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Duga​-​3 +

by Gianmarco Liguori

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Limited edition 2xLP repress with compilation of earlier material. Packaged in heavy "tip-on" gatefold sleeve.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Duga-3 + via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 3 days

      $30 USD or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $7 USD  or more

     

  • Full Digital Discography

    Get all 20 Sarang Bang Records releases available on Bandcamp and save 25%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Duga-3 +, Espiritu Santo Variations, E-Music : Electronic Music From the Mod-X Archive, Student Flat Reunion, Instant Compositions, The Way In Is The Way Out - The Music of Murray McNabb, 1966, Every Day Is A Beautiful Day, and 12 more. , and , .

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Energy Wind 06:48
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Indian Milk 04:47
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5AM-PRN-KSV 06:58
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Duga-3 03:10
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Sphinx 05:46
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Alpine Bossa 04:34
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Bronze Frog 05:31
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Penta 04:00

about

To know Gianmarco Liguori as a musician as I’ve done since he first popped up in my brothers’ inner city Auckland record shop in the mid-1990s is to be constantly surprised and challenged. Turn your back on the North Shore-bred outlier of Italian/New Zealand descent for the barest of moments and he’s already joined a handful of stray South Islanders and an American actor and voice artist in an instrumental outfit with a popish European soundtrack edge named Salon Kingsadore.

The next minute he’s dusting down a posse of Auckland-based jazz greats – keyboardist Murray McNabb, trumpeter Kim Paterson, percussionist Miguel Fuentes, Brian Smith on horns and flute and bassist Andy Atwill – and galvanising them to new experimental heights, prodding a lost Queen City post-punk legend onto record for the first time in decades in the process.

Kim Paterson had been Marco’s music teacher in younger years, while Murray McNabb was an open-minded jazz composer and musician he’d long admired.

“I’d seen Murray playing at the London Bar and he was always my favourite piano player up there. He’d be playing bass lines on a synthesiser with his left hand and the piano with his right hand and I always thought that was quite close to something I’d like to be working with. So I got in touch with him, it was probably through Kim, and I invited him to do some stuff in the studio.”

Stolen Paintings, Ancient Flight Text and Duga-3, the trio of 2006, 2009 and 2011 album collaborations and the Penta/Beat Instrumental single from which this fine compilation is drawn chart a progression from more formal sound into the less familiar and uncharted.

The swish Latin jazz sway of Stolen Paintings, the chilled Alpine Bossa, pristine Penta and crisp clear-eyed Jobim’s Cigar are the sort of place you’d expect someone to end up after years of playing and planning together not as the first LP out of the box.

With the ensemble trimmed down to a core trio with Marco playing some wicked bass and chief collaborators’ McNabb (keyboards/organ) and Paterson (horns/drums) for Ancient Flight Text, the sound hardened and contracted into an almost danceable Krautrock that fizzed with adventure and nice little touches on songs that were tougher and funkier and more in the groove and less in the head than the first album.

Running into Marco by accident in the city one day in 2008, he played the first five tracks he’d recorded, high above the Queen City on Mount Eden as the dark night sky stretched out to a blackened Waitemata harbour cut through with shattered light and the endless south. When I got my hands on the finished CD the following year, I slotted it into the car deck and headed for a thin winding road up and over the Hapuakohe range I’d once crested as a young teen with my family which linked the Waikato River valley to the Hauraki Plains. I wasn’t sure the road existed anywhere except my imagination. That day with Ancient Flight Text soaring and Ascending Spirals with yet another friend, Danse Macabre’s Wes Prince providing the electronic pulse alongside Bronze Frog and Sphinx hinting at long lost treasure, Ancient Flight Text proved the perfect soundtrack to the quest.

Shortly afterwards in March 2009, I caught the trio with Miguel Fuentes performing in Conch, a small dance music store up on Auckland’s Ponsonby Road.

“The first song is all over the place, but by the second they find their centre,” I wrote shortly afterward for my Mysterex online blog. “I close my eyes to listen, but there’s so much going on I just have to look. Miguel Fuentes is shaking the llama bones and together with Kim Paterson is drumming up a fearsome groove while Marco adds runs on the guitar, and Murray McNabb colours and provokes, dropping hooks in with ease.”

“They run through six or so songs from the album. I’d be hard pressed to say which tracks. They all merge into a glorious whole in which Paterson’s moving soulful horn and drum groove blurs into Fuente’s masterful percussion into McNabb’s sea of sound into Marco moving from guitar to bass on which he holds down a white funk line Holger Czukay would be proud of, before slipping midway through into a piece of controlled feedback that evokes free noise at its most sonorous.”

I should have known not to get comfortable with the sound. That there’d be some devolution and breaking down of the sure and determined rhythms on Liguori, Paterson and McNabb’s next offering. It was the road they were on after-all. But Duga-3 proved the most disconcerting recording yet built as it was on a bed of persistent muted electronic and manual percussion which maintained a gamelan-like persistence. Poked and prodded by flashes of keyboards and horn, discombobulated words, mournful trumpet, bubbling synths, programmed drums from Wes Prince on Translucent Formlessness, monk-ish incantations and distant guitar arriving like a radio signal lost in space finally finding its way home, the songs draw you into their unsettling orbit like fine alcohol, strange and bitter to the taste at first, but soon becoming the intoxicating new norm.

“I happened to meet Murray at a time when he was drifting further and further away from – well, that’s what it looked like – from “jazz” and he was exploring other avenues,´ Marco explained on the New Zealand music history site Audioculture in April 2015.

“I definitely knew Dr Tree and some of what he had done, but it was only really when I got to know him that I became aware of all these other sides of his music. It wasn’t just the jazz. He was doing a lot of stuff – experimenting – weird electronic music, he was even doing…ahh, what can you say?...Strange disco music, disco jazz, solo piano. He was working with Chinese musicians.”

“By the time we got to Duga-3, it was much more collaborative than the earlier ones, because on the earlier ones, it was mostly tunes, a lot of that was preconceived. Duga-3 was more spontaneous and the tracks were built up from atmospheric things like field recordings. It materialised a bit more organically.

“I gave them freedom on the new record within the parameters of whatever it was that was starting the piece. There was a lot of music that never made it onto the record.”

Andrew Schmidt

credits

released August 20, 2020

GIANMARCO LIGUORI
electric and acoustic guitars, Korg Polysix, percussion, treatments and electronics, drum machine, electric bass, African piano

MURRAY MCNABB
piano, Korg Polysix, EDP Wasp synthesizer, Fender Rhodes, Hammond organ, bamboo flute, electronics

KIM PATERSON
drums, trumpet, percussion

MIGUEL FUENTES
bata drum, congas, bongos, llama bones, bells [C2, C3, D2]

ANDREW ATWILL
electric and acoustic bass [C1, C3, D2, D4]

BRIAN SMITH
tenor saxophone, flute [C3, D2]

JUSTINE CORMACK, DIANA COCHRANE
CHRISTINE BOWIE, ASHLEY BROWNE
string quartet [C2]

WESTON PRINCE
synth pulse [D1], electronic drums [B2]

STEVEN TAIT
snare drum [D1], wah wah technician [D3]

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Sarang Bang Records Auckland, New Zealand

Record label founded in 1996 by Gianmarco Liguori. Based in Auckland, NZ

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