Label: Horn of Plenty

ニュージーランドはオークランド発のアール・ブリュット作品!!2017年からフィジカル音源の発表を開始、オークランドの街タマキマカウラウを拠点とする障害を持つ人々のための共同音楽制作プログラム"Mapura Music"の1st LP。30年以上ニュージーランドのアンダーグラウンド界隈で活動、秋山徹次氏との共演やエクスペリメンタル・フォーク/ロック集団Pumiceにも参加するベテランStefan Nevilleがファシリテーターを務めており、メロディックな形式と自由な実験を結びつけた"アオテアロアDIYミュージック"として提示。非常に素晴らしい作品です。







Limited black vinyl LP w/insert

Māpura Music is a collaborative and spontaneous music making program for people living with disabilities set in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. Its facilitator, Stefan Neville (of Pumice etc.), has been active in the New Zealand underground for over thirty years, personifying an Aotearoa DIY sensibility that effortlessly links melodic song formats with open ended experimentation.

On surface level, this collection of improvised group jams verges towards the latter, but soon structures of a playfully melodic sensibility reveal themselves and references beyond the Corpus Hermeticum / Kye axis can be considered. This is neither avant noise nor is it sound collage, but it also barely adheres to any (western) folk, rock or pop song formats.

Kinship might be sensed with other disability music projects such as Reynols and Les Harrys, the anarcho stew of London's Triple Negative and even Basil Kirchin's elaborate 'Worlds within Worlds'. But whilst Kirchin famously used the voices of neurodiverse people as source material – with all its possible implications – here we have the people themselves taking agency and center stage.

A wildly original sound vision is put forward by this fairly constant crew of ad hoc music makers (Jemima Aherne, Hugh Bawden-Hindle, Trevor Bull, Tom Cathro, Allyson Hamblett, Colin Harris, Dave Kane, Cheyenne Minhinnick, Thais Nesbitt, Stefan Neville, Sushannah Shaw, Yung Sung Chen and Kevin Tan) and a wicked sense of humour ripples through unusual arrangements and track titles like 'Here when You Don't Need Me'. Ominous clatter and drone rock give way to mantra-like vocalisations, slide-guitar workouts to sheets of dreamy keys, chaos is summoned and resolved into clarity.