Established in 2001 and now organized by committees in every major city in New Zealand under the Audio Foundation , Altmusic is an ongoing series of audio events, regularly bringing a vital injection of contemporary and experimental music from around the world to New Zealand. This year, the program continues with each city curating its own event and touring this around NZ.
Altmusic is pleased to announce its 2010 program of international touring artists:
BILL ORCUTT (US)
Auckland: Wednesday May 19 - w/ Brian and Maryrose Crook , The High Seas , Beresford St
Wellington: Thursday May 20 - TBA
Dunedin: Friday May 21 - w / Gate & Eye @ Chicks Hotel , Port Chalmers
Christchurch: 8pm Saturday May 22 - w/ White Saucer & Bruce Russell @ HSP , 84 Lichfield Street. $10
Bill Orcutt emerged as one of the most influential guitar players of the 1990s, alongside drummer Adris Hoyos in the seminal Miami-based free rock band, Harry Pussy , their half-decade existence throwing up a boutique of caustic masterpieces alongside equally luminary cohorts on labels including Chocolate Monk (Richard Youngs, Incapacitants, Bruce Russell) and Siltbreeze (Charalambides, Guided By Voices, The Shadow Ring), but their volatile, calamitous sound has remained their matchless own. In one critic’s words, Harry Pussy ‘...filtered the Circle Jerks' brutal attack through Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch and condensed it into a narrow, high-pitched assault’, and in another’s, ‘...pretty much established a whole new blueprint for post-hardcore avant rock destruction.’ Orcutt’s unanticipated return with the 2009 self-released 7", ‘High Waisted’ and his late-2009 LP, ‘A New Way To Pay Old Debts’, was an exhilarating reincarnation of the rambunctious automatism and hair-trigger ferocity that pervaded Harry Pussy’s earlier, combustible missives. Orcutt's plucked lacerations, spooky boogie, and ballistic extraterrestrial blues, bordered by the severe candour of his own ulterior, vocal utterances makes for an unsettling but downright melodious sound that repudiates mere descent into noise-guitar discord, while serving as a reminder to a whole contemporary pantheon of guitarists of how it should be done.
RUINS ALONE (JP)
Christchurch: 8pm Wednesday 9 June - w/ Peter Wright & Grunge Genocide Drum Pentagram
Dunedin: Thursday 10 June - Details TBA
Auckland: Friday 11 June - Whammy Bar , with White Saucer
Wellington: Saturday 12 June - Details TBA
Variously described as the undisputed master drummer of the Japanese Underground, a rhythm section gone ballistic, trekker of the outer limits of weirdness and doctor of psychic polyrhythms, Yoshida Tatsuya is the protagonist of the erstwhile, hyperactive, prog-punk, hardcore, art rock, heavy metal, disco, psych and funk, drums and bass duo, RUINS .
As a central force of the effervescent Japanese underground, Yoshida has recorded and performed prolifically with a host of equally significant and influential acts, including guitar legend, Derek Bailey, Makoto Kawabata and Acid Mothers Temple, K.K. Null, Elton John collaborator, Elton Dean, Ground Zero’s Mitsuru Nasuno, Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino, Bondage Fruit’s Kubota Aki, Boredoms’ Seiichi Yamamoto and ‘Senzuri’ champion, Juntaro Yamanouchi’s seminally transgressive Gerogerigegege.
Since reforming RUINS ALONE as a solo project, replete with manically express bass-lines triggered by a sampler (a suitable partner), and his own adrenaline-fuelled voice, Yoshida's project has become a flickering apparition of piled-up beats and stratified riffs that unfold at a staggeringly blistering speed. For his live audience, it’s a breathtaking prospect.
TOMUTONTTU (FI)
Auckland: Friday 17 September - The High Seas , local artists to be confirmed
Wellington: Saturday 18 September - Details TBA
Dunedin: Details TBA
Christchurch: Details TBA
Tomutonttu is the solo project of Jan Anderzén, a visual artist and musician from Tampere, Finland, whose pivotal role in Kemialliset Ystävät and collaborative raids in Avarus and Anaksimandros has - alongside Fonal label colleagues, Es, Paavoharju, Kuupuu, Islaja, Fricara Pacchu, Lau Nau and Shogun Kunitoki - elevated the Finnish experimental underground into a Renaissance-like state, its cross-pollinating telepathy producing some of the most acclaimed records and performances since the mid 2000s, while setting a universal example for communal musical exploration.
In 2008, Anderzén toured and recorded on the Approximately Infinite Universe Tour: A Caravan of Raw Sound Magic from Finland and the US, with Blevin Blectum, Axolotl, Sumara Lubelski, Fursaxa and members of The Skaters and No Neck Blues Band. He has also held workshops and played a series of concerts for school children at the planetarium of his hometown.
Mutant Sounds has described Tomutonttu as a 'delightful traipse through a verdant forest of ergot poisoned art brut psychedelic deconstructionism; all wobbly string fumble, lobotomized key wheeze and detuned flute toot that’s wonderfully right in it's ungainly "wrongness"'.
RICHARD YOUNGS (UK)
Auckland: Thursday 28 October - The High Seas , local artists to be confirmed
Wellington: Saturday 20 October - Details TBA
Dunedin: Friday 5 November - Details TBA
Christchurch: Saturday 6 November - Details TBA
Richard Youngs is one of the most acclaimed, chameleon-like explorers of modern music, traversing a diverse set of distinctive and multi-instrumental forms that encompass avant-folk, psychedelic drone, progressive minimalism, lysergic pop, and rock concréte. The stark, unyielding minimalism of his piano-oriented 1990 debut, ‘Advent’, prompted The Wire’s Alan Licht to list it alongside works by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Phil Niblock, and Tony Conrad as a revelatory favourite of rare minimalism, while Youngs’ subsequent and prolific collaborations with Simon Wickham-Smith as R!!!&S!!! are widely seen as opuses of mind-altering cosmic abstraction, with one critic describing them as ‘Throbbing Gristle reimagined as Zen garden desk accessory’.
While recording with an array of various collaborators, including Jandek, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Neil Campbell of Astral Social Club, Alastair Galbraith, Matthew Bower of Sunroof, and Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple, and appearing on a slew of labels such as VHF (Jack Rose, Pelt, Aethenor, Sandra Bell) and Table of the Elements (John Cale, Fennesz, John Fahey, SunnO)))’s Stephen O’Malley, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Rhys Catham, Faust), Youngs has been reticent as a live performer, playing only a handful of occasions between 2006-2008, at Thurston Moore’s All Tomorrows Parties in 2006, and alongside Jandek and Heather Leigh Murray on European tours.
It is thus a rare and special opportunity to witness in person what Melody Maker has described as the ‘grand-meister of contemporary British improv, spiritual son of Eddie Prevost and Maddy Prior; gentle manipulator of English hymn-notics and religious incantations; protégé, challenger and radicaliser of folk, blues, rock, minimalism and improvisation’.
