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No The purposeful wanderings of New Zealander Dean Roberts have brought him in contact with key collaborators such as Werner Dafeldecker, Martin Brandlmayr and Matt Valentine. With his Autistic Daughters group, he articulates the effect of urban landscape on personality via a complex mythopoetic ‘blues warp’. By Jon Dale. Photography by Derek Henderson The Hotel Exeter Dining Room initially appears to be a fairly unprepossessing venue hidden out the back of the Exeter Hotel, one of Adelaide’s better known watering holes. Over a number of decades, it’s been the drinking spot of choice for a good portion of the South Australian city’s artistic reprobates. The pub’s clientele takes in seasoned drinkers, university students and the after-work crowd – the usual mix for a pub whose main charm is its seeming lack of interest in the gentrification project undertaken by the surrounding city. Why New Zealand artist Dean Roberts would choose the venue as the name for the final song on Uneasy Flowers, the latest album by the Autistic Daughters trio he shares with Austrian musicians Werner Dafeldecker (on guitar and double bass) and Martin Brandlmayr (on percussion and computer), is an entirely more surprising matter, at least at first. “I thought it sounded so great,” he laughs, ““The Hotel Exeter Dining Room” conjures images abounding. Then actually, after coming there” – Roberts played several gigs at the venue during 2006 and 2007, one of which appeared in The Wire’s 60 Seismic Performances feature (issue 276) – “I thought it’s cool scenery for a song.” If you’ve been to the pub, and know it as your local, you might find his scenario fairly odd. But this actually keys into one of Roberts’s main interests. Over the past decade, starting with 1999’s solo And The Black Moths Play The Grand Cinema, through 2003’s Be Mine Tonight, and the two Autistic Daughters albums, Jealousy And Diamond (2005) and Uneasy Flowers, he’s developed a conceptual songwriting approach where mythical characters meet the everyday, and transfiguration and disappearance play out in personal and public zones that are haunted, in both senses of the word – the ghostly and the troubled. Recalling Michel de Certeau’s claim that “haunted places are the only ones people can live in”, the figures populating these songs wander freely between texts and are trapped by circumstance or heredity, engaging in argument and interaction. And the Exeter Hotel, ultimately, is exactly that kind of space. For the most part, however, Uneasy Flowers develops the fable of Rehana. The opening “Rehana’s Theme” sets the scene for this multifaceted protagonist, working more as an archetype – or a reference to differing archetypes – than any one identity. Furthermore, while there is explicit reference to Rehana in “Gin Over Sour Milk”, this character also exists as part of a cast of players channelled by Roberts in order to articulate the different sides of the album’s morphological tale. Roberts’s music has moved through the free noise of his original trio Thela, with Rosy Parlane and Dion Workman, through the intimate guitar studies of his White Winged Moth releases, and on into his current mode, where structurally complex songs are played as a kind of meta-rock, echoing the melancholic pastoral of groups like Talk Talk and songwriters like Roy Harper. There is a core ‘necessity’ to this music that recalls such ‘dark night of the soul’ collections as Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers. In our interview, Roberts repeatedly restates the importance of the Autistic Daughters to the development of this particular aesthetic. Between them, the trio create a fluid, weightless atmosphere that’s all the more remarkable for the weightiness of its concerns. Their playing is exceptionally limber, with Dafeldecker’s swooping bass supporting Roberts’s guitar, which in turn punctuates and accents lyrics through a kind of elemental ‘blues warp’. Brandlmayr’s percussion, much like his playing in Radian and Trapist, moves between bedrock and pointillist, and he charges the songs with tense, fervent energy. Autistic Daughters formed during Roberts’s sojourn in Vienna, where he started collaborating with Dafeldecker (they have released a duo album, 2000’s Aluminum, on Erstwhile). Following Be Mine Tonight, Roberts travelled to Hamburg to play a gig with Dafeldecker, where they discussed a project that would use Roberts’s songs as frames for explorations of pop and rock. Brandlmayr was asked to join soon after as, Roberts explains, they “wanted to incorporate this kind of detailed acoustic environment [of Brandlmayr’s playing]. Though the collective input was very open, it was to centre around thematic songs... Playing around with the architecture of songs, I guess.” Although it connects with some of Roberts’s previous records, the first Autistic Daughters album, Jealousy And Diamond, still feels like a massive step forward. There’s a scrupulous focus to its seven songs, and Dafeldecker’s contrabass is particularly stunning, tracing slow-moving lines and punctuation points through tracks like “In Your Absence From The Street”. The end result was a meticulously designed project, whose thoroughness was reflected in its title, a tip of the hat to French nouveau roman writer Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jealousy. “In a very loose way,” Roberts says, “lyrically, it was about the ridiculous paranoid detail observations in that book.” The record also sounds like the end result of a completely collective process. Roberts continues, “[Brandlmayr and Dafeldecker] both took on vital roles of arranging, and adding and subtracting to the equation. They would do details that would respond to what had been added by [producer] Valerio Tricoli and me. Martin would add some layers, Werner would mix, responding to the dimensions and architecture in a very creative manner... With both of our records, writing, composition, production and improvisation all occur simultaneously, as part of a record making process.” On the road, the trio became less interested in replicating Jealousy And Diamond’s arrangements, their improvisations becoming the basis for some of Uneasy Flowers. The intense period of recording this album had the group unlocking their habitual instrumental language as never before. “We reached this really – at least for me – quite unusual point where all of the instrumental roles were sort of pooled, so there weren’t any rules about roles,” recalls Roberts. “For example, the really loud, savage guitar stabs in “Gin Over Sour Milk” were Martin. There are guitar parts and chord patterns that Werner played that became signature songs, and then there are vibraphone parts that I played. This was a kind of curious melding of our different skills.” Uneasy Flowers balances the tautness of its material with an interpersonal freedom placed in service of the album’s overarching fable. Its only real parallel of recent times is something like Scott Walker’s The Drift. Their songs are both stylistically itinerant and internally cohesive, such that, despite the complex musical and lyrical references and relationships dotted through the record, Roberts can still refer to its key threads as “desolation, a kind of old European song: that was kind of what the overriding atmosphere was.” For a good while, Roberts himself lived an itinerant, almost nomadic lifestyle, dossing down on the couches of friends in New York during the late 1990s, subsequently floating across the European continent, through extended periods in Bologna and Vienna, before re-settling in Auckland earlier this decade. This transcontinental movement profoundly changed his music. Looking back at his ‘song’ records, glossing the transmutation within his body of work from instrumental to lyrical settings, you can observe him increasingly addressing urban topography and its impact both on individuals and groups of characters. This began with And The Black Moths Play The Grand Cinema, originally released on Mille Plateaux offshoot Ritornell and reissued by Staubgold in 2005. Recorded in New York with Tim Barnes, Matt Valentine and Charles Curtis, it drew on the crepuscular soundworld of its predecessor, the electroacoustic glitch modules of 1998’s All Cracked Medias, while subverting that album’s interest in non-narrative development. Around this time, he was inducted into the shifting line-up of free folk act Tower Recordings, appearing both on their classic Folk Scene, and Tower lynchpin Matt Valentine’s Space Chanteys, an album featuring some of Roberts’s most unhinged guitar playing. 24 THE WIRE DEAN ROBERTS
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Dean Roberts at ANT’s studio, Auckland, New Zealand, March 2008 fixed posit

Dean Roberts at ANT’s studio, Auckland, New Zealand, March 2008

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