music.
Maybe the first thing you need to know about Vorsen’s gig tonight is that frontman John Halvorsen will be playing through a modest 30W Tiny Terror guitar amp.
"The bass player has one 15-inch JBL playing through an old vintage 100W amp," he says. "We are not loud."
Powerful, yep. He’ll own that. Loud, not so much.
"We are using the small, sometimes inadequate PAs the venues provide," he says of the modus operandi of band’s tour. "We are not flying stuff in like The Gordons used to. We don’t have the massive PA like The Gordons may have had once, or Bailter Space."
This detailed inventory of the band’s equipment roster is triggered by a question about the challenge facing music venues in increasingly residential downtown areas.
No complaints so far, Halvorsen says. Not about Vorsen. "And believe me, there are people just waiting to call us out on that, because of the reputation that The Gordons and Bailter Space ended up having.
"I have been trying to counter this loud thing for a long time."
There’ll be a range of opinion about whether such revisionism is likely to get much traction, but there’s certainly work to do.
A review of Vorsen’s first single, Terraformer, on the Undertheradar site, introduces Halvorsen as a "noise-rock pioneer", before repeating a quote attached to his storied ’80s band The Gordons: "arguably the most sonically challenging New Zealand act of their generation".
The review goes on to say the new song pummels listeners with "near-inhuman power and precision".
Those emphases notwithstanding, it’s a very good review. Halvorsen is clearly more than a little pleased with it.
And indeed Terraformer captures the sort of dark pulsing energy harnessed back in the day by the likes of Joy Division and Magazine.
But Vorsen, Halvorsen’s newest band incarnation, is no one thing, at least in part because the songs they are touring, and on the new album A World On Fire, released this week on Bandcamp, draw on more than three decades of songwriting.
It means that the album’s final track, Floating Point, while evoking the furious buzzing of early Halvorsen influences such as Wire, also suggests the earlier swirling psychedelia of Traffic. Third single Faster Than Light summons Springsteen via Swervedriver.
Halvorsen himself describes Terraformer as punchy, but is also quick to highlight the emphasis on melody through the album.
When he picks up the phone in Wellington to chat, it’s the day after a final late-night practice for the southern leg of the A World On Fire tour.
"We are trying to learn Terraformer because it is a brand new song for the band," he says. "I wrote that back in about ’91 or ’92, recorded it back then, so it is an old song for me but it is a new one for the band."
Vorsen is a parallel project to the extant Bailter Space, Halvorsen confirms.
"It is no more or no less than Bailter Space in my own mind. In fact, it is everything because it is current, it is very important to me."
The Gordons, whose 1981 self-titled album picked up the inaugural IMNZ Classic Record award in 2013 and the re-release of which in 2021 went to No.3 in the NZ Music Official album chart, effectively morphed into Bailter Space in the ’80s, and has continued to record and tour. However, Halvorsen’s Bailter Space bandmates are both New York based.
While forging its own path, the new band is bound to ring a few bells for long-time fans, Halvorsen concedes.
"A lot of it has the raw energy of the early Gordons — and I am talking about before the recordings really, so only people who were there would know what I am talking about.
"It does have some of the tunefulness and melody of Bailter Space and the avant gardeness of The Skeptics. So, some of those aspects of prior bands are there. I touch on them all a little but I am not trying to be any of those things, they are just inherently part of me, I can’t avoid that. I can’t avoid writing something that might sound a little bit Bailter Space, a little bit Skeptics and little bit Gordons."
Beyond the common denominator of their sing-songwriter frontman, the three-man roster is a recurring theme.
"I love three-piece bands," Halvorsen says. "I love the dynamic range ... it just works for me."
Of all his bands, only the Skeptics was bigger.
"It is actually challenging, if any one of you is lagging, or not up for it, things can suffer a lot more than, say, a five-piece band," he says.
It certainly makes for a busy time up front, especially on songs where he’s overdubbed an extra couple of tracks on the recording, he says, and has to emulate three guitar players and sing as well.
"You just do the best you can ... it is possible."
For Vorsen, Halvorsen is joined by drummer Steve Cochrane, who he bumped into in a fish and chip shop, and bassist Hayden Ellis, who came recommended.
Their job has been to get their heads into Vorsen’s songspace.
"I am a songwriter, that is what I do. I’ve been daily writing songs, all my life and this particular project, before it was called Vorsen and before it was a three-piece, an actual band, I was writing daily songs for a three-piece band ... so I do have a lot of songs there," he says.
And while some of the set list are tunes written in recent months, Halvorsen is pleased to see that some of the older songs have stood the test of time, Terraformer and World On Fire among them — songs that appear to reference both the outsized avaricious dreams of this century’s billionaire class and the world they look likely to leave in their wake.
"I wrote that over 30 years ago, both of those songs. Absolutely relevant, absolutely relevant today right?"
They continue the somewhat dystopic, sci-fi flavour of Halvorsen’s output that stretches back to The Gordons, but which now carries the extra imprimatur of a lifetime of observation, he says. It’s been a process of trying to peak through the clouds to see what’s going to happen.
"And I have been right about a few things," he says.
"I am 64 this year. I don’t necessarily expect to be relevant these days, or my songs, especially songs that I wrote so long ago. But they are standing up."
The gig
- Vorsen plays Dive tonight, with Allophones and Dale Kerrigan.
