the height of their powers. Secret Earth is more song orientated than  Future Artists and If you have done the right thing and bought the essential Vain, Erudite and Stupid think more Bitcher than Voodoo for instance.

What Secret Earth finds The Dead C doing, is returning in some ways to their Sonic Youth inspired roots. If you’re any doubt listen to the first couple of minutes of the opening track Mansions. At one point I thought maybe Thurston Moore was guesting. Mansions is the shortest thing on here at just on seven minutes. From there things get noiseier yet more mellow on Stations. Fifteen minutes of The Dead C doing their whole improv-rock thing over layers of no-fi feedback. Its great stuff. The third track Plains is my favourite it begins with a groove which underneath the fuzz, sounds a bit like Ciccone Youth’s dubby masterpiece Macbeth. It doesn’t last for long before the vocals to drastically alter the effect but it locks in a groove before sitting off towards noise-drone territory. The final track has the Dead C returning to tensely melancholy vibe, in fact it could be The Dead C’s first ballad. 

All in all, Secret Earth has the Dead C resisting the temptation to make their music more obtuse but it would also be a lie to say that they are becoming more accessible either. All of their records have amazing rock songs buried underneath the Dead C’s fuzzy, poorly recorded veneer. Secret Earth just happens to have four of them. If you’re new to The Dead C, this along with Vain, Erudite and Stupid are not bad places to start.

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Birchville Cat Motel – Summers Seething Pulse (Mar/ino) 2003

Posted in Birchville Cat Motel, Drone, Music, New Zealand Bands, noise with tags on October 11, 2008 by noisenoisenoise

I’ve been a bit ambivalent about Birchville Cat Motel this year. It’s because of the extremely disappointing Seventh Ruined Hex that he released on Important last year. That record highlighted just how careful a drone artist has to be in injecting enough texture into their noise to keep the listener engaged. What Seventh Ruined Hex managed to do was bore the shit out of me. It had it’s moments but those moments were few and far between. This year I drifted over to the recordings of Daniel Menche and I hadn’t given Birchville Cat Motel’s new output  a great deal of thought. I’m happy with the records of his I own  but his last release made me wary of dabbling again. 

Birchville Cat Motel release two different sort of records; the dark ambient rock pig records like Our Love Will Destroy the World and Bird Sister Blasphemy and the blissed, transcedent, drone ambience of Birds Call Home Their Dead and Chi Vampires. I’ve always loved the field recordings he infuses into his sound and whether it’s his drone or rock based recordings Birchvile Cat Motel is still one my favourite artists. Summers Seething Pulse is a record I never knew existed until three weeks ago. I have no idea how I stumbled over it but somehow during a late night surfing session I got directed to http://www.elsieandjack.com stumbled across this and I clicked that purchase button before I had time to think. Like most BCM records, Summer’s Seething Pulse is beautifully packaged. It’s limited edition and is on the elsieandjack sub-label Mar/ino which is all about the simple packaging of superb sounds. It’s cheap as chips (even with the horrible exchange rate) and if you have any interest in Birchville Cat Motel it would be difficult to find a more tremendous example of his transcendent drone music than this record. The field recordings infuse the whole project with a pastoral elegance which few noise artists get right. These are the true sounds of a Southern hemisphere summer.  It is breathtaking and has stirred up all those amazing feelings I got when I first heard Birds Call Home Their Dead. I mean this is quite simply awesome. I’ve added elsieandjack to the blogroll. Buy this record. It’s really that simple.

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The Dead C – Trapdoor Fucking Exit (Siltbreeze) 1996

Posted in Music, New Zealand Bands, The Dead C with tags on August 4, 2008 by noisenoisenoise

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Vain, Euridite and Stupid has to be one of the best compilations for any artist released in the last couple of years. It was a career spanning behemoth of the the best bits of groundbreaking avant-wahatever New Zealanders, The Dead C. For many that compilation is a mighty fine way of getting the Dead C into your record collection but for obsessive buggers like myself it’s always a treat to hear the tracks in their original context. Siltbreeze released the majority of the Dead C’s great albums. I’ve already posted on Tusk and The White House but for some reasion have negelected to post on Trapdoor Fucking Exit.  I’m a pretty huge fan of the Dead c and when they nail it they have to be one of the most underlauded rock acts of the late 1980’s and 1990’s. In my opinion all of the  Siltbreeze release (Tusk, Harsh 70’s Reality and The Whitehouse) are all pretty essential but I have a particular soft spot for this one.

This CD release  compiles the cassette only Trapdoor Fucking Exit and the Helen Said This record both of which came out in the  early 1990’s. It’s a pretty fine example of The Dead C at the height of their powers.  As per usual they start proceedings with a meandering and at time frustrating  slice of improv kitchen sink clatter in Heaven. After that the Dead C hit their straps on a big way. The shambolic sleaze of Hellis Now Love gives way to the stab at ealy 1990’s alt-rock. In fact it’s all pretty good and if you’ve listened to Vain …. and are thinking of dabbling further, this is not a bad place to start.

Live on NZ TV – Sky

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Birchville Cat Motel – Seventh Ruined Hex (Important) 2007

Posted in Birchville Cat Motel, Drone, New Zealand Bands, noise on March 1, 2008 by noisenoisenoise

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My bias towards this band has been comprehensively detailed in this blog. In fact three of their records made my best of list for 2007. All of them were worthy additions and lets face it as a body of work the three I listed were pretty fucking awesome and if you haven’t bought Birds Call home Their Dead yet then there is something wrong with you. The thing that anchored all of those albums was a avant garde distillation of rock music shot through a prism of drone. Transcendence through noise and all of that. So why can’t I get excited about this “proper” release? Both Amazon and Tiny Mix Tapes have this descriptioin on their sites:

A further step in Birchville Cat Motel’s ruminations on time-space distortion, featuring the additional mystikal talents of fellow gravity destroyer Matthew Bower (Hototogisu/Sunroof!). Seventh Ruined Hex presents like a lonesome planet occasionally struck with super-sized fragments of space detritus, but for the most part just haning around, spinning on its axis, and doing fuck-all. Like the deepest love, it is warm yet tenuous, filled with the ever-present potential for loss and brutality. More in line with the estranged love-tangle of the Birchville classic Chi Vampires than the most recent befuddling hyperspace rock-overload of recent albums like Our Love Will Destroy the World and Birds Call Home Their Dead.

This paragraph pretty much nails it. This record does fuck all. Like an anemic set of bagpipes being strangled by a snake, these tracks go no where fast. It was my main criticism of the collaboration with Yellow Swans and when I bought Seventh Ruined Hex I was hoping for more of the fucked up space jams of Astro Catastrophes rather than Chi Vampires re-dux. It’s not all bad though and I suppose it really depends on what you want from your noise/drone experience. This is one for those who like to pick the subtle shifts in the unrelenting assault on their ears. And I am one of those listeners but those little changes that usually send me into noise heaven are a little too subtle on Seventh Ruined Hex. If we take the description on Tiny Mix Tapes as fact then all I can add is that the onesome planet occasionally struck with super-sized fragments of space detritus is not being struck nearly enough and the  pieces of space detritus are beige and on prozac. In fact I found listening to this a bit of a slog. It’s still interesting but all I want is more of Mr Campbell’s inner filthy rock pig.

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Birchville Cat Motel – Bird Sister Blasphemy (C Psi P) 2007

Posted in Birchville Cat Motel, Drone, Music, New Zealand Bands, noise on January 11, 2008 by noisenoisenoise

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Out of all of the posts on this blog the most popular is Birchville Cat Motel’s Birds Call Home Their Dead. In fact the majority of visitors to this blog are either looking for posts about Birchville Cat Motel, Yellow Swans or the Dead C. The trouble with BCM is the speed at which new releases are issued. I’m not complaining. Everything he released in 2007 is in my opinion fucking essential. But some of the releases are tricky things to come by and sometimes of such limited number that if you intend to try to hear everything he does you’ve got some work cut out for you.

Luckily one of the most readily available BCM records is Bird Sister Blasphemy.  From what I can work out this record is the darker companion to Birds Call Home Their Dead. I thought I’d read somewhere that this was release on Campbell Kneale’s “black metal” Battlecruiser imprint. Well my copy is C Psi P if these things mean anything to you.  This certainly could have come out on Battlecruiser though. It’s dark as in black metal rather than some neo-gothic nonsense. It’s a rock pig’s, psychedelic metal fantasy shot through a prism of drone. When I got this last year I chucked it in my car’s CD player  straight away and the interior of my car literally throbbed. It makes me grin and playing this is almost a guilty pleasure. I love each and everyone of my Birchville Cat Motel records and this is no different. In fact this is occupying so much of my time I have Seventh Ruined Hex still wrapped and sitting next to my computer. This  had little of the pastoral repetitive beauty of Birds Call Home Their Dead but it does prove that Mr Kneale always has fresh ideas and some of those fresh ideas rock hard!

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The Dead C – DR503c (Flying Nun) 1999

Posted in Music, New Zealand Bands, noise, The Dead C on November 4, 2007 by noisenoisenoise

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I thought I’d post on this for two reasons.

The first is that I’m always a little nervous when delving into a great bands early output (a reason for my unease: I recently bought The Boredoms Oanie Bomb Meets the Sex Pistols. Holy shit, I’ll post on that one later). For the Dead C you can’t get much earlier than this. DR503c contains four tracks from the band’s debut Flying Nun LP, two from the cassette-only release DR503b, two from the Sun Stabbed EP, the entirety of the 15-minute Perform Max Harris cassette, a live version of “Sun Stabbed” and one previously unreleased track “Crazy I Know,” recorded in January of 1987. For the most part it is pretty great. Lots of lo-fi avant-rock gems. It’s certainly not as experimental as Future Artists but anyone who really likes the first disc of Vain, Euridite …. really needs to track this down.

Unfortunately this, like Eusa Kills, and about half of The Dead C’s back catalogue, is out of print. Most of Birchville’s releases are sadly out of print as well. I would start a record label just to make sure that anyone who wants a copy of Our Love Will Destroy the Earth can get one. And this brings me to my second reason for posting. Can someone tell me why great, even important, records go out of print? Is it really so hard to keep something in print. Is it really so expensive for a record company to every now and then get some of these made. A case in point is my search for a copy of Killdozer’s For Ladies Only which doesn’t cost me more than 50 bucks. Touch and Go hasn’t bothered to keep any of their records in print. Hey I realise that Killdozer weren’t the most popular band out there but fuck it, they did do the best Neil Diamond cover ever.

Seriously how much does it cost to keep a record in print. I really want to know.

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Birchville Cat Motel – Our Love Will Destroy the World (Pseudoarcana) 2006

Posted in Birchville Cat Motel, Music, New Zealand Bands, noise on October 29, 2007 by noisenoisenoise

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There are only a few records in my collection that astonish me everytime I play them. Sonic Youth’s Sister is on the list, so are Pussy Galore’s Dial M for Motherfucker and Big Black’s Atomizer. The Dream Syndicate’s Days of Wine and Roses, Mogwai’s Young Team, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, The Cramps’ Smell of Female, PJ Harvey’s Dry and Sunno)))’s White 2 are also worthy. This list just got a little bigger after grappling with Birchville Cat Motel’s opus from 2006. I mean, seriously, holy shit.

I’ve said it before I really like this whole transcendence through noise thing, I really do, but few bands can make their noise rock this hard. I’ve written before that I find what Birchville Cat Motel does strangely beautiful. Well, as beautiful as sound can get whilst inducing seizures. On Our Love Can Destroy the World the noise is less beautiful yet somehow more satisfying. I think it’s a record that satisfies the secret rock pig within me. Here we have guitars – lots and lots of guitars. 55000 Flowers for the Hero is the defining track, sixteen minutes of the most majestic guitar based experimental noise you’re likely to hear. Guitars dominate, playing the same blissed out psychedelic, freak-out riffs for eternity. Feedback squalls underneath and the constant drone props it all up up. When this track starts I never want it to end. It’s followed by a short lilting clarinet meditation, Lay Thy Hatred Down, which repeats the same phrase over and over while a black swarm of flies can be heard in the distance. The next track Double Cascade Mini Fantasy is a relatively short track that highlights church organ being played backwards whilst ominous drones whisper underneath. Finally we have the title track a stunning experimental kraut-rock stonker which slowly evolves with some pretty evil sounds in its later half. Is that a student demonstration I hear under the strange, churning Spaceman 3 like effects? Fuck, these truly are the sounds of psychosis.

At the moment I can’t get enough of this record. They’re releasing something new in November. I for one can’t fucking wait.

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Birchville Cat Motel

Posted in Birchville Cat Motel, Music, New Zealand Bands, noise, The Dead C on September 30, 2007 by noisenoisenoise

This is from Chi Vampires. Can’t find anything from Birds yet. Isn’t it fucking great?

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Birchville Cat Motel – Birds Call Home Their Dead ( C Psi P) 2007

Posted in Birchville Cat Motel, Music, New Zealand Bands, noise, The Dead C, yellow swans on September 30, 2007 by noisenoisenoise

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New Zealand is producing some of the most important music right now. A case in point is this latest offering from Birchville Cat Motel aka Campbell Kneale. This is a wonderful example of just how beautiful noise can become. It’s trance like, ambient, droning electronic squall. It’s strangely psychedelic. Imagine Panda Bear if he skipped the tunes and melody and embraced his inner Yellow Swan. The title track is pure fucking noise pleasure. The pastoral sounds that I like so much on Chi Vampires are back again. Birds chirp and tweet as the electronics slowly fade. Its a long bugger too 26 and a half minutes. The second track is Kissing Dragon and comes in a spritely eight minutes. Again we revisit a previous theme – experimental church organ that descends into the gentlest electronic squall you’ll ever hear. The final track ( again over the 26 minute mark) is pure Birchville, trance-like droning noise that hypnotises. In the liner notes Dianna Thomson-Kneale is credited with electric sander. How come my DIY never sounds this great?

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