★Celebrate Psi Phenomenon
the silver chair
A stunning collection of Sunday morning sleep-in destroying, home-recorded gems from the younger staff members of the C/Psi/P empire . Features Caspar Kneale's legendary ‘Feather Duster' lathe cut 7" (recorded at the age of 4), Winter Kneale's hobbling, square-wheeled, dance-music (also the efforts of a 4 year old), and a mind-melting live guitar, casiotone, bowed everything, blowout featuring a decrepit 30 year old guest. Genius? Bonkers? Or just too much ice cream?
majestic header
Killer new disc from the extended Kneale clan, with Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel/Black Boned Angel et al) joined by his children for a heavy run-through of aleatoric punk strategy, enveloping hand-scrawled drones and Kosmiche brut. Somewhere between The Shaggs play The Velvets, The Scratch Orchestra, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Damaskus-era Hijokaidan and a pre-teen Theatre Of Eternal Non-Music. Excellent.
btwxt/bdvld
Three-way post-Velvets dream-weapon conceptions by a troupe of New Zealand’s heaviest thinkers: Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel/Black Boned Angel, James Kirk of Sandoz Lab Technicians and Kim Pieters of Flies Inside The Sun. Totally gripping late-night brain beams in a soup of hands-on fug. Recommended. (label press)
myriapod
There's nothing quite like a wig out in Dads shed after a delightful family meal listening to a nice Hijokaidan album. Am I bringing my kids up wrong? Perhaps I should have sent them to work at the coalmine when I had the chance? The latest 'beautiful family time' named after Caspars latest insect preoccupation. Over-amplified exoskeletons roar in fury as they are crushed under gigantic sneakers. Wild. (label press)
lora draws blood
Latest blast of abstract sounds from the murky and mysterious musical world of Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, this one from UK dronelord Culver, who tries his hand, according to the blurb on the website, at some atmospheric ambient 'metal', there's even an Abruptum namedrop which obviously sets the bar pretty dang high. It is true, Abruptum, among others, has definitely proven that mood and atmosphere can be just as heavy and grim as riffs and shrieks, although we're not so sure this is -quite- as ev…
I Will Soothe My Eye To Feast It With A Sight Of Beauty
After releases on Kraak and Imvated (or Bread and Animals, Dutch Beer, Cauliflower Dreams or whatever Lieven decides to call it) Ignatz put out this rand new release on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Dense clouds of chirping crickets and tangled birdsong are woven into thick sonic brambles, a swirling confusional knot of sound, a bit like Sunroof! occurring in nature, while underneath a strange melodic tapping drifts and a moaned vocal floats ominously. Pulsing bagpipe like guitars intertwine with ha…
Two4dancin
Now this was a bit of a surprise. Especially coming from Simon Wickham-Smith, although by now we should maybe expect the unexpected from W-S. One single seventy five minute track, an endlessly looped tripped out hip hop beat, with stuttery vocal samples in the background, chanting and tribal, but low enough in the mix that they just sounds like random warbling and rumbling. Had trouble getting our heads around this at first, but after a few minutes, it sort of grabs hold of you, with its strange…
Application Antartica download form
‘Application Antarctica...'s sister release, performing a function akin to an exclamation mark at the end of Stephen Clovers brilliance. The routine transfer of electrons from wire to amplifier (resulting in tiny pulses of air that can only be detected by your eardrums and the hairs on the back of your neck). Golly, it never seemed quite so important before. Further proof of my theory that states ‘if you leave a tap on for long enough, you can carve your own Grand Canyon''.- label press
Everything’s fifteen
When it comes to the psychic transportation of a live audience through mere vibrations of air molecules, nobody in the whole ‘New Zealand Freenoise Thing' comes within spitting distance of Sandoz Lab Technicians... and this beautiful live show (recorded in the cavernous dome of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery) comes with free tickets to ride that bus. Discovering the most delicate balance between being sophisticated musical shapeshifters and plonking primevil troglodytes, ‘Everything's Fifteen'…
On
Remember when punk was dangerous? Nah... me neither. But hey, I read Black Flags 'Get In The Van' and it sounded cool... and it sounded really, really dangerous. Enter On... a full throttle blur of utterly wasted heaviness clinging to a two-chord, droning, punk rock core. Hell hath no fury like this mess and the threat of serious physical harm hangs in the air like a half-landed drunken chick-punch. Two monsterously distorted basses, and a guitar tone like a broken windscreen mean the poor drumm…
Outer dark
Filthy, ragged, drone-damage from the mastermind behind the insanely credible Pseudoarcana label, and recently crowned third member of Black Boned Angel. Crackle and smoldering fuzz turn over and over on itself at ever more terrifying pace until everything within its gravitational grasp begins to smell of burning plastic. Frightening, shamanic, and dare-I-suggest BLUESY (think Fushitsusha not Gary Moore!) yet set within a down-on-the-farm, Antipodean, post-Xpressway context. The future of drone…
Hung
Hooray! Boy am I happy to be putting this cracker out. Recorded live, without the cumbersome weight of newfangled techniques such as 'overdubs' (gee-whiz!) which may seem a little commonplace for you hip-to-be-square cats until you realise that the good Mr Malcolm plays two guitars and percussion with his feet. His third guitar, the guitar he actually holds in his hands, has about half a million strings and a number of contact mics imbedded where the sun-don't-shine to amplify a host of springs,…
Birchville Cat Motel . Bruce Russell
1: Recorded live at Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. Overdubbed at C/Psi/P, Lower Hutt. 2, 3: Postal exchange recorded in Lyttleton and Lower Hutt. 4: Live collaboration recorded at Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. 5: Postal exchange recorded live in Christchurch and overdubbed in Lower Hutt. 6: Postal exchange recorded in Lyttleton and Lower Hutt, additional tracks recorded live in High Street, Christchurch.
30th december 2004
New York is pretty different from Lower Hutt. In a lot of ways. But that doesn't mean New York is BAD... its just 'different', y'know? I was down the Lower East Side recently with the guy from Sonic Youth. He was as cool as he looked in Rip It Up magazine! We tuned our guitars and bagpipes, the lights sunk in anticipation, and we buried the audience in a cloud of fairy-dust so thick you could eat it with chopsticks and people with shovels tried to dig their way out of it but it just got deeper …
Three sparkling echoes
Doomy, magisterial drone works, xylophone tones dragged behind trucks ploughing straight through mountains of mud and some classically wasted drum/horizontal blades nod-out ritual ala Outside The Dream Syndicate from this inspired hook-up that pairs Campbell Kneale's orchestra with Anla Courtis of Reynols.
Chi vampires
Unleash the bats! Taking yet another quantum-physics-defying leap towards the pulsing, stereophonic ‘om', Birchville Cat Motel reaches out for the moon once more from his precarious ladder of pins. Aided by a reflection-destroying sense of... er... 'one-note melody', the level of spiritual catharsis contained within these zeros and ones out-bleeds even the most core-shattering moments of ‘Beautiful Speck Triumph'. Shadowy powers are hereby summoned... blackening forces creep... and ‘Chi Vampires…
Butta daze
Revolving feverishly around their own dark-matter, escaping Armpits unbelievable gravitational pull borders on the mathematically-impossible. Utterly impenetrable 'songs' coupled to unfathomable blankness (sometimes I swear they've packed up and gone home!), makes 'Butta Daze' one of the most fearfully disorienting, supremely damaged, and seriously beautiful recordings ever allowed out into daylight. Imagine your frontal lobe being sandwiched between two pink mattresses, and then subjected to t…
Road is open life
Oh yippee... another demo to listen to. I have to confess that listening to music can be a chore sometimes. After a hard evening on the 8-track all I can usually bare to put in my ears is the easy-listening pleasures of Judas Priests greatest hits. However, having witnessed these two weave such a serpentine spell under Jandeks live morose wanderings, would it be wrong to expect a little magic from these two?JesusMarieJoseph! What was supposed to be a quick listen as I tidied up the shed turned i…