Dunedin powerhouse sonic rock group Idiot Prayer is making a welcome return to the stage tonight, ending a nearly three-year musical hiatus.
The trio of guitarist/vocalist Tim ''Tiddy'' Smith, bassist David Ager and drummer Sam Brookland will reunite at their spiritual home, and site of many of their best shows, the Crown Hotel.
Why now though?
''We all like each other, for starters,'' Brookland said.
''We're friends outside of the band. Making a horrible racket is a good way for us to all catch up with one another. We all thought Tiddy wouldn't be coming back for years due to his academic stuff overseas.
"That's why we broke up in the first place. It wasn't some sort of Big Black [Steve Albini's legendary noise project] break-up. We said it was the last show because we really thought it would be.''
Churning through embryonic HDU/Bailterspace-style instrumentals, hypnotic math-minded rock reminiscent of 1000 Hurts era-Shellac and driving Die! Die! Die! style post-punk, as I wrote when I eulogised the band here in this column, Idiot Prayer is one of the great bands of the modern Dunedin era.
Cinematic, powerful, unique, and emotionally charged, their songs are dynamic little movements, flowing like waves, or shifting seismically like the Earth.
''About half the songs are not improvised in structure as such, but more so moving from A to B and back to A is done through cues rather than a count of bars. [It's] what I refer to as living compositions,'' Brookland explained.
''So learning those old tricks and getting muscle memory working again has taken a while. Some of the parts are exactly the same, some are changed just enough to keep ourselves interested. There's new songs and they sound pretty much as you'd expect them to.''
Moving forward, expect more shows, and potentially the release of previously unheard material recorded with Dunedin sound engineer Operation Rolling Thunder's Robert Falconer.
''We used to talk about [Stephen Kilroy's Dunedin psych guru's] Heka as being an example of the sort of band we want to be like. If we're all in the same city at the same time there's no real reason why we wouldn't do something occasionally. That's a big if though,'' Brookland said.
''There's more recordings about. A lot more. More shows, maybe play around the country. We'll see. God knows how much money I've spent on drumsticks alone over the last few months and we still haven't even played the show.''
Idiot Prayer say hello again tonight at the Crown Hotel.
GET ON THE DANCE FLOOR
Dunedin underground music revival project back on track returns with its second outing of the year at Re:Fuel tonight.
The project, founded by Dunedin siblings Hannah and Fin Wall, aims to breathe some much-needed life into Dunedin's alternative dance culture.
Joining the back on track crew for round two is Christchurch DJ Yvnalesca (Yu-Nah-Less-Cah). Yvnalesca came to prominence in the New Zealand electronic scene with brooding, sparse atmospheric beats channelling the energy of the Christchurch cityscape, and the storied history of the early 2000s United Kingdom underground.
Expect house, techno, crates of underground records from all over the world, and one heck of a dance floor.
See it
• Idiot Prayer, Astro Children, and the Violet-Ohs, tonight at the Crown Hotel (Rattray St), free entry from 9pm.back on track presents Yvnalesca with support from Wall to Wall Tonight at Re:FuelFree entry from 9pm.
