New Zealand guitarist Dean Roberts played guitar in Thela, an avantgarde trio
(also featuring Rosy Parlane)
that released two albums, Thela (Ecstatic Peace, 1995) and
Argentina (Ecstatic Peace, 1996), each one
containing lenghty artsy/noisy jams, halfway between
Dead C and
Massaker.
After the band broke up,
Roberts started a solo project named White Winged Moth with
I Can See Inside Your House (Poon Village, 1996), a collection of
eight instrumental vignettes situated haflway between
John Fahey and Derek Bailey.
It was followed by Silo Blanket (Formacentric, 1997) and
Ribbon Arcade (Formacentric, 1998), that Roberts used as testbeds
for his experiments of digital sound manipulation.
His first solo album, Moth Park (Formacentric, 1998), presented a
different artist. The music is spiritual and ambient, psychedelic and
ethnic.
His masterpiece is the sprawling suite Kompakt Arcade on
All Cracked Medias (Mille Plateaux, 1999).
There are traces of Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt in his painstaking work on
building sound for the sake of sound.
And The Black Moths Play The Grand Cinema (Mille Plateaux, 2000 - Staubgold, 2004)
adds a three-unit combo and numerous instruments that help to release some of
the claustrophobic tension of the previous masterpiece.
The fusion of glitch pop, live instruments and droning minimalism is one
of his peaks.
Aluminum (Erstwhile, 2001) is a collaboration with Austrian improvisor
Werner Dafeldecker.
Roberts converted to slo-core with the mini-album
Be Mine Tonight (Kranky, 2003), that consists of four (long, slow) "songs", arranged (mainly) for guitar, drums, bass, piano.
All Pidgins Sent To War (first ten minutes of the first track) layers romantic piano notes, jazzy hi-hats, hypnotic guitar strumming, and oneiric, floating whispers.
Six minutes of languid guitar tones introduce
Disappearance on the Grandest of Streets (second half of the first track), whose three-minute sung part glides over soft, warm, busy drumming.
Smash the Palace and What Nerves you Got is slightly more upbeat, almost threatening in the way it releases harsh beats and tones.
The 11-minute Letter To Monday is perhaps the most intimate, seductive and evocative of the batch, and its last three minutes lull the listener towards
a celestial, hummable ending.
The return to song structure of Be Mine Tonight
(three long slocore songs for voice, piano and guitar)
led to
Autistic Daughters, that debuted with Jealousy and Diamond (Kranky, 2004), a trio
project with contrabassist Werner DAfeldecker and
Radian's drummer Martin Brandimayer. Their six songs
(plus one cover) are long and convoluted essays in
sound and word painting: the xombie-like out-of-tune
litany of A Boxful of Birds, the spastic
post-gospel crescendo of Spend It On the Enemy,
the ghostly country-music of the title-track (Neil
Young on valium). Thankfully, they occasionally
stretch beyond the basic Nick Drake-ian lament. The
lounge music of Florence Crown Last Replay
mutates into cosmic signals and slow-motion jazz
jamming.
The Glasshouse and the Gifthorse (the standout)
boasts a dreamy atmosphere and a central intermezzo of
futuristic county-fair music that hark back to Tim
Buckley's early works.
As far as intimate easy listening goes, this album
represents an utter failure: it doesn't sound intimate
(too elaborate and intellectual) and it is certainly
not easy. Dean Roberts rediscovered slocore and pop
music but, like Jim O'Rourke before him, failed to add
anything unique to them. Last but not least, Roberts'
vocal skills are mediocre at best. The charm of the
textures and the dynamics are often spoiled by his
unattractive and monotonous singing.
Autistic Daughters' Uneasy Flowers (Staubgold, 2008), a seven-movement
psychological concept album, lacked the punch that could make it memorable.
It excelled at quietly shaping fragile atmospheres, especially towards the
end
(Hotel Exeter Dining Room, The Richest Woman In The World).
Not Fire (Erstwhile, 2020), his first album in 12 years,
collects songs composed between 2014 and 2019.
Dean Roberts died in 2024 at the age of 49.
