[Photo via]
Do The Dead C need any introduction? The band’s status among devotees of noise and Kiwi rock is near mythological. And their long absence from performing in the U.S. has confounded younger listeners who might have discovered the band in the mid-aughts when Ba Da Bing issued the compilation Vain, Erudite, and Stupid and then started reissuing long-out-of-print classics like DR503 and Eusa Kills. This year saw the release of Trouble, comprised of five twitching, droning, and pummeling tracks that thwart any attempt at dissection or categorization. Having long abandoned any semblance of traditional song structure in favor of visceral, blown-eardrum improvisation resembling the band’s most famed track “Driver UFO,” Trouble might yet be The Dead C’s rock opus. So to say the anticipation for their brief September tour (hitting only Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Louisville’s Cropped Out Festival, and Los Angeles) was high would be to massively understate it. Despite the absence of drummer Robbie Yeats, who unfortunately was unable to make the tour, this hour-plus set from Michael Morley and Bruce Russell is a tribute to the band’s endurance. Backed with crashing and ebbing prerecorded drum tracks from Yeats, the duo stretch the bounds of guitar-based music, resulting in a performance that is utterly and uniquely The Dead C.
Acidjack and I recorded this from a central location in the church, combined with a board feed from the engineer Gus. The sound is outstanding; the performance extraordinary. Enjoy!
Download the complete show: [FLAC] [MP3]
Stream the complete show:
The Dead C
2016-09-20
First Unitarian Congregational Society
Brooklyn, NY USA
Recorded by acidjack and Eric PH
Produced by acidjack
Soundboard (engineer: Gus) + Schoeps MK22 (FOB, DFC, PAS)>KCY>Aeta PSP3>>Zoom F8>2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CS 5.5 (compression, fades, normalize)>Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ, effects)>xAct 2.36 (tags, encode)>FLAC ( level 8 )
Tracks
01 improvisation
• Buy Trouble and other Dead C releases via Ba Da Bing/Grapefruit
• • Buy Harsh 70s Reality via Siltbreeze
Love the fisheye photo of The Dead C in Brooklyn. May I have permission please to use it in an article about The Dead C for the research e-magazine of Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand (where Michael Morley works)? Who should I credit for the image?
Thanks
Lesley
Please email at nyctaper@nyctaper.com and I will provide you all of the information you need.
thanks so much for this, brilliant. what’s the deal with yeats being absent, though? are they literally just playing on top of his loops because if so that’s fucking stunning.
Yeah they’re playing over Yeats’s drum loops. I think he was absent b/c of visa issues… He was surely missed, but clearly they made the best of it…
It was mind-boggling how much mileage they got out of those loops. I was SO disappointed Yeats wasn’t there, then so thrilled at how Morley and Russell made lemonade out of lemons.