Dead C

In the early 80s, New Zealand experienced a remarkable period of musical renewal. Influenced as much by the Velvet Underground as by the recent fires of new wave, many bands set out in search of innovative solutions, often gambling on an avant-garde, almost "lo-fi" radical approach. Pin Group (whose ranks included a very young Roy Montgomery) and Nocturnal Projections (who later became This Kind Of Punishment) are the first names one must reckon with. Nocturnal Projections — founded in 1981 in Plymouth by brothers Peter and Graeme Jefferies — featured guitarist Michael Morley.

Around the mid-80s, once This Kind Of Punishment had disbanded, Morley came into contact with Bruce Russell and Robbie Yeats (already a drummer with the Verlaines). Bruce Russell, a great connoisseur of the local underground, championed an even more extreme renewal of the local music scene. A scene in which bands, essentially, tended to fall into two seemingly distinct categories: on one side, those favouring the song format (among whom, besides the aforementioned Verlaines, The Chills stood out); on the other, those devoted to experimentation in improvisation (Xpressaway and Pin Group had been among the first to venture — albeit somewhat timidly — into this territory). Dead C were born, essentially, as a violent reaction against the former approach, and, conversely, by pushing further the "progressive" solutions and moods of Pin Group and Nocturnal Projections.

There were three cornerstones of this "revolution": 1) reconnecting with that "noise" tradition inaugurated — albeit through not entirely convergent means — by the Velvet Underground and Red Crayola, sharpening, if possible, its edges and its sense of claustrophobia; 2) favouring a "home"-style recording approach, avoiding multitrack and similar gadgetry. Only this way, Russell argued, could one capture the essence of a group of musicians intent on making music (he also has, among other things, a genuine mania for "mono" recordings). The music of Dead C, then, is "lo-fi" because the instruments used to record it are "lo-fi". 3) From the first two points follows the conclusion that what the New Zealand band was attempting was one of many possible ways of presenting sound "aesthetically" (it's no coincidence that the first single by Handful Of Dust — the duo comprising Russell and violinist Alastair Galbraith — would be titled "A Little Aesthetic Discourse"...).

Russell coined the term "free-noise" to sum up the three points outlined above. The starting point rests on two essential theses: a) what lies beyond music is noise; b) what lies beyond rules is free.

"Free" music uses "noise" because the latter is the basic element of all possible music. This brings into play composers such as Stockhausen (who tended to transcend finite time and death), LaMonte Young (who expanded the "instant" into the "infinite"), Xenakis (who often made use of "buzzing" drones) and Cage (whose following statement can be taken as testimony: "I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard"). Through the era of free-jazz, "free-music" arrived at rock. The guitar sound that Lou Reed gave to the Velvet Underground (derived, in some way, from the music of Cecil Taylor) is the clearest example of this. According to Russell, "free-music" is a mirror of reality, while "organized" music (in one way or another) represents only the vain attempt to impose — by force — human subjectivity onto reality. But it is above all the noise generated by electrical instruments — better still if faulty or of poor quality — that can open up vast operational territories for musicians. Faulty machines, in fact, distance the musician from the process of making music, introducing the factor of "chance". The instruments used in the rock field are the most suited to obtaining a "sound" of this kind. Some exceptions, however, are represented — with their violent horn blasts — by Albert Ayler, Peter Brötzmann and Borbetomagus.

The first fruit — still unripe — of this "aesthetic" was published in 1987: "DR503". 1989 saw the mini-album "Helen Said These", before "Trapdoor Fucking Exit" (1990) revealed their intentions in a far more accomplished form. That same year, "Eusa Kills" proved a valuable confirmation.

But it is with the dark, impenetrable labyrinths of "Harsh '70s Reality" (1992) that Dead C crafted a work destined to endure, one that must be counted among the greatest avant-garde rock masterpieces of the last two decades. It is also, ultimately, the album in which another fundamental influence on the Dead C sound becomes clear: England's AMM, whose "AMMusic" (1966) presented a radical form of improvisation based on electric/electronic drones and terrifying noise accumulations of powerfully "material" impact. This is what pervades, from start to finish, the twenty-two minutes of "Driver UFO" (with Buffy O'Reilly as guest guitarist), a chilling "sound sculpture" that elevates noise to an expressive element of the psyche. A dark mantra of cacophony, feedback, glissandos, infernal tremolos and untamed experimentalism. A pearl-black monolith that, in its inhuman advance, erases any traditional harmonic/melodic meaning, leaving room for an aseptic "drone-music", set within an absent structure, within a "blank form" where schizophrenic guitars, a dying organ and fourth-hand microphones wander, parallel but never converging.

The "agonizing" static effect is heightened by the elimination of any canonical "rhythmic" structure. Following in the footsteps of LaMonte Young, indeed, the track seems to live through the infinite expansion of a single point in time. Into that single "hour" is channelled a descriptive power that borders on the terrifying. Nothing is as it should be. The sensation is that of a sulphurous pastiche between Grateful Dead (the "expanded" version of "Dark Star") and Velvet Underground, as if the former were rereading, stretching it to excess and in an "ambient", almost shredded "shoegazing" key, the latter's "Sister Ray".

The garage-rock of "Sky" revives the myth of Feedtime, but cloning only its most abrasive elements and steering its sound toward a "spatial" dimension, as shown, albeit very subtly, by the lead guitar line that languishes psychotically in the background.

"Love" unfolds as a heavily degraded form of "psycho-dark" ballad, with Yeats' drums stirring a martial rhythm in slow-motion, Morley's rhythm guitar climbing and perpetually falling back into the same tormented riff, while Russell mediates acid outbursts and dense tangles of muted harmonics and broken chords. It's a track that pushes to paroxysm certain themes already present within "no wave", of which, one way or another, Dead C are disciples.

The "skeletal" impressionism of "Suffer Bomb Damage" digs deep gashes where vitriolic guitar fragments nest, periodically depressurizing tension in the form of ambient-isolationist blasts that drag an already desperate organ litany down into despair. It's a leap into the unknown, clinging to one's own unconscious. The aversion to any melodic element finds a new, searing sonic manifesto in the following track, "Sea Is Violet". A thick fog of vibrating frequencies, limping drum patterns and declamations drowning in the void find, in the gestural, desecrating, cacophonous use of electronics — modulated by a perverse tendency toward harmonic deflagration — an impenetrable wall against which to unleash their own shockwave.

If the most repellent side of Chrome underpins "Shark" (with Joan George on vocals), on "Constellation" the trio clearly aims to downgrade space-rock into an exhausting short-circuit. So, while Yeats's drumming is decorative and ascending, the guitars mutter fearfully, knotting together inside a blanket of noise so graceless it borders on granular slabs of avant-shronk flatulence. The whole track is, in short, a psychedelic tremor built on the blueprint of a heroin-fueled hallucination — the same one that, ultimately, serves as the guiding line for the disjointed "T. Is Never Over I & II".

Obsessive and desperate, right from the start, is the inverted liturgy of "Baseheart", built on the murderous prowling of a bass figure forced to repeatedly smash its head against a ring of rhythmic entrails and aborted, agonizing solos. A depressed mood and booming premonitions of death run through this psychodrama of absolute evil from beginning to end, which fades away, wrapped in sheer panic, into a definitively nullifying silence.

The closing "Hope" keeps the album's underlying premises intact: darkness, anguish, nihilism... An increasingly weary, disillusioned voice flounders among the words. With scenic effect, random chimes, indistinct mosaics of subterranean echoes and ever more exhausted guitar arpeggios bring yet another ordeal to its conclusion. A sentimental journey through terminal illness takes shape from a deathly droning chant, briefly breaking free into a garage-rock surge that evokes the Scientists, only to brutalize its verve with that radioactive vortex of psychedelic symbols now entirely bent to the will of an unprecedented transfiguration of noise aesthetics — traversed from end to end in a game of subtraction that reinvents the genre for the post-rock era.

It's no coincidence that the "negative" tension of their music is constantly reflected in a dismantling of foundational models. The "free" matrix is pushed to extremes, spasmodically heightened by performances that always carry the flavor of a fleeting, escaping moment. Just as Borbetomagus had reached the point of no return in free-jazz (stretching improvisation into a wild overlap of musical individualities that completely dismantled any attempt to establish emotional dialogue outside the raw act of pure instinctual release), Dead C (much like Royal Trux on "Twin Infinitives", though with different results) forge a new way of shaping rock's raw material. A way that finds, precisely in the shattering and destabilizing of that material, perhaps the only genuine possibility for a reappraisal that truly accounts for a "post-" perspective.

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29/10/2006