J-mz Robinson profile
TMA-1 totally defined the sound & the direction of kRkRkRk in its early period, & much of the label's original reputation for bizarre experimentalism stemmed from J-mz's unique & eccentric tastes in art & music.
Born in NZ, J-mz spent most of his childhood & early adolescence in Australia. This accounts for his special passion for 80's punk & new wave music of Australian origin (No, Severed Heads etc…). J-mz shared Peter's fondness for NZ Knoxian madness - but it was this interest in musical kitsch, punk rock & early electronica (Residents, Crass, Kraftwerk) that really impacted on kRkRkRk & TMA-1 in the 1991-94 period.
Contemporaneous
with TMA-1 was J-mz's solo project, NoTV, which
continues to the present day. Although J-mz made important contributions
to the recording & production of
TMA-1's many releases, his approach to sound recording & music compostion
is most evident in his solo work. Even more than Peter, J-mz was an advocate
of the one-take philosophy. Sometimes this resulted in a less than pristine
end product - but the presence & energy of his music more than compensated.
Compared with Peter, J-mz was also a more obviously autobiographical songwriter. Anxieties & obssessions, romantic entanglements & the sheer frustration of living in the freakscene, in a straight, middle-class city like Christchurch, have always been bread & butter for his music. A natural pop-artist, J-mz has always displayed a special talent for elevating the banalities of everyday existence to the rarefied plane of universal experience. For example, it has always been entirely natural for him to write songs about going to the shops, being bored at university, making cups of tea, watching the cats scrapping etc… A kind of kitchen sink poetry permeates J-mz's music, occasionally dark & moody, often playful &, despite strong inclinations to noise & all-out experimentation, surprisingly charming & accessible.
Always busy collaborating with other artists, TMA-1 represented only a single (if fairly important) thread of J-mz's activities in this area.
Between mid 1993 & mid 1994 he was involved with a bizarre & wonderful electro-pop cabaret 4-piece called Spastic Crunch. This group also featured future kRkRkRk contributor Tracey Pagey (Psycho-Kat, leonard Nimoy) in the role of chanteuse & frontperson. For J-mz, Spastic Crunch was an excuse to show off his recently acquired Roland Juno 60 analogue synth which, in a moment of weakness, was later sold to Mathew Middleton of CRUDE. Oh well, at least it went to a good home!
The Juno 60 was also prominent in J-mz's contributions, between late 1993 & mid 1994, to COD - a sort of local industrial supergroup put together by Jason Lane. Jason was best known to kRkRkRk for his work (with Leyton Davis) in the cyber-industrial rock projects Silium 19 & CeLL. COD also featured, among others, Simon McClaren (Loves Ugly Children), Dave Clark (The Invisible Dead, Ape Management) & future kRkRkRk contributor Mikel Goodwin (leonard Nimoy, wormwood).
COD led to J-mz & Mikel collaborating, in mid 1994, as Placenta Cookbook - a kRkRkRk project which has endured to the present day. Originally, Placenta Cookbook was a textbook example of lo-fi noise & general lunacy wrapped in punk & industrial trappings. In early 1995 a 60min cassette materialized. Placenta Cookbook's offering was Lithopaedians KRK031b on side 2. Side 1 featured Mikel's wormwood debut: Feed Back Loop Hole KRK031a. After several years in limbo, Placenta Cookbook's most recent (2001) incarnation has toned down the noise & silliness in favour of a smoother sounding, naïve electronica - not unlike early Kraftwerk.
Towards the end of 1994, with TMA-1 effectly moribund, J-mz also initiated a new collaborative endeavour with Peter under the moniker Brainlego (after an Einsturzende Neubauten song). Initially, a very tongue-in-cheek, punk-industrial-pop covers band, Brainlego quickly spawned a tape release (The Stickiest Creamy Instant KRK028, released January '95 & featuring a guest appearance, on clarinet, by CRUDE's Mathew Middleton) & a handful of memorable performances. As with Placenta Cookbook, Brainlego's activities have continued, in sporadic fashion, into the present. Peter & J-mz recently (mid 2001) reactivated the project in a more arts-oriented, electro-acoustic guise. Here at kRkRkRk, we never throw away a good name if we don't have too!
In early 1995 J-mz left Christchurch & spent a year in Dunedin where he worked with Mathew Middleton in Matt's, largely solo CRUDE project &, also, in the more genuinely collaborative Whispering City. This latter project, which could be loosely described as electronic rock, was somewhat more structured than TMA-1 had ever been but, still, tolerant of improvisation. J-mz was also a founding member of The Aesthetics (with Matt & Rustle Covini) - although his tenure with this band was fairly brief. Finally, whilst in Dunedin, J-mz also contributed to a sub-psychedelic experimental 4-piece called Kerosene which featured future kRkRkRk co-curator Ed Wilson on guitar. Recordings from both Kerosene & Whispering City (a whole album actually) exist, but are not currently available.
At the beginning of '96 J-mz was back in Christchurch in time to reactivate Placenta Cookbook for a Canterbury University Orientation slot with leonard Nimoy. Brainlego, too, was active towards the end of the year, playing a few gigs & producing some higher-tech pieces of music with the use of David's Ensoniq ASR-10 sampling keyboard.
Following a period of inactivity (J-mz moved to Sumner during 1997 which placed him outside the main thrust of kRkRkRk affairs for a while), in 1998 J-mz revived his NoTV project as a live performance endeavour. Previous to this time NoTV had performed live only twice. The first performance (all of 10 minutes!) occurred in September 1994 at the first ever, dedicated, kRkRkRk label event, A Tepid Interference Cluster, at the Interzone venue in Christchurch. This event also featured the Psycho-Kat & performance debuts from leonard Nimoy & Placenta Cookbook. Another brief live outing took place in Dunedin during the following year.
J-mz's new series of live performances (usually in the company of kRkRkRk artists & associates such as the Drawing Room or the Strap Ons) were wonders to behold. Surrounded by an ever-increasing cluster of electronics, house-hold appliances, guitars, keyboards, beat boxes & even a speech synthesizer, J-mz's hapshazard sets proved to be both charming & witty &, nearly always, won over audiences who would not normally have given such anarchic & noisy music the time of day! A number of these unforgettable performances were recorded on cassette 2-track by Ed Wilson & a live compilation of J-mz's work in the 1998-2000 period will be available soon.
J-mz's re-ermergence as an active kRkRkRk artist led to a closer association with Don Gone (Don Campbell) & Nova Technova (Bev Greene) of the Strap Ons. J-mz subsequently joined their ranks in mid 1999 as they temporarily abandoned their post punk-rock/R&B phase to pursue music which could be described as electronic cabaret (with a few rock inflections). For this stage of the Strap Ons' career, J-mz's talents & sensibilities were perfect. In fact, the Strap Ons had a long history of involvement with experimental & inprovised music dating back to their late 80's origins in Dunedin. Even the purist, punk-tinged R&B, for which they became well known, in Christchurch, between 1997 & 1999, was always accompanied by more experimental & electronic activities. Lost Found Sound KRK106 is the definitive collection of the Strap Ons' unique brand of electronica, recorded in Christchurch during the time prior to J-mz's inculcation into the group.
Bev's purchase of a Tascam 424mkIII portastudio in mid 2000 freed the Strap Ons from their reliance on David's portastudio & paved the way for regular, weekly, recording sessions. Although the group performed live only rarely between mid 1999 & mid 2001 (when Don & Bev went to live in Wellington), they produced no less than 3 complete albums of material in this period. The latter two of these works featured the input of Mikel Goodwin who joined the group in late 2000.
For J-mz, this phase of the Strap Ons took him almost full circle to the days of TMA-1. The mechanics of the recordings (mostly engineered by Don) - press record & go! - were very similar. The music also had a punk/industrial component but, owing to the very wide musical taste & awareness of Don & Bev, covered broader ground stylistically. Psychedelic rock, tribal electronica, reggae, lounge - all were grist to the Strap Ons' mill. This ensured that the late Christchurch incarnation of the group had a much more streetwise & mature outlook than TMA-1. Instrumental roles were freely exchanged in this phase of the Strap Ons, but J-mz's unique digital delay pedal/dictaphone/guitar pick-up antics are clearly audible, to the informed listener, on the recordings completed at this time.
!999 also saw J-mz collaborating with longtime kRkRkRk supporter Nathan Kerr in the performance-art oriented Agar. Combining J-mz's flair for electronic noise generation with Nathan's specialist talents, in the fields of dance, stilt-walking & dark theatre, Agar's unique performances were soon amazing audiences around NZ. The project remains active at present.
J-mz's latest collaborative endeavours comprise the industrial-pop 4-piece MiG-21, created in May 2001 (with Ed, Mikel & David), & the electronic/experimental-pop trio Antibody (with Ed & Charles Horn) which commenced operations in October 2001.
NoTV
Brainlego
MiG-21
Strap
Ons
TMA-1
kRkRkRk recordings
krkrkrk@hotmail.com
Text by David
Khan. Web-building by Ed Wilson. No apologies for disinformation.
August 2004