Last Light - A Bridge Over The Lagoon

More from Little Skull's Dean Brown with the debut of Last Light, the project he co-helms with long-term noise enthusiast, Ben Spiers. Though Brown is now based in London, the pair have been skirting around New Zealand's experimental underground for decades now, and it's to that world the music they make together displays its greatest debt. This is quite far removed from the patient beauty that informs much of the Little Skull output, trading instead in the kind of blasted guitar scree and tape spool dissonance that the Dead C and their multitudinous offshoots (The Escalation, A Handful of Dust, Gate et al) are famed for.  I see, also, that Last Light are to release a tape via C/Site Recordings, the label operated by New Haven's own avant guitar hero Stefan Christensen, and the context makes a lot of sense of A Bridge Over the Lagoon, showcasing a similar appreciation for white-noise scrawl and tension-laced ambiance. The best bits, though, are when the pair draw back slightly and widen up the space (see 'The Toroa Feather), an infinite horizon of drone nirvana bliss well schooled in the art of light and shade. As quintessentially 'New Zealand underground' as you can imagine and replete with the attendant value judgment that carries with it.