“Experimental and avant-garde…. This will challenge your perceptions of what constitutes music and open the mind to new possibilities of sounds that surround us ” – muzic.net.nz
“The 50-minute piece of music, broken down into six movements, was performed live over a few nights for the Fringe Festival in 2005; the group taking out the Best Music Award.
“It was stunning. Discordant guitars were choked, drums clattered and crashed, voices mingled with percussion and keyboards – but this form of free-improvisation had a structure to it. It had movement, it had a plan. It was a great beast of a song that writhed and wriggled and often managed to run downhill, away from the players – in the best possible way.
“Here, the show has been recorded onto a CD for posterity – and it begs discovery. It’s an intense listen – but that’s to be expected from a group of players who took their name from one of John Coltrane’s toughest listening albums.” –Simon Sweetman
…but by then I’d had enough of Wellington, and moved across the ditch, to Melbourne, Australia. The result was
In Melbourne I bought a banjo, and started to incorporate it with field recordings and electronica, using a cassette dictaphone and the laptop technology of the time.
This was still before social media or music streaming sites, so again I self-released it on CDR… one of the last albums in that format before it became obsolete. I released it under the name Dave Black, to signal a change of style from my earlier works.
Returning to NZ I spent a year in Nelson, in the South Island , and studied at the Nelson School of Music (finally learning some ‘conventional’ technique).
By this point I was 26, had played in an award-winning 18-piece punk symphony and as an international artist at the Liquid Architecture festival in Brisbane (unrecorded, unfortunately), yet could barely play a basic tune by ear.
I played in gigs down the West Coast and in Lyttelton, and at the Lines of Flight festival in Dunedin.
I next travelled further afield, and spent a year and a half with Cylvi M in Busan, South Korea (teaching English as a second language to fund our travels), and making pieces from field recordings
I spent the next couple of years back in Wellington. The capital’s experimental music scene revolved around the venue Fred’s (a precursor to the Pyramid Club)
…but i still had itchy feet, so said さよなら to Wellington again and moved to Okinawa, Japan, to spend another year in Asia (teaching English on the JET programme).
fiffdimension 