HSP

SCHAEFFER LEMALU - CRUSHING ERROR UNDER THE HEEL OF MY MIND. 4 - 19 February 2011

2011-02-07T01:59:00.000-08:00

ANLA COURTIS, BRUCE RUSSELL, HI-ASOBI. 5 February 2011

2011-01-31T01:57:00.000-08:00

Anla Courtis’ restless safari across a ton of musical borderlands has seen his founding of the legendary and super prolific Argentinean rock unit, Reynols, and collaborations with a constellation of sonic magi, including Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Damo Suzuki (Can), Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple), Yoshimi (Boredoms), Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), Glenn Donaldson (Jewelled Antler, Thuja), John Oswald, The Skaters, Christina Carter (Charalambides), Astro (C.C.C.C.), Michael Snow, Pauline Oliveros, The Nihilist Spasm Band, and Yoshida Tatsuya (Ruins). His solo work ranges from extreme, bricolage minimalism through hypnotic guitar blues, to obliterated techno, the chamber skronk of "Unstringed Guitar & Cymbals", and the processed failure punk of “Broken Walkman Research”.

Bruce Russell is an artist, composer and writer based in Christchurch, and is the founder of seminal labels, Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum. His work has appeared on a panoply of labels, including Smalltown Supersound, Ecstatic Yod, Spirit of Orr, Siltbreeze and Helicopter. His bands, The Dead C and A Handful of Dust have appeared on an equally formidable array of imprints. Russell has recorded with the likes of AMM’s Eddie Prevost, Mattin, John Wiese, RLW, Tetuzi Akiyama and Birchville Cat Motel, and has performed alongside a similar host of like minded, but diverse artists.

Hi-Asobi’s Peter Wright, Antony Milton and David Khan invent a flecked din of sparring drone guitar, ET electronics, malware keyboard bondage and dialled-in choral objection, before departing to play the fabled Lines of Flight festival in Dunedin.

JASON KAHN, RICHARD FRANCIS, ANTONY MILTON. Saturday 29 January 2011

2011-01-25T16:07:00.001-08:00

Jason Kahn is a Zürich-based artist from New York, who utilizes electronics, percussion and feedback to scope out commotions of crystalline and carbonated sound. His work has been described as “thrilling, disorienting, and quite startlingly gorgeous” (Dusted), and “discreet, delicate, and rewarding” (Tiny Mixtapes), and he has performed and recorded alongside an intercontinental panoply of musicians, including Arnold Dreyblatt, Christian Marclay, Kevin Drumm, Z'ev, Sainkho Namtchylak, Jason Lescalleet and Otomo Yoshihide, while appearing in solo and group exhibitions at galleries in Delhi, South Korea, Switzerland, USA, Belgium, France, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Australia.

Auckland artist, Richard Francis’ zoned tone generations range from amoebic electronic agitation to ballistic psych abstraction and have appeared on record labels such as Korm Plastics, Digitalis, Students of Decay, Room40, American Tapes, Last Visible Dog, and his own CMR and 20City, alongside co-luminaries like Hair Police, Wolf Eyes, Tarantel, Hush Arbors, James Blackshaw, Volcano the Bear, Tom Carter and Pocahaunted.

Antony Milton’s countless excursions into the dominion of eldritch folk and pop have included the curation of the PseudoArcana label (CJA, Birchville Cat Motel, The Skaters, Edward Ruchalski), a myriad of collaborative appearances in groups such as Claypipe, Black Boned Angel, The Stumps, Sunken and MRTYU!, and work for labels like Last Visible Dog, Music Fellowship, Tipped Bowler, Deserted Village, Black Petal, Humbug, Haamumaa, Root Don Lonie and Jeweled Antler.

KUTOMO (FIN), WITCHUALS. 28 January 2011

2011-01-18T16:54:00.000-08:00

Kutomo’s Veli-Matti Ikavalko is a Brisbane-based artist from Finland, whose collaborative co-conspirators include the likes of Larkin Grimm (Young God Records, ex-Dirty Projectors), Keijo and the Free Players, and Jani Hirvonen (Uton, Hevoset). His work as Kutomo melts between ceremonial cabin floor folk and medieval-like keyboard reflection, and invokes the psychic liturgical serenity of Hildegard of Bingen via the animist counterpoint of Meredith Monk. His work has appeared on Bedroom Suck (Blank Realm, Kitchen's Floor), Dala Horse (Richard Moult) and Jozik (Hobo Cubes, Bjerga/Iversen).

Witchuals: Devotion doesn’t set with the sun.

YEK KOO, LA LAKERS, PURPLE PILGRIMS. 23 January 2011

2011-01-07T20:26:00.001-08:00

Yek Koo's chanson mirages and supernatural lap-steel exaltation is the musical invention of Metal Rouge’s Helga Fassonaki, whose siren conduct has been compared to the work of artists such as Christina Carter, Heather-Leigh Murrary and Fursaxa. As Stunned Records writes, Fassonaki's 'lone voice etches straight to dictaphone the vibrations which have been petrified far too long in mere stone & silicone. Identity awoken in a night of raw fidelity, this oracle’s expression inhabits trance tones and punk-chant poesis'. Her music has appeared on labels next to Steven R. Smith, Sun Araw, CJA, Hush Arbors and Charalambides’ Tom Carter.

Purple Pilgrims is the duo of Clementine and Valentine Nixon. Their ethereal choral summons and tolling guitar noir unfolds across a moony dwelling of sound, transmitting the sisters’ melancholic folk songs.

LA Lakers: Can You Stand the Rain

METAL ROUGE, ANTONY MILTON, ADAM WILLETTS. 22 January 2011

2011-01-01T03:53:00.001-08:00

Andrew Scott and Helga Fassonaki’s Metal Rouge channels what the couple call the ‘forward motion of ecstatic jazz and drugged stasis of NYC loft minimalism circa ’66’, invoking their magical tumult and doomy elation through a vivid moiré of uplifting guitar confusion and requiem-like, choral unease. Based in LA since 2006, they have recorded albums for Digitalis, Stunned, Not Not Fun and their own newborn Emerald Cocoon. They have also toured the US extensively, playing at Root Strata’s renowned On Land festival alongside the likes of Grouper, Oneohtrix Point Never, Charalambides and Daniel Higgs; and Not Not Fun’s Neon Commune, next to Pocahaunted, Pukers, Robedoor and Foot Village.

Antony Milton’s countless excursions into the dominion of eldritch folk and pop have included the curation of the PseudoArcana label (CJA, Birchville Cat Motel, The Skaters, Edward Ruchalski), a myriad of collaborative appearances in groups such as Claypipe, Black Boned Angel, The Stumps, Sunken and MRTYU!, and work for labels like Last Visible Dog, Music Fellowship, Tipped Bowler, Deserted Village, Black Petal, Humbug, Haamumaa, Root Don Lonie and Jeweled Antler.

Adam Willetts is a musician from Christchurch, whose synthesizer zones slip from babbled reverie to staccato rapture. He has performed and recorded in New Zealand and internationally, alongside musicians such as John Wiese, Tomutonttu, High Places and Dan Deacon.

ORCHESTRA OF SPHERES, REUBEN DERRICK & IRD. 14 January 2011

2010-12-21T20:22:00.000-08:00

Wellington's Orchestra of Spheres’ limitless funk and cosmic highlife explorations are inspired by what they call 'the hypnotic beats of Kuduro, repetitive minimalist Bornean sape music, free jazz and improvised music, and the celestial chimes of gamelan’, but the group stake out their own territory with their prismatic minimalism, soukous-like dizziness and eminent boogie.

A graduate of Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music, Reuben Derrick has appeared in the 20+ member ensemble, Splinter Orchestra, alongside leading Australian experimentalists, Jon Rose, Martin Ng, Jim Denley, Nylstoch, xNoBBQx’s Matt Earle and Robbie Avenaim, at NSW’s The Now Now Festival, with Lucas Abela, Sean Baxter and The UNAUSTRALIANS, while also playing with Greg Malcolm in the trio, The Crust. He is joined by percussionist and electronics witch, Rory Dalley.

FABULOUS DIAMONDS. NZ TOUR. 11 - 18 December, 2010

2010-11-24T23:25:00.000-08:00

HSP is pleased to present the NZ tour of processional dub and crypt punk diviners, FABULOUS DIAMONDS from Melbourne, Australia.

Following their US excursion alongside Pigeons and Wet Hair, and their sophomore LP on Siltbreeze (Times New Viking, Sic Alps, US Girls), the duo’s heavenly garage anthems, liminal haunt funk, and transfixing, psychedelic mantras are poised to captivate audiences around the country in mid-December.

Likened to a lysergic union of Lee Perry, Terry Riley, Suicide, Silver Apples and Young Marble Giants, what Pitchfork calls Fabulous Diamonds’ ‘part pagan sleepover incantation’ and ‘lush and trippy’ minimalism is a UFO potion of radiant synth arpeggia, lock-groove futurist-Baroque riffage, celestial chant and post-disco percussive clatter that has a disquieting, modal beauty and entrancing, cosmic unease. This is the duo’s first NZ visit. Presales available from undertheradar.co.nz

Tour Dates:

Auckland Friday 10 December, Wine Cellar with Sam Hamilton and The Gladeyes.

Wellington Saturday 11 December, Happy with Diana Rozz and Orchestra of Spheres.

Christchurch Saturday 18 December, HSP with Witchuals and Luxury.

FREE CHOICE DUO, LA LAKERS, GOD DESTROYER. 17 December 2010

2010-11-24T05:39:00.000-08:00

Free Choice is the electronic synthesizer duo of Fabulous Diamonds' Jarrod Zlatic and artist, Jessica McElhinney. Their music is stationed in gooey passages of rococo drone, bell-effect elevation, and hypnotic keyboard luster. It’s educated in the minimalist exaltation and hyaline almost-disco of Terry Riley but splits for its own elatedly alien haunt.

LA Lakers: Reenactment of the Myoclonus Lagoon Battle Salsa in the Village of the Apparition Gala Xenogloss.

God Destroyer is the ambient music project of James Sullivan and Alex Donnithorne.

MONOPOLY CHILD STAR SEARCHERS & DOLPHINS INTO THE FUTURE. COAST TO COAST TOUR. 2 - 18 December, 2010

2010-11-23T23:20:00.000-08:00

HSP is pleased to present the Oceanic voyage and tour diary of US and Belgium travelers, MONOPOLY CHILD STAR SEARCHERS and DOLPHINS INTO THE FUTURE.

Monopoly Child is The Skaters’ and Pacific City Vision’s Spencer Clark. His ornate, hallucinatory environments are enacted through a Xerox mirage of celestial horse gallop, mizmar-like horn melisma and avian vocal Interpretation. His live performances have been likened to a mix of temple inauguration and 50's Ethnic Folkways bootleg, and his myriad of recorded artifacts surf from devotional pyramid drone and celestial bamboo ritual to the tropical romance audio novel of his most recent vision, ‘Make Mine, Macaw’.

Courtesy of the Ancient Skywatchers of California and Shamans for Levitated Coconuts, amongst other distant bureaus, Clark’s cosmic accretion of tapes, CDrs and LPs have appeared on labels like Old English Spelling Bee, Heavy Tapes, Eclipse and New Age, and he has collaborated and performed with artists such as Tomutonttu, Sonic Youth, Deerhoof, Nurse With Wound, Charalambides, Melvins and Wooden Wand.

Dolphins into the Future is the Antwerp-based, Cetacean Nation Communications and Taped Sounds ambassador, Lieven Martens. Forming his music through a process of ‘automatic writing instigated by dialogues with the cetacean world’, Martens’ warbly and effervescent sonic ecosystems abound with the attuned aquatic energies and tranquility of liquindi percussion, echolocative synth gurgle, Polynesian cantata and tape-collage swirl.

Martens has released music on Kraak, Not Not Fun, Release the Bats, and his own evolving imprints, which have also played host to an array of artists such as, Oneohtrix Point Never, Orphan Fairytale, Kraus, J.D. Emmanuel, Emeralds’ Steve Hauschildt and James Ferraro. Dolphins’ radiant musical glare and calming ascension emerges from an innerspace of reflective elation and Higher Intelligence.

Thanks to Kraak, High Reflections, Obedient Atom, Adam Art Gallery, Happy, Disembraining Machine, Micronations, and Altmusic NZ for their support. Tickets for NZ events are available from undertheradar.co.nz

TOUR DATES:

Melbourne Thursday December 2nd, Sunshine & Grease with Mouving and Tim Coster

Brisbane Friday December 3rd, The Old Museum with Sun of the Seventh Sister, Botski, Nicola, Spamicide

Sydney Saturday December 4th, Serial Space with Ben Byrne and Pimmon

Christchurch aquarium/temple installation and culminating performance Saturday December 11th, HSP with LA Lakers

Dunedin Sunday December 12th, Chicks Hotel with LA Lakers

Wellington Thursday December 16th, Happy with I.Ryoko and Sign of the Hag

Auckland Saturday December 18th, Wine Cellar with Octopus

RICHARD BRYANT - WALKING AND TURNING AT DIFFERENT LENGTHS. 23 November - 4 December, 2010

2010-11-23T19:46:00.000-08:00

BLACK YOGHURT, GLASGOW, GOD DESTROYER. 20 November, 2010

2010-11-20T18:06:00.000-08:00

Assembling a lawless foreground of surgical gabber delirium and ADHD syncopation against a kaleidoscopic milieu of crystalline keyboard churn and string-like electric skuzz, Dunedin’s Black Yoghurt ghosts a hyped-up line of inquiry misled by the likes of Duran Duran Duran, Shitmat and Kid 606, while instituting an especially rabid bipolar fuckedness that flicks between club-chill and -seizure. Vandalizing a laptop palette of timestretched and ricocheted snare pow, detourned Garageband presets, puerile gurgles and samplerature like 'hey thanks for killing my mom ('hey no problem'), Black Yoghurt is both shape-shifting and straightjacketed.

Dunedin compatriot, Glasgow performs a just as convulsive but further distracted arcade of glitched beat-repeat funk, pizzicato boink and downbeat but lacunae-filled lounge bedlam. He also plays in Bastardwisher and Old Psychiatrists Club.

God Destroyer is the ambient guitar project of Dakota’s Fanny’s Alex Donnithorne and Bang Bang Eche’s James Sullivan.

TIM COSTER. MIDDAY ATTUNEMENT. 9 - 20 November, 2010

2010-11-01T22:48:00.000-07:00

Midday Attunement is a material echo and meditative sonic trace of a ceremonial prelude to the installation’s own communal unfolding – a syncopated replay and rearrangement of the audition’s chiming and diaphanous ambiance.

LISTEN

AWESOME VORTEX, ANTONY MILTON, PETER WRIGHT & MICHAEL MINCHINGTON, OCCASIONALS. 5 November, 2010

2010-10-22T18:01:00.000-07:00

The aerogel pop and droplet house of Awesome Vortex is the product of Christchurch and Melbourne synthesists, Adam Willetts and Tim Coster. Like a fake meeting between Koji Kondo and Ussachevsky in a fibreoptic canopy clearing, their elektronische rites are both Otaku geek and Nihilist getdown. Coster is the head of CLaudia (Metal Rouge, Plains, Currer Bells) and new label, Fictitious Sighs (Greens, Pinks and Whites, Vogue Forums, Paeces). Willetts has performed locally and abroad alongside Sun Araw, Ducktails, Akio Suzuki, Dan Deacon and High Places.

Antony Milton, Peter Wright and Mike Minchington are in a microsynth ensemble whose endothermic polyglot of blippage and code-switching end-fire arraydom is intricately wobbly. Milton runs a paragon imprint called Pseudoarcana – a cultural cache of dissident treasures by the likes of The Skaters, Ashtray Navigations, Keijo, Zelienpole, Birchville Cat Motel, Agitated Radio Pilot and Uton. His own music has appeared on labels such as Last Visible Dog, Maggotism International, MYMWLY, Foxglove and Release the Bats. Wright has performed and recorded extensively both in New Zealand and internationally, and has released on Spekk, Students of Decay, Digitalis and Ikuisuus.

Simon Kong’s Occasionals smuggles post-disciplinary funk into the room, setting up an embracive sonic environment that’s both scrambly and see-through. Anapestic tetrameter reimagined by The Belleville Three.

OLIVER OF THE SKY - FAVOURITE THIS CATALOGUE

2010-10-04T16:56:00.000-07:00

Limited edition publication printed after the occasion of Oliver of the Sky's installation, made by the artist. 24 pages, edition of not many. $3. Please contact the gallery for a copy.

FCKN KILLER SUN, BIBLE BLACK, SIMON O'RORKE TRIO. 22 October, 2010

2010-10-01T01:44:00.000-07:00

Fckn Killer Sun is a reincarnation of the ecstatic psych trio, Glory Fckn Sun. Joan Armatrading sits in for expatriate, Ben Spiers and splashes it alongside Antony Milton and gong-brain percussionist, Simon O’Rorke. Mimaroglu has described Glory’s Tipped Bowler LP as a set of ‘gorgeous, muted improv-psych extrapolations, jointly knit into a batch of tight guitar / violin / percussion burners’. Live, it’s an oceanic churn that invokes the martial lunacy and bad romance of Fushitsusha, the disaster jazz crumble of Hair Police and, as Milton’s PseudoArcana posits, the delicate seethe of Flies Inside the Sun.

Brian Crook’s work in the seminal groups, The Renderers, Flies Inside the Sun, Scorched Earth Policy and The Terminals remains one of the most significant contributions to fried exploratory music both in New Zealand and internationally. Bible Black is an equally pioneering introspection - a distillation of the lullaby sneer, curveball shred inventions and blazed country haunts that infect his work elsewhere.

Preternatural traveler, Simon O’Rorke colludes with reed and drum dawgs, Reuben Derrick and Rory Dalley in his eponymous trio.

SUN ARAW, WITCHUALS, ADAM WILLETTS. 13 October, 2010

2010-10-01T01:41:00.000-07:00

Sun Araw is the recording project of Long Beach, California resident, Cameron Stallones, who also performs in Magic Lantern, the Not Not Fun garage soul dream team, Vibes, and an erstwhile incarnation of the celebrated ‘outsider Funkadelics’, Pocahaunted.

Augmented live by Nick Malkin, Araw’s blown up, largo funk bass lines, gunky Archimedean Farfisa spiral, tremulous plasma guitar blats, rapturously curly choral polyphonies and lucid swamp is a cinematographic safari that Pitchfork has described as ‘panoramic, dizzyingly huge’.

From the solarized surf splendor of ‘Beach Head’ - imbued with the littoral vibes of Neil Young’s ‘Zuma’ - to the Fela Kuti zones of ‘Heavy Deeds’ and the noir-like cruise through the ‘inter-dimensional back alleys, ghost cabs, and midnight-sweat locker rooms’ of ‘On Patrol’, Stallones conducts a radial dig on a panoply of fadeout, cultural artifacts, refuting the repose of endgame Chillwave.

While out on its own inner voyage, Araw navigates a sunburst tributary where Keith Hudson’s Pick a Dub meets a 70s jam between Terry Riley and Don Cherry and - as Stallones’ commissioned mixes for The Wire magazine and Rose Quartz blog reveal - commemorates the galloping trance-minimalism and exhaled mantras of Pharoah Sanders and brimming canopy ambiance and UFO Junkanoo blues of Exuma.

Witchuals: Voyage of the Rock Aliens, Ragam Thanam Pallavi, Straight Edge XXS.
Adam Willetts: Pythagoron reliquary, weird house

GROUPER (US), TOMUTONTTU (FI), LA LAKERS. 29 September, 2010

2010-09-19T17:41:00.000-07:00

Liz Harris’ return to Christchurch precedes the release of the ‘Hold/Sick’ 7" on Brisbane Label, Room40 and her tours of Australia, Japan and South Korea. Since her last appearance in Christchurch in early 2009, Harris has recorded a split alongside Roy Montgomery - with her contribution toted by Pitchfork as ‘among her most focused and spellbinding to date’ - a side on Root Strata’s a capella 7" series, ‘Tsuki No Seika’ next to... Type label’s Xela, and re-issued editions of her incredible, earlier works,’ Cover the Windows and the Walls’, ‘Wide’, and ‘Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill’.

Grouper has recently toured alongside Animal Collective in the US and played at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ ‘The Fans Strike Back!’ weekend alongside Devo, Beirut, M83, !!! and Lydia Lunch. Oriented around empyrean choral deltas, cyclical cassette scree, and endeared, zero-zero guitar straits, her music is gorgeous on record, and transcendental live.

Tomutonttu is the solo project of Jan Anderzén, a visual artist and musician from Tampere, Finland, whose pivotal role in Kemialliset Ystävät and collaborative raids in Avarus and Anaksimandros has - alongside Fonal label colleagues, Es, Paavoharju, Kuupuu, Islaja, Fricara Pacchu, Lau Nau and Shogun Kunitoki - elevated the Finnish experimental underground into a Renaissance-like state, its cross-pollinating telepathy producing some of the most acclaimed records and performances since the mid 2000s, while setting a universal example for communal musical exploration.

Anderzen’s wraithlike powwow, weirdo choral ascents, elated bleeps, bubbly glossolalia and poltergeist thumps coalesce in a captivating sylvan kaleidoscope of psych hyperbole in all his projects, but it is live, in his solo incarnation as Tomutonttu that these magnetic qualities are best articulated. As unassailable blog, Mutant Sounds has described, Tomutonttu is a 'delightful traipse through a verdant forest of ergot poisoned art brut psychedelic deconstructionism; all wobbly string fumble, lobotomized key wheeze and detuned flute toot that’s wonderfully right in it's ungainly wrongness'.

Tomutonttu's addition to the line-up has been made possible by Altmusic.

LA Lakers: Fear of duration, Lily Greenham, Total ridicule.

JAN ANDERZÉN - 'NUOETTEJA'. 28 September - 6 November 2010.

2010-09-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

Jan Anderzén is a Finnish artist whose visual practice is a kaleidoscopic ghosting of his celebrated sonic wanderlust in Kemialliset Ystävät and Tomutonttu.

His collagist, painterly work is heavily populated with furry geometries and carnivalesque planes that stick out with playful grace into alien fields of ebullient, mycological action, trippy galactic splatter, and dripped up creaturedom.

‘Nuotteja’ is a graphic score that crawls around the walls, consisting of a series of mandalas painted on shitty 7"s, various paper notation works, and a suspended, musical stave that forms the basis of an accumulative composition of vibrant debris: Yuletide refuse, incandescent trash and fresh produce.

Anderzén’s visit has been made possible by Altmusic, through their national touring of Tomutonttu. http://altmusicnz2010.blogspot.com/

KIKIILIIMIKILII (FR), THJE. House Show in Sydenham. 7 September, 2010

2010-09-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

Kikiilimikilii is the solo project of the founder of the Parisian art group, Collectif Tralala, and band, Feu Machin. He has performed in France, Spain, Estonia and the United States, but keeps a cryptic, abiographical résumé, citing ‘dgdghnfhnfnhf’ as a pretty big influence. He has played alongside Blues Control, Charlemagne Palestine, ‘pyramidal meditationist’ and Not Not Fun compatriot, High Wolf, and Animal Collective’s Deacon. He also has a pending, physical debut on Mexican micro-label, Ruido Horrible (Ryan Jewell, Slow listener, Wasteland Jazz Unit). His music skates between echoic choral terrains, mosquito-drone airspace, and cracked, lacustrine exotica.

Rainbow Beast is the new disguise of Christchurch’s Mike Minchington, whose hymnal, endless-loop instrumentals and wrung-out guitar cruises have been self-released on an array of pathologically limited cassettes, but he’s a pivotal jam donor - playing and recording alongside Adam Willetts and Witcyst, and in Slit the Throat of the Assistant and Grunge Genocide Drum Pentragram.

Alex Donnithorne's Thje rummages through ritual growl, punched slide-acoustic, drum harm and feedback caterwaul on one recording to the Niblock-like organ drift of another. Affinities with Sean Bailey’s Melbourne project, Lakes, here - by way of The Shadow Ring. It’s cool.

Many thanks to Will, Alice, James and Rob for helping out with the emergency relocation. Rainbow Beast got sick and couldn't play.

THE FUCK CHAIRS. TEXTBOOK ATTACK ON A FIXED INSTALLATION. 3 September 2010.

2010-09-17T00:30:00.000-07:00

Revisiting childhood experiences of fictionalised warfare, The Fuck Chairs installation is a military fortress fabricated from recycled domestic artifacts and handmade weapons - its violence and play synthesized and portrayed as the primitive renderings of a generation of unconscientious objectors.

Michael Morley is an artist based in Port Chalmers, Dunedin. He has exhibited at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 64zero3, Christchurch City Art Gallery, Gertrude, Enjoy, Artspace and The Physics Room. He is also member of The Dead C, and lectures in Fine Arts at Otago Polytechnic School of Art. Morgan Oliver is an interactive artist and designer who lectures in Communication Design at Otago Polytechnic School of Design.

The show's running tenure was preempted by the disruption of the September 4th earthquake.

PURPLE MOUNTAIN EAGLE. 28 August, 2010

2010-08-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

SIMON LAWRENCE - LIFE ON EARTH. 13 - 28 August, 2010

2010-08-24T22:38:00.000-07:00

DEATH THROES, WITCHUALS, DAKOTA'S FANNY. 6 August, 2010

2010-08-09T23:58:00.000-07:00

JOHL DWYER. MILKSHAKE. 16 July - 7 August 2010

2010-07-12T05:12:00.000-07:00

Refuting addictive labour and possession by novelty in contemporary painting, Johl Dwyer’s practice breaks down its auto- and mono-graphic voices through his re-working of others’ failed and dismissed works into rehabilitated and promptly executed collages.

Dwyer edits his work as he proceeds, negotiating the prearranged formal attributes of the found works, but what gets kicked over pretty much stays there.

He graduated with a BFA from Elam in 2006 and recent exhibitions include 'Yesser' at A Center for Art and 'Fruit Loop Box' at The High Seas in Auckland.

TETUZI AKIYAMA, DONALD MCPHERSON & GREG MALCOLM. 10 July 2010

2010-07-10T20:13:00.000-07:00

Master guitarist and bastion of the radical Japanese underground, TETUZI AKIYAMA has recorded and performed with an extensive legion of composers and artists both in Japan and abroad. He is the founder - alongside no-input mixer virtuoso, Toshimaru Nakamura - of the infamous Meeting at Offsite performance series in Tokyo, which has played host to some of experimental music's most recognized icons.

Akiyama's idiosyncratic and arresting vocabulary contains often volatile shifts between microtonal prepared guitar, folk pastoralism, country raga and weirdo boogie shred. His eclectic but consistently focused body of work - which also employs viola and electronics - has appeared on labels such as Locust Music (Espers, Henry Flynt, Matmos, Josephine Foster), Staubgold (To Rococo Rot, Vladislav Delay, Keith Rowe, Oren Ambarchi, Faust), Bottrop-Boy (DAT Politics, Nobukazu Takemura, Sunroof!), and Antiopic (Lee Ranaldo, Jim O'Rourke).

As Improvised Music from Japan writes, Akiyama "specializes in creating music with elements of both primitivism and realism by connecting his own aspirations, in a minimal and straightforward way, to the special instrumental qualities of the guitar. Sometimes delicately and sometimes boldly, he controls sound volumes ranging from micro to macro, in an attempt to convert the body into an electronic entity".

GREG MALCOLM is an experimental guitarist based in Christchurch. He has recorded collaboratively and solo for Korm Plastics (Psychic TV, Stilluppsteypa, The Hafler Trio), (K-RAA-K)³ (Pan American, Es, Ignatz) and Celebrate Psi Phenomenon (James Blackshaw, Rameses III, Kemialliset Ystävät).

GOLDEN AXE, DORKWIND & SECRETS. 26 June 2010

2010-07-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

Entire photo set HERE

Nominally inspired by a side-scrolling hack and slash arcade game, Golden Axe’s cult pop and hyper-transgressive Pump and Circumstance rematerializes in Christchurch for the first time since 2007. Loaded with beguiling pop gems and un-guiding, upbeat cosmic adventures, the duo have recently emancipated a glut of irreverent cover versions, including Katy Perry’s ‘Hot and Cold’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. This is the album release show for their third album, ‘Fantasy Footwork’.

Dorkwind’s minimal arsenal consists of a waveform pedal, drums and bass, but the paint-stripped palette evokes an aggrandized Mainliner splat detonated through a flying tumulus of Lightning Bolt funk and undead Sabbath camp that’s totally over the top. Its members are Wellington and Butt Simpson’s Ryan Bennett and Golden Axe’s Daif King.

Manifested as hi-romantic webcam pop, MUD disco and Chat Roulette sing-along, Fraser Austin’s auguring of the Astrological Age of Aquarius through his budding Secrets moniker is at once pastiche-soaked, heavenly and prophylactic.

CARTOON, MC STORMTROOPA & TFF. Dead Set Showroom. 26 June, 2010

2010-06-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

Entire photo set HERE

WITCHUALS & OLIVER OF THE SKY. June 19, 2010

2010-06-22T22:08:00.000-07:00

Witchuals’ music ebbs between narcotic psych dub and feral, scattered drone pop, superimposing Junior Murvin vocal syrup over eternal bedroom grooves reminiscent of Wreck Small Speakers’ ‘Together We Sense’, Augusts Pablo’s ‘House of Dub Version’ and the Hendrix-haunted licks all through Carl Harvey’s ‘Ecstasy Of Mankind’. Its members include Adam Willetts, Sam Hamilton, LA Lakers and IRD.

Substituting for IDM, Oliver of the Sky will be presenting "O's Helliez DOUGHIES do a skid au", a spatio-sonic rumination on cars with tinted windows and cut suspension.

OLIVER OF THE SKY. FAVOURITE THIS. 18 June - 12 July 2010

2010-06-22T22:04:00.000-07:00

Setting off by ghosting the trending and firsting evaluative economies of social networking sites like Tumblr and Flickr, ‘Favourite This’ re-blogs clashed maxims and proverbial visual motifs from the World Wide Web, re-ordering and -rendering them on the critical and hierarchical planes of a painting show and a larger, sculptural installation.

Both a celebration and a critique of its screened and interactive iconographies, the works catechize the spatial layouts and normalizing chiaroscuros of both server and offline space, merging and juxtaposing outdoor landscape and architectural features with the structural elements of webpages. In an extraction of their pixilated incarnations, virtual imagery is depicted with fake-digital precision, while remaining open to the errance of the hand-made and accidental. Conversely, elemental forms and otherwise radical iconographies appear as static pixel maps – flatly domesticated, tamed and subsumed in the weird, anti-Euclidean tableaux of both the paintings and the wider installation.

OLIVER OF THE SKY AND JOHN LASER IN DISCUSSION. DUNEDIN 11 JUNE 2010.

J – Do you want to talk about the installation?

O – I dunno. What do you wanna know?

J – Can you talk about the fire? I wanted to talk about the painting by numbers, pixel map reproduction thing, what does it mean to you – is it just the same as reproducing a logo?

O – Maybe it’s more like doing the watercolours of the fairings. It’s this thing…

[Interruption]

J – So, paint by numbers…

O – Yeah, I think it’s engaging with this thing, which is like finding images on Tumblr, or on the internet – I think I got that GIF of the fire in that drawing from a Geocities website. You know Geocities?

J – Yeah, they’ve got this Geocities-izer, where you put any URL in, and it turns it into a Geocities page.

O – Oh, that’s awesome.

J – They’re horrible looking pages; I was making them in primary school when the internet came out.

[Interruption]

O – Pixels.

J – Geocities and getting it off geocities.

O – So, Geocities is gone now, but there are Geocities archive sites. So I was going through archive sites and I found that little GIF – really liking it and really liking it as a really naff thing – it would’ve come from a black metal page or something, like fan Geocities. I’m just interested in how naff an upside down burning cross is. It’s a thing I would've just blogged on my Tumblr and it would've just sort of gotten lost – it’s got that ‘life’. But then it’s interesting to pull it out and stop the GIF for one thing, because a GIF is a continually looping thing. To stop it and continually - to blow it up; spend a lot of time on it.

J – Are the drawings kind of like web pages?

O – Yeah. With those drawings I’ve taken most of the source imagery from the internet in one way or another – an image that I found or little ‘bits’ – there are some marble bars, which are aesthetic motifs also from Geocities sites. And with the tiled backgrounds – that’s a web-design thing. The tiling starts at the top left and then goes until the bounds of the page and so it’s not perfect. At the right and the bottom, there’s half a tile or whatever. So, I guess they’re aesthetic compositions…

J – Based on arbitrary sights of web sites….

O – Yeah, it’s a mediation between a drawing composition, a visual image and a website. I haven’t really put that so much into words, ‘cause a lot of my process is really intuitive; I’m interested in proceeding by obsessions. Working between ADHD…

J – Distraction?

O – Yeah, I have this idea that I’ve got this self-diagnosed case of culturally-produced ADHD - Internet, media, information. But it’s not really like ADHD, ‘cause I can really concentrate, like with that drawing. Somebody was saying that people with ADHD go between not being able to concentrate but then being able to concentrate really obsessively for ages.

J – Almost autistically.

O – I’m interested in that. Tumblr, which is fucking ADHD…

J – 'Flickering'.

O – Yeah, I follow sixty people or something and they all post 5 images a day. Some people might only do 2, but some people do like, 25 a day. On my dashboard, if I don’t log in for three days, I might have 300 images I wanna go through. If I do do that, it’s just scrolling through, so fast – the logic of what is interesting, what pops out …

J – There’s not really any hierarchy, right?

O – Yeah, I couldn’t predict what it is that I like, ‘cause it’s not as if I’m going through it looking for a particular thing.

J – ‘Cause it’s all happening now as well.

O – There’s that as a process.

J – Scrolling.

O – Yeah, a cultural process that I’m participating in. And so it’s interesting to take that and do something else with it, think about it in relation to something much more slow, process-based.

J – That’s what I like about it, ’cause it's about that culture but they’re almost fossilized or freeze-framed - you could meditate on them for ages. Not just for you as the producer, but for us. They’re quite meditative. But I guess the internet is quite hypnotic.

O – Yeah, but I think in a less sustainable way, and it’s personally less comforting than it is to draw. It’s a thing that’s really important to me, makes me really happy just to draw pictures.

J –There’s a thing on Tumblr where you can have pages, with a history, but there's a bot that just keeps loading your entire Tumblr on the same page, so it’s just loading and loading, and it doesn’t actually ever load because it’s just such a long scroll. So you’re trying to scroll down and you’ll catch an image but by that time the next image has scrolled half way into the frame, so you try to capture that, and a second later… So you’re trying to scroll down but it’s this bewildering, flickering abstraction. But you see all these amazing quirky images.

O – I love that.

J – That’s symptomatic of this distraction that you’re talking about.

O – I also really love attention and technological capacity. Thinking about how the fuck we managed with 28.8k dial-up back in the day. But even now, it’s really interesting thinking about YouTube video watching - for those of us who use YouTube or watch video streaming online – an inbuilt part of what it is to watch video now is the streaming stutter. It’s just something that we’re…

J – Used to - the rupture of it.

O – Yeah. And it’s totally the same thing with images – waiting for an image to load and the way it creeps down. And I don’t know why but sometimes images load as first - big pixels and then medium pixels and then tiny pixels and then the image.

J – It’s so satisfying when it gets there. Also, the low quality thing. I watch lots of stuff online, that massive visual quality compromise, with that compared to the cinema, people forget about it, eh.

O – But it’s been like that since the days of VHS – that’s a huge visual compromise as well. And now with the i-Phone, people are getting used to watching videos on really small screens.

J – Could you talk a little about – well, nostalgia is a really awfully reductive word – but this Janus-faced confronting of the past and appreciation, not regurgitation, but re-evaluation of the past, the fetishizing of VHS, the reuse of cassette tape technology, and the re-appreciation of primitive sampling technology, and using that as empowering force?

O – That’s more your thing I think. [Laughter] What’s Janus-faced?

J – Just looking both ways. It’s this Greek God. This idea of a threshold, where you’re looking forward to the future and facing the past. So, nostalgia is always about looking back, which is a kind of fallacy, where you think you’re just looking back, when really you’re dealing with the present. So, these Nike things aren’t just nostalgic for you?

O – No.

J – ‘Cause it’s all about reproducing them in the present, but yet you still bring in all this excess genealogy. It’s a real tricky thing, but what does it mean to ….

O – Pull stuff back from the past? I dunno. I’m just doing it for the first time now. I’m pretty young, so I feel like I’ve only just come out of teenage-hood or whatever, and now all of a sudden I realize that I have history. I’ve been on this planet for 20 years – that’s enough time to look back on. When you’re six, there’s no conception of that, so it’s quite novel to have that and to think about that. I’m always in constant wonderment, thinking about different generations, people that were born in the seventies, what they were brought up with - it’s such a difficult thing to try and imagine – A lifetime that’s taken place in time different to your own.

J – But you start to sympathize now, because you can think of these things, even if they're relatively recent.

O – Part of that is part of my thinking vocabulary. Looking at things that formed my identity. It’s certainly not with an agenda of condemning it, or revering it. I’m so happy to be alive right now doing what I’m doing. It’s not about ‘the older days were better’.

J – There’s no wistful recollection. ‘Cause that’s nostalgia, right – 'childhood was always better'. But I was wondering, ‘cause I always have this discussion – we were gonna call our last show 2008, ‘cause it’s about that archeology, but it’s almost too recent.

O – The Alonzo Morning one?

J – No, the current show. What does 2008 mean in that context? Is it too recent? There are some things that I’m kind of embarrassed by. There’s something not embarrassing about a Nike logo, but there’s something embarrassing about being into post-rock and Radiohead. Is there an ethical line between, ‘oh, Nike, we all know it’s ubiquitous and kind of kitsch and it’s universal’ – it’s awful or you love it, but Radiohead, if you appreciated them in 2008 or 2007 it’s a bit more ambiguous. So where do you draw the line between the more ideal memories and the more awkward, ‘yeah I was into that, but do I celebrate that ironically?’ ‘Cause I would celebrate the fact that in 2000 I was really into Metallica, and now Metallica is having this renaissance, which is not even coincidental - it’s totally predictable that everyone’s listening to Metallica again - hipsters with Metallica iconography. But I’m sure Radiohead will come back into that economy of this ironic backward looking.

O – Maybe, but Radiohead’s got so much sincerity, you know?

J – But that sincerity’s just so camp in the same way.

O – It’s great, Radiohead was the most important band for me when I was 15 years old!

J – Same.

O – Touched my heart. Made me feel so OK. It’s so funny.

J – When’s a good time… Will you ever bother going back and revisiting that?

O – I dunno, maybe. Radiohead has fallen a bit to the wayside for me. That’s a really interesting thing, though. At what point does it become OK to ironically or not, revisit a particular thing. I had this great discussion with my friend, who writes Fiasco, about how in graffiti culture at the moment, toy style is really hip.

J – Is that just throw-away...

O – No, toy style basically means amateur, crap. ‘Toy’ is an insult. If you’re ‘toy’, you’re like a fucking kid. One of the cultural tropes of graffiti is older, established writers ‘toying’ other graffiti writers – where you write ‘toy’ over somebody’s piece. It’s really funny ‘cause Fiasco has had his pieces toyed before. Within a particular group of graffiti artists, toy has become this desirable thing now, it’s really cool to do toy pieces.

J – It’s faux-naive.

O – It’s really cool, ‘cause you try and draw letters as gross and kooky and weird as you can, use bad spray-paint, fill in really badly.

J – It’s kind of like painting abstraction.

O – Maybe, but Fiasco is really good at that. But he’s also really good at tight graffiti. So, we had this really interesting conversation about ‘what is toy?’ Is toy this consciously pursued, goofy, ‘bad’ graffiti, or is the truly toy stuff graffiti that’s trying to be super slick but isn’t? Like, all the graffiti here in Dunedin. All the people that try really hard to do graffiti here, do really fresh, dope, sick pieces fall short just that little bit, and it’s fucking embarrassing. Is that the real toy? Is that more toy than any toy that Fiasco would do? I think that’s somewhat similar to that thing of…

J – Conscious irony.

O – Yeah, you’re allowed to be ironic about particular things but there’s still some stuff that’s untouchable – ‘no way, that’s gross, that’s not cool’.

J – Makes me think of both Warhol and AMM. Warhol is supposedly indifferent. But then he still has this very select aesthetic. And AMM were in a live concert, tuning through, browsing with transistors, and they came across a Grandmaster Flash song or something, and in the released recording they edited that bit out. So, it’s all about improv and you accept everything, but Grandmaster Flash or whatever it was is a bit too much of an encroachment.

O – That’s so fucked. It’s probably just really racist. Classist.

J – What are on the margins of acceptability? Dave, who’s part of
the current HSP show, he’s really interested in labour. He did this massive Bruce Springsteen painting. It’s a nicely executed painting but it’s this really muddy copy of Born in the USA, with this Kimberly Clark towel hanging out of the pocket. It’s so bad, and yet took so fucking long to produce, except he did it 'ironically'. The whole laborious process for him is all about this performative gesture – 'I’m executing something really awful but the whole labour intensity is really fulfilling'. I guess toy isn’t so laborious, but what if you consciously make really awful, figurative painting just for the performative fulfillment – this ironic faux naivety.

O – It’s really desirable somehow. There’s a relationship to that in my work and certainly in the work of people I’m really interested in, but I’m also personally really into sincerity. As a person, I’m quite sincere and that’s really important to me. Not so crazy about irony or sarcasm.

J – It’s so grey though. There’s this thing called ‘new sincerity’ - have you heard of that? And these British artists termed this thing called re-modernism which is a reaction to postmodernism and irony. Billy Childish does these really figurative paintings and he makes this amazing kind of folk music. There’s the remodernist cinema as well. But the fact that it’s post-irony is like saying because we’re post-colonial, there’s no colonialism left, like we’ve transcended colonialism. There’s still this back-story of non-sincerity, sarcasm and cynicism.

O – Maybe that’s an unattainable thing. But maybe to acknowledge that irony can be part of the vocabulary, but to sincerely or with care, passion or heart use it?

J – What do you think about ironic t-shirts?

O - I’ve got ironic fashion. I found a Meatloaf t-shirt that I really like. It had a really amazing graphic. I tie-bleached it ‘cause I was really into that at the time. I guess that’s pretty ironic.

J – What would Meatloaf think of you – someone who’s not really interested in his music – wearing it?

O – I dunno. I have no idea who he is really.

J – What does it mean to take yourself seriously and not seriously? An existential thing.

O – I think it’s important to take yourself seriously.

J – Really?

O – Not to the detriment of the people around you. It’s really important to love yourself. It’s so difficult to think about and it’s so interesting that, for instance, in our culture, ‘that person really loves themselves’, it’s such an insult. It’s so awful that that’s negative. I think it’s really important to respect yourself. I don’t think it’s about perfection or thinking that you’re the shit but it’s about respecting yourself and giving yourself credit.

J – I’m never sure if I take myself seriously in music. I always think about it as something that I just do. I identify with it, but it’s not… I don’t love it. If I spent hours doing something and someone came along and deleted it, I’d be pretty fucked off I guess. But I just deleted 70GB of recordings, and an hour later I was like, ‘who cares’. In other two years I would've forgotten that I’d done that shit anyway.

O – And in another 100 years you’ll be gone.[Laughter]

J – I don’t know how that relates to what we were talking about.

O – It’s funny about music. To me, music is just a gesture as well. Music is complementary to the practice that I’m more serious about, or engaged with.

J – Yeah, for me music is integral, ironically. Like, it’s the most important thing.

O – That’s really cool.

J - But at the same time it’s an everyday sacredness. It’s always there. That shrine downstairs in the school gallery. I really like it, but you approach it, whereas if it was just there in your home all the time, it’d be this everyday shrine. I often hate the ‘approach’ in art galleries and that is something about the optic – you have to approach something, whereas if you hear something it already has its everyday, experiential aesthetic.

O – But with live music you have to go to a place to experience it.

J – Which is why I’m always questioning live performances.

O – I think that’s really amazing to recognize that that’s something that recurs with an art gallery or with a gig or whatever. ‘Cause it’s a space where it becomes OK to engage with something. If you’re on the train packed with a hundred other people, that’s a space where it’s not OK to engage with something.

J – But I find the acoustics of that space more interesting.

O – Yeah, but I’m just talking about everyday terms. There are these spaces where it’s for paying attention. In a lot of ways that’s really fucked...

J – ...But it’s respite, a sanctuary.

O – That becomes something you can play with, so you can go, I’m going to put this thing in here.

J – Or out here.

O – This band that me and Edie are doing is IDM, right.

J – That’s a shocking name, eh.

O – Yeah, Intelligent Dance Music. That’s a pretty ironic name.

J – But it’s almost too recent to be acceptable.

O – Maybe, but the music that we’re making is beautiful and lovely and warm and it makes me so happy doing that band and jamming with Edie. It’s like lullaby shit. It’s really cool, but yeah, playing beats and I don’t really know how to make beats and my beats are like naff and so, is that ironic, what is that gesture?

J – Aphex Twin or Squarepusher wouldn’t identify with IDM. But if you have to identify it – IDM - some of that shit’s amazing.

O – Yeah, probably, I don’t really know that much about it. I just knew that it was a genre.

J – It’s also Internet Download Manager. It’s an acronym for 30 or so different things.

O - It’s such a hilarious genre name – ‘it’s OK to like it, it’s intelligent’.

J – Too intelligent to dance to. It’s an oxymoron.

O – Yeah, you can listen to these beats, they’re intelligent.

J – I guess Ruins Alone last night was kind of intelligent dance music, ‘cause you can’t just nod your head to it.

O – I had a really good freak out to it. It’s important to let yourself move some times.

J – I always think that arrhythmia – a five four or a seven eight – is a more democratic rhythm. Four four is preferred, ‘cause it’s this disco four on the floor, easier to dance to, but I always wonder if adding an extra beat makes it this universal rhythm. It’s like a western and a non western thing. It’s Chronos versus Kairos. Chronos is this Greek god of time. Jon Savage wrote about it in 'Time Travel', which is about rhythm and time in pop music in the 20th century. And Kairos is more about African rhythm – it’s kind of this awful distinction between Chronos being this four four western time and Kairos being this syncopated, African and eastern groove. But it kind of makes sense. If you’re doing a five four beat, everyone has their own response. You make it up as you go along, whereas with four four you know when the next beat is coming. It can be kind of depressing sometimes.

O – Fascist? I really like listening to music and especially experiencing music live and then seeing what it is that has affect for me. Like, when the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It happens sometimes and totally arrests me. And the most different shit does it.

J – Live?

O – Yeah usually live. My friend, Grant in Melbourne - he does this Daniel Johnston-style folk music. Just solo, and with a borrowed guitar ‘cause he doesn’t own one. They’re the most fucking beautiful songs and the way he sings them, I nearly cry every time. And then really trebly intense noise does it for me too...

[Interruption]

J – I wanted to talk about the fire. How it relates to the GIF. If it does?

O – Loosely. I initially thought of it ‘cause the show’s gonna be in winter time and it’s fucking cold at the moment and I imagine that HSP’s really cold.

J – It’s surprisingly pretty nice.

O – Really? Whatever. I was just thinking about fire and how it’d be interesting to bring that into the gallery space.

J – Just as an image though, right?

O – Yeah, thinking about the media in which it’s presented as well, and thinking about affect and warmth and engagement and immersion. And I don’t know if it’s gonna end up being quite a cynical gesture. But it’s also quite playful, because it has a really interesting effect on this polythene.

J – Is there contrast of is it flattened out ‘cause of the black?

O – It’s quite flat but it’s kind of metallic. It’s really amazing.

J – And you’re not affecting it, no datamosh?

O – I think it’s gonna be the pure thing, ‘cause the datamosh got really complicated with the soundtrack. In a way maybe it’s a really messy work and a really speculative work, ‘cause a lot of it will be just setting it up but I am interested in materiality and affect and immersion and surface and depth and stuff like that. I wanna have the projector on a plinth or some boxes in the space, as opposed to being invisible. It seems like a bit of an elephant in the room sometimes.

[… Tape ends.]

Eye Contact Review by Creon Upton: Here

ALWAYS & LA LAKERS. Saturday 12 June, 2010

2010-06-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

The glossolalia funk, a capella techno, heterodyning rap and Upper Paleolithic shamanism of Melbourne artist, Alex Vivian’s ALWAYS has been described by Mess + Noise as a ‘linguistic circus, a vowel vandal and a syntax destroyer all in one - looping vocal tones into a continuous elastic rhythm and sewing them together in a cosmic playground’.

Vivian’s vocal ceremonies draw just as much inspiration from the fantastic realms of Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer role-play as they do from radical improvisers like Carles Santos, Jaap Blonk, Dylan Nyoukis and Makigami Koichi, weirdo Rough Traders, Furious Pig, and the hypnotic minimalism of Meredith Monk. 

Situated ethnosonically somewhere between Inuit katajjaq, the trance ritual of Balinese Kecak, and the sylvan counterpoint of Pygmy chorus, Always’ polyglot snort has been tipped by Matmos/Pitchfork’s Drew Daniel as ‘simple, powerful, and very odd’, while Aquarius Records has called it ‘totally insane’.     

As an integral player in both Australia’s visual arts and musical underground, Vivian has recorded for labels Nervous Jerk (Animal Collective, Fabulous Diamonds, Dead C) and Chapter Music (Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Tenniscoats, The Twerps), and has exhibited widely both collaboratively and solo at galleries such as Y3K, Joint Hassles, Black and Blue, TCB art inc. and Auckland’s Gambia Castle. 

Always is supported by local singer-songwriter, LA Lakers.

SF / LA LAKERS & RICHARD NEAVE. 28 May, 2010

2010-05-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

 

SF’s Sean O’Reilly is the black eminence behind the erstwhile escape punk and Kraut grot of Flying Nun’s most insolent skronk pack, King Loser - their Ritalin Morricone and stray Gainsbourg caterwaul permeated with his agitated tremolo, strung-out stabs and general, curled and blippy menace. SF’s 1996 Flying Nun EP, ‘Supra’ is a dark, minimalist blaze, adorned by the strange ingénue and weirdo, feline giggle of artist, Saskia Leek. O’Reilly has also appeared alongside Rachel Shearer (Lovely Midget, Queen Meanie Puss) and Dean Roberts (Thela, Autistic Daughters) in Xe; with Chris Hazelwood and Look Blue Go Purple’s Lesley Paris in Olla; and is a current member of Siltbreeze/Xpressway/Flying Nun legends, The Renderers. He is joined by Christchurch concréte pop artist, LA Lakers. 

RICHARD NEAVE is a Christchurch guitarist, who, after an extended period in Thailand, returns briefly to play his first show here since stoned immemorial. Neave’s work has appeared on labels such as Root Don Lonie for Cash (Fabio Orsi, Armpit, Celia Mancini, Futurians, CJA, Kraus) and Celebrate Psi Phenomenon (Richard Youngs, Kemialliset Ystävät, Slow Listener, Ignatz), and he has exhibited at HSP and the Christchurch Art Gallery's Subsonic programme.

Altmusic Presents: BILL ORCUTT, WHITE SAUCER, BRUCE RUSSELL. Saturday 22 May, 2010

2010-05-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

Bill Orcutt emerged as one of the most influential guitar players of the 1990s, alongside drummer Adris Hoyos in the seminal Miami-based free rock band, Harry Pussy, their half-decade existence throwing up a boutique of caustic masterpieces alongside equally luminary cohorts on labels including Chocolate Monk (Richard Youngs, Incapacitants, Bruce Russell) and Siltbreeze (Charalambides, Guided By Voices, The Shadow Ring), but their volatile, calamitous sound has remained their matchless own.

Orcutt’s unanticipated return with the 2009 self-released 7", ‘High Waisted’ and his late-2009 LP, ‘A New Way To Pay Old Debts’, was an exhilarating reincarnation of the rambunctious automatism and hair-trigger ferocity that pervaded Harry Pussy’s earlier, combustible missives. In Mimaroglu’s words, the latter recording ‘let loose a pan-trajectorial spray of freedom-inflected guitar histrionics, captured gloriously in a room-tone / blown-amp fidelity’. Its un-building of a noise-blues vernacular invoked the equally insubordinate spirits of the late Derek Bailey and John Fahey, and the delta bros, Fred McDowell and Joseph Spence, and was a universal, underground heir of album of the year, appearing on The Wire magazine’s Rewind list next to Oneohtrix Point Never and Broadcast. 

Orcutt's plucked lacerations, spooky boogie, and ballistic extraterrestrial blues, bordered by the severe candour of his own ulterior, vocal utterances makes for an unsettling but downright melodious sound that repudiates mere descent into noise-guitar discord, while serving as a reminder to a whole contemporary pantheon of guitarists of how it should be done.

Radical éminence grise of the New Zealand experimental underground, Stella Corkey and Alan Holt’s White Saucer takes disorderly cues from what has been described as the triple threat freedoms of free jazz, 20th century avant-garde and psychedelic, improvised rock music. Their work has appeared on Freedom-From (Hair Police, Sightings, Harry Pussy, Jackie O, Thurston Moore), Drunken Fish (Bardo Pond, Roy Montgomery, Lee Ranaldo) and their own Pink Air, while Corkery has operated both solo as Sweetcakes and Arrows, and in collaborative shapes in Siltbreeze and Xpressway groups such as Queen Meanie Puss with Rachel Shearer and Hot Buttered Soul with Roddy Pain (Snapper, Evil). The multi instrumental duo slip between grubby and warbled extraterrestrial psych sorties to buzzed out Kosmische retreats. This is their first ever show in Christchurch.

Bruce Russell is an artist, composer and writer based in Christchurch, and is the founder of seminal labels, Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum. His work has appeared on a panoply of labels, including Smalltown Supersound, Ecstatic Yod, Spirit of Orr, Siltbreeze and Helicopter. His bands, The Dead C and A Handful of Dust have appeared on an equally formidable array of imprints. Russell has recorded with the likes of AMM’s Eddie Prevost, Mattin, John Wiese, RLW, Tetuzi Akiyama and Birchville Cat Motel, and has performed alongside a similar host of like minded, but diverse artists. 

Established in 2001 and now organized by committees in every major city in New Zealand under the Audio Foundation, Altmusic is an ongoing series of audio events, regularly bringing a vital injection of contemporary and experimental music from around the world to New Zealand. This year, the programme continues with each city curating its own event and touring this around NZ. 

TURNPIKE BECAUSE. 13 May - 12 June, 2010

2010-05-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

JEFF HENDERSON, LEILA ADU, ANTHONY DONALDSON, MISHA MARKS & RORY DALLEY. 27 April 2010.

2010-04-19T03:34:00.000-07:00

Jeff Henderson is one of New Zealand’s most preeminent musicians, appearing in an array of assorted musical incarnations and running an agile and provocative gamut from blown-out saxophone skronk to Vodou stomp and Rasin psych, from Neanderthal opera to Ongaku reductionism. He has appeared alongside a host of like-minded and stellar figures, including Steve Lacy, Marilyn Crispell, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, William Parker and The Necks’ Tony Buck. His investigative yet visceral approach to performance is lucid and enthralling.

Leila Adu’s voice has been compared to hot treacle on broken glass, and her latest producer, Steve Albini (Nirvana, Joanna Newsom, PJ Harvey) has called her spooky. She has performed alongside the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, experimental heroes, Jim Denley, Lol Coxhill and Steve Beresford, NZ ethnomusicologist icon, Jack Body, and the influential American proto-rap artist, Gil Scott-Heron. Described as a 21st century Nina Simone but coming across more as an empyrean Dagmar Krause, Adu’s versatile instrument is both terrifying and mellifluous.

Six Volts, The Front Lawn, Primitive Art Group, Labcoats, Flower Orphans, Melancholy Babes, Razorblades, Rubbernecks, Braille Band, Family Mallet, Mantarays, Village of the Idiots, Bung Notes and Razor Blades alumnus, Anthony Donaldson has been described by The Listener as a haunter of the Wellington jazz and improvised music world for the better part of three decades, and as festival curator, mentor and perennially chameleon drummer has informed and appeared alongside a host of experimental and pop luminaries both in NZ and abroad.

Rory Dalley’s inflamed percussion and personal hi-fi incineration has recently materialized in both solo and collaborative operations alongside Philip Jeck, Pink Reason, xNoBBQx, and Shoji Hano. His eldritch drumming and gravel dub electronics are a quasi-martial force to witness, his dime-dropping beats both virtuosic and primeval.

RICHARD ORJIS - SILVER PARK w/ DEATH THROES & LA LAKERS. 16 April - 8 May, 2010

2010-04-10T22:51:00.000-07:00

Silver Park is a crepuscular ceremony staged in the confines of the candle-lit gallery, its illuminated surfaces setting a transcendent scene for the dark leisure of two performances, played out within its lambent tableau.

The ritual vision is both comforting and confrontational, reflecting upon the twin nature of the show’s eponymous realm as a both a locus of consolidated leisure and familial airing, and a site of mythical peril. Orjis’ idyll is camp, reflective, paradisiacal, infernal, un/finished, operatic and survivalist.

Richard Orjis is an artist based in Auckland. Death Throes is a D-beat band based in Christchurch. LA Lakers is a vocal/tape artist also based in Christchurch.

0900 SOLAR BOARDING PAUSE ALONZO MORNING. 26 March - 10 April, 2010.

2010-03-21T04:52:00.000-07:00

LaBanna Bly
Richard Law
James Ferraro
Kevin DiTrapano
Stephanie Davidson
Jeffrey Joyal and Carlos Laszlo
Daniel Lopatin / Oneohtrix Point Never
Josh Burke / Triangle Glare / Nehal Shah
Samantha Gurry
Sean McCann
Ivan Gaytan
Craig Hand
Luke Wyatt
Zahid Jiwa
Nate Boyce
Tyler Dorson
Frank Baugh
Todd Ledford

Curated by Shea Bermingham and John Laser

0900 SOLAR BOARDING PAUSE ALONZO MORNING is a visual inquiry into what musician and columnist, David Keenan has described as Hypnagogic Pop, an underground musical zeitgeist mobilised by the 'creative mishearing of hyperreal 1980s chartbusters', and the erudite detourning of that epoch's still-lambent historo-retinal afterimage into a contemporary, artistic corpus of kinaesthetic, post-noise forms.

0900 is a collection of videos from contemporary artists working with, and as, preeminent US musical acts including James Ferraro, Ducktails, Oneohtrix Point Never, New Yoga, Mossy Throats, Sun Araw, Triangle Glare and Matrix Metals. Their works all subvert commercial totems through the use of upturned and detuned samples from televisual refuse, foggy digital filters, oneiric repetition, ghostly deceleration, and pausal, collagistic juxtaposition, in an uncanny optic manifestation of the revenant timbral symbols contained in their respective, portal-like soundtracks.

Comprised of a mixture of video art pieces, music videos, commercials, late nite phone-mercials and other cathode-ray detritus, 0900 is a playful exploration of the aesthetics and politics of a collective VHS memory, through an appropriately eclectic collection of vis-aur-al material.

Photography: Laser, except stairwell and bottom landscape, by Mark Gore.

SILENCIO ENSEMBLE - MEKHANE. 18 March, 2010.

2010-03-18T15:49:00.000-07:00

The central feature of Silencio Ensemble's Mekhane is a revolving mechanical apparatus with a six meter boom from which a microphone is suspended. The live, 12-piece ensemble sits in a circular fashion facing outwards in fleeting contact with various amplifications. The music making revolves around various interactions with the device and the structures found within it.

SIGN OF THE HAG, ISAAC VS DRUM MACHINE, MOS IOCOSS, BABA ROSSA, JEMI HEMI MANDALA & ZYE SOCOLES QUARTET. 17 March, 2010

2010-03-17T16:58:00.000-07:00

JANE AUSTEN, MELA, WITH MOTHS. 6 March, 2010

2010-03-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

TAHI MOORE. FAILED PURCHASES. 5 - 20 March, 2010

2010-03-03T23:46:00.000-08:00

CALL FOR PROPOSALS, 2010

2010-02-22T23:46:00.000-08:00

HSP presents an open call for proposals for its late-2010/early-2011 programme. The gallery extends this call to both emerging and established artists in all fields, including sound art and experimental music. Proposals are welcome from artists wishing to participate in curated, group or solo shows and projects in and outside the gallery.

Applications should include: A current artist's CV (outline of current work, education, exhibitions, reviews, publications etc); An exhibition proposal including physical and conceptual descriptions, diagrams and sketches. Clearly define the project and state any special requirements.

Email or post proposals to: P.O Box 3733, Christchurch; hsp.coordinator at gmail dot com, or drop in at level 1, 84 Lichfield Street, Christchurch.

DEADLINE: TUESDAY 30 MARCH 2010.

JOHN WIESE. BATTERY INSTRUMENTS PUBLICATION.

2010-01-29T19:50:00.000-08:00

Limited edition catalogue printed after the occasion of John Wiese's sound installation. Texts by Jared Wells and Bruce Russell. 76 Pages. Design by Tinytown. Printed in USA. $15 NZD postage included within NZ. Please contact the gallery for a copy.

Wells' expanded text is available HERE.

GRUNGE GENOCIDE DRUM PENTAGRAM WITH ADAM WILLETTS, OLIVER OF THE SKY. 29 January, 2010

2010-01-29T16:11:00.000-08:00

VELVET HOUR, IRD, SLIT THE THROAT OF THE ASSISTANT, JACK HOOKER. 23 January, 2010

2010-01-24T15:43:00.000-08:00

TAKEAWAYS. VARIOUS ARTISTS. 22 January - 13 February 2010

2010-01-20T00:26:00.000-08:00

Various works submitted to the cause and taken by those in attendance.

Curated by Matthew George Richard Ward and Paul H.

Benefactors: Tao Wells, Matt Akehurst, Audrey Baldwin, Sophie Bannan, Ross Brighton, Francis Edgerton-Till, David Epaulets, Gordon Faylor, Scott Flanagan, Nik Geene, P. Hozo, Maja Klaassens, Yi-Zhen Lai-Tremewan, Ashley McDonald, Peter Madden , Tim Middleton, Gaby Montejo, Daniel Munn, Charles Ninow, Clementine Nixon, Jenny Owens, Niamh Peren, Sanjay Theodore, Matthew George Richard Ward, Charlotte Watson, Ronan Whitteker, Stuart McKay.

KEVIN BLECHDOM (USA) FT. BARNWAVE + GREG MALCOLM & JENNY WARD. Wunderbar, 7 January, 2010

2010-01-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

Download: "Live in Sydney, Christchurch & Wellington"

Kevin Blechdom is a musician from Tallahassee, Florida, whose solo and collaborative work - as a member of Blectum from Blechdom and Adult Rodeo and as a duo with Eugene Chadbourne - has appeared on labels such as Kid606’s Tigerbeat6 (DJ /rupture, Indian Jewelry, Quintron and Miss Pussycat), Kit Clayton’s Orthlorng Musork (AGF, Akira Rabelais, Ekkehard Ehlers), Sonig (Jason Forrest, Mouse On Mars), Shimmy Disc (Daniel Johnston, Ruins, Shockabilly), Les Disques Victo (Anthony Braxton, Kid Koala, Hijokaidan, Wolf Eyes, Cecil Taylor) and Chicks On Speed Records (Le Tigre, DAT Politics).

Blectum from Blechdom’s first LP won second prize for Digital Music at Ars Electronica in 2001), while the Wire magazine described the duo's telepathic synergy as a 'riotous departure from what they regarded as the tight, minimal and earnest tendencies of male-dominated electronica', approximating the 'most vivid and literal musical definition yet of the word 'haywire'". The 2005 solo album, Eat My Heart Out consisted of a topless Blechdom, clutching the drippy esophagus, heart and lungs of a goat, while the music within was seen as an enactment of this literal evisceration, a confessionalism that has continued to inform her recordings and live performances since. Widely regarded as a retreat from the musical derangements of her practice heretofore, 2009's Gentlemania is just as harrowingly candid and more unsettling for its ostensible compositional simplicity. A bricolage of Broadway psych, show tune and hillbilly delirium and euphoric faux pas, the album was recorded with Warp label’s Jamie Lidell and stands out as a next-level treatise on interpersonal and inter-species phenomena. Blechdom is currently touring alongside Christopher Fleeger as the duo, BARNWAVE.

Greg Malcolm’s otherworldly abduction of the guitar and re-sounding of its grey acoustic matter has been witnessed across imprints like Kning Disk (James Blackshaw, Machinefabriek), (K-RAA-K)³ (Ignatz, Silvester Anfang, Es, Pan American), Table of the Elements (Thurston Moore, Tony Conrad, Captain Beefhart, John Cale, John Fahey), Interregnum (Robedoor) and Campbell Kneale’s Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Malcolm co-axes his surgically changed instrument into abstract drifts and moiré-like projections, its implanted contact microphones and sympathetic strings embellishing the subtle dexterity and gleaming nature of his idiosyncratic playing. Malcolm’s duo with Jenny Ward is a radically wronged mutation of decadent alt-country and marginal cabaret, equally as virtuosic but extra-demented and as duplicitously innocent-disturbed as Kevin Blechdom’s recent work. Ward equips Malcolm’s pulp ostinato and cringing jackknife Trippelgitaristen reek-outs with a mélange of walkie-talkie soprano, prurient gargles and puppet-like double-entendre ululations, recalling the halcyon of their earlier days as the touring kid show outfit, Such n Such, albeit weathered by the onset of cynicism, genius and transcendental New Sincerity.

JOHN WIESE - 'Battery Instruments'. 8 - 29 December, 2009

2009-12-08T21:32:00.000-08:00

John Wiese is an artist, composer and arch-collaborteur from Los Angeles, California, who has recorded alongside a myriad of other musical luminaries, such as Wolf Eyes, SunnO))), Die Monitr Batss, Lasse Marhaug, Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Thurston Moore, Cattle Decapitation, Merzbow, The Locust, Smegma, Yellow Swans, Daniel Menche and Bruce Russell. He has toured extensively throughout the world, covering Europe, Scandinavia and Australia as a member of Sunn O))), the UK as part of the Free Noise tour (a tentet including Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Yellow Swans, etc.), and the United States alongside Wolf Eyes.

Toted as parasympathetic drone aesthete and noise maven, Wiese’s meticulous sonic mode of operation is an adroit mixage of concrete ruthlessness, bubbly hypnosis and mash-up cassette psychosis. ‘Much like Japanese electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda,’ Pitchfork elaborates, ‘Wiese excels in making clean, precise cuts between drastically different sounds, building a drop-dead dynamic capable of stepping from almost-absent rumbles and hums to furious noise burst’. Wiese exhibits a conscientious, microscopic attention to detail, producing visceral sounds recorded straight to tape and digitally processed with faultless precision.

Having appeared at the 52nd Venice Biennale alongside Italian artist Nico Vascellari and installing sound exhibitions at Tokyo Tech, Tokyo and Family, Los Angeles, Wiese is in Christchurch to present his Battery Instruments Installation, an extension of his performance and recorded work into the protracted and enveloping space of the gallery.

[Images: Paul Johns, Matt Akehurst]

JOHN WIESE, ADAM WILLETTS, LA LAKERS. Oxford Terrace Baptist Church. 10 December, 2009

2009-12-07T21:44:00.000-08:00

PUMICE, VOLT, RICHARD SCOWEN. 19 November, 2009

2009-11-19T21:29:00.000-08:00

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.

NICHT SO SCHLIMM CATALOGUE.

2009-11-01T05:50:00.000-08:00

Published after the occasion of the Bad Painting show. $2. Please contact the gallery for a copy.

THE FUTURIANS, ZOMBIE?FUCK!, CJA, GRUNGE GENESIS. 29 October, 2009

2009-10-29T21:23:00.000-07:00

The proton b-punk and recalcitrant rock of The Futurians has been described by their Minneapolis label, Soft Abuse as 'analog futurism performed by a group of sci-fi addicted noise freaks.’ Its zonked clique of superheroes, consisting of Duckling Monster, CJA, Mandroid, and ISO12, creates a garage din straight out of the border territories of some bio-junk comic plot in a windswept cathode past. “It's Wolf Eyes meets The Troggs, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks meets This Kind of Punishment’, Soft Abuse continues. They’ve left a myriad of marks alongside Robedoor, James Ferraro, C Spencer Yeh, Ducktails, Bobb Bruno, Kevin Shields, LSD March, Fursaxa and Kraus on imprints like Arbor, Abandon Ship, Taped Sounds, Last Visible Dog and CJA’s own cult, Root Don Lonie for Cash and Hard Drugs. They’re joined by a solo CJA himself, compatriot robo-grot duo, Murderbike, Wellington’s euphoric somnambulance-chasers, Zombie?Fuck! and Bangkok’s Grunge Genesis. Crash landing space probe funk and emblazoned astro bebop jammed mainly from the blazed planet of Dunedin but aimed straight for your universal arcade cerebellums.

FENCE, SHAYNE BOWDEN, RICHARD NEAVE. 23 October, 2009

2009-10-23T21:08:00.000-07:00

Shayne Bowden is an Australian sound artist, writer and curator based in Fukuoka Japan. His practice switches between power electronics and percussion, and he has played alongside the likes of Eugene Chadbourne, Tetuzi Akiyama, Lawrence English and Acid Mothers Temple. In 2003 he founded DETERRA, an organization that has produced live shows by the likes of those listed above, and the AGAINST: Fukuoka Extreme Music Festival that has played host to noise legends, Incapacitants, Masonna and Jazkamer.

Fence is the Christchurch trinity of Into the Void’s Dave Imlay and Paul Sutherland, and fabled Flying Nun videographer and Terminals’ bass wizard, John Chrisstoffels. The formers’ guitar / turntable eruption is spliced open by the ragged glissandos and countershape drones of the latter’s Theremin and violoncello, producing a mud-crystal din that’s as rarefied as their appearances together as a cult ensemble.

Richard Neave is the Lautréamont of NZ noise. His phenomenological description of evil through sound, in critic Alex De Jonge’s words, forces his listeners to stop taking their world for granted. He shatters the complacent acceptance of the reality proposed by their cultural traditions and makes them see that reality for what it is: an unreal nightmare all the more hair-raising because the sleeper believes he is awake. Neave channels the twin infinitives of both Keiji Haino’s charged palmistry and Stephen Wright’s lethargic hilarity in one contorted Peter Townsend arc, swatting flies with decelerated, Penderecki-like precision and Harry Pussy-esque insubordination, and confusing R.L. Stine horripilation with fuzzbox Elmo tickle. Dexterous and Allergic. [Images: fraew]

DUCKTAILS, PETER WRIGHT, NOT EVEN OWLS, ADAM WILLETTS & LA LAKERS. 8 October, 2009

2009-10-08T20:55:00.000-07:00

[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.

ILIOS - Sound Art Performance and Talk, Christchurch Art Gallery. 7 October, 2009

2009-10-07T21:04:00.000-07:00

Producer of hits like 'Love is my Motor', 'Balls', 'Eurovision / Otravision' and 'Dance Classics', ILIOS is dance music’s brain-mulching enemy. Architect of some of the most austere and extreme sonic creations that are equally contemplative in their captivating realisation, the Greek composer and Spain-based curator has worked alongside an array artists working on similar exploratory fronts of music, such as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Francisco Lopez, Sachiko M, Steinbrüchel, Jazzkammer, Daniel Menche, Reynols’ Anla Courtis, and the Basque provocateur, Mattin.

ILIOS’ music investigates the limits of audibility in embodied listening encounters through the use of extreme frequencies and treated sonic ambiances, which are fed back with immersive and disorientating complexity into the equally resonant performance space. ILIOS has recently constructed an installation using the internal combustion engine vibrations of a car at the Athens Bienalle, contributed work to a moving train installation alongside Hecker, AGF and COH, while curating "Electrograph - "Athens Sound Media" a festival on sound media in Athens, [Un]Commonsounds project and SDR Muestra de Arte Sonoro de Santander in Spain.

Presented by HSP in association with Christchurch Art Gallery’s Showcase International Series, sponsored by The Press.

PAUL SOMETHING - 'I got in the other day and there was this spindle of dvdrs on the door step...'. 29 September - 20 October, 2009

2009-09-29T20:38:00.000-07:00

'I got in the other day and there was this spindle of dvdrs on the door step with some video works on them and the name 'paul' somewhere so me and a friend handbraked a few of them and did a compilation for a show at the gallery. We didn't have the time to invigilate the upstairs space every day so we installed the work at street level and locked the glass door so the public could just check out the work any time they were passing by. The opening occurred straight after a performance by Shoji Hano but it was more like a closing because we got everyone to leave the gallery before paul's exhibition was inaugurated, yet served orange juice on the street to make it seem adequately celebratory. Perhaps we'd get even more people along because Lichfield Street has really great pedestrian traffic flow and we're always looking for a more diverse crowd. The title of the show is contained herein, and continues in undocumented correspendence and thought amongst its audience both forward and backwards in time, here represented in abbreviated form with the appearance of ellipses...'

SHOJI HANO, ADAM WILLETTS, IRD, REUBEN DERRICK, JOE MCCALLUM. 29 September, 2009

2009-09-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

We continue our Best Drummer in the Universe Series with Japan’s Shoji Hano, one of free-jazz, noise and psychedelic rock’s most preeminent percussionists and brilliant all-round sages. Widely regarded on the same consecrated plane as celebrated jazz heavyweights, the late Rashied Ali, Milford Graves, and his own mentors Max Roach and Art Blakey, Shoji’s solo drumming is a mesmerizing feat to witness, and displays a bewildering dexterity that’s both physically and psychically difficult to attribute to the motions of one individual player.

Sketching and tracing moiré-like patterns with his limbs, Shoji’s flurrying percussive vernacular is disciplined and virtuosic, while remaining spirited and idiosyncratic. Intricate cross-patterns and superimposed timings bubble up and collide with furious detail, subsiding in cyclical and funky grace before erupting again with colourful exuberance.
His adroit Octopus-like beats and fizzy punk rhythms have been heard in a countless array of collaborative recordings with the esteemed likes of late pioneering guitarist, Derek Bailey, Acid Mothers Temple’s Kawabata Makoto, Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino, Eugene Chadbourne, and cult Japanese psychers High Rise. His work has also appeared on renowned labels, P.S.F. and Improvised Music from Japan.

Hano will be joined in his premier New Zealand show by Christchurch’s modular synth wizard, Adam Willetts, sax brains, Reuben Derrick and the beat mind shredder, IRD.

xNOBBQx, GRUNGE GENESIS. 25 September, 2009

2009-09-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

The Australian drums and guitar duo xNoBBQx are frequently compared to North American noise-rock legends Harry Pussy and Mouthus et al., but as its members Nik Dan and Matt Earle suggest, that’s only a point of reference for hipsters and themesters. Their deconstructive seizure punk might be a more direct channeling of the disobedient spirits on our own Bruce Russell’s legendary Xpressway label. ‘If the Dead C are the AMM of punk rock’, Seht’s Stephen Clover has suggested, ‘then xNoBBQx are a stop-motion Morton Feldman’. While sandwiched between the shitgaze and ethereal fog-dub of their Siltbreeze siblings, Ex-Cocaine, Psychedelic Horseshit, Fabulous Diamonds, Times New Viking, Pink Reason and US Girls, No Barbecue depart for an even further offworld plane, espousing a kind of gravity-irrespective devotional gamelan that’s dialed back to earth in splattered fits of melted free-jazz, ruptured Hendrix shreds and asteroid No-wave. Dan built his own kick drum out of a washing machine and Earle lists faith, danger, and Eric Clapton amongst his primary influences. ‘Dusty, primitive auto-shop floor oil-gunk from a couple of mono-syllabic jolt-action retards hailing from the hills of New South Wales’, continues Clover in his eulogistic dis, and it’s an appropriate précis of a puerile genius and mutant telepathy that to witness is one-part stand-up and the rest, pretty life-threatening.

Grunge Genesis is smuggled chandelier jungle scumprog and fair trade nootropic chug spazz. Here, they’re joined by aforementioned Dead C / Handful of Dust / Xpressway / Hermescorp arch-sorcerer, Bruce Russell to evoke the absent presences of the Thai DVD Plaza, Willem Defoe and Hoyts 6. Clear and fun.

PINK REASON, MARYROSE AND BRIAN CROOK & CRECHE, NDLSS DMNSN & ADAM WILLETTS. 16 September, 2009

2009-09-16T18:27:00.000-07:00

The bent, de-learned and congested drone, rear-ended syncopations, psychotropic jazz, autistic ragtime and geological gangster punk of Columbus, Ohio’s Pink Reason is made by a leviathan of transitory board members chaired by one Kevin de Broux, the witchdoctor of spiked rhumba dance contests and wrong Powerpoint presentations. Entirely uncertified sonic bookies and musical genre traitors, their sound can vary radically from Health & Medicine to New Age Religion & Philosophy to Business Directories. Total Purity and Danger. Variously described as ‘gothic basement post-punk’, ‘heroin rock for folkies’ and ‘robitussin blues’ by de Broux himself, Pink Reason’s sound has unkempt affinities with Siltbreeze and Woodsist labelfriends, Psychedelic Horseshit, The Dead C, Harry Pussy, Times New Viking, and Axemen, but their dropped library funk is probably the most self-consciously untalented and retarded of the lot.

Brian and Maryrose Crook’s principal work in the Renderers has appeared on Siltbreeze, Last Visible Dog, Flying Nun and Drag City, while Crook has axed dunes in half with The Terminals and Flies Inside the Sun, themselves a crucial early constituent of Kranky, and a band who appeared alongside Ashtray Navigations and Sunroof/Skullflower’s Matthew Bower on an 8-way label collaboration that included (K-RAA-K)³ and Ecstatic Peace! They’re joined by a mutant infant improv cycling team called Crèche in a project that’ll probably be called VIVID CLOUD / LUCKY DIN. It’s essentially squelchy piss jazz, muted jerkcore percussive rage and opera prepunk that splays out and layers up the goblet murk and riverine foundations for the Crooks’ ethereal angel trash to soar over all preternaturally and piratically. Chime and clang gemology.

Adam Willetts and NDLSS DMNSN play sonar music by genetically changed short-circuited, ocean-sized schools of supersonic and ectoplasmic WowWee Alive Panda Bear Cub Plush Robotic Toys. NDLSS DMNSN wields clairvoyant guitar powers and percussive elegance unmatched by the reverie traits of most other musical air movie dreamstraiters, while causing harsh as muck wrought iron eclipses to collide with endlessly contorted Jackson-5 loops, ominous hi-profile snuff-rock homicides, slo-mo organic gun shot wounds and punctured Dame Malvina space lungs, spliced Jennifer Hudson bowels, and true post-Xpressway downer ascension. In Ben Spiers’ words, Willetts sounds like ‘Omit covering the Bladerunner end credits music (via 1975 vintage Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream)’, but he comes right out of the movie Demons style, preying upon your wobbly fears of psych blueberries, see-thru mobster unicorns, crushed 666bpm marble dénouements, Pat Boone and Olympic synchronized swimming.

RYAN JEWELL, BRUCE RUSSELL, MATT HORSESHIT. 15 September, 2009

2009-09-14T19:34:00.000-07:00

Ohio’s Ryan Jewell is Secretary of both the UFOlogical Drummer Summit and Abducted Rare Species Groove Conference, 90210 A.C. Antenna to the percussion deities, Jewell channels the same octopus tempers as fellow un-counters, Chris Corsano, Edie Prevost, Tim Barnes, Chris O’Connor and the Dialogue of Drums, but lands in a separate dyslexic ocean completely, soft abrasions and filament scratches hook up on a dexterous mulch tide of brush slithers and skimmed respires, all with the most minimal of instrumental elements. ‘It's all acoustic’, the artist describes his Blackest Rainbow release. ‘Supersonic acoustic sine waves interfering with one another making audible sweeps, etc. It's all just a floor tom. Secret fuckin' ninja jedi mind moves and shit’. He’s splashed crystals and huffed concrète with likes of C Spencer Yeh, Graveyards, Greg Kelley, Wasteland Jazz Unit, Psychedelic Horseshit and Pink Reason, who he’ll join on the kitset on the night after, but Jewell is a pretty dropjaw player in his own right as a mind-resetting soloist.

Matt Whitehurst is the conscience and intelligence behind the ‘crack-house disco and tin-can post-punk’ secretions of Psychedelic Horseshit, who have appeared on labels Woodsist and Siltbreeze alongside Raccoo-oo-oon, Wooden Wand, Wooden Wand, Wavves, Sic Alps and Blank Dogs, and many others. Commissioners of Shitgaze, the aptly manicured christening of a musical language that is scatological at its most refined, Horseshit captures what Siltbreeze calls the ‘rickety skeletal pop of Step Forward-era Fall, the lo-fi fuzz of Swell Maps, and static noblesse of Slay Tracks-era Pavement’, but turns this historical mandate into a filthy abstract matter of botched skank, fucked pop, gashed Folkways excavations and expelled school bully blues. Whitehurst also appears solo before joining Pink Reason on Wednesday the 16th. Glam has left the building.

Bruce Russell is THE most preeminent and influential musician this country, if not the planet has seen and heard. His band, The Dead C has spawned more soundalike bands than Wagner, and he has appeared on an array of labels, such as John Wiese’s Helicopter (Haters, Merzbow, Yellow Swans), Smalltown Supersound (Jazzkamer, Kevin Drumm, Jaga Jazzist), Ecstatic Yod (Sunburned, Gang Wizard, NNCK, Destroy all Monsters), Chocolate Monk (Melt Banana, Harry Pussy, Richard Youngs, Incapacitants, Neil Campbell, The Skaters), Spirit of Orr (Axolotl, Ashtray Navigations, MV&EE), Ba Da Bing! (Comets On Fire, Six Organs Of Admittance, Beirut), Fat Cat, Sub Pop, Siltbreeze and Mattin’s W.M.O./r. His own labels Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum have played host to a similarly proliferate amount of dream groups and sound wizards: The Shadow Ring, Flying Saucer Attack, Tetuzi Akiyama, Taku Sugimoto, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and others. Ambient punk brains, grunge treatise sage, mock-theoretical genius, Power Ambient architect, emotional hardcore psychopathologist and investigative shogun, Russell is Heliocentric lifer and amethyst axis of the galaxy eros.

R.MUTT - 'SPRAYS'. 1 - 26 September, 2009

2009-09-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

VEGAN ICECREAM BONFIRE. 1 August 2009

2009-08-02T03:03:00.000-07:00

anya henis & cellulite rose. vibes. 21 july - 1 august 2009

2009-07-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

JAMES VOLLER. Offsite Project Publication, 2009

2009-07-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

CRECHE / ADAM WILLETTS & NDLSS DMNSN. 16 July 2009

2009-07-17T00:32:00.000-07:00

MARTYN REYNOLDS: Chicken McNuggets and the Universal Machine. 15 July 2009

2009-07-17T00:23:00.000-07:00

MARTYN REYNOLDS: Disneyland/d'Orsay Daypass/Doorpass. 14 July 2009

2009-07-17T00:06:00.000-07:00

NICHT SO SCHLIMM. 23 June - 11 July, 2009

2009-07-08T23:25:00.000-07:00

Tom Kreisler, Mark Braunias, Rob Hood, Selina Foote, Telly Tu’u, Sam Rountree-Williams, Peter Robinson, Miranda Parkes, Malcolm Terry, Pete Wheeler, Matt Arbuckle & Gina Granwal.

Hung - and displayed here in descending sequence - by: Sam Rountree-Williams, Telly T'u, Harold Grieves, Nik Geene, Tjalling de Vries, Dave Marshall & Tony de Latour...

PERLONEX, PRESCHOOL. Provincial Chambers. 30 June, 2009

2009-06-26T17:53:00.000-07:00

The Berlin group PERLONEX’s flurrying micro textures and corrupted electro-acoustic zones have taken them on a twisting incursion across some of the most persistently radical and inventive musical fields of thought and experimentation. While the trio have collaborated and played alongside an esteemed line-up of disparate spirits that have included pianist Charlemagne Palestine and Keith Rowe (AMM), its individual members have done time with an even more proliferate array of iconoclastic luminaries, such as Don Cherry, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jason Forrest, Anla Courtis (Reynols), Philip Jeck, The Haters’s GX Jupitter-Larsen, Xavier Charles, Valerio Tricoli, Toshimaru Nakamura, Phil Minton, and our own Greg Malcolm. Percussionist Burkhard Beins’ Polwechsel has appeared on fabled UK label Erstwhile in tandem with Fennesz and prolific Swiss imprint Hat Hut, alongside AMM’s John Tilbury.

Their first appearance here will take place in the Stone Chamber of the provincial Council Buildings, whose ethereal ambiance promises to let Perlonex’s susurrating hymnal chimes, flickered euphonies and buzzing glassine arcs levitate on another level. As The Wire Magazine’s Nick Cain writes, Perlonex’s 'music is in a state of constant movement and advance, and though the rate and speed at which it shape-shifts varies greatly, it is never static. Comparison has been made to AMM, and there are surface similarities in the use of layers of sound in the construction of the improvisations, but Perlonex’s electronic source material is significantly more dynamic, and the range of sounds it generates broader'.

Christchurch’s PRESCHOOL will provide a fitting entrance mantra for Perlonex’s euphoric liturgy. Improv gone totally crèche, its members consist of the black eminences of the New Age prospect: Adam Willetts, LA Lakers, Rory Dalley, Reuben Derrick, Stuart McKay and Silencio Ensemble’s Chris Reddington. Rhapsodic and immersive, as Geraldine Wojno Kiefer would put it, 'Deity in the pastoral tradition is believed to inhere partly in the landscape and partly in the perceiver, who imagines herself as an active participant and domesticator of this eminently livable space. Pastoral landscape includes a variety of topographical forms, rendered and clothed in verdant green grass, pasturage, woods and farms'.

Presented in association with ALTMUSIC and Vitamin S.

PAVILIONAIRES: PAUL SLATER. 10 June - 10 July 2009

2009-06-10T04:39:00.000-07:00

A.D. SCHIERNING. Free-dom Fruit Gardens. 10 June - 4 July 2009

2009-06-09T23:39:00.000-07:00

Free-dom Fruit Gardens is part of a nationwide project that endeavours to have fruit orchards planted in each of New Zealand’s main cities. Schierning creates a park-like atmosphere within the gallery where the viewer can sit on a bench fashioned from scrap wood, in the shade of a lemon tree and contemplate her agenda. Drawn over one wall is a map of Christchurch detailing areas of parkland and areas that measure a level 10 on the Deprivation Index. Pinpointing the area within Christchurch with the most condensed high-level deprivation rating according to this index.

Free-dom Fruit Gardens is a visual representation of a proposal to the Christchurch City Council that parkland within this area be planted as a fruit orchard.

New Zealand is divided into 39,300 mesh blocks, which have an average of 110 people in each. From information gathered in the census each mesh block has been graded on the Deprivation Index from one to ten, one being the least deprived and ten the most.Combining data such as income, home ownership, education, living space, and other factors, the (most recent) 2006 Deprivation Index grades the entire country’s wealth in this scale. Using the 2006 Deprivation Index for Christchurch City, I have pinpointed the area that has the most condensed deprivation according to this scale. This is the site for the proposed Free-dom Fruit Garden.

NZDep2006 Index of Deprivation._ Ref: Salmond, C., Crampton, P. and Atkinson, J. University of Otago,Wellington.

JUSTIN KERR. Rat Basket. 19 May - 6 June 2009

2009-05-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

Justin Kerr’s Rat basket is a supine wicker man whose heart is a hole in the floorboards. The figure is bubbly - well, desiccate, but kind of animatronic nevertheless - contorting an amicable but amputated Vitruvian shape between the gallery’s 2 pillars that’s visually algorithmic, almost moiré like in its docility, spinelessness and playful pathos. It might be latent scaffolding for a costumed resuscitation or snap fairytale hormonal spurt, but really its anthropomorphic strut is a genetic mutation in the artist’s own errant ergonomic mishap: the inability to manufacture the quadrupedal and more imposing body of the intended titular rascal, which here might be instead the androgynous recline of a larger, sublimated art-historical rat, or indeed a navigable break down of this very gallery's dilapidation and infestation. Anyhow, Rat Basket feels like a sacrifice in the workshop of animal fetish – a sort of inverted Frankensteinian experiment to create a somatic accident that turns out too perfect, too figurative, however hollow and slack. Sacrificial also as a sort of decorative, decapitated angel, its body is alluring and unsettlingly vulnerable despite its cute enormity. While its very hollow curvaceousness, tunnel-like limbs, and general contour-like topos is an invitation to get inside it, you'd prefer to just look right through, weigh up the gently conflicting latitudes and longitudes of the buoyantly marooned reflexology, see it flutter in the draft, before wistfully retreating. From a departing distance, it seems to retreat on its own floored axis.

TJALLING DE VRIES. Montages. 5 - 16 MAY 2009

2009-05-15T17:57:00.000-07:00

JAMES VOLLER. Offsite Project, Autumn 2009

2009-05-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

RICHARD FRATER. Still. 5 - 16 May 2009.

2009-05-01T17:36:00.000-07:00

There is some writing about it HERE

NICKI WYNNYCHUK. A flag and a flagpole. 21 April - 2 May 2009.

2009-04-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

RICHARD NEAVE. 14-18 APRIL 2009

2009-04-12T23:13:00.000-07:00

Neave is a guitarist whose work has appeared on labels like Celebrate Psi Phenomenon alongside Birchville Cat Motel, Richard Youngs and Lee Ranaldo et al., and Peter Stapleton's fabled Metonynmic with the Nick Harte-led CM ensemble. He has played with the likes of Lynton Denovan, Adam Willetts & La Lakers in Grunge Genesis, and Dunedin's Lee Noyes, with whom he appears on the recent Wire Magazine and Audio Foundation Compilation, Dirt Beneath the Daydream.

Neave's first and final exhibition at HSP before his departure involves a characteristically dexterous and intricate archival presentation of field recordings mined through the artist's clandestine surveillance of gallery openings around the country over the past year. Condensing this vast repository of itinerant Enquiry and feeding it back as an audio resource into the natural habitat and accumulative forum of new spacious confines, Neave conducts a direct interrogation of a live audience that finds itself mimicked through the unintelligibility of the re-articulated din that mingles with real time gallery chatter.

LYNTON DENOVAN. 10 - 18 APRIL 2009.

2009-04-10T17:32:00.000-07:00

MATT AKEHURST. GALLERYGALLERY. MARCH 31 - APRIL 11 2009

2009-04-09T03:50:00.000-07:00

SUPERSTITION SITS

Ripped these images straight off Matt's Gallery Gallery blog. The Russian Dolls analogy is totally ace. The photographic literature of HSP's move in to the Lichfield Space on the wall is an apposite pre-echo of the de rigeur texts that line the shelves of Akehurst's cargo vault, which will themselves become part of a flicked archival history, probably sold on the way things are goin so entrepreneurially round here.

Akehurst's structure is a kind of incredulous shrine to the hardware rites of re-moval and re-fabrication of installation as a palimpsest ideology. It's suspect, or suspicious, cutting a negative-exponential and calculating hole in the main capacious room, makes the larger outfit look gratuitous, frivolous, yet transfigured by this banal replica, cast in reverse, that operates like an archetypal construction 'HQ', its makeshift yet foundational husk catalyzing some Greater Taproot Institutional Behemoth, which here is the appropriately acronymized HSP. The latter indicts itself as affable Host.

It's through one-part gest that Gallery-to-the-power-of-2 secretes itself as an affront from within and one-part appropriation as theft that it functions so admirably. Of course there's one-part Bachelardian fun to be had within the furrowed niche of this new furniture. This homely e-state is further toyed with by the enveloping smell of everfresh primer - that perennial olfactory enterprise of fake renewal. I've been admiring the way Adam Art Gallery does this with their fab rubber solution which renews your embryonic experience at every turn.

PRANK ETUDES WRONG PETCHERA KTCUTCHHA. 21 March, 2009. Disused Burger Bar, High Street.

2009-03-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

Performances by Heavy Turkey, Creche, Radio Cegeste, I Don't Spook Easy and Richard Neave. Flyer by Lynton Denovan.

TAO WELLS. ltd. edition posters for 'Cut', 2008 Offsite Project

2009-03-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

ROBERT HOOD. THE WRECKED KILOMETRE. 10 -28 MARCH 2009

2009-03-05T16:48:00.000-08:00

RAEWYN MARTYN. Waterwall. Reading Room Installation. 3 - 9 March 2009

2009-03-03T18:17:00.000-08:00

TENNISCOATS, TIM COSTER & SETH REES. Marsupial. 26 February 2009

2009-02-28T22:40:00.000-08:00

photos: Markus Gradwohl

HIGH PLACES, DAN DEACON & ADAM WILLETTS. Marsupial. February 21 2009

2009-02-28T21:57:00.000-08:00

Adam Willetts plays blissed-out psychedelic dream pop using just a couple of monophonic synths, one analogue/digital hybrid and one homemade analogue modular. He creates rich, expansive fields of sound with a fragile yet propulsive sense of momentum, and through the sparseness of his approach allows space for subtle details and blemishes to drift into the foreground. Well known in the New Zealand noise and sound art scene for his highly conceptual improvised work with self-sampling laptop, electromagnetic fields, wii remotes and other gamepads, Adam has been steadily transforming his practice since relocating from Auckland to Christchurch early last year, ditching his computer, picking up his soldering iron and building a less conceptual, more musical foundation for his work. The slake moth has hatched from his cocoon and your dreams are waiting to be eaten.

When describing the music and famed live performances of Baltimore's DAN DEACON, it's easy to slip into a juvenile and excited '90s lexicon; RAD! KOOL! SUPER! FUN! seemingly emanate from his glitch-laden, HI-NRG brand of pop. This is not to say Deacon's music is childish, but rather that his unique set-up, shows, and aesthetic conjure up the best and most vivid childhood associations like Saturday morning cartoons, pizza parties, Woody Woodpecker, blowing the dust out of yr N64 cartridges and fluorescent cereals. Perhaps this is why Deacon was handpicked for a US tour with fellow party-starter GIRL TALK; his performances are similarly free of pretension and appeal on a totally base, almost instinctual level. Rejecting the stage and occupying a space within the crowd, Deacon arranges his haphazard collection of tricked-out electronics, kitsch toys and keyboards before launching into a frenzied set of weirdo pop jams. At times Deacon adopts the role of conductor, often handing out lyric sheets, initiating dance-offs and whole-crowd theatrics in a further attempt to break down the crowd/performer barrier and encourage inter-audience connectivity.

Hailing from the ridiculously fertile streets of Brooklyn, NYC, Mary Pearson and Rob Barber formed HIGH PLACES in 2006 and have established themselves as both a local and international favourite through extensive touring (with YACHT, No Age, Abe Vigoda, Lucky Dragons, to name a few), and a smattering of small releases before being signed to Thrill Jockey records (Tortoise, The Boredoms, Fiery Furnaces) in mid-2008. Thrill Jockey allowed the physical release of 03/07-09/07 an excellent compilation of the duo's early material where Pearson's dreamy vocals weave seamlessly with the ebbs and flows of Barber's clamorous mix of exotic samples and reverb-drenched polyrhythms. Their eagerly awaited debut full-length further showcased the pair's skill in combining undeniable melodies and layers of off-kilter rhythms, but this time around with the occassional addition of bassy punctuated synths, enhancing the innate danceability within their dense soundscape. High Places embrace a series of polarities; organic/electronic, clean/cluttered, pop/experimental and their sound is a fully realised synthesis of these. It's not often pop music sounds as inviting and interesting as this.

CAROLINE MCQUARRIE. I Think I Was Blind Before I Met You. 20 February - 7 March, 2009

2009-02-19T17:12:00.000-08:00

I Think I Was Blind Before I Met You combines photography and textiles in an exploration of vernacular family photography. Combining domestic imagery with domestic craft, McQuarrie utilises the personal and the handmade to question ideas of belonging and the connections that exist between people.

McQuarrie has long been interested in the objects used to maintain connections between people, and is currently looking specifically at objects used within families. In A Singularity (2007), she uses formal family photographic portraits, working directly into the photograph and embroidering over the cosy family scenes, re-working them in tapestry wool and embroidery thread. By literally sewing her family together, she is highlighting the artificial, constructed nature of these types of images. These works also engage with both the photograph and the act of making as a way of ‘making special’, and memorialisation of the idealised family life that these types of photographs engender. How To Fight Loneliness (Just Smile All The Time), (2006-2008) is a series which continues similar themes. Again combining the media of photography and textiles, this series comprises five pairs of images. Each pair comprises two photographs re-worked in some form of textile, then re-printed as a photogram (A photogram is a photographic print made by placing an object on light sensitive paper and shining light onto it, the paper stays white where the object shields it from the light). The first image in each series is of a home the artist has lived in, its pair is a group or ‘family’ photograph taken during the period she lived in the house. Questioning social constructions of both the house as ‘home’, and the artificiality of smiley ‘family’ photos, this work also utilises both media’s tendency towards elevating particular images and objects as special. In the final work This is The First Day of My Life, (2008-2009); the artist has created a large floor ‘doily’, incorporating iconic images from childhood crocheted in wool. Exploring more fully the decorative nature of both handcrafts and photographic imagery, the artist deconstructs the ‘surface’ element of both, trapping the children in the images in a large web of decoration and artifice.

EL GUINCHO, AS AT & MOUNT PLEASANT. SOFA Basement, Arts Centre. 14 February 2009.

2009-02-06T16:19:00.000-08:00

Compare the compressed crush of the embedded youtube clip to the vociferous whine that El Guincho issued forth on the night itself. It pulls the samples right into their righteous position in a crumbly sunburst foreground. Its entropic crackle and utter LACK is a ripping depiction of what they could've been if it wasn't for the hamfisted and myopic live sound design, the monolithic pogo-oriented uniformity of the audience, the tropical depression of the basement-rave milieu, the domestic ennui of its sonic spill into the Arts centre's north Quadrangle, and the general suppression of musical seretonin by the dominant power that be: The Decibel. There were daisy snippets of the minimalist power of "Alegranza" to be-hear, but the hiss and bumble of the hi and lo ends respectively made for a pretty amnesiac 1-D pandemonium. Maybe this writer should've spent more time on that front-line of dancing mimicry and enthusiastic relaxation that constituted the mainline energy, but he just wanted to listen: and where were The Holes? I dunno, I've been mesmerized by this clip. The Dan Deacon shit I've been watching is equally aquatic in its complete incapacity. Let's hope his LIVE appearance on Saturday 21st retains some of this digital erosion before the fact.

Mount Pleasant's 'conceptual' performance was the brainchild of its drummer, a one-note exercise that sure, you could call athletic. Disciplined, its homophonic 4onthefloor pulse was augmented by a primal vocal garnish, and thus departed from its compositional intent, yet remained temporally transfixed. If the crowd had approached this as carelessly expectant as they did with El Guincho, then it could've become more than a sort of insular transformation, a group-retreat, a group-hug, a group-retirement. It was another kind of End of Music, but remained merely evocative in its terminal status: there'll be more ascencion to come from these musicians.

AS AT were as grungy as Chris Andrews' wonderfuly misplaced double exposure of LA Lakers' fetal short circuiting not seen below. Bittersweet, it was kind of like some rendition of Banshee Beat by the Beatles in all its asinine anachronism. I went over with Aleix from El Guincho later and he compared some of the car crash vocals to Ghédalia Tazartès and we ending up just talking about that.
I shouldn't have written El Guincho off so much, just blocked my ears and closed my eyes and blocked my nose and got on with my own passive proceedings throughout their vibe-rant show. try and hold on to the memory.

2009: RETREAT

2009-02-01T22:25:00.000-08:00

Albert Chan & Stacey Turner. THE POT THICKENS (WHEN YOU STIR THE PASTA). 3 - 15 February 2009.

2009-01-31T22:07:00.000-08:00

EUGENE CHADBOURNE. Wunderbar, Lyttelton. 24 JANUARY 2009. 9pm.

2009-01-13T21:17:00.000-08:00

Chadbourne's humour was as viciously desultory as his dynamic virtuoisty, witticisms ballistic left right and centre, as hick oompa ostinato subsided ruthlessly to scorched tumulus drone, itself slipping back on the highway for MOR blues-brood before colliding head-on with another jacknifed series of unwarranted genres, indelible yet incessantly stuck in the rear-vision mirror of our captivated attunement through its sheer, illegal velocity. Richard Neave once wondered how you'd distinguish between speed and velocity in music and I dunno whether Chadbourne confused or cleared up the issue but what remained pretty explicit was the carnage left at each abrupt cadence: There was no stasis if that's that speed entails, no free-fall agitprop hedonizm but I suppose that's what velocity's all about. Anyway it wasn't up/down so much as just fuckn omnidirectional - and not in that cloying manner that Borderline Ballroom presented their Merry Xmas simultaneous-DJ shtick as either. It engendered confusion and confounded a crossroads audience, which only made the hilarity of the event exponential, lucidly murmured and beautifully nagging falsetto jokes apprehended among a subdued cloud of downer frowns, and chuckles and nervous appeasements. Greg Malcolm's set was softly scintillating, more strata o'er there in his sympathetic resonances than I'd ever heard before, and I've seen him do his trick more than once, too. His music blurred latitude and longtitude, just like Eugene's, less schyzophrenic but equally mesmeric. dave took this typically infuriatingly amputated shot of the goings-off. Nice last frame though. _ JOHN LASER.

Un/Equal parts polymath, autodidact, inventor, scene-mongrelizing underground cult anti-hero and true Maverick of modern North American music, Eugene Chadbourne strikes Christchurch with his eclectically singular and incendiary brand of electrified be-bop hillbilly improv.

While sharing a not-too-dissimilar profile to thatof now-popular compatriot Daniel Johnston, Chadbourne has infiltrated contemporary rock music more as a true polemicist than a mere eccentric, a familiar icon of momentous experimentation, particularly in the New York ‘loft scene’ of the 1970s and beyond, where he has appeared alongside luminaries such as John Zorn, Bob Ostertag, Marc Ribot, Fred Frith, Steve Beresford, Henry Kaiser and Cellist Tom Corra.

With well-known producer and grunge guru Mark Kramer, Chadbourne later founded Shockabilly, who, after releases on Rough Trade and New York’s Knitting Factory, were deemed the East Coast reply to The Residents. Chadbourne has also appeared alongside Elliot Sharp, Violent Femmes and Sun City Girls on a CD called Jesse Helms Busted for Pornography, which shows where his humorous political targets lie. A top official in Ronald Reagan’s administration once referred to Chadbourne as ‘the biggest threat to the American way of life’ and his G.O.I.N. (Get Out of Iraq Now) Band has eloquently and satirically told the more recent administration where to go.

Chadbourne comes to Christchurch with his own magick invention: The Electric Rake, a gardening utensil mined with electrical pickups that makes the sound of a punk horticulturalist tending to equally belligerent blades of wild and coruscating metal grass. Mixed up with his raconteur wizardry, it will be a persuasive combustion. As Pumice put it recently, Chadbourne issues forth scrambled LSD & whiskey country & western, free range plink plonk Ayler tunes on the banjo that went on uncomfortably long, fierce rake racket. He’s totally fearless, reckless, and squirmy. I’ll be there.

MARSUPIAL GALLERY. OPENS 8 JANUARY 2009.

2009-01-07T01:00:00.000-08:00

JOHN DORY BOOKSTALL _ new books. new zines. new soda

... GRUNGE GENESIS _ TUESDAY 13 JANUARY. 9pm

Elevated In Vitro contrapunk Weltschmertz w/ Richard Neave + LA Lakers + Adam Willetts _ Crushed Misanthropy-knows-No-Age cross-suites for tenant Echo Boomers. BYO.

..SIMON LAWRENCE _ OPENING. FRIDAY 16 JANUARY. 5.30pm. BYO

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MARSUPIAL GALLERY
177 HIGH STREET, CHRISTCHURCH
marsupialgallery@gmail.com
http://marsupialgallery.blogspot.com/
027 7130011