“This is something that he has to do, that he will do, come fame or oblivion” –Chris Knox

“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“

A period when I travelled on my OE, took up the banjo, and branched out further, into video-making and ethnomusicology.

I mostly lived overseas, first in Melbourne, Australia, then Busan, South Korea, then Okinawa, Japan. New influences informed my music, and I reinvented myself as Dave Black .

2005

I said goodbye to Wellington, with

Ascension Band: Evolution

“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

After Maths & Sciences (2005/06)

An Australian novel for the ear – a double album recorded in Melbourne, Victoria, and Sydney and Gosford New South Wales, by Dave Black with Cylvi M, Mike Kingston and Francesca Mountfort (2005-2006)

“Dave Black’s debut release (and a re-birth, if you like, for David Edwards) is as much a post-modern piece of Performance Journalism as it is a static batch of “songs” or tracks, After Maths & Sciences is a pleasing challenge of an album. It lives up to the cliché of presenting something new with each listen,”– Simon Sweetman

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.

2006 – South Island Sessions

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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, 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.

2007 – South Korea

I next spent a year in in Busan, South Korea, teaching English as a second language (to fund my travels), and making pieces from field recordings

I visited Thailand,Japan, Vietnam, and Mongolia

2007/08 – First Time Around: East Asia

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Thailand

Vietnam

Mongolia

and from there took the train across Russia, then spent a few months travelling in the Balkans

Russia & Eastern Europe

2009 – 2010

I returned home to New Zealand, aged 30 and a little more worldly.

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)