- Dictaphone cassette recordings, Wellington NZ, 2004.
- Spoken word and improvised guitar; a journey down a road not taken for New Zealand music.
Listen
‘Articulation Incommunicate‘ includes an abrasive electric guitar, dictaphone and electric razor performance at the Bomb the Space Festival 2004. This is my earliest extant gig footage, and one of my very few music videos to have over a thousand views. Go figure!
Credits
Dave Edwards – acoustic guitar, harmonica, dictaphone, electronics, electric guitar (11-12), violin (13), vocal & lyrics
with
- Youjae Lee – bass (13)
- Simon O’Rorke – percussion (13)
- Simon Sweetman – ukulele, toys, percussion (16)
About
Perhaps the most lo-fi fiffdimension album of all. These tracks were primitively recorded on a cassette dictaphone; based on words scribbled in notebooks; unmelodic; unheard by anyone else at all (until their release in 2020); and seemed like unfinished demos at the time…
… but in hindsight may represent the culmination of my early period (a lo-fi postpunk fusion of songs, spoken word and free improv – www.fiffdimension.com/1997-2005).
“Emptying out of yr nautical caveman comfort / programming lines in size laden torridness hill upon plains / dense foreclosure and venomous worry / salute me and line / burrow tunnel and moth / soon I taste the next pavement / I invent to cause home”
By 2004 my style was wordy, and dense with allusions; the influences here were literary modernists as much as music – eg William Burroughs, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Dylan (Thomas), and NZ poets James K Baxter, Alan Brunton and Hone Tuwhare.
My guitar heroes included free improviser Derek Bailey, my Mississippi bluesman namesake David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, and the kiwi musicians found in my bandcamp collection – www.bandcamp.com/fiffdime
After 2004 I felt I had ‘pushed the envelope‘ of the singer/songwriter genre to its limit, and also began to find the words were ‘drying up.’ I was in my mid 20s, burnt out from Wellington and underemployment. I was keen to see the world, and needed a new approach.
I left for Australia in 2005, where my music took a different direction…
Tracklist
Further listening
Gleefully Unknown: 1997-2005
A compilation of songs, spoken word and instrumental improvisations that summarise the early phase of my gloriously unsuccessful career.
by Dave Edwards with The Winter, Ascension Band, plus Chris O’Connor, Paul Winstanley, Simon O’Rorke, Chris Palmer, Sam Prebble, Francesca Mountfort and more
or more recently,
Assembling Disconsonant (2023)
A return to solo spoken word and avant-garde improvisation, recorded for the fiffdimension 25th anniversary 2CD.
“I liked the lyrics… the the way meaning gets assembled through shattered snap shots of a picture we may never see” – Dr Emit Snake-Beings
Poems & Lyrics by John Collie (1856)
A different type of literary-inspired project – which adds a precedent, and historical and cultural depth to fiffdimension. I discovered that my great-great-grandfather had written a book in 19th century Scotland, and began adapting his words to music.
“T’were a noble sight to see the mighty men of old,
who bled that their countries might be free from the tyrants’ fatal hold –
yet I’d deem it a nobler sight by far
to behold the sons of the harp & lyre!” – John Collie (1834-1893)
fiffdimension 
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