Solo guitar/electronics record from Michael Morley of The Dead C, released by a New Zealand gallery and originally intended as a soundtrack piece. Moves from the sound of blood pulsing in your ears through classic saw-tooth Dead C riffing and Industrial machine noise. Another good one.

More evacuated noise tectonics from the dream-team hook-up of US noise wunderkind John Wiese and NZ sound-thinker and Dead C member Bruce Russell. Limited to 300 copies.

Limited edition LP in a run of only 200 copies from New Zealand’s greatest axe-strangler, Bruce Russell of The Dead C. The playing here is more overtly euphoric than many of Bruce’s earlier sides, his grip tight around the neck, tearing clusters of squeal from conveyor belts of fuzz. The opening duo with Australian noise/guitarist Marco Fusinato is fairly epic but it’s the all solo “West Space One” that best documents Russell at his most Hendrix/amp-destroying. Playing with a machine gun style that comes over like Band Of Gypsies jamming the outro to “Bury”, it’s hard not to anticipate Robbie Yeats staggering in and pushing the whole thing over the cliff. Russell’s solo sides often have a whole bunch of fascinating conceptual/hermetic weight to them but Antikythera Mechanism succeeds because of its status as ‘simply’ a solo guitar record and in its own way it feels as definitive as Donald Miller’s A Little Treatise On Morals, Jandek’s Interstellar Discussion or Keiji Haino’s Affection. Bruce does a lot of actual playing here – as opposed to just letting the guitar sing - and on the third side-long track his guitar sounds closest to Nicholas from Love Cry Want’s guitar synthesizer’, albeit with the dials set to “Iron Man”. But in the end it all boils down to this: Bruce Russell was in The Dead C and you weren’t. That’s why he can pull off fringed leather jackets when you would just look like a dope. And that’s why in his hands an all-improvised guitar album sounds like the goddamn keys to the kingdom. So listen up. Pressed on ultra thick white vinyl.  Highly recommended.

2004 album from The Dead C that works to consolidate the kinda brut rock song destruction of ‘classic’ Trapdoor era with the kinda extended gunned-up machine noise of Tusk. Great, wasted performance by Morley, while Russell and Yeats stagger through the wreckage. Every release is, of course, mandatory.

Deluxe gatefold sleeve reissue of this all-time classic of deformed rock song and avant guitar downs from Michael Morley of The Dead C: originally issued in 1994 by Table Of The Elements/Precious Metal, this new edition re-masters the original while adding five bonus tracks from the same time period and re-jigging the running order for maximal wipe-out. The Dew Line represents the apex of Morley’s song-writing style, the nod-out rhythms, the smudged, narcoleptic vocals, guitars that sound like they are being dragged behind slow-moving monster trucks, solos that barely escape the omnivorous gravity of fuzz and low grade tape hiss... chords dissolve into each other, leading to endless euphoric codas... like the best noise music – although this is far from ‘noise’ – Gate seem to focus in and amplify specific aspects of rock, here the endless ride into the sun jam, the locked run-out groove, implosions of bombastic two chord staggers, sometimes illuminated with martial drums, sometimes hovering unaccompanied above an abyss of static tone... a track like “Have Not” pushes deep into zones of endless six-string oblivion with alla the black hole weight of Kousokuya or Skullflower, ending on the sound of tortured metal extended to the point of levitation. If your favourite Dead C ‘moments’ are based around tracks like “Helen Said This”, “Sky”, “Outside” et al then think of this as their ultimate monomaniacal extension. Throw in a bunch of heavy synth drones and electronically-mangled navigations of illogic riff damage and you have a record that effectively re-wires your brain while re-thinking the goddamn canon. The Dew Line pretty much ruins you for rock music – there’s little that comes close. A landmark reissue and the rock record of this or any goddamn year. Edition of 500 copies, highest possible recommendation!

Massive public service reissue of this all-time classic NZ underground side from Brian Crook of Scorched Earth Policy/Flies Inside The Sun/The Max Block/Renderers et al and featuring Robbie Yeats of The Dead C and Peter Stapleton of Pin Group/Terminals/Dadamah et al on drums: originally released on Metonymic in 2000, Bathysphere is a masterpiece of apocalyptic late-night string-think and downer psych atmospherics that looks forward to the blasted terrain explored by the Renderers. Crook sings in a desperate, frail style while he works spindly electric guitar shapes that touch on the torrents of the Velvets circa “Black Angel’s Death Song” and doomy slide work that would animate the ghost of Blind Willie. Fans of Alastair Galbraith and This Kind Of Punishment will respond to the up-close vocal style and the slowly expiring arrangements and Crook’s song writing is at an absolute peak here, matching the best of Jim Shepard with a lonely vague ‘country’ edge that at points will have you reaching for US Saucer’s My Company Is Misery in an attempt to figure out some kind of context. For the most part the songs are unsupported by drums and allowed to ebb and flow according to Crook’s pulse but when the drummers do step in – Yeats and Stapleton – the effect is electrifying. “Living Death” is one of the all-time great psych rockers, rendered in classic Xpressway-scale fidelity while Crook mangles psychedelic leads and Yeats rocks the bandstand, coming over like The Dead C plays Human Instinct. The staggering “Apollo 13” features some of Crook’s most scorched and deformed noise guitar, coming over like The Blue Humans with Peter Stapleton taking the place of Beaver Harris, levitating flat-lined industrial structures straight into the air. File next to Morse, Picking Through The Wreckage With A Stick, Trapdoor Fucking Exit and A Beard Of Bees as a peerless example of massively out song-writing and home-burned rock avant gardisms. Hand-numbered edition of 400 copies with screened sleeves, already sold out at source, very highly recommended!

Fantastic all-electric three way that sees Bruce Russell of The Dead C (on analog electronics) joined by Richard Francis on modular synth and computer and Jason Kahn on analog synth, radio and mixing board: recorded live on January 28^th 2011 at Dunedin Public Art Gallery in New Zealand, this is a single 38 minute improvisation that feels environmental in scale but with a heady synthesized aspect that makes for a ghostly metal machine music. Three distinct voices make for a bafflingly beautiful combination, with odd almost-melodies that feel like the F/X from a 1960s Supermarionation production soundtracked by Joe Meek going up against the kind of massive UFO touchdown aspect of MEV or CCCC and some supremely invasive alarm tones that have all the flesh-penetrating third ear aspect of Bernhard Gunter or Maryanne Amacher. Whenever Bruce is involved there’s always a great non-technical garage band approach to wrassling electricity into caveman submissions and at points this feels like the scientific power trio of your dreams. A great set, highly recommended. 

Massive two-header that presents unreleased archival recordings from legendary NZ underground group The Dead C paired with new tracks from the trio of guitarists Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs Of Admittance) and drummer Chris Corsano: the Dead C side is a particular revelation, with the discovery of previously unreleased tracks that were under consideration for inclusion on their masterful 1992 album for Flying Nun, Eusa Kills. On the flip Rangda make with some dazzling power trio moves, re-thinking rock dynamics with drooling polyrhythms and overdosed modal guitar histrionics that take off on Sonny Sharrock circa Monkey-Pockie-Boo. 

Limited warehouse find of one of the secret masterpieces of The Dead C, privately issued by the group in 2002: this is an incredible side and one that is very hard to find. Some of their most minimalist tracks here, with long sections of what sounds like an input jack being manhandled give way to some of their most crashingly beautiful rock ‘songs’, with drummer Robbie Yeats on explosive style and Morley bringing the kind of drugged instant song writing style of the earlier records to some kind of savage peak. Just phenomenal, a record that sounds like absolutely nothing else, very highly recommended but very limited supply!

Warehouse find of a buncha copies of this hard to find double CD, privately pressed by NZ avant rock gods The Dead C in 2000: recorded over the space of four years this is one of their most savagely monomaniacal albums, with endless dunting single chord breakdowns and hovering amplifier drones enlivened by weirdo loops and stuttering samples, nowhere more so than on “Tuba Is Funny” where they mangle a phrase lifted from a Maher Shalal Hash Baz track to the point of nod-out excess. Hand-packaged in fold-around art paper sleeves. Highly recommended. 

Thrilling document of the more radically deconstructive side of the Butte County Free Music Society (whose Induced Musical Spasticity box set is a mandatory purchase), with a bunch of sound actions drawn from 1984-1986. Brent Lewis Ensemble come across like a darker, more occult Glands Of External Secretion, combining the goof-off Scientific American appeal of the early LAFMS broadcasts with outer space shortwave and electro-acoustic group actions that would conjure the ghosts of Taj Mahal Travellers and The Skaters. Another fantastic trawl through an alternate 1980s: “As part of the 25th anniversary of the Butte County Free Music Society, "Three Christs Of Ypsilanti" follows "Induced Musical Spasticity" 4xLP (BUFMS, 2009) and roughly coincides with "The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble’s At the North Pole, Easter Day, 1982" (upcoming on What The...?) and, if the master tapes rescue succeeds, the soundtrack to "Esther’s Brother Is Missing by Maria Estevez". Recording and performing primarily in the mid- to late 1980s, with sporadic efforts in the early 1990s, this barely organized enclave based in rural Northern California ingests and disgorges outsider free music à la Smegma and other bent LAFMS trippers, the UK’s A Band, 5 Starcle Men, and the sort of visionaries currently promoted by labels such as Chocolate Monk, Destijl, and Ultra Eczema. Members of the Brent Lewis Ensemble later migrated to Vomit Launch, Glands of External Secretion, The Idiot, Needles, Serious Prblmz, and Bananafish magazine. Each side of "Three Christs Of Ypsilanti" is dominated by tracks whose lengths meander into double digits. On Side A, “Take It Out and Kill It” is a murky glance at mortification via caninicide, with its ancillary fleas, cockroaches, and especially worms. This is the only large group recording on the album, and as such whirls around in conflicting directions in a manner that one backwater critic long ago described as “schizophrenic muzak.” A completely different version of this track was previously released on the Maggie Is a Dot cassette in 1984. On Side B, “Dark Surprise,” a 1986 recording from the crossroads of DIY autism and darkened psychedelia, is previously unreleased (the first playback of the master tape didn’t happen until 2008). In contrast to the group’s usual embrace of any and all kitchen sinks at hand, the recording was made solely with electric guitars, voice, and prerecorded audio frottage. Book-ending both sides are shorter tracks (average length: two minutes); these four excerpts from an after-hours, no-audience guerilla action were recorded in a multistory, split-level university student union, using hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects. All were previously released on the "Mary Jane" cassette in 1983. '[As] secretive as a posse’ve Masons bidding in a goat auction … a weird, befuddlin storm comin’ outta the night … tryin’ to charm you into the muddy arms of the undertow' — Roland Woodbe, Siltblog

Edition of 75 ‘tour’ CD-R, released to coincide with the Ensemble’s appearance at the 2011 Colour Out Of Space festival in Brighton, England. This is a fantastic big-band performance recorded in 1987 that feels less elusive and more coherently structured than some of the group’s work. While there is plenty of surreal tape loopage and infomercial chatter it’s bracketed by some fantastically ‘out’ jams that have a lucid, Venusian quality. Some of the guitar work sounds like drunken loops of Loren Connors while at their most ‘explosive’ the group succeed in mainlining Faust’s classic “Krautrock” via what sounds like a warehouse full of devotees and almost Stare Case-style bass jams. A killer side from Brent Lewis, cutting their communal improvisatory style with inspired tape-work and a classic/mysterious, low-level avant rock edge. Comes in the usual classy packaging with art inserts etc. 

Fantastic ultra-crude demolition of a buncha DIY/avant strategies from this re-modelled version of the Ensemble featuring Lucian Tielens on guitar, keyboard and kazoo, Silvia Kastel (Control Unit) on vocals and ‘Gnarlos’ on tapes and voice. A side features a distressed heavy/laminal demolition of two version of Manchester DIY gods God’s Gift’s “People” with Kastel on oracular hypno vox while the flip features a deranged field noise assault on ONO’s “O Jackie O” that sounds like the Fugs slum goddess jug band and a buncha tape noise that makes The Faust Tapes sound like music for hippies. Edition of only 100 copies!

Great, trans-continental collaboration between Euro avantists and Control Unit tag-team Silvia Kastel and Ninni Morgia and legendary musical savants Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, here represented by Gnarols and Lucian Tielens: recorded ‘face-to-face’ in April 2012, this is a fairly wild ride, with Morgia’s electric guitar reinvented as a particularly brutal sonic reducer that works more like a ‘simple’ channel for electricity than anything tonal. Kastel’s electronics have alla the ticker-tape/nightmare appeal of Tolerance w/a heady hobbyist vibe that has an cracked LAFMS telethon feel. Gnarlos and Tielens bring guitar, voice, objects and tapes to the mix and they combine a kind Smegma-style usurpation of traditional small instruments ‘mores’ with a fully zonked Saturn records vibe, you know those weird Sun Ra fade-outs where all that’s left is the sound of some kind of strange string that sounds like a radiator being bowed in a vacuum? Well, there’s plenty of that here, giving it the feel of a Music Improvisation Company in space or a toy-town Arkestra calling planet earth. More claustrophobic and brain-searingly electronic than the mass Lewiis actions but with a nagging/eerie late night appeal that will score points with followers of Yeast Culture, Small Cruel Party et al. And don’t try to maintain that ain’t you.