TRASCH

Rip It Up, Issue 177, 1 April 1992, Page 14

TRASCH

SYNTH SUBVERSIVES

A more rabid tabloid press than this country possesses might have had a field day: Kids Radio Taken Over By Sleazy Sexy

Junkies or Nippers'Ears Bashed By Synthy Sonic Subversives.

Yes, everyone who's ever done the dishes to the sound of Dick Weir's neoto Notional Radio show Ears, will no doubt be interested to know that the whacky sound effects come courtesy of an engineering team that makes up two thirds of Trasch. The same Trasch now peddling an album called Chemikaze, a visceral, darkly humorous soundscape of tales of addiction to power, to love, but mostly to drugs. Sorry, make that one third. Keyboardist Mike Young flew the coop to Auckland at the beginning of this year and now twiddles the considerable knobs of everyone's favourite station, 89X (but we won't hold that against him). Trasch was spawned when Mike .and Evan Roberts were at school together. They used to get their hair cut by a very strange and already legendary man called Arthur Tauhore. "Evan and I formed a little synth-based band in 1989, really heavily influenced by Joy Division, Depeche Mode and that kind of stuff. Then we discovered things like Laibach and the heavier, more

industrial things you can do with keyboards. We were basically just copying what we were listening to, but then we got together with Arthur

and used his experience playing in bands — he was in a band called Urban Dwellers, and later he was in Bumpin' Ugly. "Then Evan and I started working for Radio New Zealand which was great, because we got access to recording studios. A lot of our time was spent doing children's programmes. Dick Weir was great, he's like a little kid — he'd say 'more effects!' and when he found out we had drum machines and samplers he told us to go for it. Ears is a cool

show. We were allowed to use what music we wanted to, so we had

things like Cabaret Voltaire as backing music. We were able to

influence the kids towards decent music, instead of using horrible stuff."

The sedate studios of the national broadcaster rang at weekends to the sound of their first album, Flourish & Decay which was, if anything, darker and meaner than the new one. It spawned a song called 'Half Man Crazy 7 which

attracted a young film maker called Richard Gibson who turned in a

video which won the 1990 Flying Fish Awards.

After that video, Gibson was a wanted man for all kinds of lucrative ad work, but he came back to produce his second music vid for

'Reason Rhyme' off Chemilcaze. Everyone concerned is at pains to emphasise that the visual interpretations are Gibson's alone, but the new clip is better—and closer to the edge than the first. The clips also illustrate what a considerable factor the professional environment they dwell in has been in Trasch's evolution. Gibson was discovered through a radio contact; the album features sketches performed by those two august newsreaders, Peter Fry and Peter Sledmere. Even the Ears experience played its part in creating the OTT sense of drama about Trasch's recordings and live performances. "Our job was basically creating audio drama and the way we make music is really creating sound effects rather than instruments, because that

comes naturally. It's just creating an aural sculpture and that naturally follows on to live performance." There was the night they called the club they were due to play at and said they'd be an hour late because they'd been in an accident. "They announced it over the PA and everyone said 'oh no'. We'd been with a friend of ours who does latex makeup for films and we turned up with open cuts and gashes all over our faces and Arthur's bald head had a bit of brain poking out—we try to do something every time we play. "Looking back now I think we were initially hiding behind that sort of stuff because we wanted to make a spectacle, but we weren't really confident on stage. Now it's more just us. Arthur will dress outrageously to give people something to look at

and we just put a lot of energy into it. I think people are surprised at how much energy a keyboard band can have."

The liveness of Trasch's approach extends even unto Chemikaze.

There are no sequencers here. Up to 16 individual loops are sampled and played manually and the 'songs' remain unstructured right up to

mixdown time. Their methods have made it difficult for Trasch to work with anyone else.

"When we tried to work with other people they just didn't understand it or got frustrated. Even if they used samplers they couldn't believe that we'd sample a whole riff rather than just a sound and then fuck around with it so it sounded completely different. On Chemikaze we didn't want it to be machine music so everything's played

manually—so some things go out of time."

The influence on Chemikaze are many— including the inner-city urban lifestyle and the inner-city urban drug lifestyle. "We were all pretty heavily into the drug scene at the time, it was the biggest thing in our lives, so it made sense to write about it. But I think we realised towards the end that you can't just write every song about

getting out of it, thafs stupid. So we looked at other kinds of addiction — to power and love. 'Pluck Out Your Eyes' is about the Gulf War, which affected Evan and I because we were in and out of the radio

newsroom all the time. My shift there started the day the war started."

The mark of the stem Euro electro boys' bands like Front 242 is strong too, and if you don't like them you'll have trouble with Trasch.

"The vocals, Evan's and Arthur's, turned out quite masculine, quite butch. Thafs probably because of the way we record them, do heaps of processing, squash the sound up so ifs really condensed and then do about 10 tracks singing the same

thing, so it sounds like an army of people. Front 242 are like that you can imagine an army of people singing." And marching merrily along in jackboots too, in Front 242's case. But Trasch never stray into crypto-fascist territory — it's all . honest blood, guts and power. But have they ever thought about

turning their talents to a funky life affirming little dance tune? "I have, but thafs not Trasch. Thafs something different."

RUSSELL BROWN