ALASTAIR GALBRAITH - "Morse" LP

Alastair Galbraith - Morse LP (Digital Regress, 2019) Exceptional and largely genre'less avant folk/rock expressionism out of NZ's Dead C/Peter Jefferies/Sandra Bell etc. scene, originally released on Siltbreeze in the early '90s. "A central figure of the New Zealand underground since his days in The Rip over three decades ago, Alastair Galbraith has worked alongside scores of Kiwi legends as a multi-instrumentalist and solo artist. Morse appeared in 1992, a Siltbreeze/Xpressway co-release, and despite Galbraith's centrality to the magical NZ mix, the record is an 'outsider' classic, a peerless piece of Antipodean collage, diverted folk, and minimal psychedelia. Galbraith plays almost everything on Morse, with periodic assists from Bruce Russell, Robbie Muir and others. Mutable, unfussy arrangements - for acoustic and electric guitar, piano, violin, and some proper post-VU thudding - gather and crumble around obliquely phrased double-tracked vocals, sharing an enigmatic yet intuitive e