The sun never sets on this world I have found

A song for Wednesday:

Pere Ubu - I Will Wait (2.47 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

... from Dub Housing (wikipedia).

edit
jeez, last night's effort was pretty lame huh. So, let's try again.

If you're interested in rock music; if you're interested in the fringes of rock music, where the madman hold court and the wild things are, then you really need look no further than Pere Ubu. Their late-70s "art-punk" albums capture the angst and chaos of their times -- and ours -- with both apocalyptic fervor and surprising humanity.

Some words about Pere Ubu: insular, fractured, volatile, bleak, whimsical, eerie, tense, anxious, paranoid, confrontational, harsh, gloomy, cerebral, detached, quirky, absurdist warble, rapturous, demented, self-destructing melodies, scattershot rhythms, industrial-strength dissonance, manic intensity, dark impenetrability

Stumps live

Ok so it turns out that The Stumps are doing a late-notice show tomorrow afternoon. It's at Spacething, a cool little venue/store/library place in Newtown, Wellington. We're playing at 3pm.

Also, if you're in Auckland next weekend, we're playing at the Whammy Bar on Saturday night, 26 April. More details here.....


The Stumps and White Saucer
Saturday, 26 April 2008
at Whammy Bar, 183 Karangahape Road (St. Kevins Arcade), Newton

Dead bees

I've (finally!) got a new seht CD out which is the follow-up to The Green Morning. It's out on the PseudoArcana label, and it's called dead bees ((the((quiet)earth))suite).

On the PseudoArcana site, the label-boss Antony wrote:

Campbell Kneale once explained that to describe Wellington's seht as drone music is much the same as describing Antarctica as white. Where as many of us utilise the drone as an ingredient, a point of departure, Stephen Clover's seht project distills drones to craft something very like a fine liquor.

One Moment, the 35-minute first track on dead bees is Clover's somnambulist ambient drone masterpiece, a famous insomniac's grand fantasy of sleep. Setting sail with the gentle sound of submerged bells one sinks deeper as lush rich tones gradually merge into a swell of dream-scape waves. Deeper still and one finds oneself glowing in a deep warm golden molasses that shimmers and sways until time somehow folds in upon itself and loses all meaning as ones consciousness shifts into angel gear for the lonnnng coast out.

But Clover is also agent provocateur -- a wry and acerbic wit. To say that there are surprises to follow is an understatement...

That was nice, wasn't it! In time, this page is where you'll be able to read other stuff about the album. And, you can hear a sample from the album here.

cat vs. frog? what the bluddy hell is that, then?

Der Hund ist ein eifriger Anhänger von Yoga

I took another picture of Der Hund:

I said "Now greet the sun" and he growled at me.

Der Hund liegt auf dem Beton

Der Hund, lethargic though he may be, looks like he would take your arm off as soon as look at you.

It's some kind of husky/Samoyed dog, possibly a cross. Doesn't he have bewdiful eyes!?

Buckle up, we're wayward bound

Breakfast in cemetery, boy tastin wild cherry.. touch girl, apple blossom, just a boy playin possum.

Beat Happening - Indian Summer (5.66 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Luna - Indian Summer (Beat Happening cover) (5.29 MB mp3)

Sonic Boom (Pete Kember) - Indian Summer (Beat Happening cover) (5.05 MB mp3)

We'll come back for Indian Summer
We'll come back for Indian Summer
We'll come back for Indian Summer
And go our separate ways.....................

what the man said when his wife came home and he thought she was looking a bit sour and then the first thing she said to him was

"so whose is that new motorcycle parked outside the house?"

The Black Wood reviewed

A nice little review of the Stumps album from last year, The Black Wood, has turned up in the aQuarius Records catalogue:

In a dream, you've gotten yourself lost in an endless cavern... you've been curiously wandering in the darkness, down down into the earth, for a long long time. When you stop to rest, you realize that the silence that had surrounded you is different now. You think you can hear music... drifting from someplace deeper in the darkness. Drifting, droning, dark, dark, dark... that's this music, the reverberant, cavernous, quiet sounds of The Stumps. Sleepy and creepy at the same time. You move closer, and The Stumps get louder. Troglodytic thud and rumble begins to build. That's the beauty of this album, these tracks are part whale call mystery, part trashy crashy garage rock clangor. Ambient eeriness flows into plodding free rock chaos, with heavy distortion blanketing all. The twelve and a half minute untitled track number 5 (none have titles, as far as we can tell) is all about that drone-drift, whilst track 7, for instance, rouses itself to a spaced-out, slow-motion spasm of psychedelic guitar grind-gunk and percussive splatter-clatter.


The Stumps trio of drummer James Kirk (Sandoz Lab Technicians, Gate, With Throats As Fine As Needles), bassist Stephen Clover (Seht), and guitarist Antony Milton (Mrtyu, AM, Nether Dawn, etc.) is a New Zealand underground supergroup, by the way. No wonder they're so easily so shambolic, somnolent, and sinister sounding... Outside of their own cd-r littered island realm, we couldn't compare this to much else besides, maybe, Fushitsusha.


Welcome to the cavern, welcome to the dream.

i don't care how much i gotta spend, i gotta get back to my baby again

When on a whim I picked up this 1969 single by The Arbors -- a little-known American pop-group from the 60s (wikipedia) -- singing The Letter, much more famously recorded by The Box Tops in 1967 -- who know knew what a colossally lysergic head-buzz-off stone classic it would turn out to be?

The Arbors - The Letter (5.26 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

OMFG... OMFG... OMFG... did you hear that?

Got some live Stumps if ya wannit

The Stumps live at Happy, 2007:

From The Noise Machine.....