Track By Track: Alphabethead's New Album 'My Name Is David'

An artist with quite possibly the most infectious live energy in Aotearoa music, Whanganui-based producer and turntablist Alphabethead aka David Morrison (also of Bad Taste) released his three years in the making new album My Name Is David late last week via Sunreturn. A demon on the decks, you'd be nuts to miss his upcoming summer tour with synth-punks DISPLEASURE and electronics / drums voyagers BIRDPARTY. Order the cassette edition of My Name Is David and peruse the tee designs HERE, read Alphabethead's own words on each track on his new album below, and witness this all-killer lineup at the following dates...

Alphabethead, DISPLEASURE & BIRDPARTY Aotearoa Tour 2025

Friday 5th December - Pearl Diver, Ōtepoti Dunedin*
Saturday 6th December - Lyttelton Coffee Company, Ōtautahi Christchurch*
Sunday 7th December - Roots Bar, Tākaka (no BIRDPARTY)*
Friday 12th December - Last Place, Kirikiriroa Hamilton*
Saturday 13th December - Audio Foundation, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland*
Friday 19th December - Meow, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington
Saturday 20th December - Porridge Watson, Whanganui*

*Tickets on sale HERE via UTR

1. 'My Name Is David'
After the welcoming vocals, I introduce myself using excerpts from a few films before we descend into the abyss. My intent was to create a sinking feeling, as if the earth swallows the listener and carries them into the void from which 'No Control' emerges...

2. 'No Control'
This song is a meditation on free will and the nature of evil. I was reading 'The Golden Age' arc in Berserk by Kentaro Miura at the time and grappling with some of its themes. The lead instrument is a nadaswaram; a hardwood wind instrumental originating in South India with a powerful tone that sends shivers down my spine! When the melody enters its emotion is purposefully ambiguous so the listener must decipher whether it carries hope, despair, or a bit of both.

3. 'Finger Dance'
This song further explores the themes of 'No Control'; it takes the stance that free will does not exist and everything is predetermined. The song title and clawing bassline intends to evoke imagery of an omnipresent puppet master observing all and with colossal fingers pulls the strings of the theatre of life.

The song concludes with one of my favourite pieces of sound design on the album; the space gong! This synthesised thunderclap is the Big Bang in reverse; ending all life in our cosmos rather than setting it in motion.

4. 'Kirby's World'
Built around a synthesised kalimba (thumb piano) and Kirby's iconic "woohoo", my wish was to create some bouncy video game music to put a pep in your step and give a sense of weightlessness for it's duration! Whenever I deployed the "woohoo" I noticed it delighted my nieces and had them cracking up which is always a good thing! This song is for Bella & Frankie with whom I've been revisiting all my favourite 16-bit platform adventure games.

5. 'I'm Lucy Lawless'
Xena's iconic battle cry is a sound that has been tickling my brain since I was a child in the '90s! I feel so energised when I hear it! The song presents Xena's ululating war cry in two different contexts. The first brooding and unyielding; the tempo and mood change after the "I'm Lucy Lawless" proclamation signifies that we've found our inner Warrior Princess and the strength to fearlessly navigate the world. For me, to proclaim "I'm Lucy Lawless" means; I feel alive, powerful and primed to face life with the spirit of Warrior Princess!

6. 'Bronze Apple'
The core idea here came about from a happy DJ accident when I dropped galloping taiko drums over a super sparse dubstep tune. The spaciousness and otherworldly polyrhythms of the union was intoxicating! With 'Bronze Apple' I've tried to recreate that mashup mishap. It was a very time intensive song; hours were spent placing individual percussion hits (both real and synthesised) to simulate a swelling drum ensemble.

7. 'Dumb Dumb'
There's a lineage of iconic 1980s hip-hop tracks with stupidly hard drum machine beats; Schoolly D 'P.S.K.', Run DMC 'Sucker M.C.'s' & Just-Ice 'Cold Gettin' Dumb II'. This song is my contribution to the world of audacious drum machine workouts! The tempo in 'Dumb Dumb' is dialled waaay up, much faster than it would've been in the '80s.

8. 'Castlevania'
8-bit video game nostalgia; I see myself dipped in pixelated armour, blocky broadsword in hand barrelling through castles, vanquishing hordes of the undead! The later third of this song is an interpolation of the titular video game's end theme and concludes side one of the album.

9. 'Hamlet'
Bell Telephone Laboratories was an early telecommunications company credited with, among many other things, the transistor, radio astronomy, the laser and the Unix operating system! I unearthed a fascinating 7" record from 1963 documenting their research into teaching a computer to speak! The synthetic speech research vinyl concludes with the computer making a valiant attempt at Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy!

My song is built around this cute talking computer trying its darndest to speak. In my opening section the poor old machine gets repeatedly stuck on "To be, to be, to be, to be, to be...." Bell Labs fed their computer directives via perforated punch cards — I fed the talking computer turntable scratching!

10. 'Troglodyte'
This track opens with a real life sample from Christopher Luxon's recent meeting with Donald Trump. The song is an inarticulate, unpolished primordial ruckus; it laments humanity's glacial development as a species. It's thought that the current iteration of the human is approximately 300,000 years old and we're still behaving so badly!

11. 'Buzzer Beater'
My first sports themed song is inspired by The Last Dance, a life affirming documentary about Michael Jordan. The vocal chants throughout are lifted from the Chicago Bulls pre-game huddle ritual. The song has a tension building 'shot clock' hi-hats throughout and ends when the ref blows their whistle.

12. 'Misanthrope'
Painting a picture of the bold lines and concrete shadows of brutalist architecture was the mission here. The high pitched beeps and blips that dance across the brutalist groove are mosses and lichens gradually finding a way to propagate in this inhospitable setting. For the sound design peeps out there, those synth tones at 1:24 and 2:00 are beaming rays of radiation that mutate anything they touch! It's two out of tune oscillators converging on a shared note from different directions but never quite getting there...

13. 'Not Human'
It's the requisite dystopian sci-fi track! I adored the Dune books (and films) and I'm channelling some big Harkonnen dark energy with this one. Similarly with 'Trogolodyte', 'Not Human' expresses frustration with the current world leadership's seeming lack of humanity when it comes to addressing the ever growing influence of billionaires, snowballing wealth disparities and actual genocide.

14. 'Thunderbird'
The first song written for My Name Is David when I was unsure whether it was a downtempo or dance project! This song is both, containing the fastest (192 BPM) and slowest tempos (48 BPM) on the album.

It was a track about the pursuit of technological advancement and space exploration and how these endeavours would benefit humanity and ultimately save the world! I was brimming with optimism, hence the harp; the most optimistic of all the instruments. ;) It has since taken a pessimistic turn as I've realised the 21st century space race is becoming the folly of billionaires and a selfish rather than selfless endeavour.

'My Name Is David' is out now on major streaming platforms via Sunreturn.