dbl CD
Following the recent Dress and Strange Girls reissues, Fordamning Arkiv dips back into the NZ underground for this hefty two-CD collection of non-album tracks from Dunedin's Sandoz Lab Technicians. Plastic Carved Out in the Shape of the Music is quite the experience for the uninitiated, an impressive data-dump of lathes and self-released EPs that stretch the CD runtime to its limit: there's an obvious reason why you're not getting this on vinyl. Across close to 40 songs, the sometimes-trio-sometimes-quartet actively unmoored themselves from anything approaching established orthodoxy, folding the principles of free music theory into DIY praxis in a way that feels entirely unprecious, iconoclastic even. The South Island history of drone, improve and noise musics is a rich one (Surface of the Earth and World Resources, Dead C and associates, all those endless one-and-done lathe endeavours ++) , but even within that rarefied milieu of outsider activity, SLD feel like a relatively unique constellation. Honestly, this often sounds like music not made for ears beyond its creators' own. How else to explain such experimental whims, rabbithole digressions and inscrutable in-jokes? Well, it's all the better for such creative freedom. Take the post-punk collapse of Little Bag of Chips that sounds like an extension of the Ceramic Hobbs universe and how it contrasts with the pulsing, formless drone of Ebola, or the art damaged David Thomas flex of Heady Musky Cents up against the sinister minimalist lullaby of Fuck Your Empty Promises. I could go on, though it's probably best you dig in yourself, explore its multitudes at your own pace. There's a lot of dark corners worth shining a light towards here, though what that light reveals might not provide the answers you need. More power to such singular abstrusity.
