SPIT is the performing title of Ryan Lesley Cockburn. New Zealander by birth, lived all raround my beautiful country, settling in Wanganui to study. Singer in bad late nineties punk rock band, moved to Dunedin, New Zealand in 2002. From there and with the help of many and no-one began sculpting, heart in hand rendered song skeletons, homewired, stuck together with tape. Soft record interventions came next and scouring the fragile grooves, excavating the dust mines, led to wonky, outsider-art turntable percussion machines & collected trash ensembles, full of cast-offs, seconds and contradictions aplently. No fixed agendas, all improvised, though sometimes tracked. Homebody, who's delusions of rock granduer are long past & is required to be quiet, or at least ruin my ears by blasting the headphones after 8:30 most nights.
I am also a sometimes/past member of
EYE - 'Eye is a veritable super-group of locals, ex-pats and ex-ex-pats, and includes Peter Stapleton (fer godssake: Victor Dimisich Band, Pin Group, Scorched Earth Policy, Dadamah, Terminals, Handful of Dust, Rain, Sleep, Flies Inside the Sun and so on), Nathan Thompson (Sandoz Lab Techs, Sleep), Peter Porteous (Empirical, amongst others) and Ryan Cockburn (SPIT).' Active member in 2004-2005, rarely now &
JOJO EF STEVE - 'Spit, Storm and Currin make an all-nighter of it. A haphazard 'group' that sprung very unexpectedly and recorded possibly the best album of the lot, the unique and quite lovely 'A Quiet Night In With Jo Jo ef Steve'. Acoustic-concrete improv doesn't often sound this coherent. One night, one live to air, one gig and one aborted practice does a band make.
Now..........................Moved to Melbourne , Australia Jan 2006. Playing around a bit, getting involved with somethings, not with others. Hopefully learning to be less precious with the passing of the years. No plans for glory.
Influences
Gate, fences, Ernie Althoff, Frayden, pink gats, Dead C, Morning magpie calls over the fresh paddocks of nana's farm, A.M. , the Stumps, CHIPMUNK PUNK, Zond,washing machines with too much sheets in them spinning off centre, early mongolian war chants circa 432 ad, Pumice, Handful of Dust, beetles, Sleep, J.P. Shilo, kids music classes, Kim Pieters, guys 4 track hermitage, The Unknowns, Pateras/Baxter/Brown, Greek radio stations, Christian Marclay,dusty records, Matt Middleton, Scorria, Pumice, Futurians, Luddites, CJA, PVC, Rise of the City Cat Cult, dogs in sacks, Kahu, Ahroha, Alistair Galbraith, fucking etc, etc, etc,etc and always the sound of humming that erupts from my brain when the mouse on the wheel gets his leg stuck again.
Sounds Like
SPIT RELEASES
'Little King Annual', out on Claudia label. Jan 2008. Go to http://www.halftheory.com/claudia/index.php?go=spitlittlekingannual
& get yourself a copy or contact me through this medium.
'The big one is by Spit, also known as Ryan Cockburn, who moved from Dunedin to
Melbourne, where he recorded this album. Cockburn has been turntable and was
a member of EYE, but for this album he picks up a wide variety of
instruments. On the CLaudia website you can find detailed notes on all
instruments used, which include anything from cheap toy guitars, mixers,
microphones and computer. The result is, despite the use of a computer, a
pretty lo-fi affair, but also a pretty varied affair. From strumming the
guitar, feeding the boxes on the floor, to pieces that include drums, such
as the rock like opening 'Etude Pour Un Derive'. The pieces are pretty long
and one could wonder if they aren't too long at times. It could have been
better if Spit would have trimmed things down a bit. But when he bumps in
some variety inside a track, like in 'Cheesegrater For The Knuckles' things
are pretty nice. One geographically very
well defined product.' VITAL WEEKLY
'TRASH MUSIC SPITACULAR' out on United Fairy Moons. 2006.
'Last but not least from UFM is the percussive sound sculpture of Spit. Know nothing about this fellow, but he pulls some fairly interesting maneuvers on Trash Music Spitacular. Opener, “Painting for Prepared Piano (ex. 1),” kicks off with clattery jazz drum/vibes eruptions that sound like lunchroom trays being shook back and forth violently before slowly merging together into a tumbling post Velvets throb, only to cut out instantly. The field recordings of church bells, traffic sounds and contact mic noise on the second track make me think of Organum’s Vacant Lights, an intoxicating site-specific drone/industrial melding. The subtle shifts from mono to stereo on this track are effective. Otherwise we get a shovel scraping and dumping dirt as a rhythmic loop beneath bowed strings and crowd noise, glass gongs gliding over hammered metal and the three part free noise instrumental of “Painting for Prepared Piano,” which could be homage to the first Red Krayola album. Somewhere between Seht, later Sun Ra and even Keiji Haino’s more percussive efforts, Trash Music Spitacular is more nourishing than week old cabbage' & ' God awful shite!'. As above and down below. The sounds inside my head. That thin mecury sound. You know the one....right?
Some projects take time to mellow, to pick up lint and absorb spilt coffee grounds. 'Trash Music Spitacular' was months and months in the making and was an exhibition (at the Segue Gallery this past April), a master's thesis, a group-participation extravaganza, a public relations bonanza (nice photos of the 'unusual artist' in all the papers) and finally now a CDR. And necessarily, no CDR can give you much beyond basic pointers when dealing with such a whirlwind of activity but lemme tell you a little about what went down. You had, firstly, a room and a corridor strewn - I mean, strewn - with sculptures etched with thought on the nature of recorded sound and the various traceries of musickal hardware. Then, every day for two weeks, performances. You had Kim Pieters painting 'notation' onto graph paper while RC 'played' the piece as the ink dried; a 'street horn' - an absolutely massive length of metal piping with a stylus welded onto one end that was then dragged up and down Burlington St; a pile of wrecked furniture, taller than a man, wound with piano wire and played with anything available by RC and Aliki, with harpist Katrina Thomson (Ray Off) jamming along; a cellist in evening dress alongside a ghetto blaster that was being buried under a four foot high mound of coal; two homies on the 16rpm decks, while a drunken idiot rambled on about the secret punk beginnings of Snoop Dogg... that's a few of 'em. Flux as hell, yes? Well, possibly the best thing I saw was one night in the bellringers chamber of the church next door (the oldest church in Dunedin). Cockburn had the actual bellringers of this place perform a 'chance operation' composition, with each ringer assigned a number and him rollin' the dice. Balls like big fluffy dice, this guy.
You'll hear a section of that on this disc - and much else besides. It's really nicely varied, concisely edited - most pieces are fairly short - and gives a good overview of a guy who's a pretty zoned and imaginative cracked-sound thinker. Ryan was initially known to us music-heads around here as the guy who cut records in half, glued 'em back together all wrong, then made a hell of an invigorating racket - there's none of that here (but plenty on Eye's Black Ice CDR, him being a member of that group). He's just, you know, got a lot to offer.
JOJO EF STEVE 'A Quiet Night In With...' United Fairy Moons 2006.
'One radio live-to-air. One gig (described by one of the six people in the audience as a 'catastrophe'). One jam in a basement on a harmonium and bits of concrete. One recording session the night before one-third of the group relocated to Australia ('morning-after' photo above. The balloon illustrating the popular expression 'my muff has tusks' had just been sucked out of the window by a wind vector and blown 300 metres across the city until we lost sight of it). And now - their debut album.But people it is no joke! Take the tape/radio drop-in genius of Spit, the rock-solid repetition and resonance of Rory Storm, and the hyper melodic scattergun texturalism of Ray Off and what you've got is not only surprisingly coherent but also a damned compelling listen. Marvel at the way Storm adjusts a heart-rending two-chord riff to fit in the shifting plates of random sound! Swoon to Currin's lonely and tender balloon solo! Gasp at how Cockburn snatches exactly the 'right' piece of opera/talkback/pop trash from the airwaves at JUST the 'right' time. This is one of my favourite UFM's for the sheer chutzpah and 'uh...what? how?...' of it all. It's pretty, it's stupid, it's deep... it's... ummm... stupid again... Beautifully recorded in vivid 2-track stereo, we dare you to spend a quiet night in with Jo Jo ef Steve and not get a jazzed feeling in your bones. If the Dead C had kept making records in the vein of 'Operation Of The Sonne', but ditched the drums and the electric guitars, they might have ended up here. If the Clean got incredibly lazy and started forgetting to finish songs or turn the radio off or sing properly... 'One out of the box', as the puzzling NZ expression for something unusual goes. And, as for the name: there is no explanation; but somehow it does say it all.' JIM CURRIN (UFM)
UFM 003 $100 Band / Spit 'Old Chronicle'/"Keltic', 'Lament' 10" lathe
OUT OF PRINT
'I'm given to believe that the $100 Band actually started in the North Island town of Wanganui, where Alastair Galbraith was an artist-in-residence at the Polytechnic, and drummer Mike Dooley and guitarist/cellist Maxine Funke were members of Dunedin's own Snares, who were on tour at the time. Reconvening down south, their existence was short but intense, leaving behind some killer gigs and bugger-all recordings; Alastair and Maxine headed bush from whence they occasionally emerge playing short but very sweet duo dates.
Since Ryan Cockburn AKA Spit's CDR on this label is impending, I'll write more on him then; suffice to say that at the time of this record's release Ryan was everywhere, smashing up records, gluing 'em, and spinning 'em into maelstromic (no, that's not really a word) sonic bubonics that were, well, pretty sick. The tracks on this disc are with hindsight too nice by half.' JC (UFM)
yeah sure ryan,, just flat out busy mate. i have alot of orders of stock at the moment for next month and next summers range is being sold nationally now .really important time and its hard to find spare time. if you wanna head over this way one evening then thats probably the go, i do have appointments this week but give me a bell. 0405803529 talk soon owe...
Saturday 8th March Sabbatical is proud to present the launch of our 9th series release 'Stable Government and Adequate Sanitation' by Marcus Cook, otherwise known as Default Jamerson. Supports for this evening are Snawklor, Happy Adults, Free Choice and St. John's Ambience (who will kick the show off at 7:30pm with 90 minute drone piece). At The Afterdark, 565 High Street Northcote. Note: 7:30pm start, $5 Entry. Copies of the EP will be available at the launch, and afterwards from Sabbatical.
these pithy witticisims and glib ness Hellespontians, since they refused to be subject to Dareios. These had in former times also been hardly dealt with by the Paionians: for the Paionians from the Strymon had been commanded by an oracle of their god to march against the Perinthians; and if the Perinthians, when encamped opposite to them, should shout aloud and call to them by their name, they were to attack them; but if they should not shout to them, they were not to attack them: and thus the Paionians proceeded to do. Now when the Perinthians were encamped opposite to them in the suburb of their city, a challenge was made and a single combat took place in three different forms; for they matched a man against a man, and a horse against a horse, and a dog against a dog. Then, as the Perinthians were getting the better in two of the three, in their exultation they raised a shout of /paion/,[1] and the Paionians conjectured that this was the very thing which was spoken of in the oracle, and said doubtless to one another, "Now surely the oracle is being accomplished for us, now it is time for us to act." So the Paionians attacked the Perinthians when they had raised the shout of paion, and they had much the better in the fight, and left but few of them alive. 2. Thus it happened with respect to those things which had been done to them in former times by the Paionians; and at this time, although the Perinthians proved themselves brave men in defence of their freedom, the Persians and Megabazos got the better of them by numbers. Then after Perinthos had been conquered, Megabazos marched his army through the length of Thracia, forcing every city and every race of those who dwell there to submit to the king, for so it had been commanded him by Dareios, to subdue Thracia.
Hey it was heaps of fun playing with you to, we really liked your set and so did the young hottie neighbours. When were you thinking of coming to Sydney?
ow! i like what yr saying! it MAY be a possibility..... (tour)(khomet still together)(etc...) fringe fest is in april this time. there will be no lines of flight though if you havnt heard.... but a new 4 night concert series... more info later... im organising a GIG gig for the same time with the mr sterile assembly.... maybe it can all coalesce.... into something GREAT?
