chronox. - gwandalan - dungeon taxis - cass - 7$
Lacustrine mood service of tidal zonation and depth-sounding outlook music, transcribed from devotional watching sessions at the Coastal Mirage Tabernacle in Lake Macquarie, NSW. Face A surfaces across a GUI island of synthesizer coruscation and littoral splash; B returns as a tritone horizon of heavenly warble and remote Siren exultation. The Melbourne duo had their equipment set up for days, and would rise from the porch every now and then, change something, go back to the porch and stare across the water. Dungeon Taxis 19.
white saucer / currer bells - split - dungeon taxis - cass - 7$
Pink Air walkers, Stella Corkery and Alan Holt’s beautifully titled and likewise assumed ternary form of glow jams cross Stella’s cymbal loiter, shaker susurration, and fanned out wild flam drags with Alan’s zero zero to total dipper synthesizer fields. Tim Coster and Angeline Chirnside’s Currer Bells side comes through a faraway hinkypunk peal, yielding to a warbled zephyr of healing chime sustain. Recorded in balmy crepuscular rays at Peaking Lights’ Good Style Shop in Madison in 2010 with distortion pedal, cassettes, walkmans, Just Chimes, mixers, delays, thumb piano, looper, Korg DS-10, freeze, harmonicas, guitar, wedding bells, Monotron, phaser. Dungeon Taxis 15.
xNoBBQx. - muryoku muzenji, koenji, 2010 / happy, wellington, 2009 - dungeon taxis - cass - 7$
Flipped reprisal of that 2009 New Zealand incursion, this live Tokyo/Wellington diptych steps to the mic in unruly, xenolinguistic fashion, it’s squashy ‘drums’ and ‘guitar’ fission the most munchy and hyperventilated of all Matt Earle and Nick Dan’s released programmes. Muryoku Muzenji, Koenji, 2010’s counterpoint creature squall dovetails with rhizomatic kit blare and toothed glissandi in horn-like confusion. Happy, Wellington, 2009 is such an unreal Bolero – like crazy tormenting 4/4s, gamelan detunes, and poltergeist tempo hassle. Dungeon Taxis 16.
richard francis & clinton watkins / adam willetts - s/t - dungeon taxis - 7" - 7$
Emulsified dunes and slowmo mistrals committed to 7 inches of confinement somewhere in I Zwicky 18 by the antipodal trinity of the mind-juicing club: CMR zone-clerk Richard Francis, Whitebass’ Clinton Watkins and Saturn’s Adam Willetts. Probably written in 1610-11. First side blasts in with the sand-drinking mug-shot Francis/Watkins Hydrahead, conducting light-year syncopations, cryptozoological moshpits and gale enemy forces through the doorway of your featherweight stucco homes. Flipside captures the carbonated mind of Adam Willetts in the same place Anakin Skywalker must have been in just before he beamed over to the shadier side of synapse-shredding psychedelic pop music. Deep-as-Hell Rotella decollages from made-up worlds where this stuff grows everywhere. On Earth it’s cryptobotanical. Hydrophonic Dagobah loops, low-end data-obliteration overtures, and general all-round friendship-termination.
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sf - ghost pulse - dungeon taxis - cass - 8$
Would’ve called this set of stunning organ and guitar vignettes ‘spectral’ if it wasn’t for its already right-on christening. Did call Sean O’Reilly King Loser’s éminence grise once and the feeling stays. Has to be the musical doyen of what Deleuze would call the ‘in-between’. Looked across and saw him clapping his hands unamplified whilst playing in the Renderers, too. It was in the heat of a refrain and he was just grooving out, in tacet. His reticence is cool but this tape is next level. Sick to hear something of his very own for the first time since the Supra EP on Flying Nun. Dungeon Taxis 13
stuart mckay. - dripwatch - dungeon taxis - cass - 8$
Astonishing programme of unreal folk music and pyre mantra from Elsewhere. McKay’s delicate but inflammatory monument to cross-rhythmic acoustic guitar radiance, ligneous ragas and ruling tunes made from hardly anything is the lesson. The works are drumlike in their tolling and reiterative minimalism. Syncopated and layered interplay is strikingly cathartic but really really disquieting. Eloquent and angelic but kind of irate as well!? Shamanic voices evaporate from a sophomore song that becomes a Gamelan of aquatic and bitcrushy chimes. The harp-like contours of another one slowly crumble into a plucky microscopic breakdown before re-erupting as a luminous, tintinnabulating helix. Really good and not as obfuscate as
ird - compactor bile / herd not scene - dungeon taxis - cass - 6$
Rookie railcar leaper Rory Dalley channels the athletic parabola energies on this uprooted and winged heap of cremated beats, petrology funk and heavily composted Cadillac Fleetwood groove. Tape treks off in the Lower Paleolithic grotto mind, coalmining and telecombing the Sumner Beach fluorescence, shifting from shuffled sandhopper trapeze to iridized octopus kit-splash somewhere further down the floating coastline. Medicated contra-fizz and sunstroke splatter dubbed straight to the ebbing tide, then windswept to tape live over the unlearned spirits of Ginger Baker, Keith Moon, Mitch Mitchell and Levi Eshleman. Second side drifts the emblazoned offworld breeze of interrogated mini-koto and amethyst-clustered gunk-gaku. Explict Hex Scenes, Rug Use, Duck Language, and totally rated Basic Instinct.
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la lakers - when - dungeon taxis - cass - 6$
Live to air in Lyttelton in May 2009 when the musician pretended to be a duo from Kaiapoi and conducted a fake interview with its revenant participants. Ominous mists embraced the surrounding hills, before creeping toward the quiescent harbour. Apologetic rainbows.
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john pilcher & martin mckelvey - a bun dance - dungeon taxis - cd - 14$
The Eagle Has Strayed in this 48-minute opus of lunar musique concrete right out of the late 60s in Hastings, NZ. These squiggly, prescient jams emerge on the very 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's inaugural moonlanding, having originally sampled and plunged that stuttering, televized transmission into another sea of tranquility and magnificent desolation right out here in an even more remote solar system. Pilcher's periperal figure hangs ghostlike out on the edge of the front cover next to a poster of The Beatles' HELP! semaphore (they're not even spelling HELP by the way), It's a revealing allusion to the radically warped jams that were already taking place Out Here, a preamble for the winding genealogy of the country's later musical lab tests. Stellar tapezones joyously light years ahead of time.
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