Post-rock is a done-to-death descrip­tion but as a sem­a­phore of intent it still serves a cer­tain pur­pose. First coined by music-journo Simon Reyn­olds as a term to describe pro­gress­ive music “using rock instru­ment­a­tion for non-rock pur­poses, using gui­tars as facil­it­at­ors of timbre and tex­tures rather than riffs and power chords”, its use was rap­idly spread dur­ing the 90s by breath­less writers sud­denly over­whelmed by seem­ingly-infin­ite pos­sible music-futures. Reyn­olds fur­ther expounded:

per­haps the really pro­voc­at­ive area for future devel­op­ment lies… in cyborg rock; not the whole­hearted embrace of Tech­no’s meth­od­o­logy, but some kind of inter­face between real time, hands-on play­ing and the use of digit­al effects and enhance­ment.


… which in itself has turned out to be suit­ably ambi­tious, as in gen­er­al attempts at an amal­gam of real-time instru­ment­a­tion and digit­al frip­pery have turned out to be a big hor­rible mess (with not­able excep­tions, of course).

How­ever some have man­aged to find a kinda cau­tious way-for­ward through this exper­i­ment­al mine­field, and on Sat­urday night four pro­gress­ive music­al groups take four indi­vidu­al post-rockin’ approaches to decon­struct­ing sound with­in the codi­fied meta-lan­guage of rock music:

…some of Wel­ling­ton’s greatest rock explorers…

The Pos­tures will have you shakin’ yer booty and shak­ing in your boots with their disco/doom rhythms com­bined with pier­cing tones and a punk deliv­ery. The Stumps are quite pos­sibly the Grate­ful Dead for the 21st cen­tury… nox­ious jazz-fusion is admin­istered a good spank­ing to with­in an inch of the (cur­rent) law. Join The Dukes of Leis­ure on an idler­’s stroll through huge spaces of gentle melod­ies sur­roun­ded by walls of viol­ent and engulf­ing noise. And Black Boned Angel is über-ambi­ent doom-met­al cre­ated from massively over­driv­en instru­ments… the aur­al equi­val­ent of a tequila and opi­ates-bend­er fol­lowed by a five-day cry­ing jag.

SATURDAY APRIL 14th
SAN FRANCISCO BATH-HOUSE
10$

The last Black Boned Angel per­form­ance: