Dead C

The New Zealanders Michael Morley and Bruce Russell were two crucial figures in avant-garde rock. Their band, Dead C, created some of the most radical and intriguing albums of their era.

Dead C was formed by Michael Morley (ex This Kind Of Punishment), Bruce Russell (ex Xpressway), and Robbie Yeats (ex Verlaines). The Dead Sea Perform M. Harris (Jagjaguwar, 2010) reissues their first cassette, containing With Help From Max Harris.

Their debut album, DR503 (Flying Nun, 1987), later reissued with other rarities from the period, was already one of the most experimental works in all of New Zealand rock, strengthened by the cacophonies of Angel and the apocalyptic Sun Stabbed. The music is still tentative and naive, tied to the lo-fi pop school that dominated at the time.

The mini-album Helen Said These (Siltbreeze, 1989) may have even surpassed it in obstinate noisiness.

The masterpiece of their early period is nonetheless Trapdoor Fucking Exit (Siltbreeze, 1990), which includes Helen, an album where their roots (raga-rock, acid-rock, Velvet Underground, Grateful Dead) intertwine to create exhausting sonic ceremonies. Michael Morley and Bruce Russell’s tortured guitars produce at most a layer of noise, beyond which only the distracted tapping of a drum can be heard.
The songs are therefore not easy to digest: Heaven is an "acid" ballad pairing the vocal harmonies of the Holy Modal Rounders with the ragged strumming of Royal Trux. The more virulent and rhythmic tracks, like Mighty, present a very rough type of garage rock. The more experimental pieces, such as Krossed, are childhood nightmares—free cacophonies that give way to a military march complete with a soldier choir. The hypnotic, cadenced chaos of Power hints at what is to come in the two long tracks on the album.
Bury (after an opening section of endlessly reverberated feedback and incomprehensible recitation) plunges into sixteen minutes of a maelstrom of indecipherable noise swirling with whispered murmurs, tribal drums, animal cries, and sporadic guitar chords. In the end, only dark drones remain in the distance. It is their personal Virgin Forest.
Their own Sister Ray, on the other hand, is Helen Said This, eleven minutes of esoteric ritual: one guitar against the other in a martial crescendo, ending again with ghostly sounds—one guitar emitting only weak chords and infinite reverb, the other intoning a piercing raga.

Eusa Kills (Flying Nun, 1990) drops the trio’s horrifically spastic writing into tracks that still maintain the rock song format, effectively approaching the lo-fi folk of Sebadoh.

The double album Harsh '70s Reality (Siltbreeze, 1992) shatters every harmonic bastion, especially in the twenty-two-minute Driver UFO. This exhausting psychedelic chamber jam stretches the improvisations of the Grateful Dead to the extreme, foregrounding only feedback, glissandi, and reverb, completely eliminating rhythm, and laying veils of the most depraved electronics over the chaotic musings of the guitars. The interstellar quarrel of the guitars is almost the antithesis of rock music history.
The twelve minutes of Love are no less punishing, with its long guitar crackle, countless missed notes, random drum beats, and not a trace of song structure. A long, coarse, deafening drone drags along Sea Is A Violet, with amateurish percussion unleashed without restraint. The guitars take delight in Suffer Bomb Damage, simulating a bombardment.
There are few moments of respite. Sky reconnects with Australian garage rock, recalling Scientists and Feedtime; Constellation shamelessly copies the tribalism and distortion of Sister Ray. Hope (ten minutes) closes the album with a pseudo-hippie chant, drowned in tired guitar chords, again without drums but punctuated by gong strikes.
The album represents the pinnacle of Russell and Morley’s anti-harmonic exploration. Its sonic landscape is framed by the Velvet Underground’s second album, the earliest vertiginous suites of Pink Floyd, the most chaotic live deliriums of the Grateful Dead, and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Only the Twin Infinitive by the Royal Trux can rival it. If hell exists, Beatles fans will spend eternity listening to this record.

The Operation Of The Sonne (Siltbreeze, 1994) collects three lengthy improvisations that ranked among their most austere works yet. The swirling fog of The Marriage Of Reason And Squalor is ruined by spoken word and spastic jamming, but the drunk chant Mordant Heaven sounds like an alien ten-minute remix of a Jimi Hendrix solo. The monumental, 24-minute deranged anemic blues jam Air fades into an intermezzo of musique concrete (a Babel of voices and electronic noise) which bleeds into an unnerving vacuum of quantum fluctuations. The coda is a sequence of agonizing, grating distortions and howls immersed in a blurred futuristic landscape.

The "official bootleg" Clyma Est Mort (1992 - Siltbreeze, 1994) documents live performances. Power is a martial stoner-rock dirge polluted by swarming noises with a coda of incandescent android signals. Electric is pretty much just the chaotic noise, disposing of any melodic pretext: one repulsive sound effect climbs on top of the previous one in a display of atonal superlatives. Das Fluten Das Fluten is just seven minutes of ghostly drones and beats. However, there is also the unusual act of rock violence: the brief psychedelic freak-out Sky, like an accelerated version of Red Crayola's Parable of an Arable Land. The ending of the otherwise mediocre Sunshine/ Dirt For Harry is also an intimidating tornado of ugly sounds. The amateurish recording sometimes enhances the power of the most wildly disjointed but fantastically cohesive moments.
The album was reissued on Clyma Est Mort/ Tentative Power (Jagjaguwar, 2010), with Tentative Power collecting the 1991 singles (notably the "melodic" Hell Is Now Love and Power).

White House (Siltbreeze, 1995) revisits the same Dadaist approach to composition in a slightly more accessible format. The album opens with the deafening vibrations/distortions of Voodoo Spell, immediately submerged by Spell (twelve minutes), a magma of ever-shifting cacophonies punctuated by wildly out-of-tune guitar improvisations. The psychedelic flight of Aime To Prochain Comme Toi Meme and the ultra-distorted ballad Bitcher (sure to please Brother J.T.) solemnly open the gates of hell to the torrential Outside, which closes the record. The latter is a masterpiece of nerve-wracking anticipation of a song that will never take shape—a Beckettian parable whose protagonists are the menacing noises layered over the guitar’s gnawed chords. The almost mantric drone feeds on a wild energy that is never released. It is like the prelude to an Amon Düül ride, but a prelude that never manages to play the opening riff. Mutatis mutandis (rock instrumentation instead of electronic devices), these tracks are kin to Gordon Mumma’s sound sculptures. Brian Eno invented music that you don’t listen to. Dead C invented music that is impossible to listen to.

Repent (Siltbreeze, 1996) collects six more untitled jams, each roughly ten minutes long. Slow, almost heroin-addled, wrapped in piercing hisses, the first track unfolds according to the suspenseful crescendos of early Pink Floyd. The second lays curious noises over a Native American–style dance rhythm that evolves into a monolithically hypnotic beat. The fourth is an orgy of sonic excess, an anti-phonics triumph that buries the science of counterpoint under a dense layer of shrieking hisses, abrasive buzzing, and stupefying clangs.

These are increasingly radical records, made by a band growing ever more confident in its abilities, but for which the future is hard to discern. It is no coincidence that the members have long sought refuge in numerous side projects.

Bruce Russell’s first solo album, Poison + Lie$ = Money + Death (Crank Automotive, 1996), contains only a single composition, which is essentially a long guitar drone.

Morley, who for years had secretly developed the experiments released under the name Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos on A Child's Guide To (Flying Nun, 1988) and later compiled on River Falling Love (Ajax, 1993), also launched the project Gate, through which New Zealand found its own standard-bearers of industrial noise. The early works, released on cassettes like Fear Of Music (Precious Metal, 1989), Hate (Precious Metal, 1990), and Metric (Precious Metal, 1991), were as ambitious as those of his British counterparts. Guitar (Majora, 1993) and Amerika (Majora, 1993) only revealed uncertainties. Golden (IMD, 1995) collects material from his earliest period. Lounge (Twisted Village, 1993) returns to the Dead C sound. Maturation, however, begins in that year.

Dew Line (Table Of Elements, 1994) is an album of songs, but their harmonies could not be more challenging, all dissonances, loops, and abrasive effects at full volume. The third track (twelve minutes) is one of the most extended ballads in rock history, composed of a dying lullaby floating over a boiling sea of distortion. The vocals fade even further in the fourth track (nine minutes), still a ballad but increasingly shrouded in this dense fog of distortion. Psychedelic rock finds a formulation both epic and apocalyptic, unlike anything since the days of Tim Buckley.
The album also marks a significant step forward, as Morley becomes aware of his style as a guitarist. The second track (eleven minutes) is a mini-concert for minimalist drones and, with its open geometries, represents a clear departure from the chaotic improvisations of the Dead C. The fifth track (nine minutes) unleashes the diabolical forces of his guitar as if Morley wanted to napalm the entire history of rock.

After a series of live improvisations with Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, collected on Boston New York City (Poon Village, 1996), which cement his status as a genius of improvised noise, Morley completes his maturation first with a record under his own name, The Pavillion Of Fools (FSS, 1996), and then with a Gate work as wild as it is elegant in its wildness, The Mono Lake (Table Of Elements, 1997).

Gate's The Lavender Head (Precious Metal, 1998), recorded in 1996 and reissued as My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart (Hell's Half Halo, 2001), is a two-disc four-tracks album of computer-generated electronic music (sort of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music updated to the era of samplers and computers). The Blurred Tree is relatively similar to previous Gate albums, but the other three side-long pieces sound like gentle, lazy mantras. Gate's The Wisher Table (Precious Metal, 2002), recorded in 1997, offers similar "metal machine pop".

Morley also worked on the project 2 Foot Flame (Matador, 1995) with Peter Jefferies and Jean Smith (Mecca Normal). Their second album is titled Ultra Drowning (Matador, 1997). These are two albums much more accessible than their predecessors, and perhaps closer to Jefferies’ style than Morley’s.

Yeats recorded Mihiwaka (IMD) under the name Trash, with Bruce Blucher and Paul Cahill.

Russell, a music critic who wrote manifestos on "free noise" and "improvised sound sculptures," is also the leader of A Handful Of Dust with violinist Alastair Galbraith. After a first EP (Twisted Village, 1992), their first album, Concord (Studio 13, 1993), was released. These and other tracks from the early period were later collected on Musica Humana (Corpus Hermeticum, 1994) and Spiritual Libertines (Crank Automotive, 1996). On their second album, The Philosophick Mercury (Corpus Hermeticum, 1994), Galbraith accompanies on violin and lute two long electronic deliriums by Russell recorded live in 1993, Fama Fraternitatis and God's Love To His People (thirty minutes). Now Gods Stand Up For Bastards (Corpus Hermeticum, 1995) includes another track, Dark Lantern Of Reason. Jerusalem Street Of Graves (Corpus Hermeticum, 1998) contains perhaps their most terrifying suite, The City of God.

A CD reissue compiles Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards / The Philosophick Mercury (No Fun Production, 2009).

Russell (under the moniker Dust) also collaborated with Clinton "Omit" Williams on Deformed (Corpus Hermeticum, 1997).

Tusk (Siltbreeze, 1998), centered around the terrifying ugliness of Tusk (twelve minutes of infernal Sabbath with the hammering beat of the Velvet Underground's Sister In Ray), Plane (eleven minutes of confused percussion and found objects), Half (five minutes of dissonances and radio frequencies), Imaginary (seven minutes of funeral moans and delirious cacophony), and Head (eleven minutes of hallucinatory distortion in crescendo), brought the Dead C back to the glorious era of White House.

Russell finally released under his own name Project For A Revolution In New York (Siltbreeze, 1998), comprising two long live tracks (Eraser, a guitar solo reminiscent of Von Lmo's unreleased deliriums, and Recollections Of The Golden Triangle, a pseudo-jazz improvisation for small ensemble in the style of Borbetomagus).

DR503C (Flying Nun, 2000) is an anthology of rarities and unreleased tracks.

Bruce Russell's Maximalist Mantra Music (Crank Automotive, 2000) pays his homage to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music with three extended compositions for bedroom electronics (actually, guitars and keyboards). As cacophonous as its predecessor, Russell's album, like all concept art, is more about the whole than its parts: sounds grow and move, like living organisms, but the overall structure remains the same, a subdued psycho-industrial symphony. The War Between Desire And Technology is almost new age music (by his standards) but On Certain Obsolete Notions will make Lou Reed proud of his disciple.

Painting The Passports Brown (Corpus Hermeticum, 2001) completes the trilogy of solo albums and increases the "atmospheric" quality of his music.

Dead C (Language, 2000), a sprawling double-CD album, collects material ranging from 1995 till 1999. Technologically, it displays broader skills than previous recordings (particularly for samples and tape manipulation), but the inspiration is only occasionally up to the task. The abstract rhythm-less soundscapes Fake Electronics and High Oriental don't accomplish much. The 15-minute Tidewater and the 12-minute Pussyfooting rely a bit too much on simple ideas looped around over and over again. Tuba Is Funny (Slight Return) is chaotic for the sake of chaos (and dadaistic humor). Alas, one is left with the feeling that most of this material is leftovers from previous recordings. The 33-minute Speederbot marks one of their peaks, though, an industrial metronomy of grating noise that flows more or less smoothly, like a cacophonous version of Steve Reich's shifting minimalist repetition. When the trio of Russell, Morley and Yeats succeed, it is often in the merging of free-jazz and raga techniques, and this colossal composition can be viewed as an extreme implementation of that aesthetic. The other winner is the slow, solemn 13-minute blues Drillbit: what Jim Hendrix would have done after Voodoo Chile).

Dead C's New Electric Music (Language, 2002) is a mixed blessing: the gigantic Forever ranks among their masterpieces, but the other four tracks are negligible. As they age, Dead C are becoming less noisy and more structured.

The Damned (Starlight Furniture, 2003) is a more confused work that alternates between free noise and song format (Truth).

Vain, Erudite And Stupid (Ba Da Bing, 2006) is an odd career retrospective that omits some of their best material (e.g., nothing is from Trapdoor Fucking Exit).

Future Artists (Ba Da Bing, 2007) totally annihilated the revisionist experiment of The Damned by focusing on what Dead C do best: absolute chaotic noise with an avantgarde penchant and occasionally a faint rock rhythm. The sophisticated timbric interplay of the 13-minute The AMM Of Punk Rock The 17-minute Eternity, instead, belongs to the class of Drillbit: machine rhythm, dilated psychedelic guitar sounds, apocalyptic bluesy atmosphere, crippling distortions, etc. Unfortunately, the ending is not quite up to the task. Even more authentically blues is the glorious, garbled 20-minute disaster of Garage.

Gilded Splinters (Spirit Of Orr, 2007) collects five Bruce Russell tape Works from 1995 to 2005.

A Handful Of Dust returned with Panegyric (Next Best Way, 2009), two free-form improvisations for glass harmonica, violin, guitar and clavioline.

Dead C's Patience (Ba Da Bing, 2010) was another minor work in a song-oriented format, despite the 14-minute South, which belongs to their "abstract" vein, and the 16-minute Empire, their take on space-rock of the 1970s.

Gate's A Republic Of Sadness (Ba Da Bing, 2010) found Michael Morely flirting with dream-pop (Wilderness, Forever) and chillwave (the ten-minute Trees), although in his own idiosyncratic manner.

The split LP Dead C vs Rangda (Ba Da Bing, 2013) contains archival material.

The original Dead C lineup (Michael Morley on guitar and vocals, Bruce Russell on guitar, Robbie Yeats on drums) reunited for the two lengthy improvisations of Armed Courage (Ba Da Bing, 2013). Both are too long for what they have to say, and betray the rather haphazard way in which they were recorded. Armed begins like a high-speed, hazy Jimi Hendrix-ian jam with frantic drumming, but this is a combination of very poor guitar doodling and very amateurish drumming. Courage begins with dirty buzz and erratic percussion, with some humming and some random piano strumming, sounding like Pere Ubu at their most abstract. When the drumming gets its act together, more noises join the rather disjointed dance, and soon we are listening to what basically amounts to a cover of the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray. But it soon dies out in sheer anemia, and the rest is simply low-key chaos.

The Dead C’s double-disc Metallic OK (Glass Redux, 2017) collects seven pieces composed over several years, notably the 20-minute Back Of A Knife Blues and the 22-minute Excerpt From Motorboating.

The Dead C's double-disc Trouble (2016), recorded in 2013, contains four lengthy improvisations. Bruce Russell and Michael Morley create the usual exhausting hailstorm of guitar noise but there is little coherence, structure or imagination. Primal instincts let loose. Robbie Yeats' drumming is not an asset.

Rare Ravers (2019), one of the worst produced Dead C albums, like an amateurish bootleg recorded on a portable cassette recorder, contains the 20-minute Staver, that begins with lugubrious "doom" drones over steady drumbeat and fluctuating guitar distortion and doesn't get much better, and the more interesting 18-minute Laver, a showcase for distorted guitar with ear-splitting feedback. It all sounds improvised live.

The mini-album Unknowns (2020) contains five shorter pieces and features vocals (which is not good news). The hyper-psychedelic Grunt Machine opens with three promising minutes of wild guitar but the rest is painful, a garage-band with no instrumental skills imitating early Pink Floyd.