★Tipped Bowler Tapes
A Million Corpses of Dead Bees/High Road
Tipped Bowler returns to the fertile soil of New Zealand to cull two choice improvisations. On the A-side, Wellington's Nova Scotia delivers 'A Million Corpses of Dead Bees', an eighteen minute free-rock burner. Growing from violin sine-squeak and distant shortwave, the piece gains momentum with its patient drumming and resolves into a saxophone swarm shot through with synthetic scrabble. On the reverse, Dunedin's Eye comes off colder and more aggressive. 'High Road' throttles the listener…
Spectra
The sky done clouded over after Glory Fckn Sun's debut album, yielding this brooding and corrosive follow-up. The New Zealand sorta-super group of Antony Milton, Ben Spiers, and Simon O'Rorke concoct a slow-burning behemoth of metallic shivers and distortion churn, dark enough to invoke the dread name Haino. Spectra is an unsettling mind-meld: Spiers' desolate soundscapes bleed into Milton's heavy drones, which are complemented perfectly by O'Rorke's restless percussion. Group improvisation is t…
Quo
180 gram vinyl version of Stefan Neville' latest opus. Covers are two-color silkscreens by VG Kids on heavy-gauge recycled stock. Edition of 300. Here's what Soft Abuse had to say about Quo: as the title self-effacingly implies, Quo proffers a triumphant, primo slice of past Pumiceisms: uncertain progressions, anomalous structure, inimitable guitar buzz, sublime melancholy, and distorted vocals (crooned, spoken & moaned). Quo once more finds Pumice cruising the convergence of pop, folk and noise…