DR503

It always seemed puzzling how DR503 was received in its time – given that Flying Nun, the independent label who released it, had already backed resolutely uncommercial music by the likes of From Scratch, Marie & The Atom, and The Skeptics, it surely wasn’t too out of leftfield. But perhaps what’s so unique about DR503 is the way it reconfigures a set of reference points that weren’t so much a part of NZ independent music’s lingua franca – the corroded, crumbling edges of post-punk; the structuralist impulses of groups like This Heat; the free rock of the likes of Sonic Youth – and blurred them into something that was hard to trace in a clear outline. The presence of non-musician Bruce Russell as sonic disruptor was maybe the group’s ace up the sleeve, but the lackadaisical songs of Michael Morley helped obfuscate matters, and Robbie Yeats’s drumming either tried to pin down a moving target, or pushed the melee along. There’s a clutch of Dead C ‘classics’ here – the woozy “Max Harris”; the anti-epic “3 Years”; the psychedelic delirium of Russell’s spoken-word “The Wheel.”