Soft Abuse HHV Records 6 Items

After years apart, Horrid RED returns with their fourth and best album yet. Core members Bunker Wolf and Edmund Xavier (both of DER Teenage Panzerkorps) revisit industrial post-punk textures and sinister dark jangle sounds on Radiant Life. As with past efforts, there’s plenty of pop moves in the mix, too. Edition of 150 copies.

In The Perfect Discourse, Hermes Trismegistus and Asclepius discuss the imbuing of inanimate statues with the living power of a soul: “statues ensouled and conscious, filled with spirit and doing great deeds; statues that foreknow the future and predict it by lots, by prophecy, by dreams and by many other means; statues that make people ill and cure them, bringing them pain and pleasure as each deserves.” The frozen form of a statue still might contain a vibrancy, an energy directed by intention, which can elicit movement, both mental and physical, in those within its perceptual sphere. This very LP may well transmit a contradiction: a living moment from the past, a communique from isolation, that may yet reach others by oblique means.

Theoxenia is a solo excursion for Dave Shuford, exploratory lifer and member of, among many others, No Neck Blues Band, Rhyton, and D. Charles Speer & the Helix. Two years on from its modest digital debut, (Adventures in) Stasis arrives in its physical form, a codex glinting at a specific recency that draws upon the promontory of an even earlier time. These pieces are built on repetitions: of behavior, brief phrases, reiterated modal forms, periodic routines of the household. In even static positions, dynamic cycles emerge. The heart surges forward in a moment of enthusiasm, with a slight rhythmic variant in the music being the gateway. The sources of these sounds align with those from the excellent Arghiledes LP (Thrill Jockey), a release also in thrall to rembetika and dub influences.

Buried within the tracks, one can glean a tribute to the Queen of the Beatniks and scattered fragments stolen from a masterpiece of Lemonopoulos. Recurrent synthetic belchings and basic manual repeats, such are the limited choices available at any given moment to the performer. To roll with the lumbering flow or push against, the path of conjoined adherence is most often taken. Blind overdubs reveal monomaniacal insistence on aleatoric overlay, a nod to the Hagerty school of studio practice. A wander into the void is taken. Adventure remains an encounter with risk. Is it a place to journey to? A process in action? In this case, it may simply be a frequency, timbre, or figure that conjures another place or time, situated between recollection and prognostication, imagination and perception. In the end, with the mind and body both cast out unto a vast space, a singular expression remains: here is (Adventures in) Stasis, the first Theoxenia LP.

What Kind of Human Have I Become is a new vehicle helmed by Matt Plunkett (Cuticles, The Trendees, etc.). Conceived as a solo endeavor, the designation got a bit blurry following an invitation to record his new songs with Stefan Neville (Pumice, etc.) at the studio he shares with Ben Holmes (Oksun Ox, etc.) in Auckland.

Once in the studio, Plunkett’s songs puffed in a wholly new way with Neville at the controls, and backing and bits from both Neville and Holmes perhaps channeling Nag and Bendie. Fans of Matt’s past and current activities will find much to rejoice in here; Avoiding The Diggy Diggy Dogs plucks three songs from the sessions. More to come in due time.

As subjects of a recent career spanning vault-clearing anthology, the likelihood that more old recordings by The Strange Girls might surface was an unlikely one. Thankfully it’s just what happened. Culled from leaky audience video recordings, Truly & Lyric features two Clayton Noone songs that never surfaced elsewhere. These date from around 2002 and feature the core duo of Kaaterama Morehu and Noone. Draped in artwork by Mark Anderson (Greymouth), Truly & Lyric offers another fleeting glimpse at The Strange Girls’ downcast beauty in action. Limited to 200.

Steven R. Smith is a wildly consistent and self-sufficient auteur making epic music far beyond his monk-like solo recording practices. On Olive, one gets more of Steven R. Smith’s singular vision and musicianship, this time filtered through ensemble arrangement largely performed by others—an approach he’s explored in recent years. A micro-orchestra of horn and woodwind players was enlisted, as well as other collaborators including Kate Wright (Movietone, 1000 Dawns) and Yvonne Sone. The stunning results call to mind Mark Hollis’ eponymous solo LP and Gerald Busby’s masterful 3 Women score, not only in terms of sonics or tone, but also in the use of space.

Smith has explored many angles to soundtrack-like mood music, but there is a satisfying dark rock element to even his more refined chamber pieces. Smith’s dusky post-punk signature, borrowed from Australian artists such as Rowland S. Howard and Crime & the City Solution, synthesizes with the mannered arrangements to push his familiar, evocative sound into new spaces.

Pumice returns with an exquisite experimental bathroom sink pop record in hand, dubbed Phylis. This time out the long-running Aotearoa band, currently a duo consisting of Stefan Neville and Jade Farley, fracture sore-thumbed folk songs into crumpled bricks with riffs written on the toilet. Wonky South Pacific skiffle careens into heady organ dirges followed by galloping blurts of afterlife feedback. As ever, texture and accidents rub up against melodies, rhythms are not strict and words are grubby. But with Phylis, the restless band tenders its most exuberant, straightforward and enjoyable pop record yet. Recorded at Neville’s Tamaki Makaurau / Auckland studio in 2021, Neville and Farley have returned to the simple and joyful instincts of the earliest Pumice recordings. Nylon strings, drums with the feet, the empty and the absurd. Impossible to think of something analogous to the cosmic comforts on offer here, Phylis once more presents songs that could only come from the world of Pumice.