22nd July – Tapioca Dragon, the Electricka Zoo, 1/3 Octave Band @ Pyramid Club

A night of improv, otherworld musics, and ethereal sonic crunch at Wellington’s Pyramid Club, plus an album release for The Electricka Zoo.

Saturday 22nd July 2017, 8pm

@ the Pyramid Club

272 Taranaki Street, Wellington NZ – $10 door sales

The Electricka Zoo

The duo of Dave Black & the Digitator, The Electricka Zoo combine influences from EDM and post-punk avant-garde rock to jazz, reggae, Balkan and Portuguese music. Their self-titled debut album will be released at this gig, and features 8 original tunes by the bass/guitar and electronica duo wrapped in colourful mandala artwork by Lucie Hannon.

1/3 Octave Band

Also in the line up; the 1/3 Octave Band, aka Bill Wood. A master of tones and drones, Bill an his collaborators in the group have released many CD,s LP’s over the past decade, and recently been championed by no less than former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins in his column for LA Weekly. Don’t miss this once a year appearance from Mr Wood.

Tapioca Dragon

And let’s not forget and that merry duo of free thinkers, Tapioca Dragon, feat. Andy Wright (ex-Orchestra of Spheres) and Mark Williams (MarineVille / Cookie Brooklyn and the Crumbs). Tapioca Dragon released their debut album last year, a collection of 5 improvisations building from sparse, loops and jabs into a psychedelic spin cycle.

Nat da Hatt – Harpsychord

The latest offering from Nat da Hatt, recorded in 2015-2016 in Kawaguchi City, Japan using an array of instruments, devices and machines including: a Zoom digital eight track recorder, A Gretsch Electromatic guitar and a Korg vocoder.

Harpsychord follows hot on the heels of 2015’s Volume V and Kleptomania

and his previous 2012 solo masterpiece, Twango

Nat da Hatt is a political refugee from New Zealand who has settled in Japan where he spends his days in a cave creating tone paintings on an array of devices and instruments including: guitar, thumb piano and a Korg vocoder.

He’s also collaborated with fiffdimension’s Dave Black on the 2014 explicitly Japanese psychedelic album

ネオン列車の風景 Neon Train Landscapes

and guested on Ngumbang

as well as with American jaw-harp maestro Richard Morrison as Mezcla de Refresco

https://natdahatt.bandcamp.com/

the Ballad of William Knife

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.

1861 revisited – Continue reading “the Ballad of William Knife” →

Nat da Hatt: Volume V

Presenting the second new solo album for 2015 from Nat da Hatt!

Volume V follows hot on the heels of Kleptomania

and his previous 2012 solo masterpiece, Twango

He’s also collaborated with fiffdimension’s Dave Black on the 2014 explicitly Japanese psychedelic album

ネオン列車の風景 Neon Train Landscapes

and some 2015 collaborations in progress

as well as with American jaw-harp maestro Richard Morrison as Mezcla de Refresco

https://natdahatt.bandcamp.com/

Snake Beings

Dr Emit Snake-Beings – founder of the Hamilton Underground Film Festival, composer, musician and electrical shrine maker – is a New Zealand / British experimental filmmaker and musician. He has produced over 40 independently released film soundtrack CDs, and made a number of short experimental and narrative films in Spain, U.K. and New Zealand.

His music includes two duo albums with fiffdimension:

Ngumbang (Huia, 2014/15)

and

Ruasagavulu (Fiji, 2019/20)

He also appears on

Gamelan Dimensi Kelima (Indonesia)

His other projects include:

www.snakebeings.co.nz

Ngumbang

The first collaboration with even more legendary & underground NZ artist Snake Beings.

Listen

About

Ngumbang is the first collaborative album by two of New Zealand’s more unusual artist/musician/filmmaker/ethnomusicologists.

Performed on guitars, bass, banjo, percussion, saxophones, clarinets, harmonicas, synthesisers, Okinawan sanshin, ukulele, violin, loop pedal, piano, drums and spoken word.

The title ‘Ngumbang’ is an Indonesian word that refers to the slight difference in tuning between a pair of gamelan instruments, which gives gamelan music its shimmering quality.

The album name reflects a shared interest in ethnomusicology and experimentation, and the almost-but-not-quite-equivalent approaches of these two artists.

The album was recorded in and near Auckland, New Zealand in 2014–2015 and includes live performances at Vitamin S and the Audio Foundation.

Emit Snake-Beings,

who over several decades has travelled intensively in Spain, Holland, the Middle East, Mexico, America and Japan, is a New Zealand / British experimental filmmaker and musician who has produced over 40 independently released film soundtrack CDs and made a number of short experimental and narrative films in Spain, U.K. and New Zealand. www.snakebeings.co.nz

Dave Black,

originally from Taranaki and active since the late 90s on the NZ underground music scene, began by fusing acoustic songs, noisy postpunk, spoken word and avant-garde improvisation – and has diversified further from there. Notable performances include the award-winning 14-piece Ascension Band, appearing as an international artist at the Liquid Architecture Festival in Brisbane, Australia, and teaching a thousand Okinawan school students to perform a haka. www.fiffdimension.com

Tracklist

1.	Huia Vortex (feat. Nat da Hatt) 03:56
2.	The Feathered Serpent Sings Again 05:13
3.	Illbelly Gritts 03:57
4.	Watching a Painting Melt 01:47
5.	さくらさくら (Japanese folk song) – live at the Audio Foundation 04:52
6.	Pig in the Bamboo 01:47
7.	Live at Vitamin S (#1.5) 04:37
8.	Pick up the Pieces (after the gig) 04:48
9.	Pick up the Pieces (after the jam session) 04:45
10.	Ornery Return Cravings 02:40
11.	kuningan dan perunggu (Indonesian brass and bronze) 02:50
12.	So Long Notes 06:01

Further Listening

Continue reading →

Kalbarri, Western Australia

Music and video by Dave Black & Cylvi Manthyng from a road trip north from Perth, Western Australia. Kalbarri is a small town of just over a thousand people, known for its rocky coastline, red landscape, spring flowers, and pounding surf.

a coiled didgeridoo

in Western Australia, 2013

acoustic guitar & banjo

Dada Songwriting: Rejection dryrot ripple Gombage

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” →

in the non-idiomatic idiom in Norway (part 1, 1999)

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

Listen

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:

Background

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 →

dAdApApA: Waiting for the Drummer (1999)

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About

A companion to The Marion Flow, recorded in 1999 by the same lineup who provided that album’s longest (and least conventionally song-based track, pointing the way towards the increasingly radio-unfriendly Mantis Shaped and Worrying), “Lucifer Directing Traffic (at 3AM)”

Recording engineer Paul Winstanley, head of the excellent, now San Francisco-based avant-garde music label Eden Gully recalls it thus:

“after recording tracks for The Marion Flow at Wafer HQ in New Plymouth an ad hoc group of associated locals assembled to record for several sessions of improvised rock/noise deconstruction. really, the only rock references here come from the guitars, with the sputtering synth, air-sucking turntables, didgeridoo and sundry toys providing layers of surreal abstraction. throw in some spoken word and a special guest appearance by N.P. record mogul Brian Wafer on vacuum cleaner – and the dAdApApA nova had blazed and fizzled in the blink of an eye.

“it wasn’t until several years later after the master mixes had been lost, partially recovered and then rediscovered intact again that “Waiting for the Drummer’ was given a final mastering and released as a CDR on EdenGully. it’s been a long strange journey…..”

credits

released 01 August 2006 on Eden Gully as EG15

Fiff Dimension Dave – guitars, spoken word and furbie / Speed Cook – turntables and recording / Pal Diddly – synth and pithy observations / The Digitator – guitar, didgeridoo / BWafer – vacuum cleaner and coffees

Tracklist

1.	just in time for christmas 09:03
2.	making merry 09:00
3.	singing and drinking blood 08:31
4.	elves are farting bodies 14:10
5.	groan in extra stuffing 12:19
6.	smashed robots litter the pine 05:34
7.	an orgy of turkey gobble 08:04