The Lepht Sessions – 2006
Around the end of 2006, when Mark van Niekerk had just returned from a year in Rumania, and Gareth Dawson was just about to leave for the UK, the three of us convened in the now defunct club space LEPHT for a couple of very inspired improvising sessions.
I remember at the time we were quite enthralled by the recently reissued This Heat album, the jagged pointillistic punk of Ex Models, and Black Dice’s lo-fi electronic noise. As a result these sessions featured almost no straight guitar or bass playing; Gareth had borrowed a Korg MS-20, and my playing was more focused around no-input mixer feedback, loops going in and out of sync and more abstract guitar interventions, leaving a lot of space for Mark’s staggeringly inventive drumming to be the most grounding and motif-like element.
This music has, i think, a stealthy minimalism and razor’s edge tautness that i still find to be unifying factor in a lot of music that i really like, from the aforementioned This Heat and Ex-Models, to Tortoise’s less saccharine moments.
As it goes with projects like these, we only ever played one gig, and this was the poster.
Great music! Jazzy melting into hypnotic. I like the zero-input feedback, it makes really interesting music.