Concord

There had been hints of what was to come, both on Dead C and Alastair Galbraith albums, but A Handful Of Dust’s Concord really is the fountainhead from which NZ free noise sprung. There’s something incredibly pure about it —  a clear recording of Bruce Russell, the main conceptualist behind AHOD, and Galbraith, teasing out the potential in the freely explored interaction of strings (mostly guitar and violin) and amplification, with a brief interlude for clavioline and casiotone on “Squeezing Parson Foster’s Sponge”. The side-long “A Brief Apology”, the first track recorded for the album, is particularly choice, a sixteen-minute blinder, with Galbraith and Russell worrying bisecting streams of feedback from their instruments, tearing the listener a third eye as these two simple phenomena become so much more than the sum of their parts.