SPIT - Trash Music Spitacular

Some projects take time to mellow, to pick up lint and absorb spilt coffee grounds. Trash Music Spitacular was months and months in the making and was an exhibition (at the Segue Gallery this past April), a masters thesis, a group-participation extravaganza, a public relations bonanza (nice photos of the unusual artist in all the papers) and finally now a CDR. And necessarily, no CDR can give you much beyond basic pointers when dealing with such a whirlwind of activity but lemme tell you a little about what went down. You had, firstly, a room and a corridor strewn - I mean, strewn - with sculptures etched with thought on the nature of recorded sound and the various traceries of musickal hardware. Then, every day for two weeks, performances. You had Kim Pieters painting notation onto graph paper while RC played the piece as the ink dried; a street horn - an absolutely massive length of metal piping with a stylus welded onto one end that was then dragged up and down Burlington St; a pile of wrecked furniture, taller than a man, wound with piano wire and played with anything available by RC and Aliki, with harpist Katrina Thomson (Ray Off) jamming along; a cellist in evening dress alongside a ghetto blaster that was being buried under a four foot high mound of coal; two homies on the 16rpm decks, while a drunken idiot rambled on about the secret punk beginnings of Snoop Dogg... thats a few of em. Flux as hell, yes? Well, possibly the best thing I saw was one night in the bellringers chamber of the church next door (the oldest church in Dunedin). Cockburn had the actual bellringers of this place perform a chance operation composition, with each ringer assigned a number and him rollin the dice. Balls like big fluffy dice, this guy.\r\nYoull hear a section of that on this disc - and much else besides. Its really nicely varied, concisely edited - most pieces are fairly short - and gives a good overview of a guy whos a pretty zoned and imaginative cracked-sound thinker. Ryan was initially known to us music-heads around here as the guy who cut records in half, glued em back together all wrong, then made a hell of an invigorating racket - theres none of that here (but plenty on Eyes Black Ice CDR, him being a member of that group). Hes just, you know, got a lot to offer. Something that Melbourne, to where hes about to relocate, is going to learn very fast. - United Fairy Moons.