A Handful of Dust – The Drum Is The Shaman’s Horse LP Feeding Tube Records

With the death in 2020 of long-standing occasional third member Peter Stapleton (percussion/electronics), A Handful of Dust has regrouped as the core duo of Alastair Galbraith (violin, guitar, cello, piano, drums) and Bruce Russell (guitar, electronics). This new set of live-to-four-track recordings from January 2022 is the first album to be wholly recorded “in the studio” since 1995’s Towards a Soundtrack to the “Anabase” of St-John Perse. Committed to tape at the Rugby Hotel in Dunedin, the four-track recordings were played back in the room where they were made and recorded again, this time to Android telephone, to make a digital mono master which you hear on this record. Unadorned, brutal and sonically austere, this new set captures the “wild Mercury sound” for which this long-standing unit is rightly feted among cognoscenti of the Antipodean New Thing. Three pieces that will pop your third eye in seconds flat. Astral travel for now people. “Duck and Sally” continue their unplanned career in the extreme abuse of the rock n’ roll tool kit. Drowned phoenician sailors bob disconcertingly to the surface while the captain’s tower rocks to a sustained monomachy ‘twixt Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, brought back from the grave for that specific purpose. Don’t be shy — please jump out of your window. You know you gotta trust us, when you need a friend…Co-released with Carbon Records.