A Handful of Dust

Originally released on cassette by Corpus Hermeticum in 1994. All sounds by Alastair Galbraith and Bruce Russell. "New Zealand is on summer holidays all through the month of January. For some reason I had the house to myself, the wife and kids were elsewhere. Alastair Galbraith brought over some instruments and we plugged in a cassette recorder. We spent the sunny afternoon setting up combinations of instruments and seeing what happened. We had recorded the Concord LP the year before and done two gigs at the Empire tavern that became The Philosophick Mercury. The idea of A Handful of Dust was taking shape through experimental practice. Some of it worked better than other bits, but it all made sense as a collage of sound, pointing in the direction of freedom. Our collective practice was making leaps and bounds; and starting to get heard abroad. In Australia the young Jon Dale was listening: 'The Eightness Of Adam Qadmon was one of the first releases I heard from A Handful of Dust… I've always been drawn to this cassette for its utterly unique, acroamatic sensibility - it seems less interested in third-eye-rupturing... and more about a late night session, bleeding into early morning, under the influence of heady wisdom and headier substances... What we had here was very much the real deal, collective and solo eviscerations from the heart of sound itself. I love it, unconditionally.' Jon got the time of day wrong, but not much else. Going back to this session recently, I became aware of the strange, ungainly and unrepeatable shapes our practice assumed during these first forays into total free improvisation. Re-mastered with help from Lasse Marhaug, at the request of some visionary Finns; here Adam Qadmon, the ur-Golem, comes again. Walking from the graveyard of the past, blinking in the autumn sun, and shaking twenty-five years of clay from his coat." - Bruce Russell