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daggerzine · 2 months

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Throwback Thursday #59!- The 3Ds- Hellzapoppin (1992- Flying Nun/ First Warning)

This insanely talented New Zealand band, featuring members of Look Blue Go Purple, Bird Nest Roys, etc, burst out of the gate with this terrific debut LP in 1992 (a shame that their US label, First Warning , went belly up shortly thereafter) that won them many fans (and an opening slot on a Pavement tour in the mid-90’s).

The band members, the 4 d’s actually, including vocalist/guitarist David Mitchell, other guitarist/vocalist David Saunders, bassist/vocalist Denise Roughan and drummer Dominic Stones were a well-oiled unit, though it might have been hard to tell with their gleefully thrashy sound including squealy guitars, grinding bass and slap happy drums to create a sound that’s confident, powerful and well, fun!

Opening cut “Outer Space” is a hoot from start to finish as is the equally feedback-laden “Sunken Treasure.” Elsewhere, “Ugly Day” is another sock full of noise that grinds it out even more while the Roughan-sung “Sunken Head” takes a darker, more sinister turn (but again, still fun) and the title track is a race from start to finish with guitars that sound like they’re being played underwater.

Their next album, The Venus Trail, was good, very good in fact, but not this good.

If it’s been a while give this one a spin and if it’s new to you then you need to go all in (I recommended headphones). Hellzapoppin rules!

www.the3ds.bandcamp.com

www.flyingnun.co.nz

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still-single · 4 years

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HEATHEN DISCO for Feb 16th, 2020 <-- LISTEN

New show! Great show. Lots of fun going way, way out on this one. Still grounded at points but otherwise this is freeform radio the way I like to do it. New/newish releases and reissues within by Ramleh, SiP, RIKI, Wire, Advanced Audio Research, East Village, Wednesday, Dolly Mixture, Beatrice Dillon, Gil Scott-Heron/Makaya McCraven, Heith, Sweet Tooth and Komare. Dark times make for a wilder Heathen Disco, Sundays 9p-midnight streaming live on http://www.chirpradio.org 107.1fm Chicago, and locked for multiball here Mixcloud.

LISTEN HERE: https://www.mixcloud.com/mosurock/heathen-disco-with-doug-mosurock-show-202-16-feb-2020/

Tracklist below:

David Nance - More Than Enough Pt. 2

Joe Walsh - Rocky Mountain Way

Ramleh - Procreation as an Imperialist Act

Private Arms - Safe House

Annette Peacock - One Way

Squarepusher - Detroit People Mover

Dif Juz - Mi

SiP - Amibutal

Cluster - Georgel

RIKI - Know

Wire - Off the Beach

Simple Minds - Wasteland

Oval - Pushhh

Guided by Voices - I Am a Scientist

Comus - So Long Supernova

C Cat Trance - I Looked for You

Polygon Window - Untitled

Taboo - Into the Sun (instr.)

Rema-Rema - Rema-Rema

Advanced Audio Research - FYP

Ulla - Stunned Suddenly

East Village - Strawberry Window

High Mountain Hoedown - Pickin' Berries

Wednesday - Fate Is...

The Beau Brummels - Love Can Fall a Long Way Down

Dolly Mixture - Now When I Count

The Go-Betweens - Hammer the Hammer

Bobbie Gentry - But I Can't Go Back

Calibro 35 - Thunderstorms and Data

Beatrice Dillon - Clouds Strum

Gil Scott-Heron / Makaya McCraven - Me and the Devil

Heith - Yoga of Stealth

Micon - Circle of Tragedy

Chrome - Anti-Fade

Schatten Unter Eis - Use Me

Sweet Tooth - Youth Corruptor

The Cardigans - My Favourite Game

Jeff Parker - Go Away

Alice Coltrane - Journey in Satchidananda (live 7/23/72)

David Mitchell & Denise Roughan - The Grey Funnel Line

Maddy Prior & June Tabor - The Grey Funnel Line

Komare - Got to Stop Me

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dustedmagazine · 6 years

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Sandra Bell—Net (Drawing Room)

Net by Sandra Bell

Think of Sandra Bell as New Zealand’s Patti Smith, chanting abstract poetry over firestorms of guitar noise, collaborating with the avant garde and turning up the noise and distortion in a way that few female contemporaries felt moved to do. At least that was the trend in 1992’s Dreams of Falling, her first full-length, the one produced by Peter Jeffries (This Kind of Punishment, Nocturnal Projections) and bolstered by contributions from Peter Gutteridge (the Clean, the Chills), Kathy Bull (of Look Blue Go Purple) and Dunedin experimenter Alastair Galbraith. Four years later, with Net, Bell was mixing gritty distortion with more overt nods to folk and blues, substituting a disaffected drawl for chant and bringing a passel of Irish traditional instruments in for certain songs (“Caitlan” especially).

Net was Bell’s second album, coming after the breakout Dreams of Falling and U.S. tour with Peter Jefferies and Alastair Galbraith. Produced by Brendan Hoffman, it features a slightly reconfigured band – Kathy Bull again on bass, Shaun Broadly (of Chug) on drums with cameos from David Mitchell (Goblin Mix), Alastair Galbraith, Denise Roughan (Look Blue Go Purple, 3Ds) and Greg Fox. A mini-Celtic band of Barry Corkery, Kate Jenson and Greg Waite puts a desolate lilt under “Caitlan”, and its members turn up separately in a couple of other tracks as well. The reissue also incorporates some contemporaneous singles — the “Angel/Gilt” 7” released on Zabriskie Point in 1995 and a double 7” on the Turbulence label in the same year.

Net’s best songs seesaw between spare and desolate minor key acoustic guitar and the balls-out abandon of overdriven guitar. “Long Time”, the first cut, contemplates loss in mournful tones at first, the haze of strumming pierced by the tick of sticks on cymbals. But as Bell reaches the climax of her narrative, “another tear… carved into my face” the emotion shifts from melancholy to a transporting kind of rage. The fuzzy guitar break is huge and bristling with dissonance, riding blistery long notes that are drawn out to the point of cat-wailing torture. It’s obliterating and beautiful in the manner of certain Dinosaur Jr. songs.

With “Trains”, you get a hint of the folk-derived direction Bell is heading. Corkery plays a plaintive accordion that flits and wheezes through the blare of sawed off guitar sound; it’s like music plowed over by bulldozers. But it’s really the wild-stringed “Caitlan” that hears Bell plunge, piano first, into keening, unhinged folk mode. Corkery plays Bodhran here, Greg Waite picks up the Irish pipe and Kate Jenson coaxes wounded murmurs from a cello, but if you thought all that Irish accoutrement would soften things, you’d be wrong. The song is burnt, blackened, gutted, crazed. “Men shouting, shouting at the sea, swimming or drowning, hey look at me,” wails Bell, unearthly, untethered.

There’s a blues foundation in a lot of these tracks – “Walking”, “They Say” – but Bell and her bandmates are guided, not constrained by it. “Keening”, the cut with Alastair Galbraith, is particularly experimental with its vertiginous zooms of guitar effect and moodily abstract atmospheres.

The singles appended here seem more straightforwardly rock than the main album content. “Angel” in particular has a lo-fi exuberance that reminds me of Ty Segall, a verbal acuity that evokes Sebadoh. Bell’s voice is almost entirely submerged in the guitar murk; the sound as viscous and enveloping as a basement show. “Gilt” runs a bit slower, smoldering with shorted out bass, thumping with eighth notes on the kick drum. “I remember years ago, when they burnt this house down, we screamed and shouted, we couldn’t take no middle ground,” Bell chants, her voice rising to a moan, very reminiscent of Lydia Lunch. The Turbulence singles are very much in the “Subway Nihilism” mode of Bell’s first album, spoken poetry wrapped in a nettle-stung bristle of noise.

Net fits loosely into a landscape of sprawling lo-fi (Sebadoh), of feedback addled freakouts (Dinosaur Jr.), of hazed over, fuzz ridden NZ rock (the Clean), and female empowered contemporaries like PJ Harvey and Lydia Lunch, but loosely is the key word. There’s not really much it sounds like in any direct way, either from the mid-1990s period of its creation or any time between then and now.

Jennifer Kelly

#sandra bell #net #drawing room #jennifer kelly #dusted magazine #albumreview #reissue #new zealand #poetry #guitar

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end-of-the-world-optimist · 4 years

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Schedule Announced for BBC's Short Play Showcase Unprecedented, Featuring Denise Gough, Arthur Darville, More

Episode Two: May 27 at 10 PM BST on BBC Four

House Party, by April De Angelis Directed by Holly Race Roughan Starring Patricia Allison, Risteárd Cooper, Gabriel Harland, Cecilia Noble, James Norton, Rhashan Stone, Meera Syal, Olivia Williams, and Fenella Woolgar A street in South London get together on "Houseparty" for a virtual drinking session in the first week of isolation, but not everyone is in the mood for a party...

Link: https://www.playbill.com/article/schedule-announced-for-bbcs-short-play-showcase-unprecedented-featuring-denise-gough-arthur-darville-more

#james norton

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ricardosousalemos · 7 years

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Look Blue Go Purple: Still Bewitched

In the late 1970s, punk swept through the UK and washed away any remaining mop-top mods. In Dunedin, New Zealand—among the furthest possible cities from London—kiwi punks applied this self-sufficient ethos and wrote pop songs. Their lo-fi jangle pulled from the Byrds’ ’60s pop melodies, the psychedelia of Pink Floyd circa Syd Barrett, and the Velvet Underground’s corporeal dronings. It would be dubbed the historically influential Dunedin sound after a 1982 compilation from its most iconic label, Flying Nun Records. Two of the bands on that comp, the Chills and the Verlaines, along with their Flying Nun labelmates the Bats and the Clean, would come to define New Zealand’s mid-1980s indie rock scene. Amid all these humbly named acts, Look Blue Go Purple—Francisca Griffin (formerly Kathy Bull), Norma O’Malley, Kath Webster, Denise Roughan, and Lesley Paris—were bound to stand out.

Like their optimistic, kaleidoscopic moniker suggests, Look Blue Go Purple poured vivacity into a scene that was already chock full of cheery, sparkling songs. But unlike a majority of their peers, the quintet never released an LP, which prevented them from finding a foreign audience despite their mainstream success on the New Zealand pop charts. Still Bewitched, a recent compilation of Look Blue Go Purple’s three EPs and unreleased live rarities, promises to expose a new crowd to the band’s enchanting style.

After forming in 1983, Look Blue Go Purple debuted with a tight, distinct sound on 1985’s Bewitched EP. The five women fused the gentle guitar pop that was then well-established by their Dunedin/Flying Nun labelmates with the post-punk experimentation of the Slits and the Raincoats, and to a lesser extent, Swell Maps and Television. Three of Bewitched’s four tracks each focus on a different sound: the whistling synths of “Safety in Crosswords,” the new-age flute and staggered drumbeat of “Vain Hopes,” and the cloudy chill of “As Does the Sun.” But it’s “Circumspect Penelope” that gathers these elements together and affirms Bewitched’s pleasant distance. “She’s been waiting 20 years/And you just walk in/Telling stories of the sea/She should hate you, your Penelope,” the band bitterly scold The Odyssey’s titular character, whose wife has been waiting years for Odysseus’ return. Thanks to the crystalline sound of O’Malley’s organ, Webster and Roughan’s saccharine guitars, and the tight interplay between Griffin’s bass and Paris’ quick crashing drumbeat, Look Blue Go Purple’s condemnation is by far the poppiest, catchiest track on the EP. But their layered vocal harmonies seem to be the murmurs of sirens from a world beyond.

When Look Blue Go Purple returned the next year for LBGPEP2, the band shed their winter coats for a bright new life. A whimsical song like “Cactus Cat” would have been a shock on the staunchly post-punk Bewitched, but on the LBGPEP2 it feels right at home. “Cactus Cat”’s sun-streaked bubblegum style flows into “Grace,” a hypnotic, lilting tune about a girl whose beauty has faded from her namesake to something far more foul. “100 Times” and “Winged Rumor” recall Bewitched’s subdued mysticism thanks to the former’s hushed, airy chorus and the latter’s reverential flute. But the gossamer feel of both songs give way to a ramshackle groove, something Bewitched’s songs never achieved. The spoken-word incantation “Hiawatha” is the band’s most new wave song, though its punctuations of shrill synths and howls surpass in imagination anything their peers were making.

“Cactus Cat” in particular propelled LBGPEP2 to No. 26 in New Zealand’s pop charts in January 1987. The band used the track’s popularity to address a topic that had haunted their press. At the end of the song’s succulent-stocked music video, an anonymous interviewer queries whether there are any difficulties being a female band. “Only the presumption that it means something, that it’s a bunch of females together,” says Webster. “But we just happen to be five musicians who get on well and play music together but it can be a hassle.” Look Blue Go Purple never labeled themselves as feminist, nor was the content of their music remotely political. The only people who seemed to find the band’s gender worth noting was the media; players in the New Zealand indie scene considered it a non-issue. Women “were very active participants in a very creative and politically active era, charged with post-sexual revolution and determination to create anything but typical male music,” says the Chills’ Martin Phillipps. That said, “[It’s] rock’n’roll, gender has got nothing to do with it,” Griffin concludes in the video.

Shortly after the release of 1987’s This Is This, Look Blue Go Purple broke up to pursue other personal and professional ventures (notably, Paris became the manager of Flying Nun). The quintet’s final release is their most indie pop record, and echoed the concurrent work of England’s C86 bands like the Shop Assistants and the Pastels. The bouncy “I Don't Want You Anyway” makes rejection seem fun while the docile “Year of the Tiger” could be a Sarah Records cut. Perhaps because of its spare compositions, for the first time the band’s eloquent lyrics are placed in the limelight. “I’m a fool to believe in love and its channels/I’m a fool to believe in it at all,” Griffin sings on “In Your Favour.” But by the end of This Is This, Look Blue Go Purple fall into the same pattern as LBGPEP2 and return to the sleepy melancholy of their first EP.

Still Bewitched ends with seven unreleased live takes handpicked by the band from their final years—all originals except for an impassioned cover of folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Codeine.” The most intriguing of these are the funky sleuthing “Spike” and “A Request,” which show the Raincoats’ abstract influence more discernibly than any of their official releases. The inclusion of these tracks on the compilation is a refreshing peek at what Look Blue Go Purple sounded like in their prime: a little mythical, a little goofy, overflowing with wistful indie pop hooks and eloquence. Without Look Blue Go Purple, any definition of the Dunedin sound is insufficient.

#reviews-albums

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bandcampsnoop · 6 years

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3/27/18.

Sandra Bell (Dunedin) wasn’t there for the 1980s explosion of New Zealand music on Flying Nun, but she was there for the second wave in the 1990s on Expressway. Drawing Room Records (released an excellent Samara Lubelski LP) is re-releasing “Net”. Right now the only song available is “Trains”. If you’ve ever wondered what a Flying Nun/Expressway mash-up would be, this is it (listen to that bass)

The guests on this are pretty astounding: Kathy Bell and Denise Roughan (Look Blue Go Purple), David Mitchell (The 3Ds) and Alistair Galbraith (Plagal Grind).

This is a 2 LP set which compiles some of Bell’s earlier work. Bell also has released new material through Thokei Tapes (Hamburg).

#Sandra Bell #Drawing Room Records #Dunedin #New Zealand #Flying Nun #Expressway #Look Blue Go Purple #The 3Ds #Plagal Grind #Thokei Tapes

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still-single · 7 years

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NEW RADIO 3/12/2017

Sorry for the delay. Here you go: https://www.mixcloud.com/mosurock/chirp-radio-doug-mosurock-show-077-12-march-2017/

Playlist below:

Turning for Home by Major Stars Glass Blow by Matt Jencik The Grey Funnel Line by David Mitchell & Denise Roughan Three Teeth by Bruce Langhorne Who's Gonna Cry by Tommy James Beguiling the Hours by Gareth Williams & Mary Currie Vibe Killer by Endless Boogie Taken By Ascent by Six Organs of Admittance Blue Mountain by The Necks Two Feet in Front by Lync Turbulence by Orion The Second Night-Blooming by The Quietus Sick Bug by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever In My Dreams by Reg King I Know We're Going by The Bevis Frond BBC by Thigh Master Wohin by Wuhling Ursula by Brokeback I Could Really See Things by Mountain Movers Back of Her Hand by The Magick Heads Mary Provost by Nick Lowe Chancifer by Kicker About That Time by Earthen Sea Lifeguard by Reptile Ranch Qu'est-ce qui t'as pris by Sida Surya by Cryptorips Andromeda by Meridien Trio Spydr Brain by Black Bananas Manager by Black Abba Wired by Lysol It's Not Allowed by The Make-Overs Allonge by Pierre & Bastien Cherry Red by James Arthur's Manhunt Sanctuary by David Weiss & Point of Departure Somewhere in Your Mind by Pisces Here Come the Cyborgs Pt. II by Simply Saucer The Slow Room by Robert Scott Igual a Si by Tropa Macaca Spite by Mordecai Early Wish by Tropical Trash I Am a Specimen by Grandpa's Ghost

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