Audio Culture: Denver McCarthy

bka Micronism, aka Mechanism

Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

Denver McCarthy spent the 1990s creating electronic music in Aotearoa under the Mechanism, Chaos Reader and Micronism aliases. In 2017 he told RNZ’s Tony Stamp, “For those 10 years, my whole life was just writing, producing electronic music, playing electronic music out, and listening to electronic music with friends. It was full immersion into electronic music.”

Before the decade was out, McCarthy had recorded two classic albums, his industrial techno debut Morningstar (1994) and his Independent Music NZ Classic Record-winning dub techno opus Inside A Quiet Mind (1998). In the process, he served as a guiding light for New Zealand’s electronic music scenes.

In 1999, McCarthy joined the Hare Krishna faith and embarked on a new adventure that took him to South America for several years before he settled in Brisbane. His story is a sequence of life-changing moments and the chaos and calm he found between them.

Near the end of last year, I was lucky enough to interview and profile McCarthy for Audio Culture. My story is live on the site now here.

INSIDE A QUIET MIND:

Courtesy of Loop Recordings Aot(ear)oa, Micronism’s Inside A Quiet Mind is available for purchase in vinyl and digital formats via Bandcamp above. Here’s an excerpt from a great piece Grant Smithies wrote about the album for his 2007 book Soundtrack: 118 New Zealand Albums.

“Inside a Quiet Mind was the third release from Auckland label Kog Transmissions, a tiny independent label whose entire annual promo budget wouldn’t buy the Sony boardroom a round of lattes. Consequently, many people never got to hear it, and that’s a great pity, because it remains the best electronic album ever made in this country. Luxuriously melodic, rhythmically complex, tinged blue with sadness, and – occasionally – bright red with joy, it is a record that’s not so much touched by the hand of God as given a lengthy massage.”

Read the full review/essay here.

WHAT ELSE:

I’m on holiday in Te Waipounamu (the south island of New Zealand) and have been resting up, sleeping well, eating properly and going to the beach several times a day. All of this will soon end, as all things do, but for now, it’s pretty nice.

FIN.