The crumbling lattice rock and cherubic choral goo of Stefan Neville’s Pumice was last witnessed here alongside US’ Grouper and has more recently been performed over in the States itself, meanwhile being committed to record on both Soft Abuse (Wooden Wand, The Futurians, Hala Strana, The Skygreen Leopards) and Dirty Knobby (Astral Social Club, Peter Wright, Our Love Will Destroy the World). It’s difficult to elude the exoticised imagery of lo-fi loner/zoner/stoner frequently superimposed over Neville’s entire practice, but it’s at least hinged between detonation and dilapidation, two bi-polar tendencies in rock and roll. As Neville himself suggests, ‘Perseverance’ is central to the act’s modus operandi: "The instruments are wearing out, the guitar gets harder and harder to tune, the tape loops get sicker and the batteries get flatter", but it’s this loaded fragility and micro-catastrophic eventfulness that makes it so magnetically compelling. Its self-destructive and bee-line Thanatos is its very vivacious and celebratory impulse, and it’s this virtuosic recklessness that keeps us reaching out to the passing sphinx punk briefly beheld within the music.
VOLT is the fried electromotive psych and friable hack-fi out-of-it-ness of Dunedin’s Peter Gorman, Justin Taulu and Richard Scowen. Gorman and Scowen’s polymathic utilization of crosswired synthware, rerouted gadgetry and homespun anti-specialized miscellany - including the Fustigator and the Thunder Stick, plus the recently debuted 12-oscillator hat - is as reprogrammed and hornet-like as the interstitial swat and punch of Taulu’s #8 Taiko incantations.
RICHARD SCOWEN’s solo project employs a similarly sprawling mandala of devices, its dusty undulations and Xpressway-like scrub-chimes tolled and droned as a gauzy euphony that invokes the palimpsest minimalism of Frippertronics, the thrummed and thawed vignettes of Alistair Galbraith, the post-freakisms of Starving Weirdos and the Neu-Kosmische of acts like Emeralds, Growing and Sunroof! However, as the flawlessly titled ‘Southern Sparkle Morning Gothic’ from his early-2009 self-release as The Coloured Crystals Have Tone suggests, Scowen’s in a pretty remote and unmapped, but totally amazing place.
