A Bridge Over The Lagoon

Last Light is the glorious confluence of the UK-based and Aotearoa/NZ born Dean Brown and Ben Spiers – names that might be familiar to anyone who has followed the post-Corpus Hermeticum school of hiss and klang as it’s spread out across the world to coalesce in little pools here and there. Their album A Bridge Over The Lagoon is the latest stop on a trajectory set flowing out of small town Aotearoa, hastened by the fire lit by Le Jazz Non.

Dean Brown is best known as Little Skull. A basement Florian Fricke, creating grainy chamber miniatures with the same latticework intricacy as the delicate handmade dioramas that serve as the covers of his records. He was (is?) also a member of Nova Scotia, purveyors of reed-heavy skree clouds – a band whose existence feels more like a rumor than a fact and one of the final acts on Peter Stapleton’s Metonymic label.

Ben Spiers mostly performs solo and has produced a spartan architecture of lonely electricity since the late 90s. He offset the romanticism of his contemporaries in Wellington (Campbell Kneale, Antony Milton, Bill Wood) with a skeletal directness. His guitar: hard edges hidden in gray shadow. Wood and metal ringing out into a void, the air charged and alive. He is also a member of ecstatic free maximalists Glory Fckn Sun and a number of duos (Seen Through, Tea Dust etc) imbued with the same dark intimacy as his solo work. He moved to the UK where his solo voice became further and further refined, taking on a melancholic halo – late night semaphores floating on winter sleet.

Last Light shines differently from it’s members’ respective pasts – it is not the earth rending blaze of Glory Fckn Sun, nor the candlelight glow of Little Skull. There are hints of the burnt out star cinders of Total or the rumbling flow of Flies Inside The Sun, but with much more of a sense of optimism than those comparisons would imply. The first side is a travelogue of movements over which the spirit of Peter Stapleton hangs heavy – long rolls of low percussion creating fields over which the guitar crackles and hangs suspended, carving the air.

Much is written about alienation and isolation as being foundational to the underground arts originating in Aotearoa/New Zealand, but A Bridge Over The Lagoon is a testament to optimism and connection. A testament to acceptance and patience. This is the sound of two bottom-of-the-worlders, now decades deep into their own respective sound rivers and hemispheres away from their homes striking a vein of triumphant unity again and again and again.

A guitar and amp producing sounds that sit like hard facts smoldering in space. Instruments pass by, continuously re-contextualizing each other – a series of silhouettes in grainy half-light.

Let this last light billow out from your speakers into the darkness of this horrendous year. Let guitars and drums and electricity tumble gracefully.

A Bridge Over The Lagoon is a bloom in the night.