“It’s lo-fi, organic and about as eclectic as one could manage. Kind of reminds me of Nick Cave if he had grown up in Timaru. No pretentious American accents or catch phrase choruses, just a bunch of people making music. A little beauty!” – NZ Musician, August/September 2002
Listen
Credits
Produced by Paul Winstanley, & featuring Steve Duffels, the Digitator, and the Dadapapa Magickclone Orchestra.
Recorded at the TFC Lounge, New Plymouth, 1999 – with special thanks to Brian Wafer.
About
The Marion Flow is a pre-millennial fusion of warm acoustic pop, spoken word and postpunk discord.. An almost-acknowledged New Zealand classic from Taranaki – of its time (the ’90s!) yet timeless.
As the sophomore fiffdimension release (following 1998’s Scratched Surface), The Marion Flow began to mix more experimental elements alongside the songwriting. It shows an evolution in ambition and production values, and a more complex & impressionistic lyrical style.
“I sit in this tower of tongues & bells, & move to the groove
Or so that I’m reckoned, & then I am beckoned
Back to these shoes, nigh marion blues
And so to the seashore our body now go, & tale shall flow & power ye know…” – The Marion Flow
In 1999, aged 20, I left New Plymouth, a large rural town, where I grew up, and moved to Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, where I was born. The Marion Flow reflects this journey, geographically, sonically and spiritually.
The Marion Flow was originally a longer album spanning recordings from New Plymouth in 1999 and Wellington in 2001. I’ve now reissued the two halves separately – to emphasise the sense of time and place, and stylistic evolution, and to re-present each more concisely (for the short-attention-span 21st century).
This page is for the 1999 New Plymouth sessions; for the 2001 Wellington followup recordings see The Marion Flow (part 2);
“Edwards’ music is often a sculpture rather than a melodic composition. Within this chosen form, amongst all the writings rantings & poetry there’s much difficult pleasure to be had for the musically adventurous.” – Brent Cardy, Real Groove, July 2002
Tracklist
1 Chairs to Tie the Revolution Down
- Dave Edwards – electric guitar, vocal
Mariachi without the trumpets
2 Banana Wizard
- Dave Edwards – acoustic guitar, vocal
- Paul Winstanley – fretless bass
- Steve Duffels – drums
My first and probably only pop hit, which actually got a bit of bFM radio airplay at the time. Originally titled ‘Dope Smoking and Wizard’, after a character in the rarely-heard third verse – which I omitted, to keep it to 3 minutes. I later retitled ‘Banana Wizard’ after the banana he was peeling; I’d grown tired of irrelevant drug-reference notoriety overshadowing my wider catalogue.
3 Locked Without March
- Dave Edwards – upturned acoustic guitar, vocal
- Paul Winstanley – screwdrivers
Beat poetry… noisier versions appear on Live 1999 and Live 2022-24
4 The Marion Flow
- Dave Edwards – electric guitars, vocal
- Paul Winstanley – cymbal and pitch-shifter
A personal favourite, a one-chord wonder… funnily it never even occurred to me til years later that Marion is a girl’s name (I was thinking more of ‘marionettes’). Paul turned an ordinary cymbal into a gong to suggest oceanic depths.
Reappears as an extended rock improvisation on The Marion Flow (part 2) and Live 1999, and again reinvented 20 years later as a solo acoustic number on Live 2019.
5 Open the Dogs
- Dave Edwards – acoustic guitar, harmonica, vocal
- Paul Winstanley – fretless bass
- The Digitator – snare drum & foliage
Not about animal cruelty
6. Summer in Fairyland
- Dave Edwards – acoustic guitar, vocal
- Steve Duffels – percussion
Metaphysical satire
7 Phoenix Road
- Dave Edwards – electric guitar, harmonica, vocal
- Paul Winstanley – fretless bass
An alt-country black comedy
8 Lucifer Directing Traffic (at 3am)
- Dave Edwards – electric guitar, vocal
- Paul Winstanley – turntable
- Paul Winther – analogue synth
- The Digitator – acoustic guitar
He’d had a few… this piece leads in to DDPP: Waiting For the Drummer – recorded at the same sessions in New Plymouth in 1999 with the same personnel:
9 On a bus
- Dave Edwards – acoustic guitar & vocals
- Paul Winstanley – field recordings, turntable & sound engineer
3-chord minimalism (progression played that way for 4mins straight, not looped), to evoke the tedium of a long bus ride, complete with crying kids.
Further listening
- If you enjoy the avant-garde sound of Lucifer Directing Traffic, try the companion album DDPP: Waiting For the Drummer – recorded at the same sessions in New Plymouth in 1999 with the same personnel;
- for my raw live solo punk sound at the time try Live 1999
- for an overview of this whole period, featuring selected tracks from all the above albums and more, try Gleefully Unknown: 1997-2005.
- and for a years-later (2017) postpunk/electronica reunion with the Digitator (who I’d met in high school), try The Electricka Zoo
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