SELECTED WORKS #005

Bandcamp Daily, What I've Been Listening To/Reading, Dudley Benson.

Again, fingers crossed.

BANDCAMP DAILY:

In January 2019, I started writing feature stories and interviews for Bandcamp Daily, the editorial arm of the American digital music sales company Bandcamp. Writing for Bandcamp Daily is a real pleasure. The editorial team are a dream to deal with, and the nature of the audience allows me to write about topics and individuals I might struggle to cover elsewhere. Also, for most of 2020, they’ve done this really cool thing where once a month on a Friday, they waive the fee percentage they usually take from sales, which has been a real lifeline for a lot of independent musicians operating in countries without any real nationalised pandemic support.

Over the last two years, I’ve written seven feature stories and interviews for Bandcamp Daily, and I’ve loved all of them. In a roundabout way, most of this work was the result of time I’ve spent travelling through Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Europe, the US and the UK, a set of experiences which I definitely don’t take for granted.

• Another Planet Distribution Revives Experimental Sounds from South Korea: “When I arrived in [South] Korea, everyone told me there was no good experimental or electronic music here,” says Curtis Cambou, aka DJ 6TS. “I felt like I wanted to prove the contrary…” (click here)

• White Noise Records is a Hub for Hong Kong’s DIY Underground: “In Western culture, it’s almost a rite of passage to rebel—to join a band, to be an artist, is generally no big deal. That’s not Hong Kong’s reality,” explains Valentine Nixon, one half of New Zealand dream-pop sister duo Purple Pilgrims. (click here)

• Certified - Sui Zhen’s Experimental Pop Collects the Fragments of Digital Identity: “I’m not so much interested in technology as I am in what it is doing to us—the emotional ramifications,” explains Becky Sui Zhen Freeman, the Australian experimental pop musician and multimedia artist better known as Sui Zhen. (click here)

• The Warm Ambient and New Age Discography of Liquid Liquid’s Dennis Young: “We never thought people would still be listening to our music in 40 years, or make an impact like we did,” admits New Jersey musician and producer Dennis Young of his groundbreaking New York no-wave quartet, Liquid Liquid. (click here)

• Music For Dreams’ “Oto No Wa” Comp Shines A Rare Spotlight on Japanese Chillout Music: In 2009, the UK-born, Tokyo-based DJ and producer, Max Essa, headed into Shibuya to hear some new friends play records at a bar he’d never visited before. (click here)

• Admas - The Music of the Ethiopian Diaspora in 1980’s Washington D.C.: As a young man in Washington D.C. during the early ‘80s, keyboardist Tewodros “Teddy” Aklilu regularly tuned into WPFW 89.3 FM, a local community radio station owned by the non-profit Pacifica Foundation. (click here)

• Special Touch’s “Garden of Life” is a UK Street Soul Classic: “I did it more for passion. I couldn’t honestly say that it was because I thought I was going to strike it lucky and get rich,” says Robert Charles Roper, aka DJ Mastermix, reflecting on why he launched cult UK street soul label TSR (Top Secret Recordings). (click here)

WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO:

Virtual Shadow Ensemble, Keep Your Distance! (Noa Records)

Sample Song: ‘Manu Messengers’ feat Ryan Hendricks

During Aotearoa New Zealand’s first COVID-19 lockdown, NOA Records assembled an online collective of sound explorers - Virtual Shadow Ensemble. Recording at home in isolation, then sharing files and ideas online, they channelled Papatūānuku (Mother Earth)’s messages into seven vivid songs sitting at the crossroads of jazz, soul, funk, beats, improv and noise. If you’re familiar with any of Aotearoa’s contemporary music scenes, you’ll recognise contributing names such as Riki Gooch, Benny Lindsay-Williams, and JY Lee. Here, they’re joined by nine other instrumentalists, vocalists and poets. Poets are key here, cause one of the beautiful things about Keep Your Distance! is how Aije, Janina Nana Yaa, Julian Lubin, and Ryan Hendriks recite timely, illuminating prose over Virtual Shadow Ensemble’s fully realised soundworlds. Available in vinyl and digital formats. (Purchase)

Arthur Russell, Sketches For World of Echo (Audika Records)

Sample Song:’Let's Go Swimming (Live 6/24/84)’

If you’re a fan of the American cellist, artist, and composer Arthur Russell - who connected disparate worlds (disco, the avant-garde, art pop, classical, etc)  - you’re a fan of World of Echo, the only solo album he released before dying aged forty. So, as an Arthur Russell fan, I was stunned when earlier in the month, Audika Records uploaded an album called Sketches For World Of Echo: June 25 1984 Live At Ei on Bandcamp. The deal here is fairly straightforward. Two years before he released World of Echo, Arthur carried his cello down to Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation in Soho, New York, set up his sound equipment and performed a set of sketches of the songs that would end up on World of Echo. Amazingly, someone thought to record it, and thirty-six years later, we’re all the richer for it. (Purchase)

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:

Various Authors, Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World (World Weaver Press)

How about if we took Cyberpunk and reframed it with a sense of optimism around sustainability, environmental issues and climate change recovery? What if we did all of that, but didn’t evangelise a sustainable future as a perfectly equal, free and moral utopia? Let’s call it Solarpunk. As it turns out, Brazil is way ahead of the rest of us on that front. In 2012, the Brazilian science fiction author and editor Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro assembled Solarpunk: Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável, a collection of nine solarpunk stories by authors from from Brazil and Portugal. Six years later São Paulo based cyberpunk author Fábio Fernandes translated it into English for publication through World Weaver Press. This work is timely and offers a lot to consider. (Purchase)

ARCHIVAL:

This week marks ten years since the Aotearoa New Zealand avant-pop star Dudley Benson released his remarkable second album, Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne. In the intervening decade, Dudley and his partner Josh have relocated from Auckland in the North Island to Dunedin in the South Island, and opened a lovely bar and cafe called Woof. Over the same timespan, Dudley has toured Japan, Europe and the UK, buffed up, and released his towering third album, Zealandia. To celebrate ten years of Forest, I'm republishing an interview I conducted with him for Rip It Up in 2010.

Dudley Benson Interview (Originally published in Rip It Up)

Early this November, on a balmy Friday night in Auckland, following a particularly tension inducing physical recital by academically decorated performance artist Cat Ruka, in celebration of the launch of his new album Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne, Dudley Benson took the stage at the Te Mahurehure Marae. Flanked by a close-harmony quartet of singers outfitted in neat dress pants, shirts and bow-ties, as well as a female beatboxer draped in an elegant black shawl, for the next two hours, Dudley and his cohorts (The Dawn Chorus) ran through a spectacular series of voice only re-imaginings abstracted from his recorded discography. Eliciting rapturous song by song applause from the audience, Dudley introduced every song with confident, humorous stage banter, consistently wowing the refreshingly discordant mixture of artists, musicians, writers, rappers, DJs and weird music lovers present. Following the performance, the general consensus was agreed, Dudley had done it again. The very next day I met with him early in the afternoon near the sunny banks of the Grey Lynn Park, a region constantly serenaded by bird song, the symbolism of which was not lost on me when we began a circuitous all-encompassing discussion of sorts. 

In an era defined by accessibility and disposability, Dudley eschews convention. Facebook, myspace and twitter free, Benson's career as a Christchurch born, yet Auckland based, composer, singer and performer began formally close to half a decade ago. In the intervening time this former Christchurch cathedral chorister and University of Canterbury school of music composition student has, through a series of limited run EP, 12" and album releases, as well as two national tours, amongst numerous other decorated accomplishments, carved himself out a reputation within the New Zealand underground which, in diametric opposition to his diminutive height, is creatively towering.

Equally towering in scope is Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne, Dudley's sophomore album, a work two years in the making. Triggered by an experience Dudley had at the bird sanctuary on Ulva Island (near the lower South Island) where as he puts it, "I became closer to nature then I had been in a very long time," the record sees him, out of tribute to the indigenous birds of Aotearoa, resculpt a series of works drawn from the songbook of acclaimed Māori folk singer/songwriter Hirini Melbourne. Taken specifically from Forest and Ocean, a series of guitar and voiced based sing along waiata (song) Hirini Melbourne wrote for the birds and forest animals of our country, Dudley's almost entirely voice based mercurial interpretations of Hirini's music sound like nothing else. And if The Awakening, his church music and historical narrative rooted 2008 first album was as Dudley puts it, "like a painting," Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne is musical sculpture. "Forest is more about digging your hands into the earth directly and having a visceral experience," he continues. 

To construct what he describes as "a journey of experience" populated with "life and physical movement" though, there were a few silver-lined hurdles Dudley had to overcome along the way. In his words, "At times this project was extremely agonising and at times it was a total pleasure. [Regardless] I was [always] extremely happy and energised by it." Enrolling in Māori studies at The University of Auckland to prepare himself for singing in te reo, Dudley, whilst re-interpreting Hirini's works into elongated voice based compositions, slowly collected up a cast of supporting characters which included, outside of a choir and The Dawn Chorus (essentially an unconventional barbershop quartet), Franz Josef glacier based bird mimic Gerry Findlay, infamous Wellington street beatboxer King Homeboy, Taonga Puoro revivalist Richard Nunns and most impressively, legendary weird English folk singer Vashti Bunyan amongst others. 

Almost all as equally idiosyncratic as Dudley, his collaborators were all drawn for specific purposes, or due to specific events. Gerry Findlay, a man who Dudley describes as possessing "a direct dialogue with the birds of the forest," featured in a nature documentary Dudley watched at a cinema in Akaroa one afternoon. Vashti Bunyan, emotional predecessor to the likes of Johanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, came to the party after Dudley won her support when he sent her a copy of The Awakening, later on down the line followed by a comprehensive physical package of music, books, art and a letter which led to, as Dudley recalls, "her finding an affinity in what I was doing with her focus at the time." Then there was King Homeboy, who as Dudley laughs, "I really had to hunt down, it was a major challenge to even get in touch with him."

Having begun his career with two keyboard, programmed drumbeat and voice centralised EP's (Steam Railways of Britain and The Orders, Medals & Decoration) as well a 12" record of dance-tempo remixes of his songs from the likes of Pacific Heights, Casiotone for The Painfully Alone and Stefanimal, over the transitory years between then and now, Dudley's music has become progressively more organic and natural. Given this, his arrival in the soundworld of beatboxed kicks and clicks, swirling atmospheric voice arrangements, divisive lyrical deliveries and precise vocal stabs which hold Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne together, is a perfect, fearless progression. 

During this development, Dudley also experienced an expansion of understanding in terms of his perception of the state of our natural environment and hand in hand, the current condition under which Māori language exists within Aotearoa: two areas he feels would benefit immensely from a greater degree of wider understanding. Concurrent to this, even though he titled his debut The Awakening, Dudley sees Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne as his true personal awakening, or as he enthuses, "a statement of my active artistic expression in contemporary Aotearoa." 

In terms of where next however; he is intriguingly vague. "I kind of know what I need to do, but it’s not at a point that I can express it. I have to complete my tour, head down south, and open myself up to water the seed that’s now there for my next project." 

Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne is out now.