Bruce Russell
Performs Monument Maker
The debut recording from the duo of multi-award-winning Scottish author David Keenan and Bruce Russell, the guitarist from the greatest underground rock band of the late 20th century, New Zealand’s the Dead C., was recorded live in Christchurch, NZ, as part of the Word festival in August 2023. A series of live improvised settings that pair readings from Keenan’s monolithic and critically-acclaimed modernist masterpiece, Monument Maker (White Rabbit 2021), with guitar and electronics from Russell…
Archive Fever - New Zealand Underground Sound in Fanzine Interviews 1991–1999
Bomb! A book collecting interviews, artwork and texts of New Zealand underground sound artists from fanzines in the years 1991-1999. Collected by Noel Meek. Texts by Noel Meek, Bruce Russell, Seymour Glass (Bananafish) and Nick Cain (Opprobrium). Cover illustration by Stefan Neville (Pumice).308 pages, format: 18 x 24 cmInterviews with: Alastair Galbraith, A Handful Of Dust, Omit, Bruce Russell, Gate, Surface Of The Earth, Sandoz Lab Technicians, The Dead C, Witcyst , Roy Montgomery, Dadamah De…
Les Français sont les ennemis du Pacifique
In February 2020, during one of his trips to New Zealand, Thierry Monnier (1972 - 2022) recorded a session with Bruce Russell, the Dead C's guitarist of whom he was a big fan. We decided with his agreement to do everything we could to release this record on vinyl. This record is co-produced by Doubtful Sounds, Dysmusie and Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers! With the support of Corticalart.
Say No To Hate
Bruce Russell and Noel Meek return with their second harsh noise collaboration. Their first, Classical Music (2018) was an all-electronics wrestling bout that simulated engine testing on a long-haul passenger jet. Their new album combines guitar, violin and electronics and was recorded in a wood workshop. You can hear the power tools, even though none were actually used. Extreme noise can sometimes be associated with offensive, racist or extreme-right views. The New Zealand duo have chosen to sp…
Visceral Realists
Debut LP by the New Zealand duo of Bruce Russell (Dead C, Handful of Dust, etc) and Luke Wood. Visceral Realists is a high-concept commentary on the state of vinyl, analogue recording, music culture, art, etc. A 45-rpm bullet of short bursts of free electric sound, the music here is tactile and rough but not “noise music.” Russell and Wood play over loops of scratchy records, with their guitars and electronics surging to get over the wall. Russell’s guitar sound from his vintage transistor amp a…
Classical Music
Edition of 250. You know that old phrase, 'Teach a penguin to cuss, and you'll never have to buy another comedy record' I'm sure you do. But what about its codicil? 'Teach a guitarist to play synth, and you'll never have to buy a new age record?' If you know that one, you might well be put off by the fact this album features one of New Zealand's most wickedly post-tongue guitar players fiddling about with oscillators and analog synths (in concert with a guy who does this stuff all the time). But…
Metallic Ok
Bruce Russell is a New Zealand experimental musician and writer. He is a founding member and guitarist of the seminal noise rock trio The Dead C and the free noise combo A Handful of Dust (with Alastair Galbraith). He has released solo albums featuring guitar and tape manipulation. "In summer of 2013, Bruce Russell's daughter Olive Russell uploaded a documentary of her father that she shot and edited herself called "27 Minutes with Mr. Noisy: A Documentary about Bruce Russell" to Vimeo.c…
Howling and Instability at High Volume Settings
"If ever there was an album by NZ's great Bruce Russell whose title carried the essence of his genius, this is it. The words come from the manual of the amp that Bruce uses to create his special brand of guitar havoc, and its wording could not be clearer. Naturally, Mr. Russell takes great delight in pushing the poor thing beyond its stated limits as often as possible. The results almost always possess a strange majesty. And so it is here. Originally issued as two-thirds of a CD included in the …
Virginia plane
Pressed in an edition of 300 copies. A new collaboration between these two heavy-weights, and the first in what will hopefully be an ongoing project. Composed remotely across oceans and hemispheres over the last five years, the album draws on the languages of musique concréte, dub, power electronics, free noise and at times even early Italian avant-garde composition (believe it or not). This entire work highlights the startling power of their individual approaches and the true potential o…
21st Century Field Hollers And Prison Songs
This album has been made entirely from samples taken from the Midnight Crossroads Tape Recorder Blues album, which I made with Ralf Wehowsky for A Bruit Secret. Like that album it is a tribute to the spirit of the blues, viewed through a prism of 21st century cultural criticism. It evokes an earlier era when the relationship between a performer and a song arose out of a community, not a property relation. In appropriating my own material I have short-circuited the prevailing ethos of piracy and…
Project For A Revolution In New York
The first Bruce Russell solo release Project for a Revolution in New York sees our man truly alone on the first side, messing with a guitar over a looped drone accompaniment. Remarkably subdued and dare I say, relaxing. Side two has Tom Lax (Siltbreeze main-man) and Paul Toohey (Surface of the Earth) helping out with percussion and electronics in a very free collaboration where what doesn't happen defines the tension of the piece as much as what does. There's always been a tension between noise …
Antikythera mechanism
Pressing #01 in an edition of 250 copies on 200 gram virgin white vinyl. A new solo LP from this New Zealand expiremental icon. An album comprised of throbbing guitar and tape loop improvisations recorded throughout Australasia. The LP also includes a duo piece with Melbourne based guitar-electronics destructionist Marco Fusinato. bruce lives and works in Lyttleton, New Zealand. He is a member of The Dead C, A Handful of Dust and founder of the Corpus Hermeticum and Xpressway record labels.
Left-handed blows: writing on sound 1993-2009
Bruce Russell, member of the groups The Dead C and Handful of Dust and founder of the renowned record-labels Corpus Hermeticum and Xpressway, is reputed to have driven a substantial wedge into New Zealand music. Besides his acclaimed work as a performer, recording artist and producer, RUSSELL is a respected as a writer who theorises improvisation from a leftist perspective. His collected writing, fluidly unequivocal, effectively tracks the thinking of the group of free music luminaries to which …
Midnight Crossroads Tape Recorder Blues
Bruce Russell : acoustic guitar, vocal, analogue Tape treatments, mixing and composition. Ralf Wehowsky : sitar, digital sound processing. Recorded 2003-05, Lyttelton, New Zealand and Eggenstein, Germany. Digital mastering at the Temple of Music. “It is Midnight during the summer of 1951, the scene is a rural Crossroads somewhere outside Paris. A man called Pierre Schaeffer is sitting in the grass by the side of the road. As the village clock strikes the hour he invokes Eleggua, the Yoruba god o…
Sights
Back in stock. Take two collaborators, one a German sound artist noted for his painstaking micro-engineered computer compositions, the other a New Zealand noise terrorist with a reputation for making albums over his morning tea breaks. Put them in a basement studio in Karlsruhe for three days in February 2003, feed them on coffee and apple juice and let them out to walk in the woods once a day. What do you get? Sights, a dramatic collision of two very different but complementary approaches to th…
Project for a revolution in NY
Dead C. mainstay's multiple personalities mull the merits of the back-to-monodiglycerides movement.
Midnight Crossroads Tape Recorder Blues
Recorded 2003-05, Lyttelton, New Zealand & Eggenstein, Germany. Digital mastering at the Temple of Music.
Birchville Cat Motel . Bruce Russell
1: Recorded live at Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. Overdubbed at C/Psi/P, Lower Hutt. 2, 3: Postal exchange recorded in Lyttleton and Lower Hutt. 4: Live collaboration recorded at Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. 5: Postal exchange recorded live in Christchurch and overdubbed in Lower Hutt. 6: Postal exchange recorded in Lyttleton and Lower Hutt, additional tracks recorded live in High Street, Christchurch.