***The city of Tauranga doesn’t have as celebrated a history as other centers of New Zealand music such as Otago or Port Chalmers or Whangerei. It is home to Rotate The Completor, however, whose music is disconnected from all known scenes in Aotearoa and elsewhere. Stumbling upon the one-man band busking on the streets, an enthusiastic passerby nabbed a home-recorded cassette and here we are. All attempts at personal correspondence with its creator to date have been ignored, so forget about the next volume of Songs In The Key of Z, outsider aficionado. Rotate The Completor gets to his otherworldly inner-world using guitar, kick-drum, and vocals that might pass for early Residents; the songs are a strangely addictive brew of lo-fi bedroom pop, proggy loner folk, bouncy children’s music, and a one-man band at a carnival that’s gone off the rails. Lyrics concern beer-stealing cantaloupes, dead albino hedgehogs, and emphatic denials of insanity. Includes free download card.
LP $15.50
09/28/2010
***With recordings stretching back over 20 years with the Portuguese avant trio Osso Exótico and collaborations with Z’ev and Minit, Maranha follows up Marches Of The New World (2007) with two side-long excursions into monolithic drone-rock in the vein of Tony Conrad & Faust, “Venus In Furs,” La Monte Young and Terry Riley. The ensemble is driven by keyboards, strings, and hypnotized-heartbeat percussion. Like the great white expanse of the titular continent, it can be taken in simply as a glorious wash of sound; listen to it closely, however, and you’ll hear the smallest details jump out in high relief: a feather can move a mountain. 300 copies, silkscreened covers, digital download coupon included.
LP $19.35
04/07/2010
***RODNEY KEITH ESKELIN (aka RODD KEITH, ROD ROGERS), would’ve certainly found the recognition during his lifetime that his talent demanded, if he hadn’t chosen to work in the lowest depths of the music industry: the “send us your lyrics” field, known today as the song-poem genre. Saucers In The Sky gathers together twenty-six previously uncollected Rodd Keith gems from the hundreds upon hundreds of songs that he recorded before he leapt from a highway overpass in 1974. Packaged in mini-LP gatefold sleeves with liner notes from DEL CASHER, inventor of the wah-wah pedal and guitarist on many of Rodd’s early recordings, and STACEY KEITH, Rodd’s daughter.
CD $13.75
10/03/2005