Scaramouche: "Scaramouche's Theme"

DNRC08 Format: 7" single Released: 2003 Status: DELETED Scaramouche, an incorrigible llama in search of his next neenish tart, remains one of DNRC's most successful solo artists. His entire ouvre consists of this solo masterpiece, a theme song described as "Cher meets the Tin Lids", plus two home-recorded soundscapes that we hope never to release. Scaramouche originally became a recording artist in order to share his inner thoughts and meditations with the world. Sadly, his addiction to quiche lorraine and ham off the bone led him to become extremely obese, and he has since been admitted to the Betty Ford clinic for rehabilitation. Nevertheless, on this nose-bleeder, the llama's inner being really does shine through. As Stung says of his favorite animal recording artist: "When Scaramouche sings, your spirit soars ..."

Stung: "Dream of the Blue Pipe Cleaners"

DNRC07 Format: Long Player Released: 2003 Status: DELETED What little hasn't been said about this remarkable album is still best left unsaid. Stung, New Zealand's most talented flautist, pulls out all the corks on "Dream of the Blue Pipe Cleaners", an epic statement of intent. Unbelievably, this was his first and last album for DNRC and has sadly been relegated to the dustbin marked "Deleted". Nevertheless, it is worth looking back on this timid artist's sporadic career, which sputtered to a halt somewhere between Australia and New Zealand, on a flight that was meant to be the start of his aborted "Nothing Like the Sun" Australasian tour, complete with come-back album, booked out shows in the Top End and a rumoured duet with Davey Dreamnation. Tragically, a ticketing mix-up led to an altercation between the airline crew and Stung, whose seeing eye pony was refused a seat on the flight. Flying blind, and in the absence of his good friend and collaborator, Stung decided to take his own life and was found in one of the aeroplane's toilets with a Vicks inhaler jammed down his throat. Listening to this moving and emotional album now, one hears echoes of Clannad, Enya and Scaramouche's solo works. Stung, we salute you.

Maple Lanes: "Maple Lanes"

DNRC06 Format: Long Player Released: 2003 Status: DELETED During the heady summer of 2002, when DNRC was still in its infancy and Davey Dreamnation had just completed his barnestorming tour of the Northern Territory, rumours began circulating about oen of the support bands on that tour, and their reputation for incendiary live performances. Maple Lanes, as the band were fleetingly known, featured a barely-disguised Dreamnation on drums, plus an assortment of stand-in vocalists and guitarists. Their music, which remains to this day unlistenable, focussed heavily on the gas and mineral exploration industries, whose influence still towers over music produced in Australia's far-north. Astonishingly, Maple Lanes only ever recorded one studio LP, and as a showcase of the band's talents, it remains unsurpassed. Diehard fans will already possess live versions of most of these tracks, however this collection would be worth the purchase price for the inclusion of "MLF" alone, had the album not sadly been deleted upon its release.

Teh: "93602"

DNRC05 Format: Long Player Released: 2003 Status: DELETED Teh were something of an enigma during their brief half-life. Their sound was built around the talents of two full-time members (the equally-enigmatic T and eh), whose notorious live shows were supplemented by a galaxy of groupie-like choral singers, whose keening delivery left many reviewers wondering who'd died. "93602" finds the band in devastating form, working through the dim logic of Farsi-inspired Beat poetry on the justly-renowned tracks, "IT Service" and "Scatter". Elsewhere, T boldly steps up to the Farsifa for the deadly knock-out blows of "Shoot Who?" and "Elect". Always a political band, Teh were also known as champions of womens' rights in their native Iran, and the epic closing number here, "Roots", shows just how far these two global ravers, eh in particular, had come since their first recordings for Nono in 1988. Rumoured to be alive and well in Paris, Teh have not released a full length album since the follow-up to "93602", the disappointing "Live at Hari's". Interested fans are sure to find live versions of these tracks circulating on the usual file-trading services.

Sluice: "Time, Gentlemen"

DNRC04 Format: Long Player Released: 2003 Status: DELETED Portarlington's extraordinarily prolific Sluice emerged from that fine city's Chinese-rock underground to redefine what it meant to make music. Featuring four guitarists, no vocals and one battered tape recorder, they embarked on a four year musical odyssey that took in all of their native city's extensive musical influences and that would lead them to collaborations with Dr Sick and Cruns. Their sadly-deleted sophomore album, "Time, Gentlemen", is considered by many to be the high water mark of their turbulent career. Its nine freeform improvisations challenged the musical orthodoxy of the time in which they were created, apparently withour rehearsals. A tenth track (later versions of which plied the bootleg circuit) was abandoned when the afore-mentioned tape recorder's batteries went dead. Described by one critic as "the sound of a city eating itself", the album's freewheeling title track, with its oddly prophetic mantra "time, gentlemen/ time, please" has come to be regarded as a classic of its genre. The existence of this genre, sadly, has not led to the spawning of Sluice-influenced bands in Portarlington or anywhere else.

Cruns: "Extra Hair"

CAT #DNRC 03 Format: Split 7" single Released 2003 Status: DELETED Cruns, hailing from Boston, made the extraordinary decision in 2003 to stop listening to any of their New England counterparts and start making noise. This, their first release, is the result. Equal parts barn-door whinny and shoe-gazing abandon, "Extra Hair" sees the band in top form, delivering the one-two in the from of verse, chorus, verse, instrumental and repeat verse to fade. B-side "We are the Cruns" packs no punches and pulls no favours. Nose-bleeding for the single-minded. Absolutely no compromise went into the recording and packaging of this sadly-deleted release.

Davey Dreamnation: "Live At Budokan"

CAT #DNRC 02 Format: 4 disc box set Released 2003 Status: DELETED Every once in a while, an artist comes along seemingly with the intention of blowing things apart, only to somehow end up piecing it all together instead. In this category we could place Patti Smith (who has swung full circle from rage-poet to high priestess of the nu-old-wave), the collected members of Sonic Youth (who, now about to release their 16th proper album, surely deserve some sort of pension) and Bob Dylan, whose surrealistic early 60s prophecies saw him knighted as the fifth horseman of an impending acid-driven apocalypse (if not an all out invasion by plasticene icons from space). Unfortunately - perhaps for rock and roll, more likely for listeners of avant pop, bullet-bitten shot rock - Davey Dreamnation does not fit this category. He is an artist on the verge of exploiting himself. He messes with freeforms, then strictly applies the eeriness of vocoders to what should be straight out rants or spoken word grumble jazz sketches. His recording careers - to now, shrouded in mystery but slowly coming to light by way of a series of Internet-only releases - posit him as a man with too much time, and perhaps only one idea worth following through. This live set, however, will make more than one listener stand up and say: “by gum, I think he’s onto something”. "Live at Budokan" constitutes a recording of a single concert held at the Japanese venue that has been host to some very famous musicians, including the above-mentioned Bob Dylan. Clocking in at roughly 4 hours and 34 minutes, spread over four discs and coming with a set of drinks coasters of which the barmaid from “cheers” would be proud, this album is something of a remarkable achievement. The first disc, ironically titled “Sound Check”, sees Davey d-tuning each of his seven guitars in turn, so that by the time the disc ends, at roughly the seventy minute mark, the listener is being physically assaulted by the sounds of seven hideously pitched wails, quadrophonically separated and arrayed across the listening spectrum, pulsing in and across the pain barrier. This is challenging stuff, reminiscent of Neil Young’s “weld” period, where he dipped his hat to support acts the aforementioned sonic youth, by releasing a bomus disc to append to a devastating two cd set, entitled “arc”, that contained solely feedback, and a good half hour of it too. Dreamnation goes further than this, however. Disc one clocks in at 74 minutes, poerhaps another ironic stab at the limitations of cd technology, or perhaps an unintentional cut off point or mistake. Disc two (“Sound Check/Silence”) then, continues in this vein for almost half its length. The true effect of the sound is best achieved by playing the two discs simultaneously, a la the flaming lips. At the half way point (note, we have now been subjected to over a hundred minutes of tuning), davey suddenly switches off all the mikes, amps and foldback, and leaves the stage (having been at the concert myself, I can only hint at the devastation this caused amongst Davey’s Japanese following). We are then left in silence for the remainder of disc two, which again runs its full length. By this time, you can hear the fans screaming out requests, getting more and more pissed (off). Disc three (“Lab”) is where the listener first gets the sense that there’s a real performance taking place here. From the blistering opening track “lab”, right through to the obligatory epic “lab 25”, what we are presented with is not so much a series of discrete and well-crafted tunes, as 25 elaborations (no pun intended) on the same theme, namely: the sound a drummer makes with the sticks when counting the band in, used so famously on Nirvana’s “In Utero” opener “Serve the Servants.” thus we get “lab 6”, all high-step fandango and sonic bleating, “lab 8” (a paeon to one of dreamnation’s favourite acts, gamelan orchestras of the mind) and of course, “lab 16-and-one-half”, a thirty six minute, breakneck tour through what coleridge might call “caverns measureless to man” - in other words, the interplay between a dozen Glenn Branca-trained ukelele players on speed, six percussionists with Georgia on their minds and the rock chameleon himself on vocals, mixing up razor-sharp commentaries on the current political situation (“don’t vote/try instead the white rope”, “cowards sneer where dirty dogs fear to spread”) with witty and fragile pop lyricisms (“come give me shadows/ I’ll play puppets with your ears”, “hey you/ in the third row/ what’s so funny now?”) reminiscent of the very best of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Che. By disc three’s end, then, one gets the sense that Dreamnation is finally warming to his task. What eventuates on disc four (“Death Traps”), therefore, might shock even the most die-hard avant-artist. How can I describe it, except in these words: Davey Dreamnation records the sounds of his own attempted suicide, cutting himself up into small quivering pieces to be left on the cold budokan stage, there to slowly fade out. No, that’s not enough: there is the sound of a smoking gun in the mouth of Rock Ikonics, davey’s all-suffering manager and producer. It is in the screams of the dead and their watered-down blood, trampled beneath a stampede at a soccer stadium. It is in the lever being pulled on a gigantic load of broken glass from a bull pen. It is the sinews of pain dripping down the speakers, only to be engulfed in the acid rain of feedback issuing from eight trumpets of doom, turned down to a dull shriek, and then turned off. And that’s just track one. “Death Traps” alone can be read as something of a prophetic statement, a manifesto even of the artist’s future intent. Since the recording of this album, Dreamnation has gone on to reinvent himself, coming back from the dead as it were. Let’s hope he stays not dead. Because for all intents and purposes, this four cd set should have been his funeral. That it isn’t, is credit to the man himself, and his sense of musical history. The Cobain of his generation he may not be, but at least he’s got something to show for it.