Ascension Band

“With elements of punk, post-punk, jazz, classical, straight rock, opera and music hall, the Ascension Band are that rare thing: Something Wholly Other. They retain avant garde cred and still manage to rock harder than AC/DC.” – www.varsity.co.nz
2005

Featuring organist/conductor/arranger Nigel Patterson (The Black Seeds, The Manta Rays, Fly My Pretties), guitarist Dave Edwards (fiffdimension, The Winter), and over a dozen musicians on guitars, basses, drums, electronics, keyboards, trumpets and vocals, was the seed that grew into a full scale electric symphony: Evolution.

“Evolution” is a five-movement symphonic piece tracking the history of evolution, and combining a macro classical form with modern orchestration. It’s basically a symphony in the standard form – but instead of using violins and woodwinds etc, we use two electric guitars, two keyboards, two bass guitars, two vocalists, two trumpets, computer, tone generator, piano and drums. “Evolution” draws its sonic palette from experimental, free-jazz, noise, industrial, punk and contemporary classical musics. It’s less free-improvised than our previous performances – it’s an attempt to compose a piece allowing for improvisation within a macro structure.
Often with modern improvised music the listener is almost totally reliant on the absolute properties of the music: E.g. the new weird and wonderful noises that you never knew that instrument could make. But by utilizing a programmatic approach we hope to create a piece of music that is both stimulating in an absolute context – I.e. sounds and textures – as well as realizable in a programmatic context, by telling the story of evolution. our main objective: A realizable statement of modern music.” – Nigel Patterson
2004
An earlier version of the group performed at the Meatwaters Festival