john pilcher / martin mckelvey “a bun dance” compact disc

• one giant leap (14:51)
  
• collection plate (2:31)
  
• ac 1 (2:02)
  
• song for o (3:23)
  
• blue smoke (5:43)
  
• plant (0:57)
  
• freaks show (1:23)
  
• zycles (1:02)
  
• ohmn (7:08)
  
• ac 2 (9:18)

dungeon taxis press release...

john pilcher & martin mckelvey, a bun dance (dungeon taxis). the eagle has strayed in this 48-minute opus of lunar musique concrete right out of the late 60s in hastings, nz. these squiggly, prescient jams emerge on the very 40th anniversary of apollo 11's inaugural moonlanding, having originally sampled and plunged that stuttering, televized transmission into another sea of tranquility and magnificent desolation right out here in an even more remote solar system. pilcher's periperal figure hangs ghostlike out on the edge of the front cover next to a poster of the beatles' help! semaphore (they're not even spelling help by the way), it's a revealing allusion to the radically warped jams that were already taking place out here, a preamble for the winding genealogy of the country's later musical lab tests. stellar tapezones joyously light years ahead of time. mastered by surface of the earth's paul toohey. softly abrupt, the music ends. it recedes discreetly, a fugitive peripheral figure. it's not conceived as an album, as a book-ended thematic enterprise, but as a spatiotemporal 'unwinding'. not content with a sentimentally or sedimentarily versed edit, nor with any consolidated syntax, it's almost geomantic in its divined trajectory, pieced together as an errant evocation, an attuned reverie. it's no literal emotional dispatch, but occurs as an elusive aide memoire, supplying brief vestigial clues to an elliptical sonic locale, before scattering the spatial details across a terrain vague that disorients vigilant listening. impatient, it preempts any harmonizing absorption, using billowing, parabolic tones as pure protean filaments that scuttle past recall or retention, registering as so many hallucinogenic and evaporative effects. its musical trajectory becomes the textual grain that cheeky glissandos flirt with in buoyant or airborne disobedience, their own textural gestures playing across the dusty surface of the whole, each sonic speck displacing the next in its entropic minutiae. it strays from a cloistered compositional scheme, preferring the intoxication of its divergent, sonic ingredients. packed with arrested crescendos and playful, whizzing glissandos, it mutates the trope arcs of a melodic prescription, becoming instead a scattering of curtailed tonal phrases in an errant suite of polyphonic glee - all flippant bursts of animated auditory characters dis-appearing all over its ludic tapestry. timbral resources are stretched out and toyed with, playfully pinched and squashed - all with the intention of scrutinising their resonant properties and unearthing their immanent musicality. it doesn't play back as a pilgrimage in the manner of some dandified sixties concept album, but ventures out with a not-dissimilar diligence in its desultory forage. while ostensibly a product of psychedelic invention, imposed by its historical foundations, a bun dance annuls palliative immersion. moving between apprehension, the music oscillates between foggy lopsided languor and lucid angular dissonance, providing a forensic meditation on the 'everyday landscape' through innovative and prescient tape manipulation, accelerating and decelerating the sounds of insects and other backyard detritus, while submitting the seemingly more extraordinary broad casted artefacts of woodstock and the moon landing to a poetic abstraction that appears, quite ambi-valently, 'ahead of its time'. the sampled, eponymous utterance of 'one giant leap' thus recuperates its galvanizing currency amidst a nostalgic contemporary glut of repeated historical 'events' by re-appearing, however apocryphally and entropically, live. it moves in and out of reel time, as pilcher himself says. as an archival product .. it functions now, in the realm of paramnesia, superimposed by rootless and fractal contemporary listening posts. while the equivocat 'blue smoke' drifts through a sedative haze, it gets plagued by its very errant provenance: the malfunctioning circuitry that constitutes its reflexive sonic impediment. the onomatopoeic meditation of 'ohmn' also goes awry through an acknowledged electrical recalcitrance, the 'wonder of reverb' unhinged by a digital intrusion that accents its juxtaposed itinerary. an interrogation of rock as a form, a bun dance displaces that genre's dramatic denouements, perforating its forgetful epiphanic apexes and severing its synchronic crests in order to dwell on its cadential downtime. snatches of rock aura are transformed into an incessantly thwarted sort of leisurely stasis that could be the didactic extraction of all that makes that form. it repays rock's debt to those moat forgotten of all purges: silence, exhaustion, committing this asyndeton while complicating mere abbrwiation. mlbo9llirvteidunit ~ and nudging ptimary ~ m.,glna of ita tonic sy geological metaphor in fl of cartograplc transposition. eachewing any summary of its intensive sound-m the auspices of symbolism, alchemy, or heroic cabbalism. predestined time becomes susceptible to the incisive detail of pilcher and mckelvey's conscientious metier. not just a spectatorial point ~- ... ken up on the scripted action or as i~9"subsumed within playback's ceaseless .....j _~immutable onslaught, memory here. ~akes a cous detour, disputing its own chronology.

richard francis / clinton watkins / adam willetts “s/t” seven inch single record

• richard francis & clinton watkins
  
  
• adam willets