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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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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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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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