Welcome to the temple of ruin, I am drunk and you're insane...

Heka is the magick of ancient Egypt - magick practised while still alive.

Heka - exhuberant noise chime, landscape-y topographical hallelujah music -- nzmusic.com.

It's been too long a time since I last heard the magic, but those days and weeks and months are wiped off with the peal of the first notes. It's taken four years for this moment, but finally I have my hands on the CD. Heka is the name of the band - Dunedin duo of Stephen Kilroy and Heath Te Au - and Last spiritual gas station before the end of civilisation is the name of their new album.

Both have spent time in legendary bands - Kilroy is an alumnus of the band Stephen (feat. David Kilgour), released a solo track on the seminal Xpressway Pile=up compilation, and was a founding member of Chug; Heath has done time in The Puddle, Suka, Mink, and Cloudboy to name but a few. Both are enthusiasts and horders of classic old equipment - huge Gunn valve amps and vintage tape echo boxes and shiny electric guitars and analogue effects units. For both it was time to re-enter the music scene after something of a hiatus.

Put Stephen Kilroy and Heath Te Au together and what you have is a self-described "sonic tour-de-force based around furious krautrock beats and a 12-string Rickenbacker guitar soaked in delay". So - take the extended jams of The Clean, the dense overtures of Spacemen 3 or H.D.U. or My Bloody Valentine or Bailter Space or even The Jesus And Mary Chain, and the transfixing propulsive motorik of Neu!'s Klaus Dinger - and you might have some idea what they're about. Or, what they at least sound like. But these two illuminati conjure up something entirely more mystical altogether.

For this pair, Heka is about coming together to make beautiful, ritual music. Together they summon magical spirits to which they offer themselves up and they enter another world where they become one with the ceremony and can lose the now and forget about the trudging from one day to the next.

Heka - Temple of ruin (3.74 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download)

It's glorious stuff. This is the sort of music you can live your life without hearing, but one listen and then you wonder how you ever got by. And of course, to see them live is a special treat.

Good Heka magic indeed.


Please visit the arclife records site if you want to buy the CD, which I naturally urge you to do. The CD is not actually listed on this page, but I trust the ordering information and other avenues of purchase are still valid.

Mystery bird

What the hell kinda bird is this I just saw sitting on my back fence? Well, Charlie (the cat) saw it first and she was having a complete spaz all over the kitchen about it, so I knew it must be pretty special and I came and checked it out.

Despite living where we do, we actually have an amazing array of bird-life - plenty of pigeons and sparrows and thrush and blackbirds of course - but even better, tui and bellbirds, with their distinctive calls, fantails, waxeyes, and incredibly, at least two keruru (morepork) complaining every night in the bush across the road. I could swear I heard one of those fat-ass native wood-pigeons one day, too.

But I've never seen one of these before.

The Stumps are live

The Stumps will be appearing live this Saturday night, 21 May, at Enjoy gallery. With any luck we will be promoting our new CDR (At Murder Shed, on French label Paha Porvari) and our new CD (Lost Weekends, on US label Digitalis) but that will depend on such vagaries as the international postal system. We will play at 6pm in order to accomodate such entertainment synchronicity as Super12 semi-finals and A Low Hum omnibus-gigs at Indigo. A superlative film will also be presented.

Also appearing later in the evening will be THE JUDGE, New Zealand and Golden Axe, one and all decent bands and true.

The event is Enjoy's final celebratory bash at 174 Cuba Street. They're throwing a party to help raise funds for the move to their new space down the road and they ask that you please give generously at the door.

God bless.
----------
Who are The Stumps? The Stumps are a bit of a free-psychedelic-noise-rock supergroup from the rugged confines of New Zealand. Featuring Antony Milton (PseudoArcana, A.M., etc), Stephen Clover (seht), and James Kirk (Sandoz Lab Technicians, Gate, The Dead C, King Loser etc.), these are sonic musicians putting their best foot forward. On "Lost Weekends," the trio unleashes a sonic, droning landscape of epic proportions. If there ever was a masterwork, this is it.
--- brad e rose, digitalis industries

Resurrecting Bailter Space

They were the best band you'd ever want to see in a dark smokey dive where the sweat drips off the wall and the high notes ricochet off the pillars directly into your synapses. They blew our minds with their pummel and fuzz and then they upped digs and off to New York, USA. And after a few years and a couple of barely-noticed releases, pretty much disappeared below the radar.

I've just undergone a personal Bailter Space renaissance and it's taken a recent evangelical turn - from getting their CDs and LPs out after a long, long while, to regularly featuring tracks on my radio show, to uploading Bailter Space mp3s to friends in Scandinavia and North America.

Bailter Space - Shine (4.55 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download)

Bailter Space - Robot World (6.05 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download)

So here we go with the proselytizing. Well, actually I'm going to keep it pretty low-key. Shine is from Bailter Space's US breakthrough EP The Aim, released 1991 on Matador, and Robot World the title track from from their 1993 follow-up LP. They are the more melodic highpoints of the band's repertoire and as such feature little of the aural bludgeoning that underpinned other tracks; be asured that live, however, they stood toe-to-toe with the rest.

These tracks... this band... was just gorgeous. We always reckoned they were better than My Bloody Valentine, the nearest comparison you could ever hope to make. Now fifteen years later, we were right, and Bailter Space needs to be heard again.

We still reminisce about this gig and that gig, this album and that. Perhaps their time is yet to come.

[Note: After a couple of false starts in the mid-80s Bailter Space settled on a line-up which was basically a reformation of The Gordons, notorious sonic terrorists from half-a-decade earlier and reputedly the loudest band in New Zealand. Stay tuned for a Gordons post soon.]

Application antarctica download form

Blow blow trumpet trumpet etc. I've got another new CD out, Application antarctica download form. This time it's on New Zealand label Celebrate/Psi/Phenomenon. This is what Campbell the label-boss sed about it:

Brrrrr, it's gettin cold in here... don't fall asleep 'cause you may never wake up. Like its namesake, "Antarctica..." comes on like a vast cathedral of suspended ice-prongs dripping out action at a pace roughly comparable to the formation of a glacier. Nature's fractured architecture pixelated and amplified through the green luminescence of night vision goggles... almost TOO beautiful to be real? My esteemed friends, this falls well inside the parameters of 'effortless' and, not to make too fine a point of it, makes even the most vogue-ish dronesters look pretty silly indeed. A zenith of sensual, hypothermic dream-states. File under 'Near Death'.

I don't really know what I can add to such praise.

There's a compilation which has just hit the shelves (well, not really, it's not actually officially released yet, wait a week ok?). It's a double-CD comp on PseudoArcana called The tone of the universe (= the tone of the earth). Antony Milton (PseudoArcana man):

This compilation arose out of a Routes for War and Travel discussion about the news that astromoners have discovered a galaxy - far far away - that is resonating in a steady B flat drone. Due to this drone's inaudibility (not only is it remote but it is also something like 50 octaves below an audible pitch...) it was decided that a compilation of 'cover versions' was in order. That is not to however imply that the tone b flat is neccesarily present in all of these trks...

Featuring:
'white cd'
1 Blithe Sons- 'Map of Dusk'.
2 Peter Wright- 'Haboob'.
3 Keijo- 'Stellar Wind'.
4 Eugene Carhesio & Leighton Craig- 'Untitled #14' (from the Hunter Constellation Series).
5 CJA- 'Misty'
6 Anla Courtis- 'Several Galaxies of Bb Sound-lave Playfully Roaming About'.
7 Vibracathedral Orchestra- '3 Bb Moods'.
8 Hands of Satisfaction- 'Version 1'.
9 A.M/Uton- 'Ground has Curve'.

'black cd'
1 The Moglass- '05:05'.
2 Neil Campbell- 'Bbreeeze'.
3 Birchville Cat Motel- 'I Am But Dust'.
4 The Skaters- 'Between Land and Cloud Galloping Through Her'.
5 seht- 'Antarctica Download (edit)'.
6 Of- 'The Blank Room'.
7 1/3 Octave Band- 'Dominion'.
8 The Nether Dawn- 'Amber Eyed'.
9 My Cat is an Alien- 'Hear the Voice of the Cosmos'.

YES IT IS AS GOOD AS IT SOUNDS! (<- me) Clayton No-one (Armpit, CJA, Futurians, Root Don Lonie...) says: im listening to "the tone of the universe (= the tone of the earth)" & it is truly blowing me away, super thanks to antony for making this double cd compilation happen, i can feel the coldness of space & the lonliness, it is really 'out there'...pseudo arcana rulz!

This is the best compilation I can think I've ever heard... it functions so much better than many, it really is greater than the sum of its parts. Some of the music is so so wonderful and beautiful and essential that I felt a bit stink, embarrassed like, out of my league.

Oh, and did you think I was finished? Celebrate/Psi/Phenomenon also released a companion CDR to my Application antarctica download form album. It's called Communion longplayer. Campbell Kneale again:

Application antarctica...'s sister release, performing a function akin to an exclamation mark at the end of Stephen Clover's brilliance. The routine transfer of electrons from wire to amplifier (resulting in tiny pulses of air that can only be detected by your eardrums and the hairs on the back of your neck). Golly, it never seemed quite so IMPORTANT before. Further proof of my theory that states "if you leave a tap on for long enough, you can carve your own Grand Canyon".

Contrary to all appearances, I don't actually pay the guy to write nice things about my shit.