An All-New Zealand Night of Drone and Doom in London

On a Thursday evening in early January 2007, a warehouse space off Brick Lane in east London hosted a programme devoted entirely to New Zealand musicians working at the outer edges of experimental sound. The event was curated and produced by [no.signal], a promoter whose interests ran toward drone, doom and the more abstract reaches of underground music. The billing brought together three artists whose approaches differed in texture but shared a willingness to work with noise, repetition and slow-moving form.

A First London Appearance

The headline set came from Birchville Cat Motel, the project of New Zealander Campbell Kneale. The evening was described as his first ever London performance, and it fell at the start of a United Kingdom tour that would continue on to the All Ears Festival in Oslo. Kneale's recorded output had appeared on labels including Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, Pseudo Arcana, Ecstatic Peace, Corpus Hermeticum and Last Visible Dog, and his reputation had grown through a steady stream of releases issued both by established underground imprints and through the international cassette and CDR network.

His music was framed as an ever-changing, gently unravelling ball of pure sound, sometimes beautiful enough to move a listener to tears and sometimes ferocious enough to strip the gravel from a driveway. Kneale cited a wide range of sources: 1960s minimalism, musicological field recordings, religious music, doom metal and Appalachian music all fed into ecstatic blur-scapes built from delicately handled pieces of electronic junk. Press responses gathered around the project emphasised both the cantankerous quality of individual sounds and the evocative character of the results when combined, with comparisons drawn to heavy drone, psychedelic space rock and the sustained hum of minimalist composition.

Peter Wright and the Deconstructed Guitar

Peter Wright, also from New Zealand, had spent a significant portion of the previous two decades investigating ways of taking the guitar apart. His path ran from avant-pop and semi-industrial grooves in the 1990s toward experimental soundscaping, semi-acoustic drones and miniature sound poems. Releases had appeared on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, Pseudo Arcana, and more recently Last Visible Dog and Digitalis.

Live appearances by Wright were described as rare but involving. He combined field recordings and found sound with an open-tuned twelve-string electric guitar, improvising his way down a hidden path into an aural world. The primitive musical forms that resulted could feel deeply personal and intimate, drawing the listener into something like a mesmerising fairy tale. Wright was also scheduled to support Kneale across the wider UK tour, and this marked his second appearance at a [no.signal] event.

Alex Mein Smith and the Space Between

Alex Mein Smith, previously known as Little Thief, opened the evening. His work set disparate and opposing elements against one another: punishing rhythms beside lazy ambience, positive energy beside pensive moods. In his own account, these contrasts pointed toward dualities such as right and wrong, violence and peace, bitter and sweet, repression and release, physicality and mentality, suggesting something in between and beyond those poles.

His live practice took recorded material as a starting point for studio tracks that were then re-imagined through entirely analogue improvisation. The performance was noted as his first live appearance at a [no.signal] event since changing identity, and his output on High Tensile drew a succinct endorsement from Kneale himself: nice dark-bop, good and unfriendly.

An Evening in Three Sets

The structure of the night was straightforward. Doors opened at 7.30pm, with Alex Mein Smith performing at 8.00pm, Peter Wright at 9.00pm and Birchville Cat Motel at 10.00pm. A DJ set by Sheikh Ahmed followed. The venue was the state51 warehouse at 8-10 Rhoda Street, off Brick Lane and across from Bethnal Green, in postal district E2 7EF. The nearest Underground stations were Liverpool Street and Bethnal Green, and several bus routes served the area. Admission was six pounds.

For listeners interested in the overlapping territories of drone, doom and improvised noise, the billing offered a concentrated sample of a scene that circulated through small labels, limited editions and word of mouth. It placed three New Zealand artists on a single London stage at a moment when that country's experimental music was reaching audiences far beyond its own shores.