New live working from the free NZ trio who levitated a whole bunch of beards with their last release on Metonymic. This one features Richard Whyte, Rick Jensen and Dean Brown live on 04/12/04 in Wellington, New Zealand and works blasted skeleton forms from low-level percussive shuffle, slow hurricanes of malformed tone, pitched wine glasses and saxophone squawk. Parts of this sound like a huge abandoned galleon being slowly blown to pieces by slow-motion tides. Fans of AMM, NNCK and even later Shadow Ring might well wanna smoke on these bones.

Inspired split LP that pairs two contemporary NZ outfits with tentacles that run deep into that country’s singular drone scene. Nova Scotia is the quartet of Richard Whyte, Rick Jensen, Guy Nicholls and Dean Brown and they play a form of hands-on eternal music that touches on the previous experiments in horizontal guitar tones and bowed electricity of Surface Of The Earth, Sandoz Lab Technicians, Thela, CM Ensemble, Flies Inside The Sun etc. Manipulated guitars and distant horns relocate the ritual aspect of Heathen Earth to the very edge of the world while aggressive free form drums ala Robbie Yeats/The Shaggs push the whole deal into a primitive free jazz zone where punk aggression and endlessly smeared tones combine in staggering vertical take-offs. Pretty amazing. On the flip the Eye quartet – featuring key NZ players Peter Stapleton, Peter Porteous, Jon Chapman and Nathan Thompson – perform a haunted electro-séance with arcs of sighing electricity cut-up with distant audience noise and obsessively minimal hovering melodies that build to claustrophobic architectures of feedback sounds and overheated amps until it feels as if the instruments are playing each other and the melodies are buckling under the strain. Beautiful grid-locked psychedelic drone from a bunch of masters of the form. Who knows what it is about New Zealand but the end of the world never sounded so magnetic. Edition of 250 copies on 150g vinyl with silkscreened sleeves by Alan Sherry. Highly recommended!