Bilders - Nictate CS (Grapefruit / Sophomore Lounge, 2024)
"Nictate" available on cassette and digital. Nictate's Side A is mostly Direen/McManus/Swanson spillovers from the Dustbin relay sessions, an alternative route from the LP. But this is no residuum. In 22 minutes, six tales of marginality pass by cafés of experimentalism and heresy, intersecting with psycho-acoustic secrets known only to the sound producers. Guests include distinctive piano from Tony Crow (The Thieves, Lambchop), the grace of Hawk and a Hacksaw's Heather Trost (violin) and Jeremy Barnes' scene-setting accordion (Hawk and a Hacksaw, Neutral Milk Hotel).
Side B is no B Side. Fifteen micro-songs by the NZ Otago Bilders group made up of Direen, composer and multi-performer Steve Cournane (Alpaca Brothers), William Henry Meung (found instruments, outlier circuit-bent synths) and long-time Dunedin denizen, expatriate American violinist Alan Starrett (also erhu). The music grew from a book published by Grapefruit in 2023 ('100 Years of Darkness'). The result was fifteen
micro-tunes that fit together like an armadillo’s tiles. Separation, horror, war brutality, the mentally ill, the beauty of children … jagged and smooth fragments of an entire story-film, compact and committed as any Bilders project.