The Dead C's Clyma est mort (1993) is the record of a live gig for one person. Tom Lax was running the Siltbreeze label in Philadelphia and had come to New Zealand to meet the artists he was releasing. He heard The Dead C at their noisy, improvised best, turning rock music on its head with a free-form style of blaring, loosely organised sound. Leading a second wave of music from Dunedin, New Zealand, The Dead C were an assault against the kind of jangly pop that had made the Dunedin Sound famous during the 1980s. This book uses The Dead C and in particular their album Clyma est mort (1993) to offer insights into the way the best of rock music plays vertigo with our senses, illustrating a sonic picture of freedom and energy. It places the album into the history of independent music in New Zealand, and into an international context of independent labels posting, faxing and phoning each other.
The Dead C's Clyma est mort (1993) is the record of a live gig for one person. Tom Lax was running the Siltbreeze label in Philadelphia and had come to New Zealand to meet the artists he was releasing. He heard The Dead C at their noisy, improvised best, turning rock music on its head with a free-form style of blaring, loosely organised sound. Leading a second wave of music from Dunedin, New Zealand, The Dead C were an assault against the kind of jangly pop that had made the Dunedin Sound famous during the 1980s. This book uses The Dead C and in particular their album Clyma est mort (1993) to offer insights into the way the best of rock music plays vertigo with our senses, illustrating a sonic picture of freedom and energy. It places the album into the history of independent music in New Zealand, and into an international context of independent labels posting, faxing and phoning each other.
Acknowledgements
An American visits New Zealand only to find that nobody wants to
play
You wouldn’t play like that if you didn’t know what you were
doing
In which the band find themselves in front of the whole country
An Englishman does not share the droll humour of the local
people
The natural born gifts of the drummer
On the poetics of the Bible, and the day jobs of the artists
Looking the Horse in the Mouth
In which a correspondence is established, and an exchange of like
views
The Port Chalmers Sound
The cells of the body return to their unliving state
References
Index
Discusses improvised rock and DIY labels stretching from Dunedin, the tiny centre of New Zealand pop and rock, to Europe and the US through The Dead C’s Clyma est mort album.
Darren Jorgensen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Western Australia. He is the co-author of Wanarn Painters of Place and Time (2015), co-editor of Indigenous Archives (2017), and editor of Bush Women (2018).
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