A Handful of Dust were (are still?) the most radically weird of New Zealand bands. Ask legendary free-improv guitarist Alan Licht, who wrote a paean to this release:
“Hahaha! Dude, don’t you realize you can keep the guitar out and twiddle knobs at the same time? Just ask Keith Rowe…or, better yet, Bruce Russell. Rather than starting off as a Chuck Berry/Freddie King copyist (hey, those were different times), Bruce seems to have innately recognized his place in (post-punk) rock and roll as an electroacoustician, skipped the fingering exercises, and logically embraced the guitar as an accessory to his amplifier. (Not just any amplifier; a Concord, as immortalized on his 1993 Twisted Village album of the same name). That’s what I call progress.
Indeed, when Bruce began cutting these “sides” in the early 90s he was essentially sui generis in New Zealand—with no noise scene to speak of he recruited other renegades from the then-prevailing Flying Nun indie rock corps, namely Alastair Galbraith & Peter Stapleton, to accompany him in his alchemical quest beyond the tedium of band rehearsal to rock-contextual free improvisation. He called it “free noise,” but his efforts should one day be recognized as New Zealand country music—the sparseness of the recordings, the high, lonesome sound via howling feedback, capture the remoteness of the South Island (which is practically at the bottom of the world) like little else. A decade and a half after he initiated A Handful of Dust and issued his one-voice-in-the–wilderness “What is Free?” manifesto, the Flying Nun bands are ancient history and the New Zealand noise scene is (reasonably) active. Like I said, progress.
Alan Licht
Brooklyn NY May 2008 “
