A Handful Of Dust

A Handful Of Dust

The Drum Is The Shaman's Horse

Carbon / Feeding Tube

***With the death in 2020 of long-standing occasional third member Peter Stapleton (percussion / electronics), A Handful of Dust has regrouped as the core duo of Alastair Galbraith (violin, guitar, cello, piano, drums) and Bruce Russell (guitar, electronics). This new set of live-to-four-track recordings from January 2022 is the first album to be wholly recorded 'in the studio' since 1995's Towards a Soundtrack to the 'Anabase' of St-John Perse. Committed to tape at the Rugby Hotel in Dunedin, the four-track recordings were played back in the room where they were made and recorded again, this time to Android telephone, to make a digital mono master which you hear on this record. Unadorned, brutal and sonically austere, this new set captures the 'wild Mercury sound' for which this long-standing unit is rightly feted among cognoscenti of the Antipodean New Thing. Three pieces that will pop your third eye in seconds flat. Astral travel for now people. Duck and Sally continue their unplanned career in the extreme abuse of the rock'n'roll toolkit. Drowned Phoenician sailors bob disconcertingly to the surface while the captain's tower rocks to a sustained monomachy 'twixt Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, brought back from the grave for that specific purpose. Don't be shy - please jump out of your window. You know you gotta trust us, when you need a friend...

A Handful Of Dust

Topology Of A Phantom City

Ba Da Bing!

Topology of a Phantom City was a cassette originally released in 1996 on Bruce Russell’s glorious Corpus Hermeticum label, and this reissue captures the spirit of the original version by…well, by also being on cassette. For these recordings, the core members of A Handful of Dust—guitarist Russell (The Dead C) and violinist Alastair Galbraith—are joined by Peter Stapleton (Terminals, Pin Group, Scorched Earth Policy) on percussion and synthesizers. The two sprawling paeans to the glories of improvised invention ride waves of menacing intensity and freeform scrawl.  This reissue is a refreshed opportunity for fans to hear one of the more obscure recordings in A Handful of Dust’s catalog. It also marks the first in a series upcoming cassette releases on Ba Da Bing—leading with their shiniest leg first.