The Dead C’s Clyma est mort (1993) is the record of a live gig for one person. Tom Lax was running the Siltbreeze label in Philadelphia and had come to New Zealand to meet the artists he was releasing. He heard The Dead C at their noisy, improvised best, turning rock music on its head with a free-form style of blaring, loosely organised sound. Leading a second wave of music from Dunedin, New Zealand, The Dead C were an assault against the kind of jangly pop that had made the Dunedin Sound famous during the 1980s. This book uses The Dead C and in particular their album Clyma est mort (1993) to offer insights into the way the best of rock music plays vertigo with our senses, illustrating a sonic picture of freedom and energy. It places the album into the history of independent music in New Zealand, and into an international context of independent labels posting, faxing and phoning each other.
By:
Darren Jorgensen
Edited by:
Jon Dale ,
Jon Stratton
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 197mm,
Width: 127mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781501386954
ISBN 10: 1501386956
Series: 33 1/3 Oceania
Pages: 144
Publication Date: 07 September 2023
Audience:
General/trade
,
Professional and scholarly
,
ELT Advanced
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgements An American visits New Zealand only to find that nobody wants to play You wouldn’t play like that if you didn’t know what you were doing In which the band find themselves in front of the whole country An Englishman does not share the droll humour of the local people The natural born gifts of the drummer On the poetics of the Bible, and the day jobs of the artists Looking the Horse in the Mouth In which a correspondence is established, and an exchange of like views The Port Chalmers Sound The cells of the body return to their unliving state References Index
Darren Jorgensen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Western Australia. He is the co-author of Wanarn Painters of Place and Time (2015), co-editor of Indigenous Archives (2017), and editor of Bush Women (2018).
