Dean Roberts – Not Fire

“Not Fire is the outcome of close to a decade in which I experienced something of a creative block. I was writing and recording, in my absence from the music scene not recording and releasing albums, I remained musically active in the period 2008-2020. Living in Aoteroa New Zealand for the period 2008-2014 I lived a reclusive life in solitude on a 6 hectare coastal rainforest property. While only about 45 min from Auckland city, but about as remote as one could be with just a small community, off a dead end road which had a vista of the spectacular and wild west coast iron sand surf beaches of Auckland, which during the summer periods, these beaches, Kare Kare and Piha are swarming with day trippers and surfers, but during the Autumn and winter months are more or less completely empty except for the od- hardcore winter surfer ( myself being one, some days I would swim and surf alone on this seemingly endless beach) I was splitting my time between teaching at Elam School of Fine arts in Auckland, I would commute 3 days a week from my isolated cottage, leaving early each morning in darkness on the winding road through the Waitakere forest and returning in twilight, or if lucky with time I could catch a western sunset over the the Tasman sea from my little house perched high up on the mountain range overlooking the wilding and raging seas breaking on the coast. This decision to embrace this lifestyle in 2008 was following a decade of itinerant touring, playing European gigs with the the Autistic Daughters on 2 tours, and playing some horrendous amount of solo concerts across Italy, Spain, France, China, Australia. In 2007 alone , if memory serves, I would have played 120 European shows, and suffered 3 or 4 36 Hour flights from New Zealand to Europe.. I was burnt out… This period wasn’t all isolation. I was working with Brent Hayward, formerly of the Kiwi Animal and Shoes This High , and I played and recorded regularly with him and his group Fats White, a madcap collection of vagrant musicians who would play 6 hour sets in Auckland Pubs and dives. I became involved with the Audio Foundation, a government funded organization for touring experimental music in NZ on a board with Richard Frances, my former band-mate and dear friend Rosy Parlane, Clinton Watkins, Jeff Henderson, Zoe Draton and others. I had a band, the Absolutionists with guitarist Sam Hamilton and drummer Chris O”Connor, which played regular gigs in Auckland in the period 2008-2013, Inspired by “Guitar Absolution in the Shade of the Midnight Sun” by Jesse Harper of Human Instinct fame. This group morphed into The Blue Ladies to include Jeff Henderson (horns) and Hermione Johnstone( Prepared Piano), and I worked with with the arts collective known as “et al” who represented New Zealand at the Venice biennale. I was head of sound for films and installations for the collective. Later in 2008-2011, I was commissioned to make a piece, a song cycle entitled ‘Red Memory’ which was made for the MAU Theater Forum by invitation of choreographer Lemi Ponifasio. This was a kind ‘opera’ inspired by the writings of the late ecologist/ sociologist Geoff Park. I wrote a libretto steeped in NZ colonial history, and thus the work was maybe too colloquial for an international audience so it was never released. For this work, I employed Paul Taylor (Drums), Chris O’Connor( Percussion), Marie Thom ( Cello/Bass), Matthew Sunderland ( Lead Vocals), and a String Quartet. This was an hour long piece that was performed 4 times and sadly there is scarce documentation of the show. But it was during the development period of this piece that I was concurrently writing the songs that appear on Not Fire, – namely, “Paul”,”Kids”, and “Heron”.. Paul and Kids were recorded in my afore mentioned shack/studio on the west coast of NZ.. Also in 2008 took a commission for a permanent sound installation in an outdoor space in a sculpture park called Brick Bay which has commissioned artists to create work in this wild landscape and so I made a text- based multi speaker sound trail in the forest using a text of mine inspired by Geoff Park again and used the voices of prominent actor Rena Owen( Once Were Warriors) and Barry Jenkin( a famous NZ FM Radio Host and DJ). This work was re-commissioned and sold to a private investor who had me install the work on their property in southland New Zealand, making this the 1st piece of non sculptural or object based “sound art” to be sold on the art market in New Zealand. (apparently). I worked as an art installation technician for Artspace Gallery and the Auckland City Art Gallery, and I was living itinerant between Auckland and Melbourne. In Melbourne I was working with a team of people from the Strines and Rear View galleries, and playing occasionally in the Improvisational music scene, memorable gigs were playing in duo with Mike Cooper, solo gigs at IMA in Brisbane, Make it Up Club, Adelaide at the Hotel Exeter.. Too many to remember. .. I found myself back in NZ, and had a part-time lecturing position at Elam School of Fine Arts heading critical studies and sonic arts, and concurrently engaged in an MFA/ Post Graduate Diploma, studying and teaching concurrently approaching 40 lead to a kind of burnout, and I was also working again with the Artspace organization as in-house preparator and technician. It was through working in the art world that I began to work as an assistant to the award winning filmmaker and artist Vincent Ward (In Spring One Plants Alone, Vigil, The Navigator, What Dreams May Come, Map of the Human Heart, Alien 3, Children of the Mist), and I became his wingman. It was Vincent who encouraged me to get back into music and it was through working with him on his Audio Visual shows that my work was spotted and I was head-hunted to compose music for the Lemi Ponifasio MAU dance company. The 2014 show ‘The Crimson House’ was commissioned to perform at festivals in Europe including Theater De la Ville Paris, Molier Theater Sete, Linz and The Holland Festival, and it was months of development on the road, starting in NZ and then Austria, and huge shows in these festivals. I didn’t play on stage but from the sound booth front of house, and the noise and music needed to be played live using Ableton Live™ because the Butoh inspired dance sequences were not fixed, so I had to keep my eye on stage for cues.. The brief for this work was Xenakis and Black Metal, and Lemi the director loved the music of the golden age of Mille Plateaux, so that was my directive. For this I composed very noisy drone based sound beds, and drew a lot of the material from my catalog, including “Red Memory, All Cracked Medias, and sheets of sound that were used as a score to this dance work which featured a cast of Kiribati, Samoan and Maori dancers, an extremely complex light and sound show. While this show was touring the spring and summer festival season in 2014 I flew 3 maybe 4 times back and forth from Europe to New Zealand. The travel and work load was taking it’s toll on my physical and mental health, and so in 2014 I decided to live in London, because the Company was mainly working in Europe and it would make it easier for me to access the continent for gigs with the MAU dance company. It all came to a sudden end when the show was dropped from a festival in Athens which subsequently bankrupted it and so the show was canned, leaving me with no other plans.. I retreated to my friends studio in Surrey and demoed some ideas, but didn’t make a masterpiece but learned a lot about analog recording and production techniques whilst there. During this 6 month stay, I lived in London and worked with a close friend Travis Hefferen- an old friend who had a sound recording studio in the East End. I would work for him doing night shifts mixing commercial music and sound design. This was a fairly unfruitful period except for a full-house solo show at Cafe OTO and a period working with Heather Leigh at the studio is Surrey to produce her album ‘I abused Animal’. During this time I left central London and moved to live at the TRAK recording studio in Surrey with my mentor Joe, and with it’s close proximity to Gatwick Airport, and very cheap flights,I soon found I was coming to Berlin almost every week, as my cohort of friends are here, cheaper living day-to-day, and so I eventually extrapolated myself from the UK and made my base here in Berlin in summer of 2014. I arranged an Italian tour playing solo, and in the spring of 2015 toured Italy playing shows solo and with Stefano Pilia, and it was on this tour that these songs started to come to life, I also took in a 10 day writers retreat in Umbria in rural central Italy, where I could write in solitude, and developed some of these songs there. Following this tour I returned to Berlin still living out of a suitcase and squatting friends houses, until getting a semi-permanent residence. A chance meeting lead to me being invited to guest lecture at the dBs Academy( a division of the University of St Mark’s and St John, UK, which set up a satellite school in Berlin). This lead to an offer to develop a lecture series and to supervise Dissertation/ Thesis in the field of ‘Critical Studies and contextual Awareness’ which I spend 6 month writing and then engaged in teaching and lecturing full-time. The workload in academia was not super conducive to creative musical work however, but I had a few sporadic gigs, playing improv in the “echtzeitmusik” scene, playing support slots for Lee Ranaldo, Thalia Zedek and Seth Frightening. I produced records for Victor Herero and Julia Reidy consecutively at Funkhaus Studios, and with my students produced numerous performances of Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music”, Phill Niblock’s “guitar 2 for 4” and John Zorn’s “The Book of Heads”. These were just academically based learning exercises. I was lucky in my teaching module to be able to have a guest lecturer visit monthly, and so in my classes we had lectures and workshops with Tim Barnes, Mouse on Mars, Roger O’Donnell(The Cure/Berlin/Psychedelic Furs ), Ashley Paul, Andrea Parkins, Mike Bulloch, Danny Butt, Thalia Zedek, Simon Reynolds, Bob Ostertag were among the guests I could bring into my class, and eventually Andrea Parkins joined me and became a senior lecture and we headed the program together. Fast forward to 2018, and 19th nervous breakdown ensued and because of stress I left my University job and worked solely as a freelance language advisor to a left-wing news organization. In early 2018 my partner Erin Lang organized a tour of Mexico and Canada where we shared the bill, myself solo and her project Foundling, which was quite an odd coupling but it was good to road-test my new material solo, because playing live can sometimes be the best way to figure out what one wants to do with a song. On returning to Berlin in the summer of 2018 I was a little lost for ideas and spent most of that year working with Erin on her vegan catering business, and had a failed attempt to open a record store, as the winter came on I retreated to Australia in early 2019 to visit family and regroup, and during that time played a single concert in Brisbane and gave a lecture on Tony Conrad at the Institute of Modern Art.. In this period in Brisbane I started to collaborate with Leighton Craig and Sandra Selig AKA Primitive Motion and we had a weekend of recording together at Sandra’s studio and some of the material recorded became sound beds over which I would compose songs for Not Fire. On returning to Berlin in April 2019, I played a single show with the group Perlonex for their 20th anniversary at Ausland, I only playes 2 shows that year, November when I debuted the Not Fire material with the band consisting of Erin, my old friend Boris Hauf on Piano, Emanuele Porchinai on guitar, and Andi Stecher on Drums.. Stepping back to August 2019, David Bryant (Godspeed You Black Emperor/ Set Fire to Flames) had moved his studio The Pines from Montreal to Berlin, and set up in N.K. a building that had housed a venue, artists studios and recording studios, but was by now abandoned and just housed David’s studio. David was going back to Montreal and offered me the studio to work for 6 weeks, and there I worked in solitude day and night on making Not Fire, with some recordings made with Andrea Belfi(Drums) and Emanuele Porcinai (Guitar, and production) at their studio and migrated back to my studio for tweaking. For the technical geeks, the Pines Studio has an excessive collection of vintage gear, Neve, API and Studer pre-amps,Coles, AKG and Neumann Microphones, and all of Godspeed’s custom guitars and vintage Fender amps, all at my disposal, I used David’s guitars more than my own, a custom built Telecaster, Travis Bean aluminum guitar, and few sprinklings of 12 string acoustic, which are hardly audible but do have some presence. This was a long way from recording with my TASCAM 4 track in New Zealand. On finishing this tracking phase of extensive late night recordings through to the end of the Berlin summer, I decided to work with Giuseppe Ielasi in the final stages of production and mixing. Giuseppe is a very close friend of over 20 years, we have had many many hours of listening and discussing productions of albums we love, and our relationship in terms of creativity and realization verges on telepathy and so I handed it to him to mix and master. I flew to Milan to spend 5 days with him, and in this procedure Giuseppe suggested I keep out of the studio and leave it to him, because – and rightly so- if I am to be in the studio fastidiously combing through each track, by the end of the week I would lose perspective of the vision of the overall, which I had already pre-mixed and settled on such as track sequence and mix/production techniques, or be driven insane from hearing the material over and over. So I would meet Giuseppe each morning for a briefing on what songs would be mixed that day, then I would roam the parks and piazzas of Monza as a flâneur. Giuseppe and I would meet for pranzo and discuss directions of the mixing proecess. Over these late afternoon , long Italian style lunches we discussed production styles, and references to other producers who’s work we admire and respect, names bandied about in discussion were Mitchell Froom, Tom Verlaine, Trevor Horn, The Blue Nile, Mick Harvey, The sound of Memphis Ardent Studios, Lo-FI and Hi Fi aesthetics and how to harmonize a lot of different elements ( because in this case, the tracks were comprised of material made in many different recording locations, ranging from an iPhone recording in a garage ( the foundations of Say After Me), a stereo recording made in my shack studio in the forest in New Zealand ( Paul/Kids), Live recordings from a concert with Chris Abrahams and Paul Taylor (Not Fire), and free improvisational meditations made in Sandra Selig’s studio with Leighton Craig in a tropical storm in 40 degree heat in Queensland, through to very precise Hi-Fi tracking made with Andrea Belfi (My Diviner) and finally the majority of the guitar and vocal parts done at The Pines Berlin.” – Dean Roberts

Label: Erstwhile Records – ErstPop 003

Format: CD, Album, Stereo

Country: US

Released: 2020

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