The city of Invercargill near the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand is not really notable other than for the legendary quip that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards made when on tour there in 1965; he is reputed to have dubbed it "the arsehole* of the world". If Invercargill is the arsehole*, then the tiny hillside suburb of Stokes Valley, near Wellington, is surely the prolapsing haemorrhoid on that poor anus; particularly only a few years later ('68 - '72) when John Pilcher and Martin McKelvey were creating their manipulated strangulated tape/electronics/concrete noise jams within its strictures. (* note for readers with language settings configured to English(US): arsehole=asshole.) Or if you wish to be less vulgar about it all, Stokes Valley is more like J.R.R. Tolkein's Middle Earth in the un-Tolkein-like "real world". And its inhabitants may or may not sport bodyhair in unusual places. Scene-setting. Got me?

Who are/were Pilcher and McKelvey? As far as I know they could have been artists, family men, drug fiends, escaped lunatics, precocious teenagers, amateur pharmacologists, garden-shedders, Friday and Saturday-night down at the RSA dance bandists, astrophysicists, homemade science fiction movie-soundtrackers, or any number of other romantically originated scenarios. They could even have been students at (nearby) (relatively) Victoria University's grand and known and Douglas Lilburn-patronaged Electronic Music Studios. Why were they making cosmic tape noise in a haemorrhoidal fissure-like dormitory suburb on the bottom of the world about the same time as America was (supposedly) sending men to the moon? No amount of research at the coal face of information will tell me. Are these two (co)incidences related? The timelessly obtuse liner notes -- by writer or writers unknown -- give no clue. What connection does any of this have to a chain of crappy bakeries with the Hairsalon Punnery titlege "A Bun Dance" and crude pictures painted on the streetfront windows of cinnamon rolls with block graphic legs and arms and facial features "dancing" to musics never heard nor known?

It doesn't matter. They could be me, or more likely, they could be you. They could be our collaborative side-project. We all have a box of cassettes of the "noise" music we made when we got our first 4-track, and inspirationally egged-on by the booklets of essays that came with those first few A Handful Of Dust CDs on Corpus Hermeticum in their awkwardly-oversized and immediately-tatty paper packages, we spent hours abusing instruments into the microphone ports, manipulating casual electronics and tapeloops, conjuring up 50 Hz earth humm and sunlight through dusty motes swimming in the thickly souffleed air and dreaming of a New fucking Music. Sounds like John Pilcher and Martin McKelvey were up to something along the same lines. Now offering hard evidence for that "what's up with this music from New Zealand" "it must be something in the water" argument in that it simultaneously stands apart by virtue of an intrinsic 35-yrold "then-ness" as well as lines up next to the contemporaneous-ish NZ noise mongers. Passages of intense beauty bookended by moments of irritating shambles; it's really all par for the course, but "A Bun Dance" however is almost so primitive that its not even on the same scale as "primitive". A less self-conscious avant-garde, perhaps. Put these recordings on a continuum with precedent-setters such as Henri Chopin, Perry and Kingsley, and Richard Maxfield, and give them descendants like This Heat, Bruce Russell, Sandoz Lab Techs, Flies Inside The Sun, and Howard Stelzer. Does that help?

Two men are arguing about drugs. Meanwhile a fighter-bomber made from hand-sped Beethoven swoops overhead. Moon-landing audio documentation is juxtaposed with sound so alien one must now believe that Apollo 11 never took Messers Aldrin, Collins, and Armstrong anywhere other than deep into outer space. The crude cinnamon rolls are still dancing to their mutant tunes. It's impossible to for me to moar rank or rate this, and pointless to even try. Volcanic Tongue calls it "a major historical unearthing". It is just is what it is -- folk music of the atomic age. And it sounds so familiar that it feels just like going home. Vividly essential. 10/10 -- Stephen Clover (2 December, 2009)