Big Tip! This is one for the faithful. An Afternoon With Victor Dimisich gathers a set of recordings that until now existed only as rumour - an unearthed afternoon from the legendary pre-Flying Nun underground of Christchurch, New Zealand, surfacing more than four decades after it was first committed to tape, and never issued in any form before now.
The Victor Dimisich Band took shape in 1980, when Stephen Cogle and Peter Stapleton broke away from Bill Direen's Vacuum to follow their own songwriting axis - Cogle shaping the music and lending his cavernous baritone, Stapleton writing the dark, quietly funny lyrics and driving the drums. With Alan Meek, Tony O'Grady, and Mary Heney filling out the group, they played fewer than a dozen shows before dissolving in late 1981. Their lone studio document, a five-song 12-inch, didn't appear until Flying Nun pressed it in 1983, by which point the band was already a memory. Theirs was the denser, darker pole of the South Island scene - closer to the bruised abandon of the Velvet Underground than to the brighter jangle of their Dunedin neighbours, all spectral reverberated guitar, moping organ, and one of the great voices in New Zealand music, a deep resonating instrument that seemed to predate religion itself.
What this collection captures is something more intimate than the EP. Stripped to their bones, these are the tender Cogle/Stapleton ballads as they sounded before the full band rolled over them - thirteen songs in pared-back, half-private form, recorded among four men in their twenties with a spare afternoon and a crate of beer to get through. The mood is brooding and bleak, Old Testament in its weather, yet shot through with the dry wit that always lurked beneath the gloom. Many of these titles - Shade, Too Far Gone, Shocking Pink Clock, Mekong - would go on to lead second and third lives in The Pin Group, Scorched Earth Policy, and The Terminals, the dark-flowering family tree that grew out of this moment. Here they sit at the root.
True to the spirit of the thing, Roy Montgomery, who was in the room, offers no tidy account of why the tapes exist, only a multiple-choice riddle to which the honest answer is all of the above. Bruce Russell's insert lays out the rest. With Stapleton's passing in 2020, the record arrives as both a discovery and a remembrance - a missing first chapter from a scene whose full weight is only now being understood. Issued by Siltbreeze as a one-time pressing, with a timestamp insert.
