Canada gets a pretty rough time of it, musically speaking. One wit even went so far as to suggest that the USA needed to tighten up its border control to prevent the influx of Canadian bands and music. Don't get me wrong: Canada has definitely earned something of a reputation for producing terrifyingly successful and overwhelmingly bland artists. But I don't want to be negative here. You see, there are a wealth of exceptionally talented musicians in Canada - challenging, intelligent artists producing works of very real merit, they just don't get the exposure that the dreck is awarded. Well, in my own insignificant way I wish to take steps to redress that balance. So, every once in a while I'll profile a Canadian band that I really dig.
And so it is to Menace Ruine. They are a duo. They hail from Montreal, Quebec. The names they go by are Genevieve and S. de la Moth. Their albums give no musical credits. No instrument list. No biographical detail. As far as I am aware their photos have only appeared on the interior of their debut full-length: 'Cult of Ruins' and then their faces were shrouded in shadows, half-eaten by darkness. They are startlingly prolific: 2008 and saw the release of not one but two full-length albums: 'The Die is Cast' being the latter. They have then followed that by releasing an album every couple of years: 'Union of Irreconcilables' in 2010 and 'Alight in Ashes' in 2012. They change labels fairly frequently, their most recent disc is released by the thoroughly awesome folks at Profound Lore records.
The band name. The obfuscation. The album titles. You have to know that you're not in for an easy ride.
Together this duo sounds like the absolute end of the world.
Picture this: a vast ruined desert of blanched bone, worn by time and the elements down to the texture of dust. Imagine a birdless sky, storm-choked and seething, the sun burnt down to a frozen cataract. What few trees remain are scorched to their crooked spines and somewhere off in the distance the last vestiges of a city collapses into rot and ruin. The air is thick with drifting ash and there is no life anywhere. Every last vestige has been scythed away.
That is the world that this music conjures in my mind. But next comes the tricky part: they make this entire vast emptiness - this howling abyss that is all that comes after - they make it seem glorious, seductive. They make the monstrous beautiful.
Their debut disc - the wonderfully titled 'Cult of Ruins' - is black metal de-constructed down to the last shreds of itself and then reassembled by broken machines. The hallmarks of the genre are there: the eerie tremolos, the insanely kinetic drumming, the rasping vocals. But they've all been twisted and altered, shot through with avant-garde, experimental noise and industrial influences - the drums sound like a bone being rapped against the side of a battered pot, the vocals are suffocated in the mix and all the more terrifying for it, keyboards shriek and gibber like agitated baboons in an echo chamber. And then there are the clean vocals...
But, a confession: I have never actually listened to that first disc in it's entirety - just fragments. So I'll move along to the second disc and the one where things get really interesting. For a start, the artwork on the rather modest digipak is a beautiful thing: rich dark hues and an almost holy-looking image - an angel bending over...what: a coin, a bowl, the fallen moon? And a black-winged bird reflected in the surface below, inverted. The back-cover depicts a many-eyed monster straight from a particularly feverish passage of Revelations. All the interior text is printed in elaborate archaic font. The whole things looks ancient and sacred. And 'The Die is Cast' sounds like that too.
The overt black metal influences have been largely excised (though the disc still drips occult influences and that bleak and blasted vibe) and in their place are ominous drones, martial percussion and Genevieve's extraordinarily compelling voice. The production is insane, cloaking everything in a layer of static and haze, making it impossible to discern what instruments are being played - sometimes you'll hear something that sounds like a church organ, other times it's clearly a muffled bass chord, occasionally something very like a hurdy-gurdy can be discerned but they all just briefly surface from the strange and blackened miasma, never really identifiable. Listening to it, I'd half suspect that all the sounds were sampled from guitar and bass feedback - recorded and looped through a laptop setting, each one painstakingly reshaped, distorted, elongated, sculpted and layered into their final form. The drumming is sublime: tribal, military, beating a rhythmic tattoo underneath the shifting chiaroscuro of the textural layers.
But imperative to all of this: Genevieve's voice is a rich, dark-hued contralto. Her voice is unmodified, clean. It is a crucial human element in this desolate mix. She grounds the music. Genevieve has the melancholy and icy detachment of German chanteuse Nico, but tempered with the more vulpine styling of Grace Slick. The vocal melodies are always exquisite and often complex - even occasionally attaining a near-melodramatic, torch-song feel not entirely unlike Nancy Sinatra. They seem to drift over the rhythmic drones, almost independently of them. Genevieve doesn't so much sing as chant the lyrics. These aren't songs, these are incantations: hymns to a degenerate God that long ago abandoned His dying Creation.
Follow-up 'The Union of Irreconcilables' expands their palette even further, reintroducing the black metal and noise influences and producing something far less accessible than 'The Die is Cast' (accessible being a very relative term in this context). Again, the artwork prepares you for the experience. It depicts impossibly conjoined male-female twins, their faces smudged and blurred like Munch's scream, a vast bird with black and burning wings towers over them: though whether it menaces or shelters them is unclear. (Wait, I just checked that again - it's definitely menacing them). The interior artwork shows what appears to be a medieval engraving of a lion devouring the sun. The track titles are printed black-on-charcoal.
The opening track '...collapse' is blistering and deformed black metal, cloaked in noise and grime, like the ghost of a black metal track. The rasping is back, still choked deep inside the mix and unintelligible. This gives way to 'The Upper Hand' perhaps the most immediate and overtly beautiful of the album's tracks. A see-sawing and very heavily distorted guitar/bass riff rolls back and forth over booming military-style drums and on top of all of this is a startlingly melodic vocal melody. It is a wonderful, hypnotic track - strikingly Genevieve's vocal is even more boldly placed in the mix on this disc than on the one previous. But then comes the epically-titled 'Not Just a Break in the Clouds but a Permanent Clearing of the Sky'. It is 10:47 of roiling, blackened feedback, shot through with screeches and snarls of static. The vocal appears only twice, and then fleetingly, all-to-quickly consumed by the dense swarming of the track. It is a fascinating but staggeringly unlovely track. I can hear the clouds, or perhaps those are locusts swarming, but of the clearing of the sky, there is nothing. The first time I listened to it it damn near killed the album for me. Not because what it was doing wasn't profoundly effective. It was. That was the problem. It really is a track that you need to be braced for. It is followed by the comparatively brief 'Corridor de Perdition' which is a surprisingly delicate filigree of pure static. No vocals, yet oddly appealing.
Things get gob-smacking again with 'There Will Be Blood' - all haunted vocals and shuddering organ drones - and perhaps my favourite track on the disc: 'Nothing Above or Below'.
'Primal Waters Bed' (at a herculean 15:39) returns to the howling maelstrom experimentalism of 'Not Just...' but does so far more satisfyingly - to my ears at least. Vocals play a consistent and prominent role throughout and the song slowly looms grander and more terrible until it finally consumes the last of the disc in an apocalyptic gale of sound.
I have not yet heard their latest - 'Alight in Ashes' - but early reports (and a little sound-byte I sampled) point at it being a return to the sound of 'The Die is Cast'. Perhaps it will necessitate a post all of its own.
Further reading about the band reveals that their music is concerned with a sort of non-being, of unbecoming: the loss of the self. This explains the lack of album credits, band photos. They seek to withdraw their identities from the music, leaving it to exist in and of itself, almost independently. They do not perform live often. Fascinating.
Menace Ruine are truly a union of irreconcilables. They take sheer, overwhelming dissonance and marry it to the most exquisite of harmonies. They produce music that sounds utterly ancient and yet could not have been produced without cutting-edge modern technology. Their work is simultaneously repulsive and utterly enticing. They are the last song of a dead world. If 'Current 93' and 'Unto Ashes' are Apocalyptic Folk, then Menace Ruine are Post-Apocalyptic Folk. They are the aural equivalent of staring into Nietzsche's abyss. They are a masterpiece painted in bone-dust and clotted blood.
They are also a really hard sell: too out-there for most metal fans, not consistently black-metally enough for the black metal fetishists, way too dissonant for the neo-folk crowd, too melodic for the hardcore noise freaks.
Perhaps it would appeal to adventurous doom- or post-metal fans...perhaps.
Either way, if you're ever in the market for a French Canadian/Vegan/Industrial/Black Metal/Avant Garde/Ritual Drone/Noise/Neofolk duo - boy, have I ever got a deal for you.
http://www.myspace.com/menaceruine
http://menaceruine.tumblr.com/
Thursday, 31 January 2013
Saturday, 26 January 2013
The Girl, the Witch and the Seven Ravens
It was one of those semi-mythical glorious Wellington days: late afternoon, the sky still clear and hot and the concrete slowly simmering in the heat. We waited by the car park outside Toi Whakaari: the National Drama Centre, just on the edge of Newtown. There was a small group of us - the performance we were about to see did not permit a large audience - everyone was dressed for summer (except me, of course, I'm always braced for inclement weather).
Presently the director - Tabitha Arthur - appeared and ushered us into the darkness of the Basement Theatre. We stepped through a low metal door and then turned right through another door and into...
...A path through the space picked out by suspended strips of fabric. All was dark but for small spotlights trailing cobwebby light through the gloom. There was a strong sense of being drawn into another world, of being taken away from the warmth and general summer business going on outside. We were seated on a couple of low benches set before a screen and more trailing strips of fabric. The shadows of a forest were cast by projectors upon the screen and the whole chamber was filled with strange and atmospheric rustlings: like the sound of whispering trees.
After a moment or so a woman emerged from one side of the stage, beautiful and formidable in a dress and bodice that looked like to be sculpted from tree roots and moss. She hushed us with one finger placed to her lips and began the tale of how seven brothers came to be transformed by a witch (Caligosa, whom the storyteller also played) into seven ravens and how it fell to Octavia, their sister, to go in search of them and to find a way to break the curse. Her narrative was delivered half-spoken/half sung accompanied by an accordion (played live from somewhere offstage). Carrie Green (who played the storyteller/Caligosa) is possessed of a rich deep timbre and used it to tremendous effect in this piece: occasionally taunting, cautioning and oddly seductive in the way that all truly wicked things should be. She also made excellent use of vibrato lending the performance additional drama and the feel of a macabre operetta.. The booming and groaning accordion accompaniment gave the piece a wonderful twisted carnival vibe - curiously reminding me of Tom Waits' excellent but underrated performance of The Black Rider (another stage performance based upon a folk tale, incidentally). While she narrated the scenes were played out, projected like shadow puppets onto the hanging trails of cloth. It was an ingenious ploy and one that fitted superbly with the skewed, mythical sense of the piece.
Presently the play transitioned into the first fully enacted scene and Caligosa left the stage to be replaced by Octavia, the girl. She looked small and delicate in her costume, faintly elfin - though she was dressed for battle, with a sword on her hip and an elaborate bow over her shoulder. Her outfit had a wonderful half-realistic/half whimsical design that made it look as though it were plucked directly from the pages of a particularly lovely picture book. The actress Jessica Aaltonen, has a fine sense of physicality and moves like a dancer - all of which worked wonderfully within her (mostly) mute performance.
Octavia crept silently across the stage until an unearthly sound rattled through the performance space. There followed a confrontation with a bearlike beast that looked to be fashioned from black smoke and had something of a fondness for hurling branches. Octavia, after some ducking and diving, plucked the bow from her shoulder and sent an animated arrow through the creature's skull, whereupon it broke apart and scattered, becoming nothing. All of this was accomplished by matching physical action with projection and animation. It must have been a bugger to orchestrate but it was very effective. After the evanescence of the monster, Octavia crept to where an object had fallen in its place. She stooped to pick it up and, with a startling shriek that genuinely sounded full of terror, plunged through a tree-root lined pit and into darkness. It was a profoundly effective moment - the sheer volume and potency of her howl coupled with the way blackness suddenly swarmed to obliterate the projected image utterly.
We, the audience, were left with nothing but the words: to be continued.
This was all a sort of teaser, you see: the opening scene from an as-yet-unproduced full-length performance and Tabitha Arthur's final submission for her Master of Theatre Arts Degree. The intention of this piece is to demonstrate an understanding of sound design (including live musical accompaniment), projection and costuming - which is to say those clever technical elements that can elevate a play into something genuinely transcendent. It is an ambitious and accomplished vignette put together by some very talented people and I have to say, I'm damn keen to see a full-length version of this play.
Amusingly, one of the children in the audience chided Arthur for having Aaltonen scream too loud - for myself, I think her howl was exactly as blood-curdling as it should be.
It is of course, based upon the Brothers Grimm tale (which I am familiar with). For twenty or so years I have been pretty much obsessed with fairy tales, particularly the raw and bloody origins of them: the ones with darkness and fear still at their black and beating hearts. It is this dark, otherworldly vibe that Arthur and her co-conspirators have conjured and that is definitely something that I feel ought to be encouraged.
So keep your peepers peeled for the full version of 'The Girl, the Witch and the Seven Ravens' which will hopefully be developed after Arthur completes her degree.
Presently the director - Tabitha Arthur - appeared and ushered us into the darkness of the Basement Theatre. We stepped through a low metal door and then turned right through another door and into...
...A path through the space picked out by suspended strips of fabric. All was dark but for small spotlights trailing cobwebby light through the gloom. There was a strong sense of being drawn into another world, of being taken away from the warmth and general summer business going on outside. We were seated on a couple of low benches set before a screen and more trailing strips of fabric. The shadows of a forest were cast by projectors upon the screen and the whole chamber was filled with strange and atmospheric rustlings: like the sound of whispering trees.
After a moment or so a woman emerged from one side of the stage, beautiful and formidable in a dress and bodice that looked like to be sculpted from tree roots and moss. She hushed us with one finger placed to her lips and began the tale of how seven brothers came to be transformed by a witch (Caligosa, whom the storyteller also played) into seven ravens and how it fell to Octavia, their sister, to go in search of them and to find a way to break the curse. Her narrative was delivered half-spoken/half sung accompanied by an accordion (played live from somewhere offstage). Carrie Green (who played the storyteller/Caligosa) is possessed of a rich deep timbre and used it to tremendous effect in this piece: occasionally taunting, cautioning and oddly seductive in the way that all truly wicked things should be. She also made excellent use of vibrato lending the performance additional drama and the feel of a macabre operetta.. The booming and groaning accordion accompaniment gave the piece a wonderful twisted carnival vibe - curiously reminding me of Tom Waits' excellent but underrated performance of The Black Rider (another stage performance based upon a folk tale, incidentally). While she narrated the scenes were played out, projected like shadow puppets onto the hanging trails of cloth. It was an ingenious ploy and one that fitted superbly with the skewed, mythical sense of the piece.
Presently the play transitioned into the first fully enacted scene and Caligosa left the stage to be replaced by Octavia, the girl. She looked small and delicate in her costume, faintly elfin - though she was dressed for battle, with a sword on her hip and an elaborate bow over her shoulder. Her outfit had a wonderful half-realistic/half whimsical design that made it look as though it were plucked directly from the pages of a particularly lovely picture book. The actress Jessica Aaltonen, has a fine sense of physicality and moves like a dancer - all of which worked wonderfully within her (mostly) mute performance.
Octavia crept silently across the stage until an unearthly sound rattled through the performance space. There followed a confrontation with a bearlike beast that looked to be fashioned from black smoke and had something of a fondness for hurling branches. Octavia, after some ducking and diving, plucked the bow from her shoulder and sent an animated arrow through the creature's skull, whereupon it broke apart and scattered, becoming nothing. All of this was accomplished by matching physical action with projection and animation. It must have been a bugger to orchestrate but it was very effective. After the evanescence of the monster, Octavia crept to where an object had fallen in its place. She stooped to pick it up and, with a startling shriek that genuinely sounded full of terror, plunged through a tree-root lined pit and into darkness. It was a profoundly effective moment - the sheer volume and potency of her howl coupled with the way blackness suddenly swarmed to obliterate the projected image utterly.
We, the audience, were left with nothing but the words: to be continued.
This was all a sort of teaser, you see: the opening scene from an as-yet-unproduced full-length performance and Tabitha Arthur's final submission for her Master of Theatre Arts Degree. The intention of this piece is to demonstrate an understanding of sound design (including live musical accompaniment), projection and costuming - which is to say those clever technical elements that can elevate a play into something genuinely transcendent. It is an ambitious and accomplished vignette put together by some very talented people and I have to say, I'm damn keen to see a full-length version of this play.
Amusingly, one of the children in the audience chided Arthur for having Aaltonen scream too loud - for myself, I think her howl was exactly as blood-curdling as it should be.
It is of course, based upon the Brothers Grimm tale (which I am familiar with). For twenty or so years I have been pretty much obsessed with fairy tales, particularly the raw and bloody origins of them: the ones with darkness and fear still at their black and beating hearts. It is this dark, otherworldly vibe that Arthur and her co-conspirators have conjured and that is definitely something that I feel ought to be encouraged.
So keep your peepers peeled for the full version of 'The Girl, the Witch and the Seven Ravens' which will hopefully be developed after Arthur completes her degree.
Friday, 25 January 2013
Home.
I spent this week back home in Christchurch, NZ.
There's been a lot happening in my life so far this year. Big changes. Heavy, life-altering stuff. It was wonderful to simply be able to walk away from it all, even if just for a week. I have family down there, family whom I love very much and see far less often than I should. So to be down there, surrounded by those closest to me...it was fantastic.
But, Christchurch.
If you know anything of New Zealand (anything not directly related to an ongoing cinematic franchise set in a fantastical universe, that is) you will know Christchurch was struck by a series of devastating earthquakes. The land down there is mostly stilled once more, although the occasional rattle does still stir in its bones, but it has been utterly and irrevocably altered by those events. It is not the first time I have returned there since the quakes, but it is the first time that I have had a blog to write about the experience.
It was a screamingly-hot day when my parents took me in to the centre of the city, to the place where the arbitrary violence of nature is most strikingly evident. The cathedral is a sagging husk of churned stone. Many of the walls are still standing but they have been gnawed open and the spire (perhaps the most striking feature of the Christchurch Cathedral) is long gone leaving just a blasted hole in its place. A friend of mine used to ring the bell in that spire, I believe the term is 'campanologist'. The mayor has proposed encasing the whole structure in a sort of colossal glass museum case, after fortifying the remaining walls so that it can still be used by worshippers. It is an idea not without precedent. It will certainly be a peculiar sight if he can get the backing for it.
The central city itself is now more negative space than anything else: checked across with empty lots that are pebbled like riverbeds and serve mostly as parking spaces. There is a heck of a lot of parking space in Christchurch. It's strange to walk through it and see an area that I used to pass through frequently, fenced off and rioted across with cracks, gutted by weeds. Everywhere there are huge piles of rubble, snarls of tangled metal, and the sort of homogeneous dusty gravel that it seems pretty much everything can be reduced to. Most anywhere you go you can hear the industrial grinding of earth-moving machines picking through the debris. There are security fences and traffic cones everywhere. Above it all the sky was blue and blazing.
Some very clever things have been done with all this new emptiness: a start-up mall built of shipping containers has sprung up in what used to be one of my favourite areas for browsing, a soccer field of glistening astro-turf has been laid out in another empty lot, still elsewhere there is a memorial to those that died during the quake - a white chair set out for each person lost.
A couple of days later - on a day that was overcast and much cooler (something of a relief to me as I have become kind of used to Wellington's more consistently chilly weather) - we drove out to the East side of the city. It's not one you hear much about and there's a pretty good reason for that.
It's basically gone.
We passed a series of abandoned suburbs. The houses empty and dead, windows gone or boarded over, brickwork cracked and snarled across with graffiti. The gardens were all overgrown and the driveways empty. Beneath the wheels of the car you could feel all the broken places in the road shuddering through the suspension.
The plan is to tear everything in those neighbourhoods down. Plant trees. These suburbs follow the river and in the absence of all the houses there can be a snaking series of parks and recreational areas. It will be beautiful. That's actually the thing I took away the most from my trip through these ruined areas: whatever Christchurch will be once it has been built again, will be beautiful. And it will also be utterly and fundamentally different from what it has been. It's as if a knife has been drawn across the history of the city - utterly severing its past from its future.
Once Christchurch was a sort of mini England-away-from-England: the Garden City. Unfortunately it also had a still active class-system (something the bulk of New Zealand originally sought to break away from, though time has brought it back in again). It was a sort of running gag that if anyone found out you were originally from Christchurch they would immediately ask which school you went to - the idea that a lot about your familial wealth and status could be inferred from the answer (which is, to say, that you really should have gone to one of the fancy private schools, preferably one named after a largely forgotten saint or something).
Now it has a much looser vibe, almost bohemian. Another friend has said it would be a fantastic city to be student in right now. It's a city caught in perpetual change and from here its future could be anything. Most of my own past is there, in those broken streets. But its altered now, buried in gravel pits and mangled concrete, and all my old haunts are long gone. As a man newly single for the first time in over a decade this feels oddly appropriate to me. And so it is that ultimately I want to leave Wellington and move back there - to be a part of that strange, uncertain future. It's exciting, y'know. Also, but most importantly, my family are there still.
Now I can't stop thinking of the one line in William S. Burrough's novel Naked Lunch (which I have not read since I was about fifteen or sixteen and, truth be told, it might not even be Naked Lunch but another of his novels - I've read quite a few) that always haunted me for no apparent reason:
'They are rebuilding the city'.
And that's it, blog post number two and not even a little bit about music. Oh well, it did however feature a few references to actual, literal architecture so I think Frank Zappa would probably be amused.
There's been a lot happening in my life so far this year. Big changes. Heavy, life-altering stuff. It was wonderful to simply be able to walk away from it all, even if just for a week. I have family down there, family whom I love very much and see far less often than I should. So to be down there, surrounded by those closest to me...it was fantastic.
But, Christchurch.
If you know anything of New Zealand (anything not directly related to an ongoing cinematic franchise set in a fantastical universe, that is) you will know Christchurch was struck by a series of devastating earthquakes. The land down there is mostly stilled once more, although the occasional rattle does still stir in its bones, but it has been utterly and irrevocably altered by those events. It is not the first time I have returned there since the quakes, but it is the first time that I have had a blog to write about the experience.
It was a screamingly-hot day when my parents took me in to the centre of the city, to the place where the arbitrary violence of nature is most strikingly evident. The cathedral is a sagging husk of churned stone. Many of the walls are still standing but they have been gnawed open and the spire (perhaps the most striking feature of the Christchurch Cathedral) is long gone leaving just a blasted hole in its place. A friend of mine used to ring the bell in that spire, I believe the term is 'campanologist'. The mayor has proposed encasing the whole structure in a sort of colossal glass museum case, after fortifying the remaining walls so that it can still be used by worshippers. It is an idea not without precedent. It will certainly be a peculiar sight if he can get the backing for it.
The central city itself is now more negative space than anything else: checked across with empty lots that are pebbled like riverbeds and serve mostly as parking spaces. There is a heck of a lot of parking space in Christchurch. It's strange to walk through it and see an area that I used to pass through frequently, fenced off and rioted across with cracks, gutted by weeds. Everywhere there are huge piles of rubble, snarls of tangled metal, and the sort of homogeneous dusty gravel that it seems pretty much everything can be reduced to. Most anywhere you go you can hear the industrial grinding of earth-moving machines picking through the debris. There are security fences and traffic cones everywhere. Above it all the sky was blue and blazing.
Some very clever things have been done with all this new emptiness: a start-up mall built of shipping containers has sprung up in what used to be one of my favourite areas for browsing, a soccer field of glistening astro-turf has been laid out in another empty lot, still elsewhere there is a memorial to those that died during the quake - a white chair set out for each person lost.
A couple of days later - on a day that was overcast and much cooler (something of a relief to me as I have become kind of used to Wellington's more consistently chilly weather) - we drove out to the East side of the city. It's not one you hear much about and there's a pretty good reason for that.
It's basically gone.
We passed a series of abandoned suburbs. The houses empty and dead, windows gone or boarded over, brickwork cracked and snarled across with graffiti. The gardens were all overgrown and the driveways empty. Beneath the wheels of the car you could feel all the broken places in the road shuddering through the suspension.
The plan is to tear everything in those neighbourhoods down. Plant trees. These suburbs follow the river and in the absence of all the houses there can be a snaking series of parks and recreational areas. It will be beautiful. That's actually the thing I took away the most from my trip through these ruined areas: whatever Christchurch will be once it has been built again, will be beautiful. And it will also be utterly and fundamentally different from what it has been. It's as if a knife has been drawn across the history of the city - utterly severing its past from its future.
Once Christchurch was a sort of mini England-away-from-England: the Garden City. Unfortunately it also had a still active class-system (something the bulk of New Zealand originally sought to break away from, though time has brought it back in again). It was a sort of running gag that if anyone found out you were originally from Christchurch they would immediately ask which school you went to - the idea that a lot about your familial wealth and status could be inferred from the answer (which is, to say, that you really should have gone to one of the fancy private schools, preferably one named after a largely forgotten saint or something).
Now it has a much looser vibe, almost bohemian. Another friend has said it would be a fantastic city to be student in right now. It's a city caught in perpetual change and from here its future could be anything. Most of my own past is there, in those broken streets. But its altered now, buried in gravel pits and mangled concrete, and all my old haunts are long gone. As a man newly single for the first time in over a decade this feels oddly appropriate to me. And so it is that ultimately I want to leave Wellington and move back there - to be a part of that strange, uncertain future. It's exciting, y'know. Also, but most importantly, my family are there still.
Now I can't stop thinking of the one line in William S. Burrough's novel Naked Lunch (which I have not read since I was about fifteen or sixteen and, truth be told, it might not even be Naked Lunch but another of his novels - I've read quite a few) that always haunted me for no apparent reason:
'They are rebuilding the city'.
And that's it, blog post number two and not even a little bit about music. Oh well, it did however feature a few references to actual, literal architecture so I think Frank Zappa would probably be amused.
Saturday, 19 January 2013
The Nudge live at Wellington Botanic Gardens
Last night I saw this band...
When I first met this guy (in my usual capacity at my not-important day job) I figured him for a musician: he had that vibe, you know - tall, dreadlocked, heroically blessed in both beard and teeth. His last name struck some kind of half-memory chord in me as well, so when he left I googled him.
Please note: I do not make a regular thing out of googling strangers. That would be wrong. And peculiar.
Turns out his name is James Coyle and he has clocked up some impressive musical credits under his completely awesome alternate moniker Reverend Black Keys. He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a keyboard player. On top of that he is a hard-line reggae fan and a collector of keyboards and organs. He is also one of the nicest damn people I have ever had the pleasure of randomly meeting so when he told me on Friday that he was playing the ASB Gardens Magic show the following night I assured him that I would head along. And I meant it.
The ASB Gardens Magic show is a series of free open-air gigs held at the sound-shell in the Wellington Botanical Gardens. They run this thing yearly, scraping together financial support from businesses (this year, thank you ASB) and the Wellington City Council. Typically it falls over a couple of weeks in whatever it is that Wellington has passing for summer that year. By-the-by that's Wellington, New Zealand. Just so you know.
I arrived just as the first hush of dusk was creeping over the gardens. It was a rough evening, the wind tattering through the bush and biting at the buildings. The sky constantly threatened rain. The grassy stretch in front of the soundshell was already starting to fill up with small huddles of twenty-somethings, hipsters in the wild. The band hadn't taken the stage yet and low-key reggae music was playing through the sound system. Where I sat a sign advising people not to climb into the flowerbeds kept getting lifted by the wind and battering lightly against my head. It was not unlike being gently flogged with a manilla folder.
They dress the gardens up quite beautifully for these occasions, painting the various trees in different coloured lights. A clever installation piece had been set over a nearby pond - a series of illuminated orbs suspended above their reflections in the black water. One low-weeping tree was hung with mirror-balls of various sizes, catching and refracting the lights beamed at it from several points. In case your wondering, the Wellington Botanical Gardens basically looks how you picture NZ Native bush: dense trees, huge ferns, everything damp and green and ancient-seeming, only in the gardens it's better cultivated and there's ample wide paths to walk. Also, ducks.
Coyle is MCing these concerts and he took the stage just as the area really started to fill. He did the usual banter and then announced that the band to play, his band, were The Nudge. Now, I'd heard the name before, read an article about them some time ago. I remember I'd been curious at the time. I don't remember much else. I'd figured I was in for an evening of chilled-out reggae/roots sounds (Coyle being an avowed reggae fan and Wellington's musical scene being weirdly dominated by the vibe) but as soon as the guitarist/vocalist - Ryan Prebble - took the stage dressed in a sort of pseudo-Eastern take on a Sgt Pepper's costume and a top hat it became clear that things were going in a different direction. He set the keyboards to play a weird oscillating tone not unlike that of a glass harmonica (exactly the way sunlight glinting off ice would sound, if it were rendered in musical form). He then fetched up his guitar and laid down a psyched-out guitar riff, presently joined by the drummer - Iraia Whakamoe - who added his own intense, tribal pulse to the song, spurring the mantra-like rhythm onward. Coyle then returned (having changed from his MC outfit into something more thematic) and fleshed out the keyboard pattern with some denser bass tones. All this paired with a repeating vocal phrase, issued in a back-of-the-throat rasp by Prebble, gave the vibe of a really tight jam band. Now I know enough of this stuff to know where this vibe is heading and sure enough, layer after layer the song built and built until finally in a cathartic rush the song blossomed in a starburst of sound: keyboards erupting into a barrage of siren noise, the drums pounded down as though Whakamoe didn't want to see them getting up again, and the guitar spitting an acid lead break.
Through the applause the band dove straight into the second piece of the night: a dirty blues-boogie that had a whiff of early Sabbath about it. So that's how the night was to be: a thrilling display of pyched-out blues rock, played by three very fine musicians who seemed to feed off one another. Man, what I'm saying is the band was tight.
Incidentally, I hope nobody is expecting me to name any of these songs as the band didn't announce them and I didn't even know who I was going to see before I showed up on the night. It didn't matter. A great song is a great song and these were all great songs.
The keys remained psychedelic and astonishing, whether they were set to that glorious Seventies' farfisa organ sound or conjuring delicate waves breaking on a Bali shoreline, whale song, or at one particularly memorable bit - the sound of a jet engine imploding. And the drums, man, Whakamoe is a very precise drummer - tightening and loosening the rhythmic pulse in perfect fit with the rest of the band. He repeatedly used his hits to build and release the tension of the piece while always spurring the music onwards. Prebble on guitar is a thing to behold - now, I'm a huge fan of a heavy blues riff and those were in ample supply on the night, that coupled with his psyched-out leads and the odd surf-esque roll made for something plenty special. As a vocalist he's delightfully unhinged: possessed of a rough-edged blues rasp and a tendency to sound almost as if he's gargling the words. He growls, pants and howls his way through the songs - an id who can carry a tune.
The dark crept over the venue and the trees lit up all in otherworldly colours. A hoard of people moved in sketched-out silhouettes against the front of the stage. From somewhere amongst the lights a device regularly issued clouds of tiny bubbles that drifted on the weirdly still air - the wind had disappeared as soon as the band took the stage.
Eventually after a couple of damn fine and very energetic encores the band were out of time and the audience were left to drift off into the strange, phantom-lit world of the botanical gardens after dark. The wind picked up again shortly after that and pounded me in the face on the walk home. It was a great night.
So that's it. If you get the chance to see the Nudge performing live, I say take it, it's a wild ride and I know I'll be keeping an eye out for their albums from here on in.
And here's some links...
http://www.thenudge.co.nz/
http://www.eventfinder.co.nz/2013/asb-gardens-magic/wellington
http://nudge.bandcamp.com/
When I first met this guy (in my usual capacity at my not-important day job) I figured him for a musician: he had that vibe, you know - tall, dreadlocked, heroically blessed in both beard and teeth. His last name struck some kind of half-memory chord in me as well, so when he left I googled him.
Please note: I do not make a regular thing out of googling strangers. That would be wrong. And peculiar.
Turns out his name is James Coyle and he has clocked up some impressive musical credits under his completely awesome alternate moniker Reverend Black Keys. He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a keyboard player. On top of that he is a hard-line reggae fan and a collector of keyboards and organs. He is also one of the nicest damn people I have ever had the pleasure of randomly meeting so when he told me on Friday that he was playing the ASB Gardens Magic show the following night I assured him that I would head along. And I meant it.
The ASB Gardens Magic show is a series of free open-air gigs held at the sound-shell in the Wellington Botanical Gardens. They run this thing yearly, scraping together financial support from businesses (this year, thank you ASB) and the Wellington City Council. Typically it falls over a couple of weeks in whatever it is that Wellington has passing for summer that year. By-the-by that's Wellington, New Zealand. Just so you know.
I arrived just as the first hush of dusk was creeping over the gardens. It was a rough evening, the wind tattering through the bush and biting at the buildings. The sky constantly threatened rain. The grassy stretch in front of the soundshell was already starting to fill up with small huddles of twenty-somethings, hipsters in the wild. The band hadn't taken the stage yet and low-key reggae music was playing through the sound system. Where I sat a sign advising people not to climb into the flowerbeds kept getting lifted by the wind and battering lightly against my head. It was not unlike being gently flogged with a manilla folder.
They dress the gardens up quite beautifully for these occasions, painting the various trees in different coloured lights. A clever installation piece had been set over a nearby pond - a series of illuminated orbs suspended above their reflections in the black water. One low-weeping tree was hung with mirror-balls of various sizes, catching and refracting the lights beamed at it from several points. In case your wondering, the Wellington Botanical Gardens basically looks how you picture NZ Native bush: dense trees, huge ferns, everything damp and green and ancient-seeming, only in the gardens it's better cultivated and there's ample wide paths to walk. Also, ducks.
Coyle is MCing these concerts and he took the stage just as the area really started to fill. He did the usual banter and then announced that the band to play, his band, were The Nudge. Now, I'd heard the name before, read an article about them some time ago. I remember I'd been curious at the time. I don't remember much else. I'd figured I was in for an evening of chilled-out reggae/roots sounds (Coyle being an avowed reggae fan and Wellington's musical scene being weirdly dominated by the vibe) but as soon as the guitarist/vocalist - Ryan Prebble - took the stage dressed in a sort of pseudo-Eastern take on a Sgt Pepper's costume and a top hat it became clear that things were going in a different direction. He set the keyboards to play a weird oscillating tone not unlike that of a glass harmonica (exactly the way sunlight glinting off ice would sound, if it were rendered in musical form). He then fetched up his guitar and laid down a psyched-out guitar riff, presently joined by the drummer - Iraia Whakamoe - who added his own intense, tribal pulse to the song, spurring the mantra-like rhythm onward. Coyle then returned (having changed from his MC outfit into something more thematic) and fleshed out the keyboard pattern with some denser bass tones. All this paired with a repeating vocal phrase, issued in a back-of-the-throat rasp by Prebble, gave the vibe of a really tight jam band. Now I know enough of this stuff to know where this vibe is heading and sure enough, layer after layer the song built and built until finally in a cathartic rush the song blossomed in a starburst of sound: keyboards erupting into a barrage of siren noise, the drums pounded down as though Whakamoe didn't want to see them getting up again, and the guitar spitting an acid lead break.
Through the applause the band dove straight into the second piece of the night: a dirty blues-boogie that had a whiff of early Sabbath about it. So that's how the night was to be: a thrilling display of pyched-out blues rock, played by three very fine musicians who seemed to feed off one another. Man, what I'm saying is the band was tight.
Incidentally, I hope nobody is expecting me to name any of these songs as the band didn't announce them and I didn't even know who I was going to see before I showed up on the night. It didn't matter. A great song is a great song and these were all great songs.
The keys remained psychedelic and astonishing, whether they were set to that glorious Seventies' farfisa organ sound or conjuring delicate waves breaking on a Bali shoreline, whale song, or at one particularly memorable bit - the sound of a jet engine imploding. And the drums, man, Whakamoe is a very precise drummer - tightening and loosening the rhythmic pulse in perfect fit with the rest of the band. He repeatedly used his hits to build and release the tension of the piece while always spurring the music onwards. Prebble on guitar is a thing to behold - now, I'm a huge fan of a heavy blues riff and those were in ample supply on the night, that coupled with his psyched-out leads and the odd surf-esque roll made for something plenty special. As a vocalist he's delightfully unhinged: possessed of a rough-edged blues rasp and a tendency to sound almost as if he's gargling the words. He growls, pants and howls his way through the songs - an id who can carry a tune.
The dark crept over the venue and the trees lit up all in otherworldly colours. A hoard of people moved in sketched-out silhouettes against the front of the stage. From somewhere amongst the lights a device regularly issued clouds of tiny bubbles that drifted on the weirdly still air - the wind had disappeared as soon as the band took the stage.
Eventually after a couple of damn fine and very energetic encores the band were out of time and the audience were left to drift off into the strange, phantom-lit world of the botanical gardens after dark. The wind picked up again shortly after that and pounded me in the face on the walk home. It was a great night.
So that's it. If you get the chance to see the Nudge performing live, I say take it, it's a wild ride and I know I'll be keeping an eye out for their albums from here on in.
And here's some links...
http://www.thenudge.co.nz/
http://www.eventfinder.co.nz/2013/asb-gardens-magic/wellington
http://nudge.bandcamp.com/
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