Dead C - Free-noise from the southern hemisphere

There is an area, among the other forms of music, in which all the "rules" that keep them separate cease to apply. All musics bleed into this Empty Area; some exist more within, others more outside, these boundaries.

Being beyond "rules", it is "free".

(Bruce Russell, "What Is Free? A Free Noise Manifesto") 

There is a tradition in Western thought, dating back at least to Pythagoras, according to which the cosmos is structured according to the principles of musical harmony.

(Bruce Russell, “The Disharmony of the Spheres Extolled in Ten Theses”)

In essence, music is human matter and must return to human hands. No universal laws, no ties to God: it must simply be what it has always been — noise.

It was with this principle in mind that Bruce Russell, Michael Morley and Robbie Yeats, in Port Chalmers, near Dunedin, in the south of New Zealand, brought Dead C to life and coined the term free-noise.

Free the noise! 

When the group was born, in 1986, Sonic Youth, fresh off masterpieces such as Bad Moon Rising and Evol, were the iconic band of noise-rock. The four New Yorkers, however, were gradually but irrevocably drifting away from the experimentation of their early records to focus more and more on their rock side, a transformation that found its perfect synthesis in Daydream Nation. At roughly the same time, Dead C were following the opposite path: from uncertain rock beginnings, they were heading towards an increasingly noisy, improvised, dark, impenetrable style. A style that would find disciples across the globe, Sonic Youth first and foremost.

The legacy they left behind is enormous, because Dead C managed to perfect a unique sound, fusing improvised noise with low fidelity. The peculiarity lies in the fact that, although the albums are made on a four-track, sometimes in mono, what's lo-fi is not the recording but the instrumentation itself. This isn't the low fidelity born of slacker attitude (see early Pavement), but rather the realistic recording of a sound that was already dirty at its source. Dead C, by their own admission, are in search of a "pure" sound, free of any after-the-fact intervention or any "technological fakery". This is the nature of free-noise: noisy, improvised music recorded in a realistic way.

The origins of this sound are many and aesthetically diverse, ranging from the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth to the outer fringes of psychedelia (Red Crayola, Angus MacLise and Dream Syndicate chief among them), from the avant-garde to free-jazz. But their spectrum also makes room for the skeletal rawness of Suicide, the spaciousness of Pink Floyd, the experimentation of Faust, and the stark reductionism of The Fall.

With the move to the American label Slitbreeze, and the consequent spread of their records beyond New Zealand, a veritable "Dead C cult" soon sprang up (a cult that, alongside the usual Moore and Ranaldo, counts Keiji Haino and Loren Mazzacane-Connors among its followers). But it was with the development of the web that the ranks of disciples of that no-fi free-noise sound grew beyond measure.

Virtually every noise musician of the third millennium owes them something, even if the offshoots of the Dead C sound are found less in individual artists than in entire scenes, such as the crowd of psycho-unstable regulars at Carlos Giffoni's No Fun Fest, or in various themed labels — a perfect example being Last Visible Dog with its drone-noise output — or in acts like Gang Wizard or Skaters, who took the concept of realistic recording and ran with it, sometimes all too literally.

What's more, they proved to be prophets in their own homeland too, to the point that people would come to speak of New Zealand noise, an expression that finds its leading name in Campbell Kneale (aka Birchville Cat Motel) and his label Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, but which actually denotes an entire universe — indeed a family made up of homemade micro-labels, barely-more-than-amateur musical projects (Omit, Armpit, Pumice, Cja and a thousand others), and countless impromptu collaborations.

However, when the Dead C were born, New Zealand found itself in a rather peculiar recording situation. In the mid-Eighties, kiwi-pop was a lively and particularly stimulating scene, rich with stylistically diverse bands all gathered under the local label Flying Nun. It's from one of these, Terminals, that drummer Robbie Yeats hails. Something in that idyllic situation, however, was starting to jam. Flying Nun, for whom Bruce Russell worked as a publicist, was edging closer to a deal with major label Wea in order to offset financial difficulties – a deal that would increasingly push local underground bands away from Flying Nun. Annoyed by the situation, Russell decided to found his own label, Xpressway (a name with obvious Sonic Youth origins), to keep documenting New Zealand's musical underground.

In its few years of life, more precisely between 1988 and 1992, Xpressway put out around forty releases, largely cassettes, and caught the attention of several American independent labels such as Drag City, Kranky, Slitbreeze, Drunken Fish, Fusetron, Merge (much to Russell's displeasure, since it was all happening off the books), becoming a reference point for the New Zealand music community. This Kind Of Punishment, Terminals, Alastair Galbraith, Pin Group, Dadamah, as well as Dead C themselves, are all artists who, thanks to Xpressway, were either rescued from obscurity or given their shot.

Having covered Yeats and Russell, the band was completed with the arrival of Michael Morley, a guitarist who already had Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos under his belt.

The trio's first steps were taken in 1987 with the live album Perform Max Harris, followed by DR503 (reissued several times with slightly different tracklists). These are albums made up of short songs hovering between rock leanings and noise tendencies that hadn't yet been fully honed, presenting a band still unsure of its direction.

Live Dead See doesn't change the picture much, but it's still an important release in the group's history, as it marks the birth of Xpressway.

After the promising EP The Sun Stabbed, it's with the following Eusa Kills that, thanks to the ballad "Scarey Nest", to "Phantom Power" or the T-Rex cover "Children Of The Revolution", but above all thanks to the first genuine noise digressions, the first signs of evolution start to show.

Trapdoor Fucking Exit, originally released by Precious Metal, Morley's tape label, in 1989, and later reissued on CD under the same title alongside the Xpressway mini-LP Helen Said This, is the album that marks the move to Philadelphia's Slitbreeze, exporting the band to the States for the first time.

"Heaven" and "Power" are skeletal chants built over trembling mists of feedback, cut through by Morley's sleepwalking voice; "Mighty" tries to hold an urgent rhythm, but falls apart, lost among hisses and limping percussion. "Sky" is a putrid garage-punk anthem with amplifiers on the verge of collapse; in "Calling Slowly", on the other hand, the guitar howls almost like a theremin, while the drums stumble along and lose the beat more than once; that same scandalous drumming in "Krossed" underpins various samples, including a gloriously decontextualized Gregorian chant. Indicative of future developments are the two versions of "Bury", essentially an endless drone amalgam stuffed with radio and TV intrusions and samples of various origins.

"Helen Said This" is the cornerstone that draws most of the attention, a constant struggle between tension (rock) and release (feedback) that gradually crumbles, repeating three weary, trembling chords to the point of exhaustion. "Sister Ray" travelling down a "Xpressway To Yr Skull".

The following Harsh 70s Reality can be considered their most representative album, but it's on Trapdoor Fucking Exit that, bringing together the defining elements of their sound with masterful balance, the trio achieves formal perfection.

Harsh 70s Reality is ambitious right from its format, a monumental double vinyl (with two extra tracks compared to the CD version) recorded partly live between '89 and '91. The opening is entrusted to "Driver U.F.O.", the point of no return of the journey begun with "Bury" on the previous record. The two-guitars-and-drums scheme has by now been abandoned; what dominates now are massive doses of tape-loop, organ and synth. With percussion gone, vocals gone, and any melodic temptation gone too, "Driver U.F.O." condenses pure post-nuclear desolation into an ambient-noise digression.

"Love" is a spatio-temporal expansion of the track already featured on Trapdoor Fucking Exit; "Suffer Bomb Damage" (half a tribute to This Heat) is mental confusion painted by a wheezing organ; "Constellation" is a hysterical guitar brutalization.

On Harsh 70s Reality, the intuitions of Trapdoor Fucking Exit are brought to maturity: the noise increases, the sound becomes claustrophobic, and the improvised parts take up ever more space. It's a pitch-black record, a dark well with no visible bottom, and the closing "Hope", a semi-acoustic ballad that wanders sleepwalking until it dissolves into the chatter of the audience, paints, if possible, an even more harrowing scenario.

Between Harsh 70s Reality and the following record came a handful of minor releases: Clyma Est Mort is a bootleg, later made official, which brings together interesting unreleased tracks ("Sunshine – Dirt For Harry", or the blistering one-two punch of "Highway"-"Ein Kampf, Ein Seig") and live versions of known songs ("Power").

Next came Operation Of The Sonne, a droning, abstract mini-LP that reaches its peak with the lengthy "Air", and finally World Peace Hope Et Al, a sort of odds-and-sods collection including unreleased tracks, live versions and other scattered gems. Among these, "World" stands out, an amphetamine-fuelled drone-rock rush directly descended from "I Heard Her Call My Name" by the Velvet Underground.

With The White House the trio takes a decisive step toward the listener, offering a sound that's considerably cleaner than in the past. The first four tracks, all instrumental and largely improvised (except for the splendid, melancholy "Your Hand"), feel almost like an introduction to the two pieces that close the album.

"Bitcher", marked by Morley's circling flanger, is their ultimate rock song — with a bit of imagination you could picture Dinosaur Jr played at 16rpm instead of 33. "Outside" picks up with astonishing intensity the thread started by "Helen Said This", a tremendous melodic anthem left to bleed out in a lake of feedback.

For every step The White House takes toward the listener, the live album Repent takes three steps back.

Recorded in '96, the album consists of six untitled pieces, entirely improvised and instrumental. Their most impenetrable legacy. On one hand the drumming is more autistic than ever ("II" and "III" especially), on the other the guitars seem to exist solely to make the listeners' eardrums bleed (the whistles and blows of "IV").

More an endurance test than a record (one that's a bit pointless in itself). Worth noting: the packaging is nothing but unsold digipacks of The White House with photocopies glued on top.

The following studio album, Tusk, overtakes in the wrong lane any brutality offered up until then. Like its predecessors, it's supposed to be a rock album (or at least so the band claims), but concepts like melody, songwriting or structure are barely hinted at, only to be buried under six feet of free noise.

The start is in slow motion: the long minutes of tinkling junk that open "Plane" get swept away by a series of weary, disjointed pick strokes. From here on it's a declaration of war. "Head" is a frantic percussive gallop that collapses in on itself, "Tuba" and "Half" charge in headfirst, "Imaginary" buries the drums under endless layers of feedback, above which an alien voice rises. The title track closes the album with twelve minutes of delirium, amid battered drums, subhuman vocalizing and guitars straight out of a crypt.

Zero recording fidelity, maximum din — Tusk easily stakes its claim as their nastiest, most uncompromising legacy.

After Tusk, short on money, Dead C found themselves unable to release a new record for three long years. In the meantime they piled up plenty of material, and in 2000 came out with a sprawling self-titled album. The Dead C leaves the drums in the attic and bids farewell altogether to both the rock and the noise components. While credit must be given, after more than ten years of career, for attempting to radically reinvent themselves so as not to stay trapped in a genre of their own making, it's hard not to admit that over two hours of minimal pseudo-electronic digressions prove rather unbearable.

New Electric Music, despite being more concise and featuring a couple of inspired moments (above all the brutal "Hush" and the ethereal "Repulsion"), continues down the same path.

In 2003, riding the wave of a noise scene starting to come out into the open (Wolf Eyes, Black Dice & co.), Dead C decided with Damned to retrace their steps, dusting off guitars and amplifiers. The album adds nothing new to the trio's history, coming across as rather formulaic.

With the compilation Vain, Erudite And Stupid comes the first celebration of Dead C's by-now two-decade-long career. It's an operation, however, that leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste. The format is the classic anthology-plus-rarities that never satisfies anyone. Still, it's a good way to get acquainted with the band and trace their evolution over time, and it also includes a few otherwise-lost gems (the priceless "World") that alone are worth the price of the album.

Future Artists marks the return after four years of silence, and it's an unexpected late flourish following ten years of questionable releases. Surprisingly, the album shows no signs of age — if anything, the three work hard on the more experimental side of their trademark sound, crafting five tracks that are extremely different from one another.

"The AMM Of Punk Rock" is a long, dark, minimal drone held up by muffled beats in the background; "The Magicians", an out-of-tune noise-rock track, harks back to the Trapdoor Fucking Exit era with surprising freshness; "Macoute" speaks an abstract language that best condenses the ethereal intuitions of Operation Of The Sonne; "Eternity" revisits the percussion-versus-distortion dichotomy in a less brutal but more disembodied way. The closing "Garage" is instead an unexpected surprise, a twenty-minute blues monument to stillness in which, for the first time in twenty years, acoustic guitars make an appearance.

Bruce Russell

Alongside the main group, the two guitarists have pursued their solo careers with equal consistency. Bruce Russell, after closing the chapter on Xpressway, founded a new label in 1995, Corpus Hermeticum. Corpus Hermeticum is essentially the vehicle through which Russell (who earns his living as an archivist in a theology library) tries to spread his musico-philosophical theories, and the A Handful Of Dust project is its chief expression. This is "free" music in the truest sense of the word.

The music of A Handful Of Dust — the other steady member being the eccentric singer-songwriter and violinist Alastair Galbraith — doesn't fit neatly into any genre, nor is it easy listening. It's material ideally related to free-jazz, at times droning, at times close to the expressive freedoms of AMM, in some cases drifting into minimal-ambient territory, and sharing with Dead C the same lo-fi, noise-driven approach.

Musica Humana (Collected Works 1990-93), released in 1995, brings together the single A Little Aesthetic Discorse, Concord, an LP released in 1993, plus a handful of scattered tracks, and stands as the best showcase of the duo's style. Fragmentary music, scattered between the creak of a door and the voice of an answering machine ("The Lonesome Death Of Albert Ayler"), torn between mocking the American anthem and indulging in pure noise ("Masonic Inborn"), yet always ready to narrate everyday degradation ("Come Breathe Upon These Slain That They May Live").

Worth noting is the elaborate booklet packaging, which includes the full programmatic statement of intent, "A Free Noise Manifesto", quoted at the start. It is, in fact, an article from "Logopandocy – The Journal Of Vain Erudition", a kind of small magazine that Russell includes with many Corpus Hermeticum releases, in which he discusses music, philosophy, history, occultism, Rosicrucianism, alchemy and plenty of other rather esoteric subjects.

The group's discography turns out to be quite vast, yet it keeps revolving around the same concepts, and since the overall quality stays fairly consistent, it's hard to recommend one release over another.

The Philosophick Mercury consists of two long pieces recorded live, surprisingly coherent and tangible given the duo's usual spirit (in this issue of Logopandocy, the reflection concerns the humanity of music). On Now God, Stand Up For Bastards, "Oration on The Dignity Of Man" stands out, with Galbraith's violin conjuring a drone worthy of following in the footsteps of Tony Conrad; Jerusalem, Street Of Graves, on the other hand, is distinguished by the lengthy "The City Of God/Negative Jerusalem", dominated by a delirious tribal rhythm.

Moreover, since 1998 Russell has carried on a prolific solo career that, at least in its earliest releases, moves through drone-free-noise territory without many particular surprises.

Michael Morley 

If Russell comes across as the philosophical mind of Dead C, Michael Morley is its musical one. Even before meeting Bruce Russell, he had been part of a band with the improbable name Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos. River Falling Love, the only release available on CD, is a collection of tracks recorded between 1984 and 1986 alongside drummer Richard Ram. Although these songs are rather raw and naive, they still carry a certain charm in their gloom and spectral quality ("Rain").

Far more interesting is everything released under the name Gate. Officially a solo project, in reality Morley is often joined by various guests of greater or lesser renown. Gate's origins date to shortly after Dead C and fade into self-produced cassettes issued in tiny runs (around fifty copies) by Precious Metal, by now virtually impossible to track down.

Among these obscurities, Metric from 1991 is worth a listen: the presence of Russell and Yeats makes it essentially a Dead C record, turning it into the ideal link between Trapdoor Fucking Exit and Harsh 70s Reality. "Call Constellations" (an extended version of "Constellation" from Harsh 70s Reality), clocking in at ten minutes, is the record's mighty tour de force, "Forced Sight" brings in a spectral organ, "Evidence" stands out for its crushing rhythm, and "Opening My Arms" proves that, when he wants to, Morley can also write proper songs.

The first album to enjoy any real circulation is Lounge from 1993, made up of long digressions for solo electric guitar; truth be told, it's not the happiest release. In this style, Guitar (slightly earlier and now nearly impossible to find) is preferable, or even better, the live album Boston – New York City 1994. The first track, "Boston", is half an hour of live playing alongside Lee Ranaldo, in which the two vent their shared passion for saturated distortion. On the "New York" side, the pair are joined by harpist Zeena Parkins, but the brief sketches produced add nothing to what's already been said.

Golden, being a collection of singles and other rarities, is a very uneven release. The first half wallows in the classic guitar quagmire, while the second throws up rock attempts that are memorable in their sheer madness (on "Mett.", amid the usual din, a recording of a metal guitar solo pops up, with results that call for immediate hospitalization).

Meanwhile, making the most of Table Of The Elements' backing, Morley kicks off his own highly personal rock trilogy. The Dew Line, Gate's expressive peak and comparable to Dead C's finest moments, boasts a leaden, desolate sound in keeping with its Jandek-esque cover.

Not a ray of light gets through: "Needed All Words" is an oceanic crossing of solitary sadness, "Millions" a ballad for the institutionalized, "Venerable Clouds" leans hard on the distortion pedal, while "Have Not" lodges itself in memory for its impossible attempt to fuse noise with blues-tinged melancholy.

Although there's no shortage of stylistic differences, the atmosphere is reminiscent of Jandek's records, particularly in the vocals, which are often filtered and distorted, sharing that catatonia and homespun isolationism typical of the great disconnected one.

With a likely undercurrent of irony, Monolake opens in a more rock-oriented fashion than ever, as "Standing In Fields" features a riff seemingly lifted from any generic hard-rock band. Once the joke's over, it plunges into the bottomless well of the record's central section. To return to shores of greater communicability, you have to wait for the closing "Jennifer", a cover-tribute to Faust (to whom Morley lent his guitar on “Rien”). The whole thing closes out worthily with The Wisher Table, which, though less inspired than the other two, still offers a couple of excellent moments such as the ethereal "Spirit".

After this trilogy, with My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart Morley attempts new paths, bringing in electronic beats without achieving any results worth noting.

Secret Earth (2008) completes the catharsis with a lesson in flayed, dissonant noise-rock, just as it should be. The four tracks on the lineup are four funeral laments, very similar to one another in syntax. So beneath the usual leaden, lo-fi layer of soot, the melodies give the sound its shape, while all around it drones crumble and reform, guitars clatter furiously with no regard whatsoever for harmony, and the vocals accompany it all like the wail of a dying man.

"Waves" is a bulldozer of dissonant guitar progressions, "Stations" drags on for over 16 minutes amid scrapyard clangs and exhausting rhythmic stop and go, while the opening "Mansion" is the most melodic of the bunch, albeit with a telluric pulse that seems to come from the center of the earth.

The masterpiece, however, is "Plains". Free-form and uncertain in its progress, the track is made (and unmade) of sounds that struggle to hold together as a coherent whole, seeming to spill out from every direction.

A black hole of radioactive, putrescent matter.

Unfortunately, though, the following Patience is a mediocre effort, and the opening "Empire" wastes no time confirming it. Across its sixteen minutes, in fact, little or nothing happens: a slow, hypnotic development, with a second half that grows ever more half-hearted and utterly devoid of verve. The vocals are completely absent, with the trio focusing on the instrumental side, but it's a clockwork kind of focus, incapable of bringing anything truly interesting to fruition. After the murky interlude of "Federation" (electric whispers in the dark and gently brushed cymbals), "Shaft" steps in to stir the waters a little (but just a little, nothing excessive…) with hammering percussion against which the guitars' lysergic aura shakes. The relatively best moment, in any case, comes right at the close with "South", which, despite its apathetic, sickly rambling, manages to weave together a decent amount of tension. But it's still too little.

Still in 2010, Morley returns under the Gate moniker and releases Republic Of Sadness, an uneven work made up of listless laments, hypnotic-hammering beats and unsettling drone carpets ("Forever", "All"), but also angular guitar loops that underpin lopsided, funk-tinged trances, in which the paranoia of Dead C comes back in through the window ("Desert"). The second half fares better, in any case, with the marriage between the sources becoming more convincing and better polished.

The stroboscopic epos of "Wilderness" is without doubt the high point of this sound, torn between the physicality of the mechanical beat, the radiant evanescence of the drones and the inescapable desolation of the vocals. On "Freak", by contrast, the guitar swarms, utterly abrasive, along the ecstatic path of a stunning back-and-forth. The closing is entrusted to the sidereal layers of "Trees", which close the circle around the boundless refractions of a melancholy that offers no escape. The cosmos, imposing, like a womb into which everything returns.

Two years later comes Damned Revolutions, opened by a sick, alien murmur, devastated by unfathomable psychic turmoil. The obsessive, minimalist repetition of the whole surrounds the listener, pushing them back against the wall. Suddenly, out of the dark turmoil, a voice emerges (that voice!), like a pestilent dirge.

Michael Morley has never forgotten his paranoias, so much so that he returns to the murky introspection of Monolake. It's the sound of anguish, the obsessive resonance of a fatal illness. Eighteen minutes for "Turned and Gloowing Inwardly", eighteen for "Turning and Towards the Light". Metallic clangs, crumbling horizons, shattered hopes. Mannerism, in any case, lurks just around the corner.

Dead C return to action in 2013 with a split shared with the supergroup Rangda, made up of Ben Chasny, Chris Corsano and Sir Richard Bishop.

The record shows the band's fiercest and most uncompromising side, but also their most unhinged, here tackling the radioactive discharges of "Eusa Kills", the lo-fi, derelict improvisation of "Tomorrow", the monstrous recess of "This Much I Know" and the hammering, more “recognizable” (take that adjective with a huge grain of salt, obviously!) "Heaven's Wheel". With Rangda, on the other hand, we're in the midst of a gentler, more evocative sonic fresco: "Gracilaria" (featuring blazing percussion and meditative chords that sketch out boundless prairies, in a vibrant crescendo); "Sancticallist" (which stays essentially within the same coordinates).

A few months later comes Armed Courage, a work that, mediating between the two souls of their sound (torrid, lo-fi noise explorations and apathetic swaying in the darkness of the bleakest anguish), settles at a respectable level. The best moment is probably "Armed", an anarchic jam of noise run wild and blazing acid, propelled by disordered drumming and set ablaze by barbed-wire feedback and napalm-fueled wah-wah whirlpools. More reflective, "Courage", by contrast, is a nighttime nightmare haunted by the vocal ghost of Michael Morley, in which all the instruments initially sound like scattered configurations of apathy, only to converge into a garage-rock crescendo, itself interrupted by a questioning guitar interlude. The coda, on the other hand, is a dark, lysergic tribulation that leaves the listener in a state of terrible emotional suspension.

When Byron Coley (journalist and music critic who, among other things, wrote for Spin, ed.) visited New Zealand, around 1988, he was talking to an Auckland musician who said he couldn't believe someone in America was about to put out a Dead C record, and he didn't understand why anyone would be interested in doing that. The comment was “Why distribute an album like that? It's just big fucking noise”. Byron Coley replied “Yeah, isn't it great?”

(Bruce Russell from “Invisible Jukebox” by Nick Cain, “The Wire”, April 2006)

Contributions by Antonio Ciarletta (“Secret Earth”) and Francesco Nunziata (“Patience”, “Republic Of Sadness”, “Damned Revolutions”, “Dead C / Rangda”, “Armed Courage”)

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