Ten Favourite Things
by Andrew Clifford
The second of six albums for pioneering New Zealand progressive rock group, this was the highlight for the line-up that featured guitarist Billy Tekahika aka Billy TK (often referred to as the Maori Hendrix), and probably one of the best examples of New Zealand prog to make it to tape. With a sound system they'd brought home from the UK, they were known as the loudest band in the land - people are said to have gone to see them purely for the sonic experience. Not that TK wasn't a major attraction, sending out waves of pure sound with his unapologetic use of feedback.
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Of particular interest here is the cover, which intriguingly features an adapted version of the Michael Smither painting Two Rock Pools. It is an image that was particularly well known at the time through appearing in a Benson and Hedges competition, won that year by Wong Sing Tai, and subsequently appeared in calendars and other related paraphernalia. I asked Smither a few summers ago about his work appearing on this much-hallowed album of kiwi psychedelia and he recalled receiving a phone call about using the image but didn't realise anything had come of the project until more than 20 years later when an acquaintance brought the album to his attention, by which stage a mint copy could fetch around $US500.
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2. Matching Mole self-titled (1972)
Having left Soft Machine, the group that had been the house band for the London
psychedelic scene in the late 1960s, drummer/vocalist Robert Wyatt formed
Matching Mole, named phonetically from the French phrase machine moll, which
translates as Soft Machine. Wyatt is probably best-known for the elegant piano
playing he provides on Brian Eno's landmark album Music for Airports. But
it is his dry, matter-of-fact wit, deadpan stream-of-consciousness lyrics
and free vocalisation that most fans find endearing. For my money, this is
best demonstrated in the first section of the first Matching Mole album, particularly
with the track Signed Curtain. The song begins with the repeated line "This
is the first verse", and then continues in that vein, providing the most straightforward
commentary on (and deconstruction of) the song's structure, before brilliantly
bringing it together with an emotive twist at the end.
3. Soundmarks
In his book Haunted Weather, British writer-musician David Toop writes eloquently
of the sonic cartography of soundmarks - distinctive sounds that help create
the identity of a community, locating it spatially and projecting a sense
of the cultures and activities that reside and take place there. Like studying
old maps, if it were possible to revisit the landscapes of previous eras with
our ears, there is a lot we could learn about that time and place. These are
often everyday phenonema that would go unnoticed and end up mostly lost to
time if it weren't for passing mentions in literature and more recent efforts
to document and map our sonic environment with recordings. As well as the
iconic sounds of distinctive clock towers chiming, there are less dramatic
examples, such as car alarms, the hum from your desktop computer, the soft
whir of air-conditioning, the throb of a nearby nightclub on a Saturday night,
the overhead passing of aircraft. The significance of these sounds as markers
of their culture are usually most noticeable when a society has moved on and
the sounds, like an endangered species, disappear from our lives - typewriters
in offices, wagon wheels on cobbled streets, the call of street vendors. Sometimes
the absence of certain soundmarks quite literally relate to ecological situations,
such as the changing of the dawn chorus or the increasing absence of frog
calling at night. Unfortunately, some soundmarks are considered by some as
a form of pollution and Toop describes well-intentioned but misguided campaigns
to halt the sounding of tugboat horns on the Hudson River and silence the
carnival barkers of Coney Island - usually the actions of the privileged classes
working at the expense of everyone else. This sounds reminiscent of the period
when apartments first took off in Auckland's CBD and there were attempts to
remove 'noisy' birds from Albert Park. Not to forget the ongoing noise control
battles that would have entertainment removed from the city. Personally, I'm
quite fond of the ship's horns that I used to be able to hear echoing across
the isthmus from my Grey Lynn flat. Now living in Mt Albert, I find the periodic
passing of trains to be comforting, as well as the clatter of Thursday morning
collection of glass rubbish.
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4. Mineko Grimmer, Untitled (1994), ice, quartz
pebbles, wood, wire, brass, Collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
I can't profess to knowing anything about this artist but I could watch this
work for hours. Owned by the Auckland Art Gallery, presumably this work was
acquired as a result of a residency by the artist in 1994. Being an inherently
time-based medium, presenting sound art in a gallery context rather than as
part of a performance can often be problematic. The typical length of an exhibition
usually defies the artist's ability to always be present to produce sounds
and the limitations of most media can result in an indifferent recording looping
incessantly hour-after-hour, day-after-day. Employing frozen clusters of pebbles,
which are suspended over wires and rods and allowed to fall as the ice thaws,
Grimmer has created a system that is organic and unpredictable, compellingly
playing with constant variation.
5. Paul Burwell, If you were born in '33, you would
have been '45 in '78 (1986)
On encountering this work in the Sonic Boom exhibition at the Hayward Gallery
during my first major trip abroad, I suspect it was my kiwi sensibility that
was drawn to the DIY ethic of this assemblage, which makes a giant, pedal-powered
gramophone out of an exercycle and road cone. But it is the ingenious formula
of vinyl formats in the title that I like most - possibly my favourite title
of all. Anyone out there who can come up with something comparably clever
from the fact that I'm now '33 in '07, please send a self-addressed envelope
to ...
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6. Phil Dadson Soundtracks (2004)
The cover of Phil Dadson's first solo album is a section of a stone lithograph
he produced at the same time in collaboration with Alt design and Muka Gallery's
print studio. The full image, which I am a proud owner of, is based on a star
map. The original chart was given to Dadson via American composer Lou Harrison,
who had visited New Zealand in the mid-1980s. It turns out Harrison had been
travelling the world, meeting musicians and having stars named after them
because not much later a certificate arrived in the mail from the international
star registry, announcing the registration of a Phil Dadson star. For this
print edition, Dadson has coloured the map and added five-line musical staves,
which transform the heavens into a musical score - the originally planned
title for the album was Soundtravels but Nathan Haines had used the name a
few years earlier. The red arrow indicates Dadson's star.
7. Billy Apple becomes Daniel Malone
When Barrie Bates bleached his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes, and changed his
name by deed-poll to Billy Apple in 1962, it was a radical gesture that transformed
the artist himself, and all aspects of his life, into his own living artwork,
as well as an exercise in self-branding. When Daniel Malone paid homage to
New Zealand's conceptual pioneer by legally changing his own name to Billy
Apple and exhibiting the resultant certificate, the possibilities open up
even further, bringing the legitimacy of both artists' future works into question.
This canny stalemate, in principle, makes it difficult for either artist to
extract themselves from the other. If an additional certificate is produced
to assert that Billy Apple is now named Daniel Malone, what will that mean?
By Malone adopting the brand of Billy Apple, Billy Apple has also become Daniel
Malone. Incidentally, Malone has apparently been known to travel with a Billy
Apple passport.
8. Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas (1983)
Given that German filmmaker Wim Wenders was born in 1945 (or year zero, as
it is often known), it is convenient that his early films provided a significant
move forward from the troublesome spectre of identity in post-war Germany
and heralded the arrival of a new generation of artists. Appropriately, Wenders
chose to transpose the supposedly American genre of the road movie for a series
of existentialist films, including Kings of the Road (1975), which has a technician
travelling up and down the East-West border to repair cinema projectors. Paris,
Texas is Wenders' first major film working on the other side of the Atlantic,
amidst the American roadside iconography that had infiltrated his German work.
This time, the theme of repressed trauma, identity and loss is even more evident
through the almost catatonic main character, hauntingly played by Harry Dean
Stanton. Ry Cooder's spacious slide-guitar playing in the score perfectly
captures the film's emotional and geographic emptiness.
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9. Pania of the Reef
Napier's Pania of the Reef seems to be a recurring theme amongst CNZARD staff
on this website. Although I spent my childhood in Hawkes Bay and was impressed
by Napier's newfound appreciation of their bronze siren after the recent theft,
this entry is not so much about sculpture in the deco city as it is about
the resonance that objects can acquire through ownership. In particular, I'm
thinking of a small wax statuette of Pania; a classic piece of kiwiana kitsch
that belonged to my late Grandfather and now has pride of place in my lounge.
I don't know when he first acquired this piece, which was never used for its
intended function as a candle, but I distinctly recall always being aware
of its presence on childhood visits to the brick house he built at the north
end of Wellsford. I often wonder, whilst surveying the collection of small
dings and nicks that she has acquired over the last 30 or more years, which
of my relatives may have dropped or knocked her over. I don't even remember
it ever being remarked upon as being particularly special, and so it simply
became like a part of the furniture; a background part of family life, and
now a poignant memorial to accumulating memories.
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10. The Vesparini Wasp
A classic of Italian design that revolutionised the way we think about motorcycles,
the Italians think of the Vespa scooter as their own Model T Ford. It was
designed for aircraft manufacturer Piaggio by an aeronautical engineer who
claimed to hate motorcycles and kickstarted the Italian post-WWII economy.
Corradino D'Ascanio created a bike that was easy to mount, easy to ride, and
with leg guards to keep you clean and dry, allowed you to ride in style. And
by moving the gear-change from a foot lever to a hand lever, Italian shoe
designers were no doubt grateful too. Audrey Hepburn starred alongside a Vespa
in Roman Holiday and there was hardly a film star in the 1950s and 60s that
wasn't photographed on one of these. Note the use of a metal sheet frame,
rather than the traditional bike tubing, and the side-mounted wheels, both
of which take cues from aircraft design. Mounting the engine at the rear allows
for the step-through seating configuration and also resulted in the bulbous
rear pods, tapering at the end, which gave the bike its Vespa (Italian for
wasp) name. The smaller 50cc bikes don't require a bike license and are known
in Italy as the Vesparini. My first Vesparini was made in 1964 and proved
to be somewhat of a handful for maintenance. Fortunately, when it gasped its
last, I was able to replace it with an almost identical model, produced in
Japan in the late 1990s as part of a classic reissue, so I still have a vintage
bike, but with the reliability of a new one. So why is it, as I write, awaiting
further repairs?