Five Rhythm Works LP

This collection gathers together some of From Scratch's earliest recordings, all of which have long been unavailable. It captures the first phase of the group's career as they explore and consolidate a renewed focus on rhythm through the shared actions of a tight musical unit. The closing track, "Passage", is their earliest recording, which documents the first From Scratch line-up (Bruce Barber, Geoff Chapple, Philip Dadson and Gray Nicol) and has not been previously released. It was recorded by New Zealand public radio (then known as the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation) during a lunchtime concert for the 1975 Auckland Festival, and broadcast later that year. "Passage" is perhaps a final link to the group's predecessor, The New Zealand Scratch Orchestra. During his time with the Scratch Orchestra, Dadson devised a manifesto and a series of eight compositions called Variable Occasion Music (VOM) for collective music making that could be adapted and integrated into different contexts - events or non-events. The first From Scratch performance in 1974 included "VOM 5: Loop Music", "VOM 6" and "VOM 7: Waxing and Waning Influences." "Passage", composed in 1974, is VOM 8.

Although the final VOM works indicate the evolution of the Scratch Orchestra into From Scratch with a progressive focus on smaller percussion groups, it is interesting that "Passage" is scored for four drummers with an option to include two reed instruments, playing mainly rhythmic pulses and sustained tones to expand the palette of percussive sounds. The score is a spiralling structure that is a precursor to the score for "Out In", which was also intially performed with reeds. The recording here of "Out In" is the first half only of the original track, in which the three primary sounds (drums, tubes and chimes) are introduced using 5/8, 6/8 and 7/8 timing respectively.

Records show that From Scratch Perform Rhythm Works was originally intended to be a quite different release - a double LP with two additional tracks. It would have opened with "Triad", a two-person work with Dadson on piano and Nichol producing drone sounds by stroking a wire attached to the piano's interior. The closing track was to be "Parabola", a 1976 recording of an annual winter solstice drumming ritual known as Solar Plexus, an open-invite event started in 1970 that encouraged people to bring percussion instruments for a dawn-to-dusk ritual that took place in a volcanic cone to monitor the pulse of the earth. Combined with the group's growing interest in pan-Pacific music, the album would have been a diverse affair!

From Scratch were fast becoming well-known for their distinctive use of PVC pipes played with foam rubber mallets, resembling a popular local footwear known as jandals or flip-flops. The inspiration for the tuned PVC pipes came from seeing a visiting group from the Solomon Islands perform at the South Pacific Festival of the Arts in Rotorua, New Zealand in 1976, using bamboo tubes struck with coconut husks to play boogie style bass-lines. By 1978, From Scratch were playing their own plastic version, made from local building materials, along with an array of similarly inspired wooden slit drums, brake drums and drones that spin through the air. At a time when Western avant-garde (and pop) music was taking inspiration from Africa and Southern Asia, From Scratch were defining their own sound based on New Zealand's position in the Pacific. This diversity of sound is articulated with particular clarity on the second side of From Scratch Perform Rhythm Works on "Drumwheel", where we get to hear the climactic second half.

"Out In" and "Drumwheel" were the main works performed by From Scratch throughout 1979. That year they also performed a new work, Gung Ho 1,2,3D, which they previewed in excerpts in June 1980 at the 3rd South Pacific Festival of the Arts in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. The full work was performed as a standalone piece later that year throughout a tour of New Zealand universities and other venues.

From liner notes by Andrew Clifford.