Music Arcades: Various: Dirt Beneath the Daydream - A Collection of Sound from Aotearoa/New Zealand

I decided I wouldn't be lazy, for a change, and I'd dig out the February 2009 issue of The Wire so I could read more about the tracks on this CD and the artists who made them. It turns out there's nothing about the tracks or artists in the magazine. However, I did skim an interesting article about Hamilton Yarns, an obituary for Davey Graham, and a guide to the recordings of William S Burroughs. That was just while I was waiting for my cranky old iMac to complete some audio editing tasks.

All the information about the music on the CD is on a dedicated web page. Slightly confusingly, the tracks themselves aren't available online, though a bunch of others that were submitted-but-not-selected are available — the b-list, I guess.

I wonder about the expectation artists have when they put their tracks on compilations like this. Is it just like putting a message in a bottle and hoping for the best? Are any of them sufficiently career-minded to calculate what tracks they should include? If so, what's the calculation? I'd imagine few people who are not professionally motivated, either as label owners/A&R people or promoters, would give a CD like this a really close listen. Most, like me, would just give it a casual spin. So the ways to stand out to casual listeners are: (a) to be outstandingly beautiful, (b) to shock, or (c) what else? Since (a) is really hard — beauty being in the eye, and all that — (b) seems the most reliable tactic. Yet the pieces on this CD that shocked me did so in thoroughly alienating way. So that's not much use.

If you'd asked me yesterday to name a Aotearoan/New Zealand experimental musician, I'd have only come up with Peter Wright, and he's not included here. I'd heard of Rosy Parlane — who is — but didn't know where he came from. Sadly, if you ask me again next week, those are still the only two I'll be able to name.

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