Dadamah may have ascended into the pantheon of good music from New Zealand some years since, but their history remains as distressingly undocumented as the recordings of their descendants remain distressingly unheralded. First came Flies Inside The Sun the first [Peter Stapleton, Kim Pieters, Brian Crook, Danny Butt], whose An Audience Of Others (Including Herself) stands as a tall peak of vision-blurring audio swoon. Second came Rain [Peter Stapleton, Kim Pieters, Danny Butt], after whose extraordinarily fine Sediment CD (yet to receive its deserved global bouquets) the open door lineup policy confusion begins: duos, trios, quartets and assorted permutations, eventually leading to Flies Inside The Sun, the second whose out-now eponymous (second) album marries gorgeous Audience-style floaters with delirious free screamers, representative of this collective's gradual shedding of structure. In order to de-encrypt the saga, we convened three of the principal participants at the Purakaunui estate and despatched the servants for the afternoon. The trio were given strict instructions to "stay chronological"; being improv musicians, they had trouble adhering to linear format, but the relevant history eventually got dispensed. (For the course of the interview, as in all Opprobrium interviews, the subjects were placed in front of a powerful spotlight and interrogated 'aggressively'; faced with such intimidation, there were a few things they neglected to mention-these afterthoughts have been rendered editorially in [square brackets].)
So how did Dadamah come about?
Kim Peter wanted to play with Roy [Montgomery] again, I remember.
Peter I was playing with The Terminals.
Kim But you wanted to start something else up.
Peter I met Roy on the street, and we talked about it. Sometime in the late 1980s. It was outside a movie.
Kim He was working at the [Canterbury] university bookshop then, wasn't he?
Peter Not then. He did work there. I think he would have been working at Lincoln [University] when we discussed it.
Kim No, because when I first met you, we were at the university bookshop for some reason, and you said, "That guy over there, I used to be in a band with him."
Peter But that wasn't when we talked about playing music. We talked about writing stuff together, because he'd always had a problem with writing lyrics himself. He said he wanted to do movie music, soundtrack stuff. This was a thing between him and me. We shelved that one, I think. [laughs] About that time Kim decided she wanted to do some singing.
Kim Peter heard me on the bus. The first incarnation of Dadamah was with Mick Elborado.
Peter This was a parallel thing.
Kim We got Glenda in at one stage, Glenda from very early Bailter Space days. Very interesting woman.
Danny Was she on the first Bailter Space record?
Peter Yeah, she played guitar with us, she was doing really strange feedback things. By that time Roy was there and he tried to structure things. And she didn't want to do any structure, she felt it was imposing in some way. This is all going forward a bit. We went through a whole period with Mick Elborado...
Kim We did quite a few sessions with David.
David?
Kim David Theobold. That's his name.
Peter But he's known as Mick Elborado.
What did it sound like?
Kim Wild.
Peter Pretty wild. Mick's a really amazing player.
Kim We wanted him to lead the band. [to Peter] Remember? There was a big thing about leadership. [laughter]
Peter Not really. Just because he was playing the guitar and I was playing drums. You were singing, weren't you? But anyway, it didn't really work out, because I don't think he wanted to do freeform music. It was much freer than later Dadamah. It was long improvisations, basically, with singing over the top. A couple of the songs on the singles came from those sessions-'Scratch Sun' and 'Nicotine', I think.
Kim We credited David for those.
Peter Yeah, because they were his ideas. Roy interpreted them. But I think he really wanted to play more structured music.
Kim I thought it was all about leadership. [laughter] I obviously got it wrong.
Peter No, I don't think so, because everything he's done has been structured, kind of pop/rock, like Gas [current Elborado band].
Kim But Roy's really structured in his approach, too.
Peter But Roy was into a repetition/duration thing, very simple repeating sounds, minimally structured things.
Kim And Janine [Stagg] was my friend. Roy was Peter's friend. [laughter]
How come Janine joined?
Peter We started playing with Roy after that, and we decided we needed someone else.
Kim That's right, that's why we tried Glenda.
Peter That didn't really work out, and out of the blue one day Janine said she'd play. We never knew Janine played anything.
Kim She was quite keen.
Did she have a musical background?
Peter Maybe she learned to play the piano when she was younger.
Kim She went to see bands more than I did. She followed the bands. She knew more about them than I did, and Peter could talk to her about them.
Peter [laughs] She bought along a Velvet Underground tape one day, of 'Sister Ray', and said, "This is what I want my keyboards to sound like." [laughter]
Kim She fitted in quite well.
Peter She had the right idea.
Kim And it all went from there. We played about two years together, didn't we? Two and a half years.
How regularly did you play?
Kim Quite regularly, at least once a week. I once drove back from Nelson [five hour drive] to go to a Dadamah practice.
Peter What were you doing in Nelson?
Sitting on a golden beach? [laughter]
Kim We were all very conscientious.
Peter We got really good at one point. [laughter]
That's a revealing comment, Peter. [laughter]
Kim I wanted to leave Christchurch, and one of the reasons I couldn't was because of Dadamah. And I was really pissed off when Janine and Roy decided that they were going to America. [laughter] I thought, fuck you, here's me staying in this godforsaken town... [laughter]
Hey, slow down.
Kim Ah, it's all very subjective.
Danny There's some nice people in Christchurch.
At least three.
Kim You found three?
Peter We won't ask you to name them. [laughter]
Danny Let's go with three.
Dadamah didn't play live very often, did you?
Peter We played live maybe four times. Twice down here, once with The Terminals in Christchurch, and once at a party.
Kim The going-away party. [laughter]
Whose, Roy's?
Peter No, all of us. We were all going away.
Kim Haven't you read the liner notes to the Kranky CD?
Danny It's all that new typography. It was so illegible, I just gave up.
Peter Bill Meyer wrote a slightly peeved review of the CD, he complained because he couldn't read the liner notes.
Doesn't he speak English? [laughter]
Danny Bill has a fine command of the English language.
Kim Then we all left town.
Peter We considered doing an American tour. [laughter] It was true. Nick [Schulz] of Majora said how about we do a tour with Sun City Girls, and we had this dilemma of whether to move to Dunedin or go to America, because Roy and Janine were going anyway.
Kim At one stage we were going to live together at Laverick's Bay, on Banks Peninsula. Dadamah. Two hours drive away.
Peter In a mansion, an absolute mansion. With a private beach. But it was so horror-movie idyllic.
Kim I had nightmares about it.
Peter And everybody had bad feelings about it, and we decided not to do it.
Kim That would have been really bizarre. That was near the end. [laughter]
Obviously.
Kim So we left town instead.
Not to ask a stupid question, but where does the name Dadamah come from?
Danny Hey, Nick, never preface a question like that. It's a surefire warning you're about to ask a stupid question. [laughter]
Peter It was just a lyric I had.
Kim It's a made-up word.
It's a neologism.
Peter What's a neologism?
A word you coin that enters the public lexicon.
Danny Doesn't it have something to do with 'Dadamax', the Max Ernst painting?
Kim I like the whole thing of Dada...
Peter But it wasn't really anything to do with that. I wrote a lyric that was called 'Dadamah' and you looked in my lyric book one day, and that became the name.
And the rest is rock history. The end was caused by people wanting to go overseas?
Peter To different corners of the globe.
Kim Otherwise we would have reconciled our differences.
Peter No, we were getting further apart musically.
Kim We were generally pretty tetchy.
Peter Kim and I wanted to do freeform stuff, and Roy didn't want to, he was into doing basically what he's now doing solo-longer, repetitive, movie-type things.
Kim I think there were a few tensions, but they were from issues outside the band. There were some bad times we went through. I came down here and flatted at Grey Street [in Port Chalmers]; we were recording the album. Janine and Roy had to come down to record the album-they got pissed off about that, they didn't like it.
Peter They were Christchurch people.
I don't imagine the early '90s was a real happening time musically in Christchurch.
Peter [laughs] I can't really remember early '90s Christchurch.
There you go.
Kim The Terminals were there.
Peter But we just kept on going and going.
Kim There was always that other band of Mick's, The Young Achievers.
Peter They went through a whole lot of mutations. They were called The South American Question first, then The Templers, then The Young Achievers.
Kim Didn't they call themselves The Losers?
Peter No, they referred to themselves as "the losers".
Kim They were always really good. Peter and me were the only ones who used to go see them.
Peter Occasionally there were half a dozen people there.
Kim We really liked them, they gave a really good show, so we told all our friends, and all our friends turned up. The band got really freaked out, because there were ten people there, and they were terrible. Our reputations were shattered.
Peter They were like a funny punk band, something like Gas. Then there was Christchurch.
Kim Christchurch the band.
Peter It was a shifting bunch of people, Bill Fosberg and people like that.
Kim And Eddie.
Peter A skinhead guy who did rant poetry and played the trumpet.
Kim They were great. But they deteriorated into a heavy metal band pretty quickly. [laughs]
Danny Ah, it happens. [laughter]
Peter, when did you start becoming interested in improvisation?
Peter From time to time right through I always have been. We used to have 'jams', getting a bunch of people together and just playing, so it was not a big step from doing that. In Scorched Earth Policy we had songs, and then we had whole passages of stuff where we did whatever we wanted.
Kim Even The Vacuum.
Danny Before that.
Peter Yeah, but The Vacuum was like The Grateful Dead or something, [laughter] no, probably Television, where the guitarists went on for ages. Stephen [Cogle], was playing bass then. We did the same thing over and over again, feedback solos that went on for ages. This was 1978 or '79.
Danny But you liked free music before that.
Peter Yeah, before that I'd listened to John Coltrane and late '60s/'early '70s Miles Davis-and in the early '80s we used to listen to a lot of Albert Ayler, and some Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman.
I remember Bruce Russell telling me some story about how Scorched Earth Policy would play these long free jams, then you would be the one who'd say, "Okay, that's enough of that hippy shit, let's do some songs."
Peter [laughs] That's probably true, it was a combination of those things. Our model was something like Swell Maps, where they do songs, then long improvised things.
Kim What's your interest in songs?
Peter Because I used to write lyrics. [laughs] It was purely selfish.
Danny Songs are alright. Like Oasis. [laughter] Just while we were driving up here, Nick Cain was telling me how catchy the choruses are. [laughter]
My little brother sent me the tape for my birthday. Where I work they play commercial radio all day long, and next to Celine Dion and Sheryl Crow they sound pretty good.
Peter I suppose they do. I can only think of (What's The Story) Morning Glory?, which they kept advertising on television.
Kim And the whiny road.
That's 'Don't Look Back In Anger'. [laughter]
Kim Really?
Take it from me.
Danny I was just telling Nick before that for ages I thought Oasis were one of those trance bands.
You got a very pleasant surprise.
Danny [laughs] I just thought, this is exactly like The Beatles, except more obnoxious. Then I read an interview and it was even worse, they're just really horrible people. But they do write catchy choruses.
Kim Like Abba.
Danny Like Dadamah. [laughter]
The material on the album was obviously from a different period to the material on the singles.
Peter Yeah, it came after. [laughter]
Kim We'd learned how to use the 4-track by then.
I seem to remember some Americans being quite confused by the singles. The album was quite soothing.
Peter We got a real surprise by how they seemed so nonplussed by singles, they couldn't work it out. We didn't think it was that strange, and they all seemed to think it was like the weirdest thing on the planet.
Danny I guess for an audience that at that stage would have been coming out of post-Chicago noise-rock, it would have been pretty weird. I remember getting the singles, and not actually listening to them that much for ages. After I'd had them for about a year, I went back to them and really liked them, but they didn't grab me at first. They weren't part of my musical language, they didn't connect with me. But then a year later, it was like,"Wow, why haven't I been listening to these records?"
Peter I'd always do that with records.
Danny I guess Dadamah were just ahead of their time. [laughter]
Did the singles come out while you were still together?
Peter Oh yeah, they came out quite quickly. [debate ensues about when exactly singles and LP came out] Bruce took a tape away [to America] and hawked it off to various Americans. Tom [Lax] really liked it. They'd heard of this guy called Nick, who had this really enigmatic label.
Danny It was a match made in heaven.
Kim Until we went into CDs, and he stopped liking us.
Peter He wanted to do it straight away, we were a bit taken aback. He was scared that we'd change it, go into a studio and clean it up.
So after Dadamah broke up you all went off and recorded solo concept double-LPs for Virgin UK?
Peter We're still working on them.
Kim In 1992 and 1993 Peter and I were sort of between Dunedin and Christchurch, we were trying to shift down here, but it took a long time to sell the house. We met Danny in 1992 when he was over here on holiday, and when he came over here to live...
Danny We got together. And we asked Brian to join and he graciously agreed.
Kim And so Flies Inside The Sun began.
Danny This was mid-late '93.
Were you as regularly rehearsing a band as Dadamah?
Peter The same, really. Once a week.
Kim That was the transitional period, when the songs started getting more improvisational. My bass playing was getting more confident, I could play in time. I remember Roy was amazed by my timing. [laughter]
Peter It was always a problem in The Pin Group-Desmond got ejected from the group because he couldn't play in time.
Danny It's a constant issue in Rain. "Jeez guys, it's 16/13."
It's probably not the time to bring it up, but there's actually a Rain/Oasis link.
Kim [gasps theatrically]
Peter [laughs] They're another band that's ripped us off.
Seriously. In England in 1991 or 1992 there was a band called Rain, and they were kind of Beatles-pop. They had a brief brush with fame, but then they put out an album which had a photo of a naked woman's torso on the cover, because that's what they were into. [laughter] So they fell from favour. But apparently the drummer now plays the drums in Oasis. [impressed sounds] You obviously weren't reading the NME as avidly as I was in 1991.
Peter I used to buy it, but I can't say I read it.
Danny I think also, like Kim said her bass playing got more confident, my guitar playing changed a lot as well. When I was in Australia I played in pop bands, and I had some interest in doing more free things, but certainly never had any real opportunity to do it. It took me a long time to loosen up and experiment a bit more.
Peter Me too. I made that transition over that time to doing free drumming, which always seemed like a bit of a contradiction. Before, when we did impro vised things, I played beats.
Was that underpinned by some theoretical basis?
Peter Only after the fact. It was interesting playing with A Handful Of Dust. The first time I played with them was the piece that's on The Philosophick Mercury, and that was like being thrown in at the deep end. [laughs]
What about your theory, Danny?
Danny I'm interested in theoretical issues generally, in aesthetics and politics, and I guess there is an interesting body of work on improvised music. But it actually feels a lot more comfortable-I'd been playing guitar for quite a while, and playing in Flies was the first time it really felt...
Kim It's too hard to play songs.
Peter It's more that it's kind of inhibiting. It can be interesting, but...
Danny I'd had a really good time playing songs, but I definitely felt like my relationship with music and my instrument was much more satisfying on a whole lot of levels once I was playing freely. If you think of it theoretically, it's like the thing of physics, the degrees of freedom that an object has, the axes that it can move along. In pop music what you can do is very limited; but suddenly playing free music and being able to think about rhythm and texture and space, and just thinking about music much more spatially and sensually and emotionally-it's so different to playing songs, you can do anything. I felt that I started to understand the relationship of music and how I play to the rest of my life a lot more. If I was feeling a certain way, I'd be playing it a certain way, whereas if it's just like you're going along to play some songs, you have to do it wheter you like it or not.
Peter I think you have to be a lot more in the music if you're playing free.
What are your thoughts, Kim?
Kim Being an abstract painter, I hav resisted it, and feel pretty uncomfortable with songs and song structures. Peter and I have long arguments and discussions about the merits of both, but I've always been more inclined to abstract and random music.
But Flies was still only semi-free, wasn't it?
Danny As Peter said, it was a matter of us finding our way. For me, I started playing guitar when I lived on the Gold Coast in Queensland, [laughs] there wasn't a thriving free music scene on my doorstep just waiting for me to discover. The wildest things I discovered were in Brisbane, and still highly influenced by American noise-rock music. So that was what I learned about, and once you're doing that, finding your way out of it takes a long time. Which is not to say that if I'd been exposed to it earlier that I would have gone straight into it, but I definitely feel like Flies was about freeing up and realising that a whole lot of things which you just take for granted don't need to be like that, realising that you've got more room to experiment. But I really like the record, and sometimes I listen to the songs and think it'd be great to do those things again, like the way the songs hover on the edge of their structure. I find that tension between the structure and its decay really interesting.
Peter It's like the last vestiges of structure, the absolute minimum.
Danny And sometimes I miss that, but when I really think about it...I couldn't do it if I wanted to, my relationship to my instrument doesn't work like that any more.
Kim I have no sympathy with structure at all, I tend to think of it as [whispers mock melodramatically] the patriarchy. [laughs]
Danny I find your painting highly structural, though, Kim.
Kim You could also say that freeform is highly structural. But that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about structural rules that become tyrannical, so I reject them out of hand, yet use other underlying things. Painting is pretty stuck in male traditions, but the whole of culture is saturated with male meaning, so as a woman, I have to work with it, otherwise I don't exist. There is no other language for me. I don't feel attached to it, like you talk about attachments.
Danny and Peter, what sort of associations does structure have for you?
Peter I don't think of structure and freeform as being that far apart from each other. From a playing point of view, I just try to get the sense of a piece, and that'll be subject to how I feel at the time. But I had a problem because I wrote lyrics, and I couldn't think of any way to fit them into with a freeform approach.
Kim But there's been a whole tradition of freeform lyrical expression.
Peter I don't know if there has.
Kim What about scat singing? A lot of jazz singing is freeform.
Danny This is an area where I differ quite markedly from Kim's position. For me, I'm finding that playing more freely, discovering it as a form in itself, I guess I have an interest in form and genre generally. More so nowthan before, I can appreciate genre and structure and feel that when Rain play there's quite a lot of structure to that, even though we play freely. There's certain kinds of things we tend to do. It's just like a language-pop's a language, and it has certain meanings and ways that it's transmitted, but I can't draw a line between doing free music and structured music, it doesn't exist for me.
Peter It's like the way David Mitchell plays with the 3Ds, not the way the rest of them play, but the way David plays; or the way Brian and Mick play with The Terminals, and I do on some things.
Danny I've come to a lot of contemporary classical music through being interested in free jazz and starting to think about music differently. The things which appeal to me are different-texture and space, tone. Then there's a whole lot of composed work which can be really interesting as well, and more and more the free/not free divide is not the major way I think about the differences in the music. And Rain's really composed as well, [laughter] we record 45 minutes each session, then we go through it. We all have different opinions on what works and they get negotiated, but we do tend to choose.
Kim But it's not worked out beforehand, and we can't reproduce it. We tend to repeat ourselves because we repeat our patterns.
Peter Over a period of time we do similar things
Danny That's why it's quite good having a break-I often find that if we haven't played for a while and we come back and play, it's fantastic, becuase we've gottne out of those patterns.
With Flies do you write songs and then take them apart?
Peter Almost.
Kim Some of the Flies songs were old Dadamah songs that hadn't been recorded, lyrically. They were just changed musically. 'Absent And Erotic Lives', 'Sleepwalk', 'Icarus', all those were Dadamah songs, except 'Mothers Kiss'.
Danny Something like 'Mothers Kiss' had a structure, I remember we worked out a structure for it-it goes quite slow through this bit, then it gets loud up to here, it goes slow and gets quieter, then gets loud to finish.
Peter Then all hell breaks loose. [laughs]
Danny And that was it. But other things like 'Man With No Arms' was totally free, pretty much sampled from a jam.
Kim 'Absent And Erotic Lives' has got a bassline, and 'Icarus' has a particular guitar part. And 'Sleepwalk' did too, the middle piece.
Danny Which ended up only being two minutes out of the 25.
Kim Apparently that's a rock device-building up to a climax. [laughter]
Danny Oh, right. Excellent.
Kim For me, free music, even though it has the structures running through it, allows for much freer interpretation a lot more, when you listen to it and when you make it. Orthodox music, that has structures that are repeated and become like a hegemony which you have to adhere to, to me it's like a power base that humans are going to tend to want to consolidate. [I suppose politically, the problem of structure for me is that it signifies more often than not consolidated power bases, which continually deny large roups of people meaningful voice. The type of improvisational music I play, like random marking in painting, represents a language that gives me the freedom to speak.]
Danny I have trouble holding a really strong position in relation to formal aesthetic issues. There's something political in it, but when it comes down to it, a lot of people who are interested in free jazz are nerds [laughs] and I don't think they're fantastic people politically either. The history of these kinds of formal issues, of breaking away from structure are really strongly driven by fairly conservative Western masculine attitudes towards art as well.
Kim But the improvisational area of music is far more friendly towards women than rock is, as far as playing music and allowing women to play.
Danny I don't know that it is, actually. I think that there are a lot more women playing pop music.
Kim I don't mean whether more women play, but how they're positioned. I find that in the free area women are respected for what they do, rather than being landed with the sexual aspect only, which is a big part of rock.
Danny I just think that maybe it's sublimated. I get the feeling that it's still there.
Kim You may be right. [I think sublimation is a step here, though. I also think that the conservative masculine attitudes in improvisation you speak of are examples of the inevitable desire to colonise and control a genre which in spirit is open and denies that sort of restriction. It is this aspect of improvisation that interests me, not the attempt to fossilise it in hierarchies.]
Danny I really love playing free music, but most of my friends, people I find interesting and who I think do amazing things politically, a huge proportion of them aren't interested in free music at all.
Kim Why should they be?
Danny They don't have to be. I accept that there are political issues in relation to form, with the free and structured divide, but I just can't see it that strongly, structured music being associated with this political system and way of being in the world, and this type of music isn't. Because there are some people who are really interested in free music who I think are highly suspect and really fucked. But I think there is something political about the way you relate with other people while you're playing free music.
Peter Whether it's a competition, which is one of the interpretations.
Often free jazz was talked about and written about in those terms, a competition between the players for ascendancy. [Although the relationship between players tends to be more democratic in improvisation.] How was it in Flies?
Danny Looking backward-and this is something that I've just started to believe is the truth now, so it may not be the way the others remember it-Peter and Brian seemed a lot more confident.
Peter Because we'd been playing for a long time.
Danny And you'd played together.
Kim I was very hesitant too, with my bass playing, I feel a lot more confident now. So we were probably minor players. But it was a matter of confidence, not a matter of not being allowed to.
Peter I remember having the feeling that we didn't play with each other all that much in those days.
Kim Now we do a lot more.
Danny I think we were working out our own relationships with music and our instruments as well. I certainly felt that-I was spending so much time concentrating on what kinds of things I could do with my instrument.
Kim You certainly have to learn that first, before you start interacting dialoguing with the other people playing.
Peter So maybe it was like four people playing pieces of their own, which may coincide. Probably a lot of music is like that.
Kim It's amazing what things sound like when you stick them together. [laughter]
So how long were this version of Flies together?
Peter Flies Mark 1 probably finished about mid-'94.
Danny I was in France for about four months in the winter of 1994.
Kim And Brian said he didn't want to play with me and Peter.
Danny And I got back and that was Rain.
Peter But I think it was finished before you went away.
I'm confused.
Danny Coming up to 1994 we were doing mixes for the first album, which never got finished. In about the month before I left, we were thinking about what would happen-I wasn't sure how long I would be away, or when I would be coming back. So we were definitely finishing up a period, but we were still interested in keeping on going, perhaps in the future, and then Brian said that he was...
Kim He went through sort of a musical crisis of his own. He was sick of being in other people's bands and wanted to do his own work. He had a problem with Peter and me.
What did you do to Brian, Peter?
Kim Brian decided that he didn't want to play.
Peter There was probably not a lot of communication at the time, and perhaps the perception of Kim and me as a couple, there wasn't the balance perhaps.
Kim There were various reasons why he didn't want to play. When Danny came back from France we formed Rain.
Peter And that was the end of Flies, for all intensive purposes. Rain came after Flies, as far as we knew it then. This was around September '94.
You obviously took the name Rain from the Wreck Small Speakers song.
Danny There were quite a few things. Bruce Russell's novel was called Rain before it got its current title. When Peter mentioned it, I immediately thought, man, are they going to associate us with Oasis. This was just before Oasis got big, and I knew they were going to be big. [laughter] We talked about a lot of titles, we had a shortlist, and Rain was one of the ones that came up. I really liked it. Boat was one of the other ones-I liked it because it looks really nice in small letters. [laughter]
Kim All the ones that I came up with, Danny and Peter were saying no way, because they were like heavy metal bandnames. [laughter] Crocus, or flower names.
Peter Which is quite a nice name, but they're a Swiss heavy metal band.
Danny Krokus with a k. Two k's. Or maybe three.
Where does the name Flies Inside The Sun come from?
Peter It's a lyric. The last line of the last song on the Dadamah CD.
Kim [to Danny] By that time you and me were more confident about playing our instruments.
Danny Yeah, we felt much more comfortable about playing by ourselves.
Kim We didn't want to do songs any more.
Peter Yeah, and I think my drumming had made that leap by that time. [laughs]
Danny Just to backtrack for a second, I should say that the Flies album comes from a book by Angela Carter.
Why did you quote Foucault on the record?
Kim It was Foucault quoting a Chinese encyclopedia.
Danny Foucault used it, but he actually pulled it from one of those bloody tortured modernist guys, Robert Musil or someone? We didn't really attribute it properly.
Did you think about the wider social implications of quoting Foucault on your record? [laughter]
Danny [sardonically] It was obviously going to look pretty wanky.
Peter [laughs] There was the odd sniff about us being a bit too clever for our own good.
Danny A bit too arty. And, you know, we don't play proper songs or anything.
Kim The next Flies album was going to be called So You Think You're A Motel.
Danny Is it still going to be called that?
Peter No, we're just calling it Flies Inside The Sun. I hope you don't object. [laughter] It's our Metallica record.
Kim That came from a discussion on improvised music and structure that I had with Brian.
Do you have a tape of it?
Kim Damn, I don't. He was going off improvisation at the time.
Peter This was at the end of Flies Mark 1.
Kim The Renderers were trying really hard to get their message across, and they were getting more and more precise about what they were saying, because they didn't want any confusion. I was going, "You want to be able to accommodate more people, you want to be more open". I kept using the word "accommodate", and he turned around and said, "So you think you're a motel?" [laughter] Anyway, he's come around again.
Peter But we have to stay chronological. Rain.
Danny Kim and I were just learning to play, really.
Kim And Peter was starting to play synth and radio, branching out. And then I started up Doramaar about this time.
Danny That might be another interview. [laughter]
Kim But Doramaar comes into it because when they started up I ended up playing twice a week. And I started burning out, it was getting a bit too much.
And what happened?
Kim I was just hysterical. [laughs] For months on end. Blaming everything else. Being burned by your own pleasures is just terrible. [laughter] So I extracted myself, first of all from Rain.
Danny You started playing with us every second week.
How did Kim not being there change things in Rain?
Peter It took quite a while for Kim not to be there, it was a gradual thing.
Danny And we started bringing in other people, and that just made it different. We did a couple of duo things, a few with Greg Cairns, two drummers. And at least on with Susan Ballard on violin.
Kim And then Brian came back.
Peter He heard Rain, and he really liked it. I remember we were in the car, we went to Christchurch for a Terminals show-we played a Rain tape in the car and he really liked it.
Kim He decided improvisational music wasn't so bad after all, and that he could be a motel too. [laughter]
Danny He's really good at it. Brian's an amazing player.
Kim But there's weird problem with a lot of those people. They seem to be split down the middle-at one time they despise improvisation, and other times they despise structured songs, and they don't seem to be able to reconcile the two.
Peter I've had that over the years, too. It's thinking in dualities.
Danny And that's another duality, Kim. On the one hand you're saying that all structured music is evil, and the root of patriarchy...
Peter Conveniently forgetting the abstract expressionists. [laughter]
Danny "We won't worry about them. They weren't really abstract."
Kim Excuse me, it's not I that talks in dualities. I merely speak of consequence.
Peter And that's what's happened with The Terminals-virtually everybody apart from Stephen [laughter] is playing freely. But I think Brian is much more at ease now.
Danny You can still do both. It's not like you have to be indoctrinated into the club [laughter] and renounce all your fealty to structured music.
Peter Have it stamped on your forehead.
Danny "Free Musician". [laughter]
So the material on Sediment was all trio stuff?
Peter Honorlea played drums on 'Lost Angel Memory'. I play synth. That's Janine from Dadamah, she changed her name to Honorlea. She stayed here a week when she came back from overseas and did a couple of sessions with us, mainly keyboards.
Danny I was really scared they were going to try and make me play like Roy. [laughter]
Peter No, we were thinking of making you sing like Roy.
You mentioned a second Rain album?
Peter There's lots of stuff, easily enough trio stuff. As with Flies Mark 2, Kim's done vocals.
Danny I should make special mention of the first trio practices which Brian and Peter and I did. They were really wild-that was when I was first starting to listen to Iannis Xenakis stuff, and it sounded a lot like that, very biological, really close-miked insect swarms.
Was this Rain or Flies Mark 2?
Kim That was the problem.
Peter Technically it's Flies Mark 2. We'll say that anything with Brian on it is Flies, and that Danny and me and whoever are Rain. But this may change.
Danny But I think Brian does bring something to the playing as well which is quite distinctive.
Peter It almost sounds like composed music.
Kim At the Dereliction show [four hour exhibition of KP's art in August] Flies Inside The Sun played as a duo of Brian and Peter.
You should have just called yourselves "Inside". [laughter]
Peter "Flies In".
Kim One of the reasons was Peter saying, "Well, if it sounds like Flies, it's Flies, and if it sounds like Rain, it's Rain". Now Flies and Rain sound the same. [laughter]
Peter No, I don't think they do.
Danny Neither do I.
Peter Even though the dynamic is the same, the sound is different.
Kim Hence the difficulty-while Danny has been away this winter, Peter still wanted to play, so we did a few sessions with Nathan from Sandoz Lab Technicians and Susan [Ballard]. So we called that Sleat. We discussed whether it should be Rain or not, but it didn't feel like Rain. It has a completely different dynamic and sound.
Danny, you've been away most of the year.
Danny I go away for the winters. Initially Flies finished-there were other issues, but that I knew I was going away seemed like a catalyst. The last three winters I've been away for various amounts of time, this year for five months. I don't know what that means for Rain.
Peter It means we have a summer band and a winter band. [laughter]
Danny What keeps me coming back down here is, partly, playing music. I felt like, especially with Peter and I, over the time we played together, it was quite fulfilling, even if we hadn't played for a fair while. And bringing Brian back in as well.
Rain featuring Brian Crook. [laughter]
Danny We'll wait until his solo album comes out.
The second Flies CD is about to come out?
Peter It's almost exactly half from Mark 1 and half from Mark 2.
It's all very confusing.
Danny Well, basically Mark 1 Flies was before I went to France and Mark 2 is since I got back. [laughter]
How did the stuff you did with Susan Ballard and Greg Cairns compare with Flies Mark 2 and Rain?
Kim It's funky. Jazzy.
Peter If you're talking to Kim, it's with Nathan and Susan. If you're talking to Danny and me it's with Greg, and one with Susan.
Danny Which was quite carnivalesque.
Peter I s'pose the violin-playing is sort of nursery rhyme-ish.
The Unspecified records have that flavour to them.
Peter Greg has a swing quality to his drumming.
Kim After I, after coming away from music, and tentatively playing in various spasmodic things...
So it comes out sounding really jerky? [laughter]
Kim Sort of disconnected.
Danny Kim's definitely the best bass player I've played with.
Kim Thank you, Danny. When I stopped playing altogether, it was just incredible having all that time, and now I think I couldn't possibly be part of a band that plays every week. But I can play when nothing else is in the way.
Danny Session musician. [laughter] Hired gun.
Kim Would anybody pay for my bass playing?
Danny Well, you could work out a deal-you could say, "If you give me this much, I'll play on your record; if you give me this much, I'll let you put a sticker on the record saying 'featuring Kim Pieters of Dadamah'." [laughter]
Kim And 'Roy Montgomery' in brackets. [laughter]
Danny That'd be another couple of hundred dollars.
Peter, tell us about Metonymic and Medication.
Peter Metonymic is just a way of putting out the stuff that I'm involved with, and generally that will include Kim, and it may include Danny. The purpose of it is to get more of our music out.
Kim You were thinking of putting other people's stuff out.
Peter Yeah...
Who like?
Danny That's classified. [laughter] You'll just go and tell Bruce, and he'll poach them. [laughter]
Peter Wave a bigger cheque in front of their faces. Bruce is like Geffen compared to Metonymic. [laughter] Medication is for more structured stuff.
So that's like the patriarchal side-label? [laughter]
Kim It's for the boys.
Peter I'm going to do a Terminals live thing on Medication, and some reissues-Victor Dimisich Band and Scorched Earth Policy. They didn't really fit on Metonymic.
Kim It's a marketing ploy.
Danny Product differentiation.
Peter We've got a lot of stuff, we've had a backlog for the last few years now, and it's an attempt to get more stuff out. We'll still do stuff with Kranky.
Danny The Americans are really good, but they've also got their schedules and priorities, and communication can be difficult.
Kim But it's quite fun doing the whole package yourself.
Peter And there's something to be said for releasing stuff that's a bit more current. I've been making records for years, and they've always been two years or older by the time they come out.
Danny You just hate them by the time they're released.
Peter You've forgotten they even exist. There's been some exceptions, but just that removed thing, I'm not sure that it's so helpful.
Kim But Metonymic isn't going to be able to release current stuff.
Peter It'll be closer. [laughs]
Danny Kranky have been really good.
Kim Despite their bad press.
Peter Their part in the drone conspiracy.
It's all their fault.
Peter The new Flies record is a contribution to the drone conspiracy.
Danny A Kranky tribute record.
Kim We didn't mean to. [laughter] And we're going to expand into CD-ROM.
But not after discussions with Danny.
Danny [laughs] Well, I've actually made one. And it takes a long time. If you're doing a CD-ROM, the only real motivation is that 99.5% of them are just totally crap and you know you can do better.
Kim Is it all not so confusing now?
Peter Rain came after Flies, but Flies also came after Rain. And they exist simultaneously.
I'll just have to memorise it.
Discography
Flies Inside the Sun
- "Angels" on Skin CD [no label]
- An Audience Of Others (Including Herself) LP [Kranky]
- Flies Inside the Sun CD [Metonymic]
- "Spy In Your Love" on Kakemix CD [Kakemix]
Rain
- Myacine 7" [no label]
- Sediment CD [Metonymic]
- "Invisible" on Le Jazz Non CD [Corpus Hermeticum]