1856 to 2026 – DIY outsider music, from Aotearoa NZ and beyond
Music video from the album ‘South Island Sessions‘, set in 19th century New Zealand with an ecological theme. ‘The Ballad of William Knife’ was the name of the show we took to the Dunedin Fringe Festival in 2006.
See also the videos for ‘Bandit Joe on a Scraded Gat’ and ‘BFD’
1861 revisited – Continue reading “the Ballad of William Knife”
Here’s a new bonus track we’ve added to the album ネオン列車の風景 Neon Train Landscapes – our version of a traditional shima uta (island song) from 沖縄 (Okinawa).
Dave Black – sanshin, harmonica, field recordings
Nat da Hatt – acoustic & electric guitars, electronics
Cylvi Manthyng – shakuhachi
As you can hear, the music of Okinawa is quite distinct from that of mainland Japan.
“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
| Dave Edwards – electric guitar & electronics Nigel Patterson – hammond organ & conductor Will Rattray – electric guitar Bell Murphy – bass Warwick Donald – bass Murray Stewart – keyboards Damian ‘Frey’ Stewart – laptop Ryan Prebble – tone generator Sam Jenks – trumpet Felicity Perry – vocal Atushi Iseki – vocal Matt Baxter – drums Greta Welson – drums |
This riff
Continue reading “Ascension Band 2005”Today is the last day of winter in the southern hemisphere – so to celebrate, here’s the fifth album from The Winter – a New Zealand free improvisation trio of Mike Kingston, Simon Sweetman and Dave Edwards… with a sound that swerves from acoustic folk/blues with hints of Asian, Celtic, and Balkan influences, to electroacoustic soundscapes, abstract dissonance, and pots & pans percussion.
Mike Kingston: guitar, bass, clarinet, electronics
Dave Edwards: guitar, bass, banjo, harmonica, ukulele, sanshin, electronics
Simon Sweetman: drums and percussion, electronics
Bye 2014 – overall a pretty good year here.
Most importantly we put out two new albums in contrasting styles: ネオン列車の風景 Neon Train Landscapes 
and in the non-idiomatic idiom in Norway.
The first was a composed Japanese psychedelic rock album while the second showcased the free improvised music I’d been influenced by in my earlier years in Wellington.
It was also a good year for travel to southeast Asia: I visited Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia for the first time… and I finally returned home to New Zealand after two years living in Western Australia and a year before that in Okinawa.
Dave and Cylvi contributed to Postmoderncore‘s first volume of Dada Songwriting Compilation, Rejection dryrot ripple Gombage.
Condo Encyclopedia coalseam egg 2:02
by Uneasy Chairs (USA, guitar) / T4x0n0m13s (España, bass + distortion pedal) / Dave Black (NZ, banjo) / Cylvi Manthyng (NZ, shaker)
Download entire album / View album at archive.org
Each contributor created two mins of raw sound – a single track recorded live with no post-processing. After each set of four tracks arrived, they were blindly put together to create each track – as & when they arrived in Corporal Tofulung’s inbox.
The title of the album was created by writing the 40 contributed words on individual pieces of paper & drawing them randomly out of a bucket. Continue reading “Dada Songwriting: Rejection dryrot ripple Gombage”
A few years ago I wrote a chapter of Jazz Aotearoa, a book about New Zealand jazz music history, discussing the free improvisation and avant-garde jazz scene in Wellington at the turn of the millennium.
in the non-idiomatic idiom in Norway is a collection of improvised instrumental music with some of the musicians in that scene, from the point of view of my own attempts as an untrained outsider to fit in with these advanced jazz players – including Jeff Henderson, Blair Latham , Paul Winstanley, Dan Beban, Julie Bevan and more.
The title is a reference to Simon’s house on Norway Street, where the recordings took place. The ‘non idiomatic idiom’ suggests the paradox that improvising non-idiomatically (eg in an original personal style without reference to any genre – playing neither jazz, nor rock, blues, reggae, classical etc) is an idiom in itself.
It was recorded in Wellington in two halves, in 1999
Simon O’Rorke – percussion
Paul Winstanley – synth bass
Blair Latham – alto sax
Jeff Henderson – clarinet
Bridget Kelly – tenor sax
Dan Beban – electric guitar
Dave Edwards – electric and acoustic guitars
and 2014, to show an evolution.
Simon O’Rorke – synthesisers
Blair Latham – bass clarinet
Julie Bevan – acoustic guitar
Michael Hall – alto sax
Chris Prosser – violin
Dave Edwards – bass, electronics, tenor sax
In 2024 Simon O’Rorke struck up a new collaboration with Dave Edwards, this time in the Wairarapa, as a trio with Antony Milton named The Margins:
Free improvisation is a genre of music with a self-explanatory name. Nothing is planned in advance, and the performers create the music on the spot by responding to what the others are doing in that moment.
Continue reading “in the non-idiomatic idiom in Norway (part 1, 1999)”This is an ethnomusicological album of pieces made from sound recordings, during visits to six different countries in Asia during 2007-2008, The sounds are edited into sonic short stories.
![First time around [South Korea]](https://fiffdimension.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/first-time-around-south-korea.jpg)
During, and immediately after, a year and a half living in
(teaching English for a living, and to fund further travels – see First Time Around: South Korea),
we travelled to:
8. 请介意你的脚步 (Please Mind Your Step) 01:33
2. Cylvi M – シルビエム在佛的脚在京都 (at Buddha’s Foot, Kyoto) 02:16
| 3. | ระดับที่สามพระอารามหลวง (3rd Grade Royal Temple) 04:04 |
| 4. | เชียงใหม่ร้านรัฐบาล (Chiang Mai government shop) 02:35 |
| 5. | หมู่บ้านกะเหรี่ยง (The Karen Village) 04:10 |
| 6. | Việt Nam chào buổi tối (Good Evening Vietnam) 02:25 |
| 7. | núi và rất cây (Mountain and Very Tree) 04:43 |
| 9. | Монголын хувьсгалт нам ((It’s a) Mongolian Revolutionary Party) 02:33 |
| 10. | ханаду ямаа (Goats in Xanadu) 03:32 |
It was a great pleasure to get to Vietnam. There was a stopover in Hong Kong airport – out the windows I could see glass apartment towers, hillsides eroded from deforestation and a polluted green harbour. Then on to Vietnam, a fertile countryside of rice paddies and fruit trees with sudden rock formations rising out of the plains. Everywhere hundreds of Vietnamese in cone-shaped coolie hats were at work in the fields from dawn to dusk… it’s definitely the land of the cone heads. The hats are an elegantly simple design that protect from the sun and rain.
Although poorer, the Vietnamese people overall seemed healthier, happier, and more stylish, industrious, humorous and better looking than the average Korean. I enjoyed the fusion of old and new on display, whereas Koreans keep their traditional things quite separate from their modern life. There was also a refreshing absence of the usual celebrity stooges’ faces everywhere, and no McDonalds restaurants to be found. Instead they had communist-style posters of good workers and Ho Chi Minh. The atmosphere was never dreary or oppressive though – it’s a vibrant, colourful country.
Hanoi, the capital, was full of motorbikes, their horns a constant soundtrack. The traffic is busy but not especially fast – to cross a road you just walk out at a steady pace and the traffic all somehow avoids you. It’s a much better system than in Thailand where you wait for a gap and then sprint across. Catching a motorbike ride with Vietnamese locals is a good way to get around and definitely part of the experience.
The slightly unsatisfying aspect was being on a time limit and being on the tourist trail for some of it. Prices were cheap but not that cheap and there were always locals around trying to sell something, and many small-time scams to get extra money. It’s hard to begrudge them though – they’re doing a great job rebuilding from the American war (one-legged mine victims the most visible reminder) and finding their place in the world. The newspaper headlines were mostly government propaganda (it’s a one-party state) and one that stood out was their goal to become an average income nation by 2020. That contrasts with Korea’s frantic industrial development (at the expense of their own culture and environment) and their new president’s unattainable election promise of 7% growth every year.Highlights included Cuc Phuong national park where we explored a bat-filled cave where stone-age people had lived 7500 years ago; the national water puppet theatre, a great Vietnamese art-form with live music, carving, action and splashes; a night drinking on a boat on Halong Bay with kiwis and aussies; and the sights and general ambience – there was an overall sense of optimism in the country.
In all, I’d love to go back to Southeast Asia another time with an open itinerary and no time limit, and see Cambodia and Laos as well.
Tonight it’s time to get on the train to Siberia, so I’ll write about Mongolia when I get a chance…
Recorded in Nelson, NZ, 2006.
1861 revisited – my pākeha (European) ancestors, John ‘Totara Jack’ and Mary Edwards, arrived in the South Island of New Zealand on board the Olympus and settled in Nelson1.
John ‘Totara Jack’ Edwards
When I lived nearby a century and a half later,
The early settler stories marked the start of an interest in genealogy, and prompted the music video for The Ballad of William Knife3 (loosely based on ‘Totara Jack’).
In contrast to the ‘traditional’ South Island NZ ‘Flying Nun‘ or The Dead C inspired sounds, South Island Sessions blended acoustic instruments with field recordings and electronic glitches. I played acoustic guitar, banjo and saxophone, and delegated the electric guitar role to two local players. We named this new genre “Steampunk Folktronica“4.
Recorded in Nelson NZ, 2006
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