Dadamah

(inclusa nell’album “This Is Not A Dream”, Majora, 1992)

After a brief stint with the Shallows (who would last just one single, in 1985), guitarist Roy Montgomery called on drummer Peter Stapleton, his old comrade from the early days of the Pin Group, who had since become a co-founder of Scorched Earth Policy and Terminals. The new project the two launched was named Dadamah; the intention was for it to also act as a catalyst for New Zealand's whole thriving new underground scene. Rounding out the lineup were two new recruits, later sadly scattered to the wind, both coming out of the local post-punk crucible of the era: keyboardist Janine Stagg and bassist Kim Pieters, who also handled backing vocals, offsetting Montgomery's serene baritone.

Like many of the bands mentioned above, Dadamah's lifespan was brief, lasting only a handful of singles and one full-length album. But as proven by one of their key tracks, "High Tension House", they were genuine gems, milestones of a certain way of making rock music that arguably still hasn't been fully embraced or developed even today. And "High Tension House", the closing track of their only long-playing "This Is Not A Dream" (1992), is just one of their many perfect artistic legacies. Worth mentioning too are at least "Too Hot To Dry", similar in length and structure, "Limbo Swing", and the shorter numbers: the lysergic lullaby "Prove" and the blazing charge of the Patti Smith-esque "Brian's Children".

"High Tension House" is, above all, a shining example of avant-garde song form. It's not at all hard to spot its original plasma, the jam that served as its embryo. In fact, the band does nothing to hide it — if anything, they seem more interested than ever in flaunting that nature, keeping it at an uncontaminated, raw stage, like a new Michelangelo-esque "non-finito". Production is stripped down to the bare essentials. It's more a long, unbridled flow of sounds, certainly arranged in harmonic and rhythmic succession, but also, and above all, free to spread out across the acoustic spectrum, as if it were a jazz piece or a work of classical music. The vocal epigram, with its wholly cryptic meaning, at once allusive and elusive — which incidentally contains the line that gives the parent album its title (along with an obscure "helter skelter") — settles into it with a distracted naturalness, a nonchalance that's never contrived.

This song, with its piano-led opening, blurred into a fade-in, as though emerging from an inaudible void where it echoes eternally until revealing itself at our "play" button, is also one of Montgomery's first towering aesthetic manifestos. The whole track rests on three guitar chords, three chords repeated ad libitum, over and over, but always with small variations, small chromatic and dynamic touches. By breaking down and reassembling this utterly simple harmonic scheme, Montgomery manages to lend a kind of epic quality to psychedelic music, despite its easy gait and extreme technical simplicity. At times it feels almost like hearing Pachelbel's music, with that heavenly insistence, that same musical awareness built from continuous repetitions and variations, in a seamless gradient that often leads to unwitting shifts in tone and register.

Then there's the arrangement. The musicians play naturally tight and organized, guided purely by genuine instinct. Stapleton's drumming fully respects the elemental brilliance of Montgomery's guitar, merely underlining it rather than amplifying it, certainly never sweetening it, tapping it out barely with the bass drum and little else. It adds body, a certain dramatically overwhelming quality. The same goes for Pieters' bass, even more faithful to the chords' root notes. But what stands out most of all is the instrument that's most understated by contrast, Stagg's electronic keyboard, a sulfurous simmer of pure static sound, another stroke of genius. Everyone plays with the utmost spontaneity, only partly following the rules of counterpoint, mostly filling in the gaps and pauses left by the frontman little by little. Pure accessories, mere layers of subliminal sound.

The result, in the end, splits the difference between neurosis and ecstasy, or between spectral claustrophobia and irrational bliss. The recording quality, sublimely lo-fi, first the sonic image of a foggy atmosphere, then a metaphor for some vague absence of reason, pairs perfectly with a wandering gait that's nonetheless brimming with excitement.

For Dadamah, the album and this track in particular draw on influences ranging from the aforementioned psychedelic music to new wave: from the more morbid, dragging pieces of the Velvet Underground, to the shamanic, suspended tone of the early Doors, all the way to Pere Ubu, for the creative use of keyboards, and almost as far as the hostile dryness of Swans. Beyond that, of course, the jam form and arguably a certain avant-garde sensibility. But the band certainly possesses its own distinct character, entirely turned inward, toward imploded sound, almost the polar opposite of the open, even brash approach of Fugazi. It could be said, and this is their great lesson, that their sound finally invents and establishes the meditative side of post-hardcore. Never before had punk sounded so closed in on itself, so otherworldly in its focus. A lesson that's been appreciated and reassessed — witness the fine Kranky reissue (1995), which also includes their complete works — but still not fully capitalized on.

The wires are overhit

There’s no shelter in the glass

This is not a dream

High tension house