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YOKO
ONO
TRIBUTE
WEEKEND
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BEN SPIERS –
Easter cassette
YOTW 008
Recorded one difficult Easter weekend, this suite
of guitar feedback drone pieces was created with self-soothing intent. The
results sounded more uptight and jaw-clench-y than intended so they were then
transferred to cassette and put through a real time pitch adjustment and
equalisation process in order to maximise positive psychoactive effects and
smooth out any irregularities the initial recordings might have had. 30
copies.
 
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MARK S WILLIAMS / BEN SPIERS – The
Friendly Road cassette
YOTW 007
It is April 2007 and I am at The Adelaide in
Wellington, New Zealand, playing a solo guitar set opening for The Idle
Suite. A disgruntled punter who has already brandished a bar stool at me
comes and stands very, very close
to me and menacingly whisper-shouts in my ear, “Do you think you could play
something a bit more fuckin’ … tuneful?”
A more insightful fellow near the back shouts out the best/worst heckle ever:
“Your music’s like your haircut!” I make a mental note not to play here again
without a machete lashed to my guitar’s headstock. Towards the end of their
set the main act invite me to join them onstage as some kind of compensation
and I agree to do so (safety in numbers). Jump ahead to April 2015: Idle
Suite guitarist Mark S Williams (also of Cookie Brooklyn, A Bad Suburb, MarineVille, Bad Statistics, etc.) and I are having our
next onstage meeting. We are playing a guitar duo set at The Pyramid Club in
Wellington and … nothing bad happens! The freewheeling music flows
beautifully and as a bonus the audience members do not wish to kill us. The
Friendly Road collects the very best bits from this live performance, a
rehearsal/recording session earlier that week and a perverse micro-session
from 2017. 30 copies.
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BEN SPIERS –
Consolation cassette
YOTW 006
Three quite different pieces yet perhaps my most
coherent solo guitar "statement" to date. Consolation is a
companion album to my side of the House Sitting split (or vice versa), having
been recorded during the same ten-day stretch in the loft at my holidaying
friends' house. Influences: the colour of damsons, intense darkness and a
Kenyan beer named after an elephant who killed a man. 40 copies.
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BEN SPIERS / MONTHS – House
Sitting split cassette
YOTW 005
When Christchurch, New Zealand's Mike Minchington (aka Months) and I discovered that we were
both house sitting and recording music on opposite sides of the world at the
same time this split cassette became inevitable. Mike has been around the NZ
noise scene for some time but most of his releases have been self-released
tapes in editions even smaller than this one. The last few years have seen
some wider exposure with his duo Memory Burn opening for Merzbow
in Auckland and appearing at Lines of Flight in Dunedin. Here he turns in a
fine layered drone piece vaguely in the Birchville
Cat Motel tradition. My side, recorded in Oxford, is a suite of minimalist
shimmer and hum for guitar and Marshall micro amp (preceded by a couple of
fairly perverse curve balls). The cover is black on frosted silver card. 40
copies.
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KAWAGUCHI MASAMI / BEN SPIERS –
The Bridge CDR
YOTW 004
In September 2009 I visited Tokyo for the first time
and was suitably blown away. It seemed like everything was amazing and
anything was possible. So when I found myself in a practice room/studio in Koenji recording with Kawaguchi Masami (New Rock
Syndicate, Los Doroncos, Miminokoto,
Broom Dusters, LSD March, Aihiyo) (!!!) it seemed
like just another (incredible) day in Tokyo. This short guitar duo album
comes from the tail end of a trio session with Mark Sadgrove
(who had stepped out early to run some errands ahead of our gig that night).
Late night swoon, amplifier meltdowns and demolished blues. 100 copies.
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SAM HAMILTON / ANDREW SCOTT / BEN
SPIERS –
Dry Hail Choir 3” CDR
YOTW 003
Around 2005-2007 I recorded quite a lot with people
from Auckland, NZ's Wine Cellar scene but these sessions seemed
technologically jinxed and few recordings survived. This one with Sam
Hamilton (City People's Farmers Music, Muffin Seeks Sunship,
The Absolutionists, Jan Anderzen
duo) and Andrew Scott (Metal Rouge, Nest, Huzun)
sounds like it barely survived (recorded with the inbuilt mic on Andrew's
laptop and yes, the sound is a bit rough) but survive it did. The
claustrophobic sound only adds to what was a pretty special atmosphere that
Sunday afternoon in The Wine Cellar. Single notes drip from the ceiling,
thick clouds of 6-string fog hang in the air. 60 copies.
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BEN SPIERS –
From What Place Did You Come? CDR
YOTW 002
Another solo guitar album. Still improvised. Still
recorded on cassette. Still dreamy and/or raw, exacting and/or ham-fisted (though
that ham is sliced wafer thin). 2009 recordings released in 2012 but this is
most assuredly a new album (that's just the pace at which things move around
here). 60 copies.
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SMOKERS PLEASE –
Flensing/Grey Christmas vinyl 7"
YOTW 001
It took moving to the UK for it happen but, with
this debut release from new project Smokers Please, Ben Spiers (Glory Fckn Sun, Seen Through, Empty Mirror) has gotten over an
aversion to overdubs and embraced the classic “New Zealand solo four-track
thing” (think past collaborators A.M, 1/3 Octave Band and Birchville
Cat Motel, along with the likes of Alastair Galbraith, early Lovely Midget,
Chris Knox, RST, etc.). The A side is a hot blast of vicious/euphoric viola
and massively distorted guitar while the B sets a stylophone
melody and dreary/dreamy strum against argumentative noise guitar. 250 copies
on black vinyl.
reviews
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transient
recordings
(YOTW's
predecessor, 2001-2008)
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TR
011
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BEN SPIERS –
And Then CDR
Long-time-coming album initially slated for release
on a US label but as it turns out it feels much better having this one close
to home. These 2004 recordings run parallel to early Glory Fckn Sun sessions but show a more grounded and intimate
approach than that band. Here you’ll find me getting all “man alone” with a
guitar, violin (briefly), and an amplifier audibly on its last legs. There’s
a melodic warmth in places which has been remarked upon by those who’ve heard
it. While still improvised and fairly noisy, the pieces have the feel of
lost, damaged or embryonic songs.
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TR
010
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BLACK WINDOW –
Gunwales 3" CDR
Debut release from the duo of US guitarist Andrew
Weeks and Ben Spiers. Black Window formed following a late night acoustic
busking session at Wellington Railway Station ….. Gunwales couldn’t be much
further from those beginnings as a bed of garage doom explodes into punked-up mass projection guitar, then collapses into
tape warble. 3” CDR housed in an oversized gatefold sleeve with pro-printed
outer and hand-painted inner. Edition of 60 copies.
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TR
009
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TIM COSTER & MARK SADGROVE –
Untitled (35:20) CDR
Last recordings from this great Auckland duo prior
to Sadgrove’s departure for Tokyo in 2006. There’s
a fine balance between meditative stasis and purposeful activity in these
computer/guitar/electronics recordings, conjuring images of a living-dead
Douglas Lilburn dropping in to jam with the Improvised Music From Japan crew.
Both Coster and Sadgrove
are members of the minimalist supergroup Plains
(with Rosy Parlane, Richard Francis, Paul Winstanley and Clinton Watkins) and run their own very
fine labels (CLaudia and A Binary Datum,
respectively).
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TR
008
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BEN SPIERS –
Artwork Temporarily Removed 3" CDR
A woozy guitar-and-breath meditation on emptiness.
“Like a time-condensed recording of a guitar being decimated by age, tumbling
out of tune, and finally breathing out it's lasts gasps of amplitude on the
ground” (Foxy Digitalis). Packaged in individually block-printed manila
sleeves. Second edition of 50 copies.
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TR
007
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SAM HAMILTON –
The Borders of the Garden Paths Are Overgrown CDR
The unofficial Mayor of Auckland City has created a
real pleasure garden of the mind with this new work (co-released with the
artist’s own Tumbling Strain label). Sam is one of the most gifted sound
artists working in New Zealand today and this is yet another fascinating
example of the eclectic, restless approach and extraordinary sense of
structure that made the Low Hill 3” such a stunner. At once highly personal
and earth-bound, yet totally out of its skull in the most magical way, at
times this sounds as if the guitar, piano and electronics are gently playing
themselves while the composer is off sleeping under a tree somewhere. Dreamy
and joyous! (27 minutes, hence “mid-price”).
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TR
006
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ANTONY MILTON –
Live @ the Cake Shop, August 2005 CDR
Gorgeously intimate live set which joins some of the
dots between Antony’s earlier song-based work (as heard on Last Visible Dog’s
Sirens reissue, the title track of which appears here) and the brain-rotating
psychedelia of current projects such as The Nether Dawn, The Stumps and Glory
Fckn Sun. A songwriting
voice as unique as that of contemporaries Pumice and GFrenzy
emerges out of this modest, yet significant release. (28 minutes, hence
“mid-price”).
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TR
005
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BEN SPIERS –
Spin You CDR
A round thing with round things on the cover. Expect
to hear strings being struck, bowed, fanned …. and
strummed (!). This one distinguishes itself from previous discs by being 75%
electricity-free, including a duet for violin and empty bedroom. All in all?
A lot of wood with some concrete & electricity. “More late night string
caressing from Mr Spiers: title track … is gorgeous - solitary notes dropped
into a gloom of taut scraping” (Boa Melody Bar).
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TR
003
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BEN SPIERS –
Again CDR
2000 solo guitar (and a little violin) recordings.
Shimmery, hazy and “late night”. Mats Gustafsson
called it “a true headswimmer that floats somewhere
between the Celebrate Psi Phenomenon gang, Pseudo Arcana and Metonymic” (The
Broken Face #17).
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OTHER
LABELS
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GLORY FCKN SUN –
Spectra (Tipped Bowler Tapes, USA) LP
"The sky done clouded over after Glory Fckn Sun's debut album, yielding this brooding and
corrosive follow-up. The New Zealand sorta-super group
of Antony Milton, Ben Spiers, and Simon O'Rorke
concoct a slow-burning behemoth of metallic shivers and distortion churn,
dark enough to invoke the dread name Haino. Spectra
is an unsettling mind-meld: Spiers' desolate
soundscapes bleed into Milton's heavy drones, which are complemented
perfectly by O'Rorke's restless percussion. Group
improvisation is the natural language of these three; even listing their solo
and collaborative albums over the past decade would take way more effort than
I can muster. Suffice to say this is a stellar and unique record to add to
their massive discographies. In an edition of 300 red records, housed in
silk-screened, heavy-gauge recycled stock jackets." - Tipped
Bowler.
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GLORY FCKN SUN –
Vision Scorched (PseudoArcana,
NZ) CD
”Reissue in new packaging! Formed in 2003 as a
conduit for intense ritualistic sonic exploration Glory Fckn
Sun is the ecstatic psyche-noise trio of Antony Milton (guitar/electronics),
Ben Spiers (guitar/violin/electronic) and improv
percussionist Simon O'Rorke (gongs/percussion).
'Vision Scorched' collects together one studio track and two live pieces.
These range through long form rumbling distorted deep space explorations
(complete with supernova and the odd blackhole),
intense yet ethereal harsh noise to close with a droning metaphysical raga-esque paean to the great cosmic inevitable of the
collapse of the sun, And of light itself. Glory Fckn
Sun have been described as having a sound that is like a cross between Flies
Inside the Sun and Keiji Haino.
The 1st edition of this release sold out in a matter of weeks and gained rave
reviews. This 2nd edition is also limited. There are 250 copies.” - PseudoArcana.
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INFO:
Email mr.ben.spiers
[‘[at]’]’] gmail [‘[‘[dot]’] com
Discounts for multiple items: If you’re ordering two
or more items and would like a discount please email instead of using the Paypal buttons and I’ll send you an invoice with £1 off
each additional item, e.g. order four items and get £3 off.
Bank deposit (in GBP or NZD) also accepted.
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FURTHER
READING:
What is YOTW? When is
YOTW?
Bandcamp
Ben Spiers
discography
Transient
Recordings discography
Yoko Ono Tribute Weekend
blog
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last updated: 11.11.18
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