A big thank you to Radio Dolby 89.6FM for this podcast interview – hopefully an interesting audio documentary, and a chance to put the music (and stories behind it) over the years into context… here’s my life story so far, or at least a lot of the music parts!
Continue reading “Radio Dolby 89.6FM interview”Category: 2000s
Ascension Band: Live 2004
This was 20 years ago today!
Ascension Band played at the Meatwaters Festival at Happy, in Wellington. We look so young… happy anniversary guys!
By auspicious coincidence, this morning (exactly 20 years on) I found an original DVD of the full performance (as well as discs of the 2005 gigs with the 18-piece imperial phase lineup).
Continue reading “Ascension Band: Live 2004”Quietism (2024)
Early 2024 – the first new recordings made since the 25-year-spanning 2CD compilation; the start of the fiffdimension 2nd quarter-century.
Listen
Video
About
By Dave Edwards– early 2024, summertime in NZ –
Solo suite for electric guitar, bass and electric drums – one single take of each, using overdubs to create a virtual trio.
Tracks 1-3 and 12 recorded early January 2024 – the rest recorded 6th February 2024, in Featherston, Aotearoa / New Zealand
The title ‘Quietism‘ refers not so much to the sound, but to the absence of vocals – or any reference to current news or politics. Part of the fiffdimension aesthetic is a certain wilful irrelevance, and ignoring of trends.
The last track ‘Hypnopompia‘ (waking up) experiments with a possible new ambient style.
The cover art is an abstract scribble drawing – attempting to bypass conscious self-doubt and create ‘something… anything’. A theme also explored in works such as Assembling Disconsonant (2023).
Tracklist
Continue reading “Quietism (2024)”2CD compilation 1998-2023
Celebrating 25 years of fiffdimension!
Electric (yang) / Acoustic (yin)
A collection of short tracks by Dave Edwards and collaborators.
“Double disc collection of more than two decades’ worth of live and studio-recorded tunes by Dave Edwards, who you may have heard recently as part of The Troubled Times with Antony Milton. It’s quite a diverse listen!
“You get some concise and catchy pop songs, some full-on rockers, banjo excursions, improv freak-out, poetry, acoustic blues, folk songs, scrambled noise… there’s something here for everybody. A good intro to Dave’s dauntingly deep discography.”
– Howard Stelzer, Noisy Bandcamp.
Produced by Antony Milton; and features Paul Winstanley, Chris O’Connor, Simon O’Rorke,Chris Palmer, Sam Prebble, Mike Kingston, Francesca Mountfort, Damian Stewart, Emit Snake-Beings, Nat da Hatt, Steve Duffels, and Oscar (the dog).
2CD double album. 35 tracks spanning 25 years. Comes in gatefold card case with full colour photography by Jechtography and James Gilberd. Includes download of the digital album.
Review
Continue reading “2CD compilation 1998-2023”“Electric (Yang)/Acoustic (Yin) boasts some wildly different tracks; short instrumentals (the guitar and percussion of King Street Boogie, the piano and birdsong of Tui and Grey Sky, the guitar, rain, and bucket- possibly oboe too- of Classical Rain Bucket), song-length instrumentals (the gorgeous and floaty Kalbarri Coastline, the spaced-out psychedelia of Shuffling The Tarot, October Ring‘s sweet little guitar melody being countered by its evil twin sowing dissent and discord), spoken word over free-forming instruments (After The Filmshoot describing either a spiritual experience or very good drugs… or both, @Bomb The Space sounding like a guitar being attacked, Ornery Return Cravings spoken over sheer instrumental chaos), and occasionally, songs too (the stripped-back post-punk glory of Tony Was Here, the slithery, smoky, speakeasy feel of Cafes In Conversation, Inverno creeping in like a fever-dream of The Cramps, and the beautiful, emotionally-charged Paetumokai (Pua pua i te Koanga)). Dave Edwards is a thoughtful and talented writer, composer, and performer. This double album ably demonstrates that, from the soft, delightful guitar ramblings on Stromatolites, to Wealth And Riches that sounds for all the world like a battle to the death between a drumkit and a horde of toy robots.
“He doesn’t seem to so much want to push boundaries, as to act like he’s never heard of boundaries in the first place. At times soft and beautiful, at others dark and jarring, it makes for fascinating listening.” – Peter Malthus, muzic.nz
The Hurricane Wrangle (a butcher-revue)
A track from the Loose Autumn Moans album – originally recorded in 2003, and recently played live for the first time in 20 years!
credits
Continue reading “The Hurricane Wrangle (a butcher-revue)”The Winter: Shortest Days 2003-2015
A compilation by Wellington NZ free improv trio The Winter
Simon Sweetman – drums, percussion
Mike Kingston – guitars, cello (2-5), clarinet (7,11,14), charango (7,10)
Dave Edwards – guitars, vocal (3), harmonica (4,7,9), banjo (7), ukulele (7,9,11), saxophone (10,14), piano (10), bass (12,13), electronics (6,8,13)
Wellington, New Zealand,
free improv music trio, formed on winter solstice day June 2003.
An archive compilation,
Continue reading “The Winter: Shortest Days 2003-2015”Articulation Incommunicate (2004)
- 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).
Continue reading “Articulation Incommunicate (2004)”“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”
Loose Autumn Moans (2003)
“Wellington, NZ composer Dave Edwards with some able assistance from duo or trio the Winter... Guitars, violin, cello, and percussion all stack up… He’s got a persona that’s all his own.” – George Parsons, Dream Magazine #5
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About
All acoustic, no overdubs, and complete with a string section! Recorded and mixed on analogue equipment, and originally released on cassette in 2003 – new 2020 remaster.
“Edwards‘ art is always an interactive experience, and the spontaneous nature of his audio output encourages descriptions such as abrasive, discordant, sombre and atmospheric. Such adjectives contribute but never tell the whole tale.” – Real Groove
The album is structured as a progression from summer. The cover image shows a NZ pohutukawa tree in flower. It continues through autumn, a time of harvest, preparation, shortening daylight, and the shedding of old dead layers.
It finishes with an extended live version of ‘O Henry Ending‘, recorded at the Winter’s first gig.
“O Henry falling leaves & branches, talk a worried sad refrain
Your eyes half tilt, your brain half mast
To tie the fond anonymous bond beyond yr aching shelter lying walls
That fall to fall, & raise the days, museum haze …”
Credits
Dave Edwards (archtop acoustic guitar, harmonica, vocal, lyrics)
Sam Prebble (violin) / Mike Kingston (cello)
Simon Sweetman (percussion)
Recorded in Wellington, NZ, 2003
Tracklist
1. | Summer Skin 06:19 |
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Mouth of the Caveman 03:26
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Dedication: Bond Street Bridge
Loose Autumn Moans is dedicated to Sam Prebble (aka Bond Street Bridge), who died in 2014.
Rest easy Sam, and thank you..
Further listening
The Winter: Shortest Days 2003-2015
Continuing the seasonal theme, Dave Edwards, Mike Kingston, and Simon Sweetman (occasionally joined by Sam Prebble) formed a regular free improvising instrumental trio , the Winter.
“A strange sonic brew that includes dissonant rock textures, rough outsider folk-blues mysteries, electric and acoustic improvisations and a considerable part of tasty feedback. Imagine equal parts Derek Bailey, New Zealand’s Pumice and classic ’60s blues/folk and you’re in the right ballpark.” – The Broken Face
After the Filmshoot (2002)
The original C60 cassette release of Loose Autumn Moans included solo interludes recorded the previous year, in 2002. These have since been reissued as a separate album.
By shortening to just the 2003 ensemble sessions, Loose Autumn Moans becomes concise. It emphasises the lyrics, and the jazzy acoustic instrumental interplay.
After Maths & Sciences (2005)
A different take of ‘O Henry Ending‘ was recorded in Melbourne, Australia in 2005. I had just bought a banjo (which I still have), Mike Kingston played acoustic guitar this time, and Francesca Mountfort took the cello role, along with Cylvi M on percussion.
While much of the album was in a new style, incorporating electronica and field recordings, ‘O Henry Ending’ and the presence of fellow expat kiwis provided a thematic bridge from the Wellington days.
Acoustic yin / Electric yang – 2CD 1998-2023
To illustrate how a song can be interpreted in multiple ways, the fiffdimension 25th anniversary 2CD features Mouth of the Caveman – and both the 2005 Melbourne version and a new (2022) a live electric arrangement of O Henry Ending
Live 2019 and Live 2022-24
Three of the Loose Autumn Moans tracks were revived in new solo arrangements for these more recent live albums:
Gleefully Unknown: 1997-2005 compilation
Tracks from Loose Autumn Moans also appear on this compilation, that gives an overview of the early years.
Poems & Lyrics by John Collie (1856).
My great-great-grandfather (himself a young man at the time) self-published a book of poems in 19th century Scotland. It includes a piece about Autumn.
Adapting John Collie’s words to music is a current major work-in-progress, that .allows a new ‘mature’ version of my acoustic style, and shows the early works, like Loose Autumn Moans, in a new light!
After the filmshoot (2002)
Dave Edwards solo cassette tracks, in Wellington NZ, 2002.
Listen
About
These solo recordings were originally released as interludes, between the acoustic ensemble pieces in the Loose Autumn Moans (2003) album. But they’re now re-presented separately as a standalone short album (with a different running order and some light remastering).
I wrote the words to the title track in a notebook during the wrap party for a short film I’d worked on – a surrealist description of the evening, based on deliberate mishearings of the conversations around me:
“Taking notes throughout the performance. Humans become worms, with a sameness that is frightening. Politics is bad: we knew this already, but now it’s confirmed. Collapse into laughter.
A cigarette chair from which comes a dictator; everyone in thrall to his conversation. A plastic wooden horse to capture the city – incongruous? Indeed. Expelled all the virtues? You to decide.”
I made the soundscape with electric guitar and a 4-track tape recorder.
The other tracks on the album expanded on this wordy fusion of postpunk singer/songwriter and free improvisation. Radio stations wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.
Background
In the early 2000s, I was living in Wellington (New Zealand’s capital, and my birthplace), looking for a way to follow up the almost-success of The Marion Flow (part 2).
But I was moving further away from conventional 3min song formats into the avant-garde.
Although I lived not far from Courtenay Place I was more interested in the scene based around Newtown venue The Space (a precursor to the Pyramid Club), then in its baroque period.
I was an underemployed arts graduate, living in a scody flat doing casual work as a film extra (blink and you’ll miss me in Lord of the Rings) or builder’s labourer, and (trying &) failing to write a novel. Partly due to lack of money, I made my own entertainment.
Although the internet existed in early form, this was before social media – so instead of selfies, oversharing took a more oblique form, filtered through art.
In all, I was a noisy (as opposed to noise) guitar & spoken word footnote to the Wellington free jazz / avant garde music scene.
Tracklist
| 1. | After the Filmshoot (take 1) 03:25 |
| 2. | Interlude: the sociopolitical context 00:51 |
| 3. | Sleep/Grease 02:57 |
| 4. | Etude, for electric saxophone 03:16 |
| 5. | Working Like a Fountain in the Slender Morning Chill 05:11 |
| 6. | Interlude: les paul tapdance 01:36 |
| 7. | After the Filmshoot (take 2) 04:51 |
| 8. | WLAF reprise 03:32 |
Further listening
The tracks on After the Filmshoot were originally part of
Loose Autumn Moans:
Acoustic songs with a string section, recorded on all-analogue equipment, by Dave Edwards, with Sam Prebble, Mike Kingston, and Simon Sweetman (2003)
Continue reading “After the filmshoot (2002)”First Time Around: South Korea (2008)
– field recordings, electro-acoustic ethnography, Asian industrial soundscapes
by kiwis in South Korea, 2007–2008
Listen
Before there was ‘Gangnam Style‘ there was 영통동버스 노래 (Yeongtongdong Bus Song)
Credits
Recorded in Suwon and Busan, Republic of Korea, 2007-2008
Dave Black – field recordings, laptop, gayageum, loops, bass, acoustic guitar, vocal
Cylvi M – tangso, shakuhachi, shaker, vocal
The pieces here are made from remixed field recordings of traditional Korean musicians, and instruments such as the gayageum, taepyongso, buddhist chants and samulnori drumming, plus our live version of the folk song ‘Arirang’.
fiffdimension 