[This review was first published in Badaboom Gramophone #3 and appears here with permission.]
Attempting to establish some form of linearity with New Zealand musicians is always a task since most of them are known more for their collaborations rather than for a specific group. That is certainly true of two central figures in the country’s free noise scene: bassist, singer and artist Kim Pieters and drummer Peter Stapleton.
Formerly in Dadamah with guitarist Roy Montgomery, Pieters and Stapleton drafted guitarists Danny Butt and Brian Crook and established Flies Inside the Sun, pushing their improvisational urges even further. An Audience of Others (Including Herself) emphasizes long, droning passages of instrumental hum and feedback. Pieters’ vocals are a low monotone, slinking between the noises with ominous intensity. But Butt’s screeching bowed guitar on “Icarus” is a stark contrast to Stapleton’s intermittent rumbles. The featured track is the 15-and-a-half-minute “Sleepwalk,” which has a repeatedly strummed chord and snare hits underneath muted guitar freakouts and what seems like air rapidly escaping through a hole — before falling to complete silence, then rebuilding with vocals over a semblance of fractured melody.
Flies Inside the Sun, recorded over a period of two years, shows a little more aggression. On “Devil,” Stapleton’s scattershot drum rolls, stick-clicks and rim hits simulate the beating of insect wings. “Living in the Real World” uses scratching on nylon guitar strings to create a uniquely skittish and unsettling atmosphere. With its innovative uses of rock instruments for freeform play, this album may be Pieters and Stapleton’s most innovative work.
Last Glass was done with Bruce Russell of the Dead C, and is adorned with Pieter’s organic ink drawings. It goes to noisier lengths than the duo has in the past, and Russell’s knack for playing against his guitar perfectly fits in with their style of improvisation. “Valerian” takes a particularly mordant turn, with thrashing fuzzed-out guitar at the center of the feedback noise layers.
Doramaar is an all-female trio of Pieters (who also does some drumming), Adria Morgan on drums and guitar and Sara Stephenson on guitar. Copula, with vocals and synthesizer (and a plethora of unhelpful diacritical marks), has such great titles as “Socrates Was Dreaming, and Many Centuries Later Hegel Is Dreaming Too,” (great interplay between droning synth and Pieters’ mumbling) and “We May Say ‘That’s Not It and Still That’s Not It'” (a live recording, with tape manipulation and a bass screech). Terra Incognita is a New Zealand freeform fan’s dream, with two side-long tracks which drop to minimal hums and build to shattering highs. On “Rose Dore Alizarin,” guitars grind away like they were trying out for a Branca symphony, while the percussion twists the composition in cubist dimensions.
Rain, which is Flies Inside the Sun minus Brian Crook, takes a well-worked New Zealand free music thang to the next level of wholesome goodness. Rain moves in the same expanse of open pasture as Flies and still dishes up a heaping dose of that all-alone-in-the-afternoon-with-nothing-to-do feeling, this time with an improved dynamic range; the ebb/flow of volume/tension is used with taste and to good effect. Pieters, Stapleton and Butt have hewn out niches and alcoves for each burbling, pounding, howling, skittering thing, thus producing records with a greater sense of texture and dimension.
Sediment, like Flies Inside the Sun, consists of short segments that build into anxious crescendos which then trail off into the ether. This album, though, boasts a larger vocabulary of sounds and textures. An analog synth (?) ejaculates alien sounds over the familiar (great) Stapleton drum scatter, guitars hemorrhage all over the place and bass blub-blubs underwater in the bathtub. “Coma” includes Pieters vocal action in minimalist fragments mixed down deep (it’s a damn, damn shame that her voice occurs so infrequently on these discs). “Radii” has a guitar being treated to a real thrashing while Peter gives color commentary on the drums. Nice track, that. All and all a super treat.
Sycamore has bits of TV (“The Silence of Cars”), music box, synth bleeps/blorps (“Turqouise”), something that sounds like a banjo, intermittent connections and the underwater bass guitar again (on “Stucco”), tom-tom pounder aggression and more. The album has the uncanny effect, at times, of making you feel as if you’re in a stranger’s house without them knowing it. They’re in the den watching telly or reading or something and you’re rummaging through their strange-smelling fridge trying to dare yourself into taking a soda. The first track, “Rope of Sand,” provides the rare treat of Pieters’ bitter treacle voice which always seems to float around like the thick, blue smoke of a good cigarette. By far the better of the two discs, Sycamore is a rare chance to eavesdrop on a conversation between musicians who really understand one another and shows that Rain has secured its roots in New Zealand’s fertile free music soil.
Stapleton also plays in Terminals and Scorched Earth Policy.