STORAGE by K-Group/Omit

"Not a split release by these two New Zealand artists, but a collaboration, carrying on from their 1997 single on Colorful Clouds for Acoustics. The weapons of choice are analogue synthesizers and the approach is slowly unfolding drones and drifting veils of sound that part and close across the listeners third ear like storms on the surface of Jupiter.

K-Group is Paul Toohey, previously of noted NZ geological drone ensemble Surface of the Earth, who also has a solo album under this name on Corpus Hermeticum. Omit is Clinton Williams, who has also recorded for that notorious NZ un-easy listening label, as well as extensively on his own Deep Skin imprint.

During 2000 and 2001, having failed to bring down the global economy with their now-forgotten Y2K scam [remember Y2K? - I thought not], this pair of Hidden Masters turned their efforts towards late-night kitchen jam sessions during their holiday moments. In these each would fire up an antiquated analogue synth and the resulting aural collisions would be recorded on a handy hard drive, then tweaked, inverted, eqd and edited to produce the immaculate slabs of sound contained within the tiny grooves of this ludicrously out-dated analogue sound-reproducing format.

These seven tracks simulate the calm of the newly sedated patient about to undergo a surgical procedure, just as he or she is starting to slip into unconsciousness. You can listen, but just when you think youre hearing something, you realise that 12 hours have gone by and you have a new and inexplicable scar on some unlikely part of your anatomy. Too late you realise that the sound you can hear at the very edge of audition is not this recording, but the sound of forty metal robotic insects starting to eat their way out through your still-sedated navel.

Waking with a start in time to flip the album over on your turntable, you notice that subsonic frequencies have begun to rearrange the contents of your mantlepiece into a veritable Morris Dance of inanimate objects, when you thought the audio had not yet begun to play back. A vestigial bass throb starts up in the back of your cranium, as very slow-moving if not actually stationary spacecraft begin to land in the garden. Three days later they are still hovering as the seventh and final track of thr album begins to play, and infinitesimally subtle stereo effects start panning in impossible permutations audible only between your shoulder blades. Apparent suspension of time, delirious interludes, interference with the basic laws of physics, all of these effects are possible results of listening to the beautifully poised, finely polished and unutterably beautiful sounds contained in this simultaneously forbidding and inviting artifact.

If, like me, these are all the things you look for in a sound recording, then look no further. If its merely music you require, then I suggest you meddle not in the affairs of your betters and proceed directly to the nearest chain CD store and stock up big time." -Bruce Russell [Noise Legend], Lyttelton, NZ, May 2002.