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Search Result for Artist Bruce Russell
viewing 1 To 8 of 8 items
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LP
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FTR 631LP
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"Herewith is an extraordinary 45 RPM album of solo electronic music by NZ's great contrarian, Bruce Russell. The pieces were all created using machines built by Clinton Williams, whose musical work under the OMIT moniker has long been championed by Bruce. Unlike many of Williams's own recordings, which contain kosmiche extensions recalling the '70s work of Klaus Schulze, the 15 improvised Sonatas presented here mix a few of those sorts of sonorities with a variety of more harshly-edged tones. There are also post-techno references recalling the work of folks like Scott Foust and Stefan Jaworzyn, in addition to the artists to whom some of the pieces are dedicated -- musicians Ralf Wehowsky and Martin Rev -- as well as philosopher Paul Feyerabend. As with much of Russell's music, the music's surface feel is restless, ornery, and questing. The pieces often feel as though they were devised while attempting to answer specific questions or notions that Bruce was wrestling with. But as always, one suspects some pieces are just pure fuckery, for which a conceptual framework was built ex post facto. Or not. Regardless of intent (and/or imagined intent), Russell has come up with another album that ends up being both about itself, and also about something big and conceptual that keeps fidgeting just outside my brain's grasp. The best approach may just be to dive in a float around in this excellent music. Context be damned. Because, really, sometimes a Sonata is just a Sonata. Y'know?" --Byron Coley, 2022
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LP
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VHF 146LP
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"Debut album by the New Zealand duo of Bruce Russell (Dead C, Handful Of Dust, etc) and Luke Wood. Visceral Realists is a high-concept commentary on the state of vinyl, analog recording, music culture, art, etc. A 45-rpm bullet of short bursts of free electric sound, the music here is tactile and rough but not 'noise music.' Russell and Wood play over loops of scratchy records, with their guitars and electronics surging to get over the wall. Russell's guitar sound from his vintage transistor amp and anti-style is instantly recognizable from countless classic Dead C sides, but the tracks are more painterly than recent DC epics -- these are celebratory vignettes of thoughts -- singles, if you will. Originally made as an unfindable edition of twenty by Wood's Ilam Press label to accompany an exhibit of NZ lathe-cut records, this new edition is beautifully packaged in a debossed and letterpress printed sleeve designed by Wood and printed by Stumptown in Portland. Two color risographs printed by Wood in NZ are tipped onto the jacket, and an additional two inserts provide revelatory notes by Russell and glam shots of the instruments that made the sounds. Also includes download slip."
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LP
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FTR 405LP
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"You know that old phrase, 'Teach a penguin to cuss, and you'll never have to buy another comedy record' I'm sure you do. But what about its codicil? 'Teach a guitarist to play synth, and you'll never have to buy a new age record?' If you know that one, you might well be put off by the fact this album features one of New Zealand's most wickedly post-tongue guitar players fiddling about with oscillators and analog synths (in concert with a guy who does this stuff all the time). But you need not fear. The only New Age being brunted about here is the same one Fahey disemboweled back in '97. An ornery cuss, it has lived in the cracks some-damn-place, only re-emerging now that it has been called forth by Bruce Russell and Noel Meek. Much of the sound on Classical Music (how Fahey would have loved everything about this record!) makes me think of Chris Marker's classic film, La Jetée (1962). As you certainly recall, the central motif in that film is the main quay at Aéroport de Paris-Orly, where visitors gather to watch the jets land and take off (just as I did at New York's Idlewild Airport when I was a kid). Well, particularly on the second side, this record is a jolt of aural déjà vu for me. If I close my eyes I can almost see a parade of 707s and DC-8s careening around the flats of Long Island, missing collisions by what seem like a series of miracles to me. Mr. Russell's last LP for us was 2016's Howling and Instability at High Volume Settings (FTR 219LP), and it is a sheer pleasure to realize how unstable he can be on instruments besides the guitar. Mr. Meek is wildly successful at this as well, and the combination is as bracing as an early morning slap of Old Spice. Step up for blast of Classical Music-style reality today. You'll be oh-so-glad you did." --Byron Coley, 2018. Edition of 250.
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2CD
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REDUX 007CD
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Bruce Russell is a New Zealand experimental musician and writer. He is a founding member and guitarist of the seminal noise rock trio The Dead C and the free noise combo A Handful of Dust (with Alastair Galbraith). He has released solo albums featuring guitar and tape manipu-lation, and has contributed articles to The Wire. In summer of 2013, Bruce Russell's daughter Olive Russell uploaded a documentary of her father that she shot and edited herself called "27 Minutes with Mr. Noisy: A Documentary about Bruce Russell" to Vimeo.com. "This will be alien music to many listeners. Guitars tuned to the occult settings of revenants like Skip James and then played with a knife in an uncanny re-contextualising of the sound of beer bottles against guitar strings on the original Metallic K.O.; massively deformed electronics that sound like swarms of static, that sound like the needle eating the vinyl; radio interference; broke down piano; sledgehammer fuzz? this is the sound of taking a live Stooges meltdown as the keys to the goddamn kingdom and as a secret intimation of the arc of the fu-ture. Now here it is" Taken from the sleevenotes of 'Metallic OK' by David Keenan, author of 'This Is Memorial Device' Glasgow May '17
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LP
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FTR 219LP
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"If ever there was an album by NZ's great Bruce Russell whose title carried the essence of his genius, this is it. The words come from the manual of the amp that Bruce uses to create his special brand of guitar havoc, and its wording could not be clearer. Naturally, Mr. Russell takes great delight in pushing the poor thing beyond its stated limits as often as possible. The results almost always possess a strange majesty. And so it is here. Originally issued as two-thirds of a CD included in the mythical No More Driver Call Me box (a never-commercially-available collection of Bruce's solo music, video work, and writing), one of the things most curious about this LP is how close to the side's titles Bruce chooses to hew. On 'Howling,' the guitar tends to get into the upper registers and maintain a bellering edge, often on several levels at once. Certainly, there are plenty of skritches as well, but the concept of howl-as-howl seems to be borne out in a major way. Concomitantly, 'Instability' has a sonic roof that is continually collapsing on itself. Twin-voiced amp-hump no more sturdy than yurt in a hurricane. Or maybe I'm just projecting. Suffice to say, it's a blindingly fine album, both howling and unstable in all the right places" --Byron Coley. Edition of 400.
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7"
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FYP 14
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2002 release. The trio of Kim Pieters, Bruce Russell, and Peter Stapleton is well known to listeners who recognize and understand a good thing when they hear it. Their two CDs, Last Glass (Corpus Hermeticum 007, 1995) and Sex/Machine (Metonymic 005, 1999), are powerful extensions of free music improvisation, taking the shake of the unknown well past the barriers of all suspected tongues. The A-side of this 33rpm 7" is a palate-forcing distender of their previous work, making blocks of concrete shimmer w/ a force that seems almost entirely natural. The B-side, on which the three are joined by Bruce's son, Max, is another kettle of gawp. Not since the early days of papa Russell's Dead C has NZ structure been so gorgeously deformed. In a sense, this track resembles nothing so much as the first punch thrown in the battle to give no wave shenanigans a place at the Kiwi table. Yow.
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CD
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HERMES 035
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"This, the third solo album recorded by the artist currently known as Bruce Russell, consists of three live slabs of improvised guitar, electronics, and analogue tape loops, recorded live in Melbourne, Australia in May 1999. This was the first of two visits he made to Australia in that year, the second being in the company of Alastair Galbraith as A Handful of Dust. These recordings are totally solo, built respectively around a pre-recorded seven metre loop taken from the Anabase LP by Dust (Black Flies #1 & #2), and a slowed down and reversed tape of thumb piano improvisation (With Rimbaud in Abyssinia). These extended works are less brutal than the pieces featured on the first two solo albums, with more space and attendant dynamics in evidence. They abrade, rather than assault, the ears. This album represents a step forward in BR's solo work, integrating the pre-recorded and live sounds ever more fully into a seamless whole. The recordings have been edited at the front and back, but otherwise are presented totally live as recorded to minidisc by Melbourne resident and Freeway Sound label curator Marco Fusinato. The Rimbaud track is subtitled 'Ass Backwards' as the reversal of the backing tape was an unintended but fortunate accident, resulting from a failure to rewind the tape after the first show. These kind of random factors do so much to enrich the work of improvisers of all stripes, as witnessed by the music on this compact disc. Going on at length about the artist responsible for these recordings would be needless in the case of the very great majority of those reading these words. Suffice to say he performs and records with the Dead C, A Handful of Dust, and Pieters/Russell/ Stapleton, manages the label on which this excellent disc has been released, and takes the kind of holiday snaps of bridges and buildings with which the cover is decorated. A 10" vinyl postscript to this recordings is being released about the same time on the Smalltown Supersound label in Norway, that record being of a much more dense and apocalyptic guitar-squall nature, recorded solo at one of the Melbourne Dust dates referred to earlier."
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CD
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HERMES 007
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Debut by an improvisational trio made up of Kim Pieters (bass, organ, synthesizer), Bruce Russell (guitar, perc., synth) & Peter Stapleton (drums, synth, guitar). "Pieters & Stapleton are known as the core of the now defunct Dadamah, as well as for new projects like Flies Inside The Sun & Rain. Last Glass is comprised of 6 instrumental improvisations which range from the near-ambient to the red faced and throttling, sometimes covering this range in a single piece. Obvious points of reference are AMM, Musica Elettronica Viva and the Silver Apples, but Pieters/Russell/Stapleton skirt these static reference points like downhill slalom skiers. All the pieces bar one are single takes, without overdubs, but the soundscapes are far from sparse as a result. Built around propulsive percussive rhythms, the other instruments provide plenty of the 'scrub and woosh' you'd expect from an outfit with this kind of pedigree. The CD comes in the trademark Hermescorp manila folder, which contains a 14 x 42 cm. folder of Kim Pieters' artwork."
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