Avant-garde soundscapes created by From Scratch’s Adrian Croucher, Shane Currey, Phil Dadson, Darryn Harkness and Chris O’Connor were thoroughly enjoyed by a good crowd at the Chamber Music NZ concert at the Glenroy Auditorium on Tuesday night.
There is something wonderfully No 8 wire about From Scratch, who over the past 50 years have raised sound out of invented instruments to high sophistication to create an enthusiastically mesmeric world. Thongophones, tuned drainage pipes of various profiles, are slapped with rubber paddles. An assortment of hung pans are struck with knuckles and rubber-headed drum sticks, string is drawn against tense wire strung over a amplified snare drum and the crystalline phenomena of quartz are combined with visual displays, clapping and stamping. Rhythmic patterns loop in and out of synchrony.
If only the staging had allowed the audience a good look and the instruments’ construction!
Dadson’s work Songs of Unsung Heroes (1989) reprised and transcribed by Currey (2025) occupies the second half of the evening. Dedicated to those "who tame tigers" and ride their backs, these "seekers of freedom from tyranny", the work is complex. Contrasting, interlocking and overlapping rhythmic canons — hocketing — is shared between the players. Dadson’s Arcs and Sparks uses Trom-tubes, Gliss-flutes and whistles, its humour aimed perhaps at the modernism of postwar Europe. Gregory Bennett’s Metroplex (2024) using drums, cymbals, bamboo and nundrums is shadowed by visual material reminiscent of the 1927 film Metropolis with Escher stairs, evolving edifices of cranks and shafts and an obedient populace, all eventually replaced by psychedelic forests. Teresa Peters’ Black Moon (2023) with aerial bells, tuned chimes and bowed bells focuses on a kaleidoscopic lunar regeneration to explore how technology plays on our senses.
From Scratch create a marvellously unworldly Sufic experience, without becoming self-important. They embody Aotearoa’s serious irreverence.
Review by Marian Poole
