1856 to 2026 – DIY outsider music, from Aotearoa NZ and beyond
2021 compilation album curated by Campbell Kneale. He’s known for his noise music, paintings of cats, and as proprietor of the Miracle Room gallery in Featherston.
A sequel to his acclaimed 119-track Psi-solation compilation of music made in lockdown 2020.
Both albums are pay what you want via Campbell’s label, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon.
I contributed a new Dave Black piece, Outono 21.
Continue reading “PSI-SOLATION + 1 (one year on)”| Campbell Kneale – electric guitar, analogue synth | Dave Black – bass, electric toothbrush, key ring |
One continuous piece, unabridged, no overdubs – the first time we’d played together.
Featherston NZ, 2018.
Two 3min excerpts appear on the compilations Other Islands: 2012-2018
and aguas brilhantes: 2018-2022 :
…but you need to hear the full length version to truly enter Campbell’s world.
Campbell Kneale is an internationally renowned sound artist, a prolific recording artist and performer and relentless collaborator. He currently releases albums as Our Love Will Destroy The World. Previous projects include Black Boned Angel, Birchville Cat Motel, Ming and Brilliant Swords.
Campbell curated the epic 119-track Psi-solation compilation during the Covid-19 pandemic:
Dave contributed an acoustic track, John Collie‘s poem ‘Solitude’ from 1856.
‘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!
Dave Edwards – acoustic guitar, harmonica, dictaphone, electronics, electric guitar (11-12), violin (13), vocal & lyrics
with
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”
“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
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 …”
Dave Edwards (archtop acoustic guitar, harmonica, vocal, lyrics)
Sam Prebble (violin) / Mike Kingston (cello)
Simon Sweetman (percussion)
Recorded in Wellington, NZ, 2003
1. | Summer Skin 06:19 |
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Mouth of the Caveman 03:26
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Loose Autumn Moans is dedicated to Sam Prebble (aka Bond Street Bridge), who died in 2014.
Rest easy Sam, and thank you..
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
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.
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.
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
Three of the Loose Autumn Moans tracks were revived in new solo arrangements for these more recent live albums:
Tracks from Loose Autumn Moans also appear on this compilation, that gives an overview of the early years.
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!
Dave Edwards solo cassette tracks, in Wellington NZ, 2002.
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.
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.
| 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 |
The tracks on After the Filmshoot were originally part of
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)”the opening track from Ruasagavulu
by Dave Black & Snake-Beings
recorded in Suva, Fiji, 2nd November 2019
This short warmup improv is based on an Indian scale, inspired by Dr Emit Snake-Beings‘ travels to Kerala in India, and harmonium lessons in Suva.
There’s an Indian influence throughout the album, as several sections are based on drones and modal improv (rather than the chord changes)… though this is not a traditional Indian album, we’ve borrowed ideas to inform our own experiments.
The temple in the photo is Sri Siva Subramaniya in Nadi. It’s built in the Dravidian style from southern India, which is also found in Singapore and Malaysia.
In contrast to other Pacific Island countries, Fiji has a large – almost half – population of Indian descent. Indians came to Fiji in the 19th century, as indentured labourers to work the sugar cane plantations.
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.
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.
with
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 (8)
These sessions were recorded in 2014. I’d just returned from living overseas, 15 years after my first exposure to Wellington free jazz.
The first volume was recorded in Wellington in 1999
Continue reading “in the non-idiomatic idiom in Norway (part 2, 2014)”The year got off to a good start, with Ascension Band: Evolution
The successful collaboration with Nigel Patterson, Ryan Prebble, and over a dozen other musicians, from jazz-schooled to untrained punks, won the best music award in the NZ Fringe Festival.
I had my first taste of success (the fame part of Fame & Oblivion 2005-2012)…
…But by this time I was ready to see the world beyond Aotearoa. I shifted across the Tasman Sea to Melbourne – in Australia, the West Island.
For the next few months I lived in Brunswick, and worked in temp jobs around the city and in rural Victoria.
The results became After Maths & Sciences
fiffdimension 