The Escalation

Limited pressing of 150 LPs 

An occasional project for two guys who lived in the same small town in New Zealand. Peter Wright has had a long career – emerging from the post-punk Industrial miasma of early ‘90s Christchurch into an open landscape of drone-based guitar improvisation. Bruce Russell’s career is even longer, hobbled to the shadow of his eternal supergroup, the Dead C. His solo guitar playing is really the relevant touchstone here, starting as an experiment with the live support of pre-recorded analogue tape-loops, eventually he felt capable of defying a paying audience with just a guitar. Out of that tragic struggle he has emerged as a plausibly flexible improviser in duo settings. This album documents a summer afternoon at the Lyttelton Coffee Company in 2014. Filmed for the ‘speculative documentary’ On an Unknown Beach (dir. Adam Luxton/Summer Agnew) – see it where you can. The session was also recorded by Peter Wright on a borrowed zoom recorder, and this LP is the eventual result. Frequencies hover, half-baked rhythms emerge and subside, riffs die in embryo and ‘we all go home barefoot’. In the words of Thomas Pynchon – ‘right fuckin’ on!’ Presented by Bunkland, Distant Bombs and Feeding Tube in an edition of 150 LPs.