Wendyhouse: Puddlekopf (digital outlets)

More than 25 years ago I heard an album by the slightly challenging but enjoyable avant-garde/literary-cum-music group Wendyhouse out of Wellington which used samples, spoken word and noise.

I sent off my $15 and joined their fan club and received some little handmade magazines and such. It was kinda fun.

But I lost touch with them until Bryce Galloway (who may be Mr Pudding) got in touch about this new CD and magazine project which seems to a have a Dada/Surrealism element. It involved exchanges of ideas, music and words between Mr Pudding and EE monk in Germany.

Each recorded some vocal pieces and instrumental music which the other could use as they saw fit by matching (or willfully mismatching) the words with whatever piece of music they liked.

That sounds a bit messy and haphazard but the result – not for lay people or those outside the temple of experimental sounds – is quite interesting.

The Best Worst Artist Ever is a whimsical if bleak spoken word piece over what sounds like loops and passages on cheap electronic gear (sign up if you enjoyed John Cale's The Gift in the Velvet Underground) and Feel Your Last Best Worst Artist which follows is folksy piece which brings to mind the spoken word/music work on Auckland's Unsung in the early Eighties and Front Lawn.

That Remindings Me is a pretty wee song of bizarre and pessimistic imaginings over eruptions of synth noise.

Meltflakes Pop is electropop with disruptive elements and is annoyingly catchy. Think early Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark if they has a sense of absurdist humour. It's kinda cool.

Some of the same lyrics are appropriated for Meltflakes Unpop with a helium-sucking vocal which sounds like Yoko Ono processed into The Goon Show.

We're probably not doing this justice by such analogies but this is one of chance recording and drawing (in the booklet) which you need to figure out for yourself.

Just An Action Movie at the end is a spoken word ballad which namechecks Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Marky Mark, Charlton Heston, Ernest Borgnine . . .

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here