A rare opportunity to observe the minimalist electronic enigma that is Omit in his first live appearance in Otautahi since 2021, supported by long time friend and collaborator K-Group and local drone guitar wizard Peter Wright, plus vinyl interludes deftly selected by DJ Kiran Dass. If you like your music weird, this is top shelf stuff – whatever other plans you had for this evening, cancel them.
OMIT
Presiding over a table loaded with a bewilderingly incomprehensible stack of homemade electronic hardware, tangled cables and machines that go ping, Omit conjures up a sonic palette of swelling modulated drones orbited by an array of off-kilter thumps and blips that appears to melt time in its arresting otherworldliness. Prepare to get lost!
“Since his first self-released cassettes in the early 1990s, New Zealand’s Clinton Williams AKA OMIT has been on a singular and personal musical journey. Described as one of the greatest outsider artists currently working in the field, OMIT employs homebuilt instruments constructed from modified electric motors and salvaged sound sources to create a startlingly original soundworld. It is a world he inhabits alone, isolated in the small town of Blenheim in southern New Zealand, but it involves a deep exploration of the human condition.”
– Pica Disk
“Clinton Williams is the hardest-working man in minimal electronic music. He is one of two people I know fairly well who I honestly believe is possessed by genius.”
– Bruce Russell
K-GROUP
K-Group is the solo project of Surface of the Earth guitarist Paul Toohey.
While retaining some of the textured atmospherics of Surface of Earth, K-Group is a more stripped back affair, where Toohey manipulates dense, processed electric guitar drones into carefully layered sound works.
Selected discography:
K-Group CD (Corpus Hermeticum, NZ, 1997)
K-Group 2 (World Resources, NZ, 2015)
Accueil 7” (I Dischi Del Barone, SE, 2019)
Series 4 LP (Knotwilg, BE, 2020)
New Series One LP (Knotwilg, BE, 2023)
Transfers A-C 10” (World of Echo, UK, 2023)
“A dust trail of electricity...ambient drones that resemble rock music derived of all content.”
– Deano McFarlane
PETER WRIGHT
Peter Wright is a prolific recording artist and performer based in Ōhinehou/Lyttelton, known predominantly for crafting improvised, organically evolving drone textures with open-tuned electric guitars, augmented by layers of effects and environmental sounds. Wright’s compositions often follow a trajectory that mimics the slow motion swell of the ocean, with his pieces building in a drifting, creeping intensity punctuated by fragmented melodic overtones, eventually rising up in sheets of overloaded distortion. There is a wide-screen feel to his work, often generating a visceral sense of immersion within a landscape, at times familiar, but most often unsettlingly wild and alien.
