Shame File Music and Albert’s Basement follow up the critically-acclaimed 2022 reissue of seminal Melbourne band Ad Hoc's Distance cassette with the band's obscure barely-released (perhaps six home-dubbed copies) live cassette Corpse.
Differing dramatically from Distance, Corpse captures the trio presenting a wall of almost self-playing instruments live to a bemused Clifton Hill Community Music Centre audience in 1980. As James Clayden explains below, the sounds were already set up before the audience entered, then the amps were simply turned on. The performers present perhaps as a corpse; unmoving, yet with a dramatic visceral impact:
"The Corpse performance at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC) came out of recording sessions we had been having at an empty enclosed car park in the backstreets of Carlton and in Chris's piano/music room in Fitzroy. We'd been experimenting with each of us getting our own specific sound/noise set up then seeing how we could manipulate these into one piece of music/sound, or noise whichever you prefer, that felt right.
"All recordings were made using a stereo binaural/dummy-head microphone set up as the "audience/listener".
"After several sessions of this we figured we were ready to play/perform at CHCMC, deciding to set the sounds up before any audience arrived, turn off the amps with everything set and once people were seated we'd count to 4 turn amps on and take it from there, after 15 minutes or so we'd turn the amps off to end the piece. Doing the same sort of thing after a short interval, the sound to start would be different from the first piece as we'd start where we'd stopped, then ending the second piece in the same way as first piece." - James Clayden, 2023.
The performance these recordings were taken from was reviewed in New Music #1 (read review at shamefilemusic.com/ad-hoc-corpse/ ). All reviewed artists were invited to respond to their reviews, and Ad Hoc responded:
Alberts Basement, 2023