A Handful Of Dust
Dream Songs
FRANCE DECIMATION SOCIALE DSCDHOD 2 x CD (2025)
This is the famed New Zealand experimental noise-rock combo with some otherwise unheard musical blasts salvaged from 2004 and 2019. Handsome double CD set with six panels and an insert too, released on Romain Perrot’s label which leads one to assume the French noiseician and composer is a major fan of this more unstructured side of the works of Bruce Russell. The other famous combo is The Dead C, which some might argue is less noise and more experimental rock, perhaps in the mode of Sonic Youth, occasionally featuring songs even.
I personally have been a latecomer to these Flying Nun, Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum releases, and if I’d been more prescient I could have bought them on vinyl in the late 1980s and early 1990s, or even investigated the Siltbreeze or Majora records that did well to bring The Dead C to an American audience. On today’s release, Russell (guitar, electronics) is joined by Alastair Galbraith on guitar, electronics, and violin, plus the notable figure Peter Stapleton on drums and electronics. Stapleton, owner of Xpressway label, ought to have his own shrine of double CD sets; I have a fleeting impression that he himself was rather ephemeral and only managed to appear with A Handful Of Dust as and when on an ad-hoc basis. All “legendary” rock groups would be grateful to have an unreliable freaky drummer like Angus MacLise was for The Velvet Underground.
On CD 1, the main chunk of your grey and cold afternoon is occupied by ‘Twelve Turns of The Rail’, which occupies your chest cavity or takes out a lease on your psyche – whichever is more affordable – either way, you won’t get out in a hurry from this solid onslaught of feral, abstract, non-rock genius. I don’t mean that it’s loud or obnoxious, far from it – we’ll leave that to the Japanese assassins armed with murderous guitars and deathly boxes of feedback. A Handful Of Dust worm their way into the widescreen cultural apparatus by dint of persistence and insanity, taming the wild serpents of noise into a beguiling, heat-filled carpet of strange vapour, as “present” as the weather hanging over a bleak landscape. This particular groink was captured at Lines of Flight (a music festival for insects) on 01/10/2004, and may or may not be related to a file-based release called Twelve Turns Of The Rail On Walls Of Emerald released in 2021 and recorded at the same date. The actual venue was None Gallery in Stafford St Dunedin, blessed with a “claustrophobic basement’ which would seem to be ideal listening conditions for this barrage of nerve-shredding infections. The trio lock into this grisly task and don’t relent for the entire duration, until the grisly caterpillar of hate is fully exorcised. CD-one has bonus cut ‘In The Clear’, some four minutes of filler guitar amp drone that still captivates with increasing sense of tension and doom, if not as intense as its taller brother.
Turn now to paper insert. Bruce Russell pays tribute to Peter Stapelton using his vocabulary. Stapleton of The Terminals as well as other achievements who died in 2020. Russell underscores that Peter was “an inspiration” to him personally, respects the drummer’s conviction that the music truly mattered, and proceeds to bring in quotations from Guy Debord, T.S. Eliot, and Mark E. Smith. Now disc two is slotted in the groove and we may savour 30:11 mins of ‘Taking Cover’ recorded much later in 2019, and something to do with a film by Phoebe Mackenzie. Enjoying parts of this bake mainly for the evil scraping sounds generated I assume by Galbraith using his violin like a surgical implement for extracting the infected alien-implant from cortex, but there’s also an insistent churn produced either by gtr or electronics or both, wrestling in a thick milkshake. Drumming is barely audible and manifests more like a stain left behind on the rug of an exorcist, and it’s in the shape of Beelzebub. While not as full-on as ‘Twelve Turns’ above, this underground cable-car journey to the underside of Pluto is reaping ample rewards in the alienation and puzzling gloomery emotion stakes, and once again it’s a document of superhuman effort in sheer stamina. How do they keep going? Even just listening to it is exhausting enough!
Cover photos of landscape and cars on road next to bridge (by Russell) aren’t really very exciting, but may be making some statement in the grand scheme of his vision which I haven’t yet divined. Received 27/08/2025.