The All-Seeing Hand 'Mechatronics' Review

When I was a kid the city was an adventure.
You see, we lived (my family and I) in Golden Bay - a huddle of green-scrubbed hills and beaches of grainy golden (hence the name) sand, at the very top of the South Island of New Zealand. An earlier name for the place had been Murderer's Bay, which has a far less romantic vibe to it and was taken from the various pioneer-era skirmishes that had soaked those golden-sanded beaches in blood. It is a tiny place, largely rural, with a strong bohemian culture - those that wash up there are mostly artists, painters, ageing hippies and alternative life-stylers; people for whom the rest of the world is too loud, too grimy and too fast. It is a lovely place, caught in its own little pocket of time like an insect forever drowning in amber. It is a great place to grow up, I reckon. To have a childhood.

But the city...
By the city I mostly mean Christchurch, although even the odd day trip to Nelson was something to be looked forward to for weeks. The noise of it, the bustle of it; the shops, the people, the grey streets under grey skies. Weirdly the thing I remember most clearly is the motel rooms we would stay in - or the smell of those rooms; the cold smell of dead cigarettes, etched into every furnishing and piece of fabric, beneath the stronger odour of industrial-quantity cleaning products. And in each and all of those motel rooms my sister and I would tune the radio to whatever big-city station we could find. In Christchurch we mostly wanted RDU (the radio station run out of the University of Canterbury, where many years later I would go to study).

Picture us then, loading our cheap and cheerful bulk-bought cassettes into that radio and poised for something good to come over those airways - always cloaked in a hiss of faint white noise. We got us some stuff, man. A lot of what we heard was made right here in NZ. A lot of it was absolutely mental. The clank-and-squalor noise rock of Lung, 147 Swordfish, Canis, the seething chaos-melodic whorls of The Dead C, the guttural death-metal and grindcore bastardry of Human, the Antipodean black metal of Demoniac, the rioting, spazzed-out playfulness of The Conventional Toasters, and a myriad of names I can't even remember or perhaps never even knew.
Heck, back then even Head Like a Hole were at the lunatic fringe - controversial for their mud-caked nudity in the album booklet (and in live performances); and setting themes from Sesame Street to gurning funk-based metal (the track '13' off their debut).
Good times, man.

These were bands who got their stuff out quick and rough; cutting it fast-and-ugly in limited studio time. Releasing it with printed-at-home covers. Selling it at gigs. This stuff was never in print for very long. But hell, some of these bands are still working the scene, even today - ghosting around the fringes. That sound hit me in my formative years, man, and I still carry it inside me whenever I think of NZ music, whenever I try to define that thing that really needs no defining. Oh sure, I dug the fuzzed-out pop and krautrock rhythms of the Dunedin scene. But I was never huge on Bailter Space and those of their breed. Never much loved the other NZ stuff either - Straitjacket Fits and whatnot. I do dig me some early Headless Chickens though, but not 'Cruise Control' - could never stand that goddamn song.

By the way, I loathe pretty much anything with the name 'Finn' attached to it - bland music, like boiled milk. And Dobbyn sends me into an apoplexy of rage. All seem to me to be the musical equivalent of a medical waiting room; all tepid, trapped air, sterility and dull, dog-eared magazines that are ten years out of date.
Okay, I won't lie to you - that simile kind of got away from me.

Today the NZ music scene is dominated by internationally successful pop acts with alt. bite (Lorde, the Naked and Famous, Kimbra, Gin Wigmore, Ladyhawke, Ladi6) and don't get me wrong - I dig their music.
Heck, I love Wigmore's sophomore album 'Gravel & Wine' - I think that album is hugely underrated in this country - I love the swampy, bayou blues and brassy soul strut of it; and her crooning, taunting, versatile rasp of a voice is a stunning thing to my ears. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

But I dig me a bit of the underground scenesters to. And nowhere in this country seems to have a better handle on pulsing, experimental oddness than Wellington. Oh forget the diet-version of reggae-lite that seems to be sold here as 'roots' music.
Full disclosure; I don't particularly like reggae. So I have no tolerance for the diluted, lukewarm version of the same that is nigh-on inescapable here in Wellington. If that's your bag, though - well, more power to you. Oddly, I am rather a big fan of dub.

But for me, the true sound of Wellington is bands who are more like the red waiting room in David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks': the yellow-and-black zig-zagged floor, curtains of oozing red velvet and a sinister backwards-talking dwarf.
Okay. I'll stop. No more 'waiting room' parables

Wellington is for the weird.

To my ears, The All-Seeing Hand are one of the finest examples of a contemporary band driven by that same DIY, screw-genre-conventions impulse of those earlier NZ acts that I fondly recall - they are the proud bearers of that long-standing tradition of crazy-eyed, ambitious music produced by bands grown lean and hungry and clever... very damn clever.

Now, I'm not saying that their sound is 'the true NZ sound' as alleging such a thing of any band is a waste of time and typing. And how would that prove them a better band anyway?
What The All-Seeing Hand are is a brilliant band - courageous, transcendent, unique and very, very cool. And their second album 'Mechatronics' proves that point and scorches that statement into stone, man.

Previously on 'Dances for Architecture'...

The All-Seeing Hand are an outfit I simply had to investigate. With a line-up comprised of a drummer; a keyboardist/turntablist; and a vocalist trained in the technique of Mongolian throat-singing, you know they're going to be something special, profound and utterly different. Their style could perhaps be described as electro-doom metal/avant jazz...erm, experimental. It is intense, densely rhythmic and driving - a swirling mist of samples, electronic effects and seemingly-impossible vocalizations, propelled forward by percussion - both from the drums and the altered vocals themselves. It is also oddly, perversely catchy. And it is a challenge to the norm - a gauntlet thrown in the face of mediocrity and blandness.

Jonny Marks - throat; Alphabethead - turntables/keyboards/samples; B. Michael Knight - drums.
There are other instrumentalists and vocalists as well, guests players - a sliver here and there of guitar. The disc comes packaged in a handsome eco-pack; the disc sleeve itself lined in black cloth. A single vast eye stares out of a series of overlaid and incorporated images - images of conception, clockwork cogs and celestial bodies. Space, birth and the machine.

The sound is a riotous and shifting blend of glitched-out Aphex Twin spookiness, industrial rhythms, death metal malevolence, malfunctioning android bleeps, and math-rock dynamics. Sampled, sketched and scribbled across it all are the eerie whistling and basso undulations (very like the bone-deep cadence of a didgeridoo at points) of Mongolian throat singing. It is a sound that hits you in the meat and marrow of you - music you feel in your guts and viscera. But it is not all violence and tribal pounding - there are myriad moments of swirling and swooning calm amid the intensity (not least of all on closing track 'Cadentia').

At times Marks subjects his throat to the vocal acrobatics of 'NunSexMonkRock'-era Nina Hagen (his delivery eerily recalls Hagen's rasped and guttural contralto). Other times he screeches and hollers, chants and wails, occasionally dropping his voice into the bowel-scraping bellows of death metal.
As with all things of this nature, Mike Patton deserves a name check - this title would sit comfortably on his Ipecac roster.

For all its variation the sound on this album is tight, man - lean and consistent across the board - never uneven or cluttered; just as dense and complex as it needs to be. And the drumming, dude... Knight plays fast and precise - his drumming so accurate and focused as to sound almost inhuman - a clattering mechanical beat driving the music endlessly forward. But no machine or programmed track could keep up these shifting and intricate tempos. Alphabethead paints finger-smudges of instrumental texture across the beats. Chopping and splicing in snippets of found, sampled, tweaked and re-constructed sound: the sting of cellos; a slice of what sounds like the hum of an overloaded speaker; the crackle of worn vinyl; white-noise hiss; a slamming gate; and sci-fi audio effects. Elsewhere Alphabethead seems to be sampling Marks himself, stretching and elongated his throat-singing into the instrumental web of the track itself, making another instrument of it.

'Empty Road' rides a galloping doom-metal drum rhythm, the spaces between beats filled in with sustained keyboard drones - what, in fact, sounds like looped snatches of Marks' throat-singing - and string samples. Glitched-out electronic flickers pulse over the instrumental layers. Over it all Marks unleashes a series of chanted, hollered, and strangely uplifting wordless vocals. It sounds epic - a galloping track hurtling across scorched land and back to the wilderness.

'Maximum Capacity' boasts bright, cheap and cheerful electronic effects over a hammering industrial dance beat - sounding like nothing so much as a metal drummer jamming with one of those maddening Eighties arcade games. All this before the same track drops into a loose jazzy rhythm graced with weirdly percussive throat-whistles. It is a playful, oddly joyous track.

Spasmodic delirium, frequently bordering on absurdity: 'Lying Dead With a Bar of Soap' is the album's hookiest and most immediate track. It calls to mind early Head Like a Hole at their most wild-eyed and feral. Catchy, pummeling bass/drum riffery gives way to a wide-screen panorama of tribal percussion and atmospheric whistling before the riff comes clattering back complete with a delightfully deranged and very committed vocal performance (nigh-on audible lyrics!), basso chanting and enthusiastic whooping. It is immensely entertaining and utterly thrilling.

'Clot' incorporates slurred keyboard fills and intricate treble drum-work with bursts of grindcore pummeling and interludes of sweeping quietude and grandeur. The vocals switch between guttural babble, mountain-deep chanting and that seemingly-inhuman piping effect. For all its multitudinous parts the track remains cohesive, tightly-structured.

'The Claw' opens with the sound of crackling and popping vinyl before an intricate and mechanical drum pattern comes in - evoking some impossible and unthinkable factory assembly-line; weird oscillating swirls of distorted and backwards-effected samples fill in the negative space before the track abruptly switches into a pounding metal-worthy drumbeat over which Marks unleashes a blood-blackening banshee howl before adopting his Hagen-esque vocal (lyrics in German?).

'Geronimo II' features perhaps Marks' most gleefully unhinged vocal performance - a dual-pronged, multi-tracked marvel in which he shrieks like Mike Patton at his most lunatic over his own didgeridoo-pitched chants all underscored by deft, jazzy drum fills and melodic, B-Grade SciFi keys.

Fittingly, the brief track 'Grab and Smash' employs a drumbeat that pounds - three hard blows in quick succession: bam-bam-bam; the fist on your door at 3am, bringing only bad news. Over this intrusion Marks shouts, chants and shrieks while Alphabethead fills in the blanks with the distorted hum of crossed wires. Okay, this track with its Zorn-esque flourishes - yeah, this is definitely in PattonLand.

But for the most part the Patton comparison is reductive throughout 'Mechatronics' - there's no sense of imitation or emulation - The All-Seeing Hand are doing their own damn thing, man. It's just when you have a sufficient degree of skronking and vocal experimentation, well comparisons can be drawn and familiarity with that legend-of-the-field's work will serve as a fitting entry-point to the precise and intricately constructed madness here.

'Mechatronics' is an aural extravaganza; sideshow and carnival in one - melodic, hypnotic, rhythmic, deranged and yet so painstakingly constructed that it remains cohesive and intelligible throughout. It never clutters its own landscape with excessive embellishments or ornamentation  - it is experimental without ever becoming less-than accessible.

Also, that artwork has to look frigging amazing in the vinyl release of this title.
By the by, a friend assures me they are quite the experience live; so if you get the chance, take it. But wear earplugs, he cautions. They play really loud.

Go here for a taste...