Sombretones - S/T EP (1990)

The only release of a very short lived band that featured Graeme Jefferies on guitar. The real winner on the album is "Good Evening Listeners" which is the track that the band is most recognized for. Pretty standard jangly kiwi-rock that's not at all unlike The Chills' early material.

Toy Love - S/T (1980)

Toy Love was a New Zealand alternative/punk rock band fronted by Chris Knox. Other members were guitarist Alec Bathgate, bass player Paul Kean, drummer Mike Dooley, and keyboard player Jane Walker. The band developed out of the earlier punk band The Enemy in Dunedin, New Zealand, and are often regarded as the progenitors of the Dunedin Sound movement.

Dadamah - This Is Not A Dream (1995)

While Dadamah is often seen as another step along the way in the artistic path of Roy Montgomery, he'd be the first to agree that does a disservice to his equally talented bandmates. Singer/bassist Kim Pieters writes the fascinating if sometimes hard to read liner notes for this complete career overview, while there's also keyboardist/backing vocalist Janine Stass as well. Together the trio continued the by-then well-established Kiwi underground music tradition of shadowy, haunting music and production, helped by noted figure in said scene Peter Stapleton, who also took care of drumming as needed. Unless the consistently aggro noise fests of, say, the Dead C or Gate, Dadamah also draw on a generally more spare but no less compelling approach, often building up arrangements and then settling back again, or else maintaining a continuing steady, gently addictive pace. There's the roots of Montgomery's work in the Pin Group, naturally, with its own echoes of Joy Division and early Cure, but there's also a very strange, folky vibe as well that at points suggests the work done half a world away by Dave Pearce in Flying Saucer Attack. Both Pieters and Montgomery's singing draws on the more idiosyncratic post-punk approach to vocals, eschewing technical skill in favor of just getting it out. Whether it's Pieters' higher, sometimes wailing approach or Montgomery's stern, strained and reflective singing, though, words and music almost always go very well together throughout. Stass' keyboard work, meanwhile, adds even more of a strange, odd edge to proceedings. Sometimes the tone is almost a bit jaunty, as the swinging skip and burbling keyboard notes of the lengthy "Too Hot to Dry," sung by Pieters, shows, even with the usual murky production style. With highlights like the Montgomery-sung "High Tension House," where the title phrase comes from, and the truly tripped, Pieters-sung "Radio Brain," This is Not a Dream is well worth investigating.

Roy Montgomery - 324 E. 13th Street #7 (1999)

This CD collects all six of Roy Montgomery's solo singles -- until 1999 anyway -- a rare single from his band the Swallows in 1985, and four previously unreleased tracks. The Swallows' single had the word "legendary" written all over it when people here in the U.S. finally got hip to Montgomery as a solo artist. It was rated with his original Pin Group material and as being better than either Dadamah or Dissolve, his other group projects. They're pleasant tunes dealing with arty subjects and rather '60s-ish backing vocals. They do feature Montgomery's guitar style as already developed, and on "Trial by Separation," they present Montgomery's only known surf guitar solo. The rare tracks, including a demo single (production run: one copy) made from an art gallery wander called "Submerged and Colorful," is catchy even without drums, and a song from a poem written by his cousin ("Cousin Song") is compelling for its hypnotic acoustic guitar effect. Of the official "singles," "Film as a Subversive Art," "Just Melancholy," "Times Three," and "Strange Attractor" b/w "On the Road, No. 1" are the most compelling.

Roy Montgomery - Temple IV (1996)

Temple IV stands as a watermark for New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery. His fully developed guitar style is stolidly in evidence, as is his lyrical improvisational ability. Temple IV refers to an actual place in Tikal in the Northern Guatemalan rain forest. According to the notes, Montgomery bribed his way onto the site and stayed there an entire night. Most importantly, this album is Montgomery's attempt at grieving a life partner who passed away. He recorded the album during his nine-month stay in New York on East 13th Street. Much of his deeply creative work was recorded during this stay, including "Scenes From a South Island," and a number of his singles. But Temple IV is his crowning achievement of the period. From its long, opening movement of the 12-minute "She Waits on Temple IV," where two subtly psychedelic guitar lines entwine and syncopate each other as both melody and rhythm, while a third plays a chorded accompaniment deep in the background as a support for the other parts; it asserts itself only as a musical accent in the spaces in between lines. The work addresses an encounter -- a meeting -- between Montgomery and something much larger, though undefined: the feeling of approach is everywhere. In "Departing the Body," both the spirit of death and transcendence are underlined. The slow, droning punctuation of chords offer a tunnel-like vision through this clearly haunted piece. There are sounds at the seams of it that are unidentifiable and the motion of wind through the strings at first comes whistling, then howling, as uncontrolled feedback through the mix. It never unsettles the chord progression, but it never relents either. As "The Soul Quietens" begins, a shift takes place; where one form meets another as Montgomery's guitars are muted almost to the point of whispering. The reason soon becomes apparent as he moves the sonic metaphor from death into life again, where the former physical body means less than nothing to its future one. "The Passage of Forms" is the dais on which the album turns: from shape into shapeless; from form into formless; and back into form again. Montgomery pulls out every dynamic effect he has at his disposal, from microtonal triad explorations to overtone lead sequences and semi-quavers masquerading as melody; all of it wrapped in an effects box and wired for an improvisation that counts as much on timing as it does on inspiration. This is truly ghost music, made by a medium through which the world of voiceless sound speaks its name. When the next shape emerges on "Jaguar Meets Snake," all hell breaks loose and feedback fights feedback for domination in the mix. But what takes place after this is the result of the process of musical, spiritual, and bodily transformation -- all held in memory of the creator 5,000 miles from its actual articulation. The disc ends with "Jaguar Unseen": a shimmering piece where the acoustic and electric guitars glisten together in a light body of sound. Tiny little melody lines ring out of the echoes, not completely present, but enough to be made aware of. The lines cascade simply over the chords and slip gradually away into silence and disappearance with only the reverbed effect left to hint at any evidence of a presence at all. Temple IV is literally a work of musical alchemy. It takes personal experience through the awesome -- and awful -- power of memory, and transforms it into a sonic presence that becomes an invisible aural storyteller to the listener's own psychic domain. It haunts; cajoles; taunts; seduces; and even comforts with its use of nuance, timing, and dynamic and opaque shape-shifting elegance. Montgomery, as the interlocutor of the devices by which the muse speaks, is blessed and cursed with the gift of offering it to us. His own personal vision of it all was given him by his muse in the depth of his grief; one dark night of Temple IV.

Alpaca Brothers - Legless (1984)

On their sole Flying Nun album, this avant- punk trio created a paranoid and edgy brand of rock similar to labelmates the Gordons and Bill Direen. This recording from '84 is a precursor to their later incarnation in the '90s as Trash, where they continued to sound like a combination of the Velvet Underground and Motorhead as they had defined it a decade earlier. "Legless" is antipodean slang for drunkenness, and the wall of Joy Division-like guitar noise cascade and skittering propulsive rhythm is certainly intoxicating. A post-punk obscurity that holds up over time as one of the more muscular releases on the Flying Nun label, a stable where delicacy and sophistication flourishes in the indie guitar world, it is curious that throughout the years would throw out wild card like this. Having the angular energy of Gang of Four style art punk, this is anomaly in the catalog along with the Dead C's "D.R.503."

Alec Bathgate - Gold Lame (1996)

The title track to Alec Bathgate's first solo album ponders the peculiar trappings of fame: "50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong/I guess they knew it all along. If you want to be a star, go today/buy a suit of gold lame." Well, it's unlikely that this particular Gold Lame outfit will turn Bathgate into a household name of Presley's stature. That said, this album is still pretty damned neat. This collection of three-minute, '60s-inspired toe-tappers has a number of high points, including the backward-guitar-bedecked "Win Your Love," a cover of Leonard Dillon's reggae standard "Train to Skaville," and the garage-y sounding "Pet Hates" (which was actually recorded in Bathgate's garage; how's that for authenticity?). With 16 tracks, Gold Lame may overstay its welcome. Still, this Tall Dwarf's album is no small achievement.

Chris Heazlewood - Hellmouth 66 Cass (1991)

Not a bad collection of Heazlewood. I'd lent some assistance to his self-released cassette Raefink and it seemed like a good idea to do this one. Shortly after I had a falling out with him, as most people do at some point, and that encouraged roe mightily to kick the label in the head. This must be one of the least common ones, I think we made about 150 copies.

There is a sound to twisted music-it's a sound that is bent, wild, and wrecked and it's usually the work of a deranged and comically brilliant amalgam of musicians. Flipper had it early on, but the band who epitomized that "sensibility" was New Zealand's Axemen. Ironically, bands who practice such unrestrained mania fused with such a sparkling sense of humor are often seemingly fit with an aggressive desire to be taken deadly seriously. I've seen exchanges in the NZ monthly Rip It Up whose The Axemen fought tooth and nail with those who challenged their "seriousness," all the while releasing gloriously biting and deranged bits of mind shatter. I have to assume that was all part of the fun.

Heazlewood seems almost too angry and selfconsciously hip at times to carry this muse, but early solo projects like Hellmouth 666 are very much in Axernen's territory. Robert Cardy (one of the mighty Axemnen) even wrote the one cover song here. Unlike The Axemen, though, Heazlewood's style is much denser, with guitars drenched in a thick and fuzzy overdrive. Heazlewood's songs don't always have the shambolic humor of the Axemen, but songs like "Who's Dead-essentially a dialogue of "you're dead" "No you're dead"-is a scream. I'd call Hellmouth 666 winning, I'd call it. what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah.. . supergood!

-Bruce Russell

Peter Gutteridge - Pure Cass (1986-86)

Peter Jefferies and Peter Gutteridge were neighbours for awhile in 1988 and got to know one another quite well. From time to time we'd hear demos he was recording with Snapper and on his own, and after the first Snapper EP came out we persuaded him to let us put out some demos. Several tracks on this were basically the first version of that band when they were still really worth the hype. There were some other demos done around the same time which have never seen official release but were better than anything they ever put out. I'd have liked to have had them on this tape, but you can't always get what you want.

Although Peter Gutteridge was a founding member of The Clean with David and Hamish Kilgour in the late-70s, documentation of his collaborations with the Kilgours is limited to one Clean classic (the Gutteridge-penned "Point That Thing Somewhere Else") and one-half of The Great Unwashed's post-Clean Singles EP. Gutteridge was apparently not suited to The Clean's mission. Where the Kilgours seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly, Gutteridge expressed darker and much less upbeat sentiments. Gutteridge seemed to leave The Clean and The Great Unwashed as quickly as he joined, and his early- to mid-80s outfits, The Cartilidge Family (with Shayne Carter and an ever changing line-up of local Dunedin luminaries) and The Phromes, went from start to finish with no released documentation. It was not until Snapper's first EP for Flying Nun in 1988 that Gutteridge returned to recorded mediums and began to fulfill his promise; shortly thereafter this collection of 1986-87 demos, collaborations, and oddities surfaced and explained some of those lost years. With their analog synthesizer, trance-like rhythms, and krautrock sensibilities, Peter Gutteridge and his bandSnapper prefigured Britain's Stereolab by about 3 years.

But while Snapper never cultivated that sound with the precision of Stereolab or produced consistent releases bust one EP, two LPs, and a handful of 7"s in 9 years Gutteridge and Snapper have created some beautifully hypnotic records. On Pure, Gutteridge's version of Snapper's sound. Archaic rhythm boxes and sustaining prog-rock guitar add a kind of low rent variation, with much of the equipment sounding dated (some sounds are reminiscent of late-70s video games like Frogger). Two tracks here would later be recreated for Snapper's first EP-"Cause of You" (appearing here as an instrumental) and "Hang On"-while "Thumbiline" prefigures the sound of "Snapper and the Ocean" and "Dead Pictures" from Snapper's first [Pre-Shotgun Blossom. All of the original Snapper line-up perform here in some capacity along with The Puddle's George Henderson and sometime-Dead C. compatriate Richard Steele. "Planet Phrom" particularly, with Christine Voice and former-Verlaines drummer Alan Haig, offers an early taste of Snapper.

-Bruce Russell

Queen Meanie Puss - The Darkling EP (1993)

QMP were a female quartet hailing out of Auckland, NZ. Formerly known as Angelhead (then based in Dunedin) they released a cassette on Bruce Russell's legendary Xpressway label around 1991 or so. A move north & a name change, they released their debut 7" on Flying Nun sometime in early '92. Then it was on to Siltbreeze for the follow-up (early '93). 'The Darkling' is 5 tracks of dark, tempered, post-post punk. I guess you could say there's a Raincoats vibe going on here, but they had to go through (pre Daydream Nation) Sonic Youth to get it.