[photos: Edie Stevens]
Take a trip back to the 1982 summer season and come parasailing through sun-stoned peach skies and glimmering turquoise waters for this special one-off Christchurch show by Matt Mondanile’s DUCKTAILS. 2009 has been a momentous year for this New Jersey native, who has released two acclaimed LPs on label du jour, Not Not Fun and boutique Olde English Spelling Bee, and a veritable mass of other material under various aliases such as The Parasails and Predator Vision, his blog-darling band Real Estate, and the continental offworlder unit, Africa Germany Germany Mexico Turkey Australia. There’s a halcyon, suburban warmth evident in Mondandile's recordings - sandbox memories and backyard feelings materialize like sun-flared and colour-saturated photographs from his crackly cassette reels. At the same time, his jams are infinitely exploratory, particularly on his latest solo LP, Landscapes, where exotic samples, swirling synthesizers and golden guitar lines float unhinged through pastel atmospheres and permeable timelines via magic carpet, creating some intensely visual evocations through sound. Mondanile skillfully weaves his love of classic AM pop and half-remembered '80s cultural totems through layers of blissful sound waves and primitive tropical riddims. The result: hypnotic, inviting, strangely familiar and totally peaced-out. Recently named by The Wire magazine alongside Ariel Pink and James Ferraro as a key figure in the hypnagogic post-noise US underground, Mondanile has also garnered glowing reviews from The Village Voice and Pitchfork Media following months of love across the blogosphere. Stay chill.
Ducktails label-companion, erstwhile London resident and New Zealand native, PETER WRIGHT has a myriad of virtuous releases and live performances to his renowned credit, sharing rosters and live bills with the likes of Raccoo-oo-oon, Pocahaunted, Yellow Swans, Hush Arbors, Uton, Best Coast, Astral Social Club, MV & EE, Starving Weirdos and Ashtray Navigations. Like Mondanile, Wright is preoccupied with the oneiric dimensions of musical creation - ‘sounds that induce daydreaming’ as he put it in a recent Foxy Digitalis interview - but his palette is a deeper abstraction of the quotidian daze din, what The Wire magazine’s Jon Dale has described as an ‘evocation of personally and psychically loaded places [that] could well act as a sequel to [Roy] Montgomery’s defining opus’.
NOT EVEN OWLS is the fabulously christened union of Dunedin’s Edie Stevens and Toki Wilson, both bastions of the city’s experimental noise and rock un-scene, and residents of one of the country’s most vivacious artistic spaces, None Gallery. Their 2008 live release from Wellington’s Spacething – where they were joined by Rory Storm’s Nick Wotton - sounds like it was recorded straight to endangered flora, crumpled up in the bottomless pockets of time-sliding botanical smugglers and narrowcasted to the listener’s skull through the knotted gusts of recycled 90’s microcassettecetera. Both Stevens and Wilson are members of the community hall improvisational band, Piano Queen Rainbow Star Telephone (PQRST), who have some recent psalms out on Belgian imprint, Fictitious Sighs, while the nightmare-dub of Wilson’s solo endeavour as Bullied at School and contributions to crag-beat Varèse-disco gang, Dirtroom have been published on mind-brother Alex Mackinnon’s Radio Jaundice. Not Even Owls’ drums and guitar inferno is at once dark and path-revealing, desolate and embracing.
ADAM WILLETTS & LA LAKERS’ iridescent mantra pop and mangled jangle jug-stomp has affinities with the maximal glam of Wuthering Heights and Suzanne Vega but travels just as efficiently as the endless bummer crescendos of Frankie Teardrop, crematory funk and processional requiem jazz of Faust IV, Cluster and Harmonia, picture book kismet trance of Kemialliset Ystävät, and arced retro eternity gospel of Ash Ra Temple’s Schwingungen. Willetts’ swum modular-synth currents layer up and lay up around Lakers’ sung assists, chipmunk hologram grot and birds-eye limb-flay spirit whir, the former’s blipped cloudbusting freaker licks lifting the nanotechnological standards of the latter’s straight-edge slacker crack to the xeroxed and imaginary max.
