the whole point of no return / let me off please, I am so tired : robert wyatt

At Avant Gardening we're quite fond of following the more hidden threads across musical careers : in a recent show dedicated to Tom Rapp/Pearls Before Swine, we explored an artist arguably at his most dramatically diverting when he dipped briefly into the familiar narrative tropes only to then head radically away from the cliche. Tonight we present an eclecticism of a similar breadth. There's a strikingly obvious turning point early in the artistic life of the great British singer/ composer Robert Wyatt : the blonde, frequently shirtless drummer/singer for jazz/prog pioneers Soft Machine (and later Matching Mole) throws himself drunkenly out of a fourth floor window after too close an adherence to the Keith Moon formula of rotating tequila and Southern Comfort, and breaks his back... and becomes a depressive, culty songwriter in a triumph of (relative) artistry over adversity. This has always been the dominant opening strand for R. Wyatt 101, but the sting in the tail is a little longer than that.

Nearly 40 years since the accident, and Wyatt has gone on to become the most interesting, consistently shifting and developing member of that generation of English musicians who created what is now known as the "Canterbury Sound" of "progressive rock". And there's a condescension in the reception of the trajectory that comprehensively overshadows the ongoing career, that is belied by Wyatt's own response: to be a serious, ongoing figure who requires no pity but constantly acknowledges his situation as casting a long shadow over his life and his work. The need to listen closer applies to his unique singing voice: tremulous, deeply accented in sound and delivery yet profoundly expressive and addictive in its depths of feeling. It's the best kind of voice to present in terms of the argument between a technically "correct" voice of general precision and that of a person who has a singular take and will sing in a singular way.

Wyatt talks about his singing in terms of jazz, as a kind of "human horn", and he often sings beautiful wordless passages without defusing emotion or focus. He has an ongoing predilection for re-interpreting old songs from disparate sources - take for example his classic take on Chic's At Last I Am Free. This tendency in the work - most likely a kind of modesty at odds with the 70s tradition of singer-songwriters he isn't really a part of - sometimes overshadows an engagement with his own songwriting. The knowledge of and love for a ridiculously open array of music reflected in the sonic textures covered across those decades is not contradicted by the range of themes expressed verbally, but the style of songwriting is much tighter, and no less compelling for it. Throughout his career as a songwriter - first expressed in tracks like Soft Machine's Moon in June and Matching Mole's Signed Curtain - he's been a striking adherent to the British schools of intelligently whimsical wordplay, perhaps somewhere between Lewis Carroll and Samuel Beckett. Somewhere in there, he's become a master of honing this tendency to a very sharp communicative point indeed... It's in evidence on tracks like the paired Alifib/Alife off Rock Bottom ("Alifib, my larder" sings the recently crippled Wyatt to his wife and ongoing collaborator, Alfreda Benge. "I'm not your larder" is the response, several minutes later) and the later Free Will and Testament off Shleep.

Of course, the sharper the point, the smaller the detail it illuminates, and Wyatt's is a deceptively modest art, one that highlights the important difference between this expressive "everyman" and the more sterile notion of the "universal". A lover and responsible appropriator of many forms from bluntly commercial pop music through many histories of jazz, world music and punk, he is also a specialist in adapting tools available with clarity and laterality. Witness the 1981 Radio Experiment LP, where he was given the tools of a small Italian radio station studio for a week to develop from scratch an equivalent of an album and did so with only the items to hand from a constant process of solitary improvisation... or also the sometimes derided tendency to use the most basic of preset sounds from 80s keyboards to great expressive effect.

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Playlist:

1. Robert Wyatt, Sea Song from 'Rock Bottom' (1974)
2. Robert Wyatt, At last I Am Free from 'Nothing Can Stop Us' (1980)
3. Soft Machine, Moon in June from 'BBC Recordings 1967-71' (rel 2003)
4. Matching Mole, Signed Curtain from 'Matching Mole' (1972)
5. Matching Mole, March Ides I from 'Smoke SIgnals' (rec 1972, rel 2001)
6. Matching Mole, Starting in the middle of the day we can drink our politics away from 'Little Red Record' (1972)
7. Robert Wyatt & Friends, Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road from '1974 Live at Drury Lane' (rec 1974, rel 2008)
8. Robert Wyatt, I'm A Believer from 'Peel Sessions' (rec 1974, rel 1987)
9. Robert Wyatt, Alifib from 'Rock Bottom' (1974)
10. Robert Wyatt, Alife from 'Rock Bottom' (1974)
11. Robert Wyatt, Muddy Mouse (c) Which in Turn Leads To Muddy Mouth from 'Ruth is Stranger Than Richard' (1975)

12. Robert Wyatt, Solar Flares Burn For You from 'Solar Flares Burn For You' (rec 1975, rel 2003)
13. Robert Wyatt, Opium War from 'Radio Experiment Rome, February 1981' (rec 1981, rel 2009)
14. Robert Wyatt, Holy War from 'Radio Experiment Rome, February 1981' (rec 1981, rel 2009)
15. Robert Wyatt, Prove Sparse from 'Radio Experiment Rome, February 1981' (rec 1981, rel 2009)
16. Robert Wyatt, Shipbuilding from 'Shipbuilding' 7" (1982)
17. Robert Wyatt, Amber & The Amberines from 'Works in Progress EP' (1984)
18. Robert Wyatt, Pigs (in there) from 'Abuse - Artists for Animals' compilation (1986)
19. Robert Wyatt, Gharbzadegi from 'Free Will and Testament' (2003)

20. Robert Wyatt, The Animals Film (excerpt) from 'The Animals Film LP' (1982)
21. Robert Wyatt, We Got an Arts Council Grant from 'Solar Flares Burn For You (rec 1973, rel 2003)
22. Robert Wyatt, Vandalusia from 'Old Rottenhat' (1985)

23. Robert Wyatt, Alliance from 'Old Rottenhat' (1985)
24. Robert Wyatt, The Sight of the Wind from 'Dondestan' (1991)
25. Robert Wyatt/Chris and Cosey, Unmasked from 'A Short Break' EP (1992)
26. Robert Wyatt/Pascal Comelade, September Song (w Pascal Comelade) from 'September Song' EP (2000)
27. Robert Wyatt, Was a Friend from 'Shleep' (1997)
28. Robert Wyatt, Free Will and Testament from 'Shleep' (1997)
29. Robert Wyatt, The Verb from 'Solar Flares Burn For You' (rec 2003, rel 2003)
30. Robert Wyatt, Forest from 'Cuckooland' (2003)
31. Robert Wyatt, Lullaloop from 'Cuckooland' (2003)
32. Robert Wyatt, Stay Tuned from Comicopera' (2007)
33. Robert Wyatt, A Beautiful Peace from 'Comicopera' (2007)
34. Robert Wyatt, A Beautiful War from 'Comicopera' (2007)
35. Robert Wyatt, Out of the Blue from 'Comicopera' (2007)
36. Wyatt/Atzmon/Stephen, Lullaby for Irena from 'For the Ghosts Within' (2010)
37. Robert Wyatt & Friends, Memories from '1974 Live at Drury Lane' (rec 1974, rel 2008)

fuck the memescape : a united fairy moons sampler

Avant Gardening's current sub-focus on under-the-radar local label activity and self-published expat wunderkindery takes a different turn of the screw this week, with a look at the prolific output of a local figure whose recent defection has been across artforms, rather than geographical borders.

Founded in late 2002 by Australian import Jim / Jimmy (nee James, nee Jimb) Currin, United Fairy Moons was, in its proprietor's words "started in order to release one record and one record only" : the item in question being a limited lathe-cut pressing of a barely-attended live performance from 2001 at the now defunct Gresham Hotel. UFM 001 is named 'Liquified', and is credited to 'Donald McPherson & co.' : a pre-Three Forks underground-supergroup configuration which also included Sandoz Lab Techicians Tim Cornelius and Nathan Thompson, as well as James Currin himself.

Needless to say, it didn't - or perhaps more accurately, wasn't allowed to - stop there. Over the next 5 years UFM's catalogue swelled to the double digits, its post-lathe, pre-neo-cassette aesthetic enlivened by the then recently accessible CDR technology, all packaged up in handpainted / handscreened 'craft boutique' covers, in the process becoming not just a reflection or documentation of, but a generator for, much local musical and associated artistic activity.

the reviews started to roll in :

"I imagine what Ray Off divines across these five tracks of peyote laced aural fever dreams would make for a fine backdrop to images of sun scorched rock formations, distant liquid hallucinations and other strange lizard-scuttling desert phenomena. One of the earliest UFM releases, currently in its third press and still roaming the wilds, highly recommended for lovers of skin-crawling, head-tickling sonic mutations."

"The effect is sort of like reading some obscure sci-fi comic book while listening to Harmonia, Vocokesh and ingesting LSD all at the same time, but there’s a lot more going on here, too."

- Lee Jackson, Deep Water Acres
"Despite its' fringe characteristics there's a sense of beauty and isolation that is much more seducing than it is perplexing, like following a hidden trail through a region draped in dramatic natural beauty. Seven Layer Ape is a slice of timeless improv.... a visual and aural masterpiece that comes highly recommended to every avid Broken Face reader."

- Mats Gustafsson, The Broken Face

then, soon after the emergence of Ray Off's 2008's monumental three CDR release 'Split the Lark' (UFM 020), the label went into hiatus. Tune in tonight as Jim joins us in the studio to spin the back catalogue and discuss the past.

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Playlist:

1. Donald McPherson & co., from Liquified (UFM 001)
2. Ray Off, track 2 from Ghost Wolf of Thunder Mountain (UFM 004)
3. Three Forks, 'Drunken Traffic', from Seven Layer Ape (UFM 013)
4. Sinking Infinities, 'L'Orb' from The Life of Riley (excerpt) (UFM 017)
5. Jo Jo ef Steve, 'Ballad of a Thin Line Man' from A Quiet Night in With... (UFM 014)
6. Rory Storm, 'Valerie Solaris Space Station' from Fuck the Memescape (UFM 016)
7. Rory Storm, 'Title Track' from Fuck the Memescape (UFM 016)
8. Spit, 'Piece for Bells' and 'Painting for Prepared Piano (ex. 3)', from Trash Music Spitacular (UFM 011)
9. CJA, 'Ok to Want Me', from Ponds (UFM 019)
10. Ray Off, 'AE', from Clean & Dry Area Before Application (UFM 015)
11. Ray Off, 'Rory & Jim Play Train Gamelan', from Clean & Dry Area Before Application (UFM 015)
12. Ray Off, live at Lines of Flight 7th October 2006, from Split the Lark, disc 3 (UFM 020)
13. Ray Off, 'Smoke People', from Split the Lark, disc 2 (UFM 020)
14. Ray Off, 'Eleballetphant', from Don't Touch your Moustache (UFM 21)
15. Ray Off, 'On Pinmero Pimero', from POLyp pop Ok Oh-oh (unreleased)

(& live interview with Jim Currin throughout the show)

'i have just come back from the land beyond the mountains, this is not a story i was told' : the music of tom rapp & pearls before swine

Psych / folk / outsider artist Tom Rapp's Pearls Before Swine project started off as a quietly successful cult, and subsequently transferred into first an increasingly ordinary and then obscure solo project, followed by 20+ years of actual obscurity, and a quietly miraculous comeback when the tides of musc shifted in the 90s.

The most successful act on the legendary ESP-Disc label in late 60s New York, Rapp and band released two quite astonishing albums of what at the time was something very hard to classify - and involved being comprehensively ripped off in the process - after a less eccentric, country folk tinged major label career into the mid 1970s, a disillusioned Rapp then quit music to become a civil rights lawyer.

For years he barely picked up his guitar again, convinced that he'd been forgotten, and that all his albums had quietly disappeared. Come the late 90s, and the strange, delicate, defiantly playful and psychedelic music of Rapp and cohorts - somewhere between Michael Hurley and Alastair Galbraith - is absolutely in tune with zeitgeist again.

Triumphant comeback? Well, perhaps. After a few festival performances, notably at legendary English psych fixture Ptolemaic Terrascope, and a new album, then it was back to work, specialising in research into defending clients who are the victims of discrimination.

Avant Gardening brings you selections from Rapp's back catalogue, stretching from Pearls Before Swine to the recent solo material.

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Playlist:

1. Pearls Before Swine, 'Another Time' from Radio Pearls
2. Pearls Before Swine, 'Footnote' from These Things Too
3. Pearls Before Swine, 'Sail Away' from These Things Too
4. Pearls Before Swine, '(Oh Dear) Miss Morse' from One Nation Underground
5. Pearls Before Swine, 'Frog in the Window' from These Things Too (1969)
6. Pearls Before Swine, 'Trumpeter Landfrey' from Balaklava (1968)
7. Pearls Before Swine, 'Translucent Carriages' from Balaklava (1968)
8. Pearls Before Swine, 'Images of April' from Balaklava (1968)
9. Pearls Before Swine, 'Playmate' from One Nation Underground (1967)
10. Pearls Before Swine, 'Drop Out!' from One Nation Underground (1967)
11. Pearls Before Swine, 'Ring Thing' from Balaklava (1968)
12. Pearls Before Swine, 'Wizard of Is' from The Wizard of Is (1969)
13. Pearls Before Swine, 'The Jeweller' from The Wizard of Is (1970)
14. Pearls Before Swine, 'Look Into Her Eyes' from These Things Too (1969)
15. Pearls Before Swine, 'When The War Began' from Radio Pearls bootleg (1971)
16. Pearls Before Swine, 'Butterflies' from Beautiful Lies You Could Live In (1971)
17. Pearls Before Swine, 'Rocket Man' from The Wizard of Is (1972)
18. Pearls Before Swine, 'I Shall Be Released' from Live Pearls (1971)
19. Pearls Before Swine, 'Suzanne' from Pearls Before Swine (1968)
20. Pearls Before Swine, 'Bird on a Wire' from Beautiful Lies You Could Live In (1971)
21. Tom Rapp, 'After the Gold Rush' from This Note's For You Too! compilation (1999)
22. Pearls Before Swine, 'Love/ Sex' from The Wizard of Is (1972)
23. Tom Rapp, 'The Old Dope Peddler' live at Ptolemaic Terrascope (1997)
24. Tom Rapp, 'The Riegal' live at Ptolemaic Terrascope (2002)
25. Tom Rapp, 'Lesson of the 60s' from The Wizard of Is (1999)
26. Tom Rapp, 'Silver Apples' (a capella) from Journal of the Plague Year (2000)
27. Tom Rapp, 'The Swimmer (for Kurt Cobain)' from Journal of the Plague Year (2000)
28. Tom Rapp, 'Space' from Journal of the Plague Year (2000)
29. Pearls Before Swine, 'Full Fathom Five / I Shall Not Care' from The Wizard of Is (1971)
30. Pearls Before Swine, 'Crawling Towards Bethlehem' off The Wizard of Is (1972)
31. Pearls Before Swine, 'If You don't Want To (I Don't Mind)' off Radio Pearls (1971)
32. Pearls Before Swine, 'Ballad of an Amber Lady' from One Nation Underground (1967)

visual substitutions / city mimicry : eves

Somewhat unwittingly, Avant Gardening's first show of 2012 mirrors the last of 2011 : what is it about Dunedin's underground sonic milieux that sees us forever celebrating the talents of local under-the-radar wunderkinds and organisational forces just as they are about to fly to other, balmier climes? I'll leave that question hanging in the rhetorical for the moment, as we shift our attention to the work of Edie Stevens.

Emerging from the atmosphere of collective improvisational experimentalism and general art/life blur which has long been a feature of Dunedin's warehouse-situated creative communities, Edie's work as a solo electro-acoustic performing/recording artist, under the moniker of Eves (and previously and slightly differently, Ms. Morse) crafts a patient, dark and gritty minimalism that seems to reflect the harsh beauty and thoughtful, wintry, wandering aloneness of her home town, in quietly austere, slowly evolving soundfields full of rich tonal beauty and peripheral-vision detail, fragile and unrepeatable architectures built from the connections between rooms, resonances, drones, hums, samples, tape-machine warble, laptop, oscilloscope, pedals and field recordings, sometimes coupled live with equally austere lens-flared video washes.

Behind such sounds is a life, spent, as she says in this interview, mostly in Dunedin, and specifically at None gallery, a place that permitted Edie, from the very first contact walking in the door at 18 years old (and seeing no less a figure than Matt Middleton blowing a saxophone), to imagine a creative life, to the extent that she has lived and organised events at the space for much of the time after. Avant Gardening talks to Edie about None, her various collaborations, playing bass in Thee Aesthetics, her collaborative audio-visual installation work, reflections on gender and sound culture, listening to the sonic spaces of warehouse rooms, and speculations on why Dunedin permits a certain type of music to happen.

Many of the tracks on this show are unheard jams, untitled events & other relative ephemera. Sound quality will vary! Podcast up soon...

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Playlist:

1. Eves, 'City Mimicry' from Visual Substitutions tape, 2011

2. Eves, 'Aves', unreleased, undated track

3. Eves, 'Lead Noi', unreleased, undated track

4. Eves & Disco Medusae, live at None Gallery, November 2011

5. Ms. Morse, (Track 9) from Driver & Utilities

6. interview with Edie Stevens, 12th January 2012 (backed with Eves, 'Octagon Mower Environ Tone', manipulated field recording)

7. IDM (with Oliver Van der Lugt), 'Take Nothing', recorded at None, 2008

8. MegaKipple (with Beth from the Futurians), live in None gallery basement, 2009

9. Not Even Owls (with Toki Wilson), Live at Refuel, 2011

these beautiful images were all taken by Markus Gradwohl, at various gigs at None gallery, Records Records, Dunedin Community Gallery, and Chicks Hotel between 2009-11, a fuller selection of which can be seen on his site, noise redux

'from the shoebox to the harddrive' : an idealstate sampler, and a lee noyes showcase

from his beginnings as a media studies student and noise experimenter on late-night student radio in New Plymouth, through the sonic nadirs of Nelson toward his eight years of quietly catalytic collaborative activity in Dunedin and an increasing attention to off-shore internet based collaborations, Lee Noyes' singular musical presence has, to date, been a poetics of focused contradiction, ranging from cacophonous psychedelic percussive maelstroms to astringent electronic sparsities. join avant gardening for an eclectic trawl through the output of Noyes' own label, Idealstate Recordings, a platform for his own collaborative activity, as well as his many and varied other releases on labels such as A Beard of Snails, Last Visible Dog, re:konstrukt, and con-V. we begin the show with the radio debut of three new idealstate releases slated for public distribution in January 2012, and culminate with an interview with the artist recorded at his home in Dunedin, as well as a recording of one of his final live performaces in the city before leaving for Sweden, a graphic score composition for two acoustic guitars written by Alex Wolken.

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Playlist:

1. Lee Noyes, track two from Xiazhi, (ISR1-12), Jan 2012
2. Lee Noyes & Radio Cegeste, 'ion and bird', from to orient themselves with coastlines (ISR2-12), Jan 20123. And/Also (Lee Noyes & Stuart Porter), 'Like Also and Any', from Like Also and Any (ISR3-12), Jan 2012
4. Lee Noyes & Motoko Kikkawa with Radio Cegeste, No. 3 Wave Magnitude, from Kinematics of the Sky, (ISR4-10), June 2009
5. Lee Noyes & Crude, 'Incarcerated Butterfly' from Crude Transactions, Artless Intent 2011
6. Je Serai Une Tombe, So What, from 19 X07, (ISRCD1-08), February 2008
7. Lee Noyes and Richard Neave, 'Mauled' from Unrepent, (ISR1-10), May 2010
8. Je Serai Une Tombe, 'Nihil est Nihil', from 19 X07, (ISRCD1-08), February 2008
10. Bury my Heart, 'Skull Death Dive' from Crows of the World vol. 2, Last Visible Dog (LVD 124). 2009
11. Lee Noyes & Phil Hargreaves, 'Smile for You', from A Present from the Pickpocket, Whi Music, 2005
12. Lee Noyes, Bruno Duplant, & Paulo Chagas, 'one hidden green pepper away from the birds' from as birds (re:konstrukt), 2011
13. Lee Noyes & J. C. Combs, 'Encrypted Note' from Confessions of a Deviant Machine, con-V, 2011
14. Lee Noyes & Barry Chabala, 'Yang' from The Shade & The Squint, idealstate, October 2009
15. Interview with Lee Noyes, 20th November 2011 (backed with Xiazhi, (ISR1-12))
16. Lee Noyes & Alex Wolken, live performance of 'In a Breath' at Threave, Dunedin, 9th December 2011

come night / the departing of a dream : loren connors

"The landscape of the modern solo guitar is dominated by two monumental peaks, each looming on opposite sides of the horizon. One peak is John Fahey, his accomplishments representing the zenith of what happens when you combine robust technique, folk forms and modern compositional ideas. The other peak is shared by Keith Rowe and Derek Bailey, their literal as well as figurative dismantling and reassembling of the guitar bringing new levels of abstraction and visceral impact to the instrument. Each of the above has hordes of devotees plumbing their innovations for inspiration.

Shadowed by these peaks, and with seemingly very few followers of his own, is the figure of Loren Connors, who for close to thirty years has played the quiet heretic, going against the orthodoxy without ever sounding the call to revolution. He neither flashes virtuoso chops nor overtly mines folk forms. He tempers his abstraction with intimacy, and his noise soothes rather than agitates. He is, above all, a poet, one who has pared down the classic language of the blues guitar, fleshed it out with bits of his Irish heritage, fused both these ideas with a subtle and less rigorous minimalist dialect, and given the world a body of work that explodes our notions of the traditional and the experimental" -Dusted

Originally trained on the trombone and the violin, Loren Connors - also known as Loren MazzaCane, Loren Mattei and Guitar Roberts at different points - has also trained as painter and won prizes as a haiku poet. He played in his first band as a teenager in 1966, and has in more recent times collaborated with the likes of John Fahey, Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Alan Licht and Christina Carter, but the great majority of his prolific output has been a singular and solitary take on electric guitar.

Avant Gardening presents a diverse sampling of this elusive master, ranging from the small, polished minimalist blues "airs" through cracked, trebly mutations of traditional folk-blues with Kath Bloom to the densely powerful psych-rock of his band Haunted House.

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Playlist

1. Loren Connors, 'Suzanne's Rain' from Night Through (recorded 2000, released 2006)
2. Loren MazzaCane Connors, 'In a Street Full of Rain' from split 7" with Roy Montgomery (1996)
3. Guitar Roberts w/ Suzanne Langille, 'Horses Blues' from Bluesmaster 2 (1988)
4. Kath Bloom & Loren Mazzacane, 'How It Rains' from Restless, Faithful, Desperate (1983)
5. Kath Bloom & Loren Mazzacane, 'Sand in my Shoe' from Sand in my Shoe (1983)
6. Loren Mazzacane, edit from Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations vol 3 (1979)
7. Loren Mazzacane, 'Blues#10 (Fallen Son)' from Fallen Son (1990)
8. Loren Mazzacane, 'The McCaffrey Playground' from Hell's Kitchen Park (1993)
9-18. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Stations of the Cross pts 1-9' from Stations of the Cross dbl 7" (1996)
19. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Flames' from Harmony of The Spheres compilation (1996)
20. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Gathering' from Harmony of The Spheres compilation (1996)
21. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Revolt!' from Harmony of The Spheres compilation (1996)
22. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Fand (A Tear)' from Harmony of The Spheres compilation (1996)
23. Loren Connors & John Fahey, 'Dark is the Night, Cold is the Ground' from Sails (2006)
24. Christina Carter & Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Smoke pt 1' from Meditations on the Ascension of Blind Joe Death (2005)
25. Christina Carter & Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Smoke Pt 6' from Meditations on the Ascension of Blind Joe Death (2005)
26. Christina Carter & Loren Mazzacane Connors, Mirrors pt 3 from Meditations on the Ascension of Blind Joe Death (2005)
27 Loren Connors & David Grubbs, 'The Highest Point in Brooklyn' from Arborvitae (2003)
28. Loren Mazzacane Connors & Alan Licht, 'Block That Nixon' from Hoffman Estates (1998)
29. Smog, 'Sweet Treat' from Knock Knock (1999)
30. Loren Connors & Jim O'Rourke, 'Most Definitely Not Koln' from Two Nice Catholic Boys (rec 1997, released 2009)
31. Haunted House, 'Thomas Paine' from Blue Ghost Blues (2011)
32 Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Airs #1' from Airs (1999)
33 Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Airs #2' from Airs (1999)
34 Loren Mazza Cane, 'Moonyean #3' from Moonyean (1994)
35 Loren Mazza Cane, 'Moonyean #7' from Moonyean (1994)
36 Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Art of the Blues pt 7' from The Little Match Girl (2001)
37 Loren MazzaCane Connors, 'Evangeline' from Evangeline (1998)
38 Loren MazzaCane Connors, 'Ships' from Evangeline (1998)
39 Loren MazzaCane Connors, 'The Bridegroom of Snow' from Evangeline (1998)
40. Loren Connors, 'Little Earth' from Red Mars (2011)
41. Loren Connors, 'Sails' from Sails (2006)

[the defeat to minimalism on the outside of any communication is inconclusive] : omit

"The feel remains deeply homemade, with analogue synths, primitive drum machines, hi-jacked electronics, tape loops and a boatload of effects, combined with sad assemblages that cross moments of documentary-style field recordings with beautiful processionals that recall the more austere Ambient works of Asmus Tietchens and Klaus Schulze. Other parts are a little more schlocky, like music for a 1960s BBC sci-fi serial, but even here there's something supremely melancholy about the lonesome play of analogue codes around little signs of synthesized melody."

-David Keenan, The Wire

Electronic sound exploration probably doesn't get any more hermetically personal than the work of Omit, a mysterious figure who has been transmitting cryptic audible missives to us since the 1980s. Filled with harsh beauty, melancholic austerity, and a deep understanding of the organically creative potential of technological failure, Omit's recordings evoke the colder reaches of the universe and Kafka-esque industrial alienation, filtered through a glacial sensibility which is private, enclosed, and self-generating, much like the all-encompassing graphic-linguistic-sonic packages which comprise the releases themselves - they can sound like lost electronic / concrete experiments of the early decades of the 20th century, outtakes from the colder sessions of Krautrock minimalism, or missives from some obsolete vision of the future. It's a mystery which hasn't been at all dispelled by the gradual coming-in-from-the-cold of Clinton Williams, the person behind the persona, in a series of recent live appearances, although it is perhaps helpful to know that Williams' notion of the sonic object, and sound in general, was largely shaped by growing up in a provincial New Zealand where lack of knowledge of sound as a live, performed medium necessitated more hands-on obsessive and imaginative appreciations, via record collecting, the awareness of small mail order labels, and fine tuning the ear to the detritus of consumer technologies - those things that other people throw away. As he himself says : "I can get clicky noises out of almost anything."

Avant Gardening's Sally Ann McIntyre and Campbell Walker took the time to visit Clinton in his hotel room during the artist's recent Dunedin sojourn, organised via the distributed networks of the Audio Foundation's Alt Music series, and talked to him at length about the nebulous entity that is Omit, making noise in the New Zealand provinces, ignoring technological fashions, why doing electronics is like gardening, the distinction between hardware / software and live / studio modalities, why mixers are "designed wrong", the importance of the 'shake test', tape music culture in the 1990s, the importance of graphics, and why he's not a 'musician'. Join us tonight on Radio One, where you will also hear rare and unavailable selections from the Omit back catalogue, ranging from the obsessively worked multimedia zine-structures of the earliest tapes, passing through the collaborations with Bruce Russell and K Group, to the most recent releases on his own label Deepskin Conceptual Mindmusic, as well as a few bootleg live recordings.

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Playlist:

1. Omit, 'Failer', from Transistor Rhythms (Transformations for the TR606), Deepskin Conceptual Mind Music, 2011

2. Omit, 'Second Divider', from Quad, Corpus Hermeticum, 1997

3. Omit, '8:30pm', from Quad, Corpus Hermeticum, 1997

4. Omit, 'The First Self-Less Reflection', from Quad, Corpus Hermeticum, 1997

5. Interview with Clinton Williams, recorded in Dunedin, Saturday 19th November 2011 [backed with 'Rundowns Type Three', from Rundowns, 1995, 'Turner' from Transistor Rhythms, 2011, and HorZtial Tracking SySyem, from Interceptor, 2005]

6. Dust/Omit, 'Black Shaft Depletion', from Deformed, Corpus Hermeticum, 1996

7. K-Group/Omit, 'Format', from Storage, 2001

8. K-Group/Omit, 'Flow & Strain', from Storage, 2001

9. Omit, 'Quarter to 12 on a Saturday Night', 1989 from Intromit, 1993

10. Omit, 'Small Angry Insect', 1988, from Intromit, 1993

11. Omit, 'The Repetitive Industrial Nightmare', 1989, from Intromit, 1993

12. Omit, 'OutPut Bender / Sideband / Transmitter LoGGer', from Interceptor, 2005

13. Omit, 'Signals' (pts. 1 & 2), from Signals (excerpts), 1990

14. excerpt from live set at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, November 2011

15. Omit, 'Bloated Swollen Liquid Vessels', from Fluid, 1992

16. Omit, 'Rejector', from Rejector, 2002

17. Omit, 'The Misrepresentation / Defusing the Infection of Control / The Beginning of Compression Amplified', from Transmogrifications, 1993

18. Omit, 'Din Shader / Slip Link', from Tracer, 2003

19. Omit, 'Solitary Disembarkment' from Interior Desolation, 1999