Nick Bollinger explores the colourful sound worlds of Wellington turntablist Alphabethead.
Alphabethead Photo: supplied
Topography is a bright, noisy, often disarmingly tuneful mostly instrumental set that plays like a travelogue for your ears, guiding you in extraordinary detail around a series of alien landscapes.
Topography Photo: supplied
Though the impression is often that of a full band - with drumbeats, basslines, big chords and solos on sometimes-unidentifiable instruments - Alphabethead is in fact just one person, Wellington musician David Morrison, and his chief instrument is the turntable.
Most of the raw material for his moving sound pictures comes from vinyl records - from classical orchestral to children’s party music - which he scours for the tiniest sound fragments, which become the building blocks of his own compositions.
These are compositions in the truest sense: highly structured, with themes and motifs, repetition and development, building to moments of symphonic grandeur.
Sometimes he’ll collapse distinct musical styles into each other, like in ‘Way Down In The Lowlands’, where a harmonica and vocal-shout evoke the delta blues while prog-rock synthesisers unleash their arpeggios, like flocks of exotic birds sweeping across the landscape.
Alphabethead’s essential hardware might not be that different from a DJ-musician like DJ Shadow, but his sensibility is something else entirely.
The name Alphabethead is the kind of alias with which Captain Beefheart might have christened one of his musicians. It’s in the same category as Drumbo, Winged Eel Fingerling or The Mascara Snake, and you might hear hints of Beefheart’s absurdist humour in these tracks.
But the musician I’m more often reminded of is Beefheart’s old foil Frank Zappa, particularly in the sped-up passages of the march-like theme ‘The Red Planet’.
One of the liberating things about sampling from the world of recorded sounds is being able to put instruments together that might never have been in the same country, let alone the same room. In Topography’s title track you’ll hear above the rich percussive and chordal landscape a couple of horns, one high and plaintive, the other deep and solemn, calling and answering each other, like a conversation that’s taking place across continents.
At other times any relationship to conventional instrumentation falls away entirely, and it’s more like the random racket of modern urban life has suddenly found a rhythm, and organised itself into a kind of industrial folksong. Try ‘Replaced By Machines’.
The total effect is cartoon-like, full of stylised shapes and brightly coloured blocks of sound. But it might be more accurate to call it collage; a mass of unrelated forms reassembled to create a new whole.
There’s an obvious parallel with the wonderful visual collage Morrison has created as the accompanying artwork. But without the visuals it is still, to coin a Zappa-ism, a magnificent movie for your ears.
Topography is available on Bandcamp
