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Dean Roberts.
New Zealand improviser Dean Roberts started out playing guitar in the noisepunk trio Thela before becoming White Winged Moth. Now playing and recording under his own name, the guitarist/composer took two years (most of it dedicated to "mixing and fixing") to release the follow up to ‘The Black Moths Play The Grand Cinema.’
Recorded in Bologna with first-time producer and buddy Valerio Tricoli, Roberts was joined by talented members of the Italian improv gentry, including guitarist Guiseppe Ielasi. The result is a genre busting quiet riot. Whispered drones and oblique guitar patterns stretch over assorted unsorted whirs, hums and moans, as Antonio Arrabbito’s drumming propels and flits like a blood-drunk dragonfly. Roberts’ fragile voice is almost otherworldly on the elegantly mournful All Pidgins Sent To War, Palace Of Adrenaline V And E.E. From a spectral murmur to an ominous din, it sets the darkly unsettling yet spontaneously inviting mood.
As an improviser, Roberts is aware of the constant need for discipline, to check and re-check oneself. "From my standpoint I am very critical of the common approach - pop, jazz, punk, metal, composition, whatever. When methods become standard they completely lose their interest for me... my methods for performing require a huge amount of practice and familiarity with the form, and the mode of each piece. When I am close to a piece of music in this way, I can throw it out a bit or twist it around. The ability to do this comes only with discipline and a lot of practice."
Also, he revels in the fact that performing improvised music can prove unpredictably out-of-control. "I think that’s what free improvisation is all about - playing on the point of control/no control. I’ve frequently crashed in this setting, although other times I catch a fire. There is a degree of elimination in my songs, and both me and the audience can easily miss the points of connection that are essential to keeping a performance together. I really enjoy the tension, but yes, that discipline word again..."
While his roots may lie in the autodidactic noise and pop scene of his native New Zealand, Roberts is influenced by a swathe of artists, from improviser Loren Mazzacane, to songwriter Matthew Valentine, composer Tony Conrad to conceptual sound artist Brandon La Belle. The Dead C’s Bruce Russell and in particular his Corpus Hermeticum label ("an institution in that it was the first real window into Avant Garde Music for many New Zealanders at the beginning of the '90s") was a guiding light for Roberts and countless others part of the world-renowned and Thurston Moore-approved NZ noise scene.
"Recording is 90 % of what I do - I spend an enormous amount of time in the studio. The music that I do is pretty time intensive, and especially in vocal stuff it involves a fair degree of Voodoo and state alteration. Therefore, it’s the only way to work, to lock myself out of the world with enough cigarettes and alcohol... I know no other way of working."
Recently much of this recording has been with his new trio with Dafeldecker and Martin Brandlmayer. "Our capabilities instrumentally and compositionally, in engineering and production match, and moreover our friendship keeps it all together. We are all able to say and do what we want, and the vision is entirely collective."
In Adelaide Roberts will play both solo and as a duo with Dafeldecker. "Festival audiences are willing to pay more attention to the art form and practice whereas a club is more of a romantic entertainment for lost night owls and drinkers. I also find that a club audience doesn’t consider the content as much as the presentation. It is also interesting to have some kind of affiliation with an academy, such as the case with the ‘Improvisations’ festival where there is a sort of workshop/discussion forum where we talk about what we are doing so it gets a little bit more under the microscope. I guess the ‘Festival’ is just a different kind of structure."
Lenin Simos
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Dean Roberts plays as part of the ‘Improvisations’ festival on Sun 22 Feb (duo with Werner Dafeldecker) and solo on Tues 24 Feb.
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