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Saturday Feb 29 at Pyramid Club in Wellington sees the eponymous album release from Wgtn/Dunedin trio FEROCIOUS. Formed in 2014 as a live, semi-improvised collaboration between Johannes Contag, Bill Direen and Mark Williams, FEROCIOUS move between spectral barely-there songs to ragged, desperate songs clawing at the edge of post-punk.
For this gig FEROCIOUS are playing with the Trembles, a trio comprised of Hermione Johnson, an intense improviser on prepared piano, and noted improvisors Jonny Marks and Isaac Smith.
Throughout his long and notable career, Bill Direen has been not only a passionate crafter of songs but an equally passionate writer of words. He publishes books, edits an ongoing literary journal, and in recent years has increasingly turned to poetry as an outlet for his ascerbic observations and canny wit. With FEROCIOUS, Direen is free to present his deft and biting turns of phrase not within the confines of his own songwriting, but rather alongside the minimal guitar and drum textures produced by Mark Williams and Johannes Contag. To this end, Williams – a songwriter in his own right with acts such as Marineville and Cookie Brooklyn & The Crumbs – uses skeletal chord progressions and noisy loops to hypnotic effect, and Contag – known among others for his work with The Golden Awesome, Cloudboy and Jay Clarkson – provides similarly skeletal beats and percussive textures. (The Contag-Williams combination, in this guise, is predated by their erstwhile drone rock project, Bad Statistics.)
The Ferocious album was recorded in 2016 by Dan Beban at Wellington’s Pyramid Club, and mixed and produced over the following years by Contag, with a release finally coming to fruition thanks to Rattle Records.
