The Drum Is The Shaman’s Horse

With the death in 2020 of long-standing occasional third member Peter Stapleton (percussion/electronics), A Handful of Dust has regrouped as the core duo of Alastair Galbraith (violin, guitar, cello, piano, drums) and Bruce Russell (guitar, electronics). This new set of live-to-four-track recordings from January 2022 is the first album to be wholly recorded 'in the studio' since 1995's Towards a Soundtrack to the 'Anabase' of St-John Perse. Committed to tape at the Rugby Hotel in Dunedin, the four-track recordings were played back in the room where they were made and recorded again, this time to Android telephone, to make a digital mono master which you hear on this record. Unadorned, brutal and sonically austere, this new set captures the 'wild Mercury sound' for which this long-standing unit is rightly feted among cognoscenti of the Antipodean New Thing.

Three pieces that will pop your third eye in seconds flat. Astral travel for now people. Duck and Sally continue their unplanned career in the extreme abuse of the rock'n'roll toolkit. Drowned Phoenician sailors bob disconcertingly to the surface while the captain's tower rocks to a sustained monomachy 'twixt Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, brought back from the grave for that specific purpose. Don't be shy - please jump out of your window. You know you gotta trust us, when you need a friend...

Co-release with Feeding Tube Records

Previous releases on Corpus Hermeticum, Thin Wrist, Siltbreeze, Crank Automotive, and others.
Bruce Russell is 1/3 of the seminal NZ free-noise band The Dead C.
Alastair Galbraith is an experimental musician based in Dunedin, New Zealand, he has released many solo albums as well as recordings with the Rip, Plagal Grind and the $100 Band.
Between them they have run a number of independent labels including Xpressway, Next Best Way, Corpus Hermeticum and Ekskubalauron Press.

Alastair Galbraith: guitar/organ (1), cello/drums (2), violin (3)
Bruce Russell: modular synthesiser (1), guitar (2) (3)
Engineering AG and BR
Rec. January 2022 at the Rugby, Dunedin, NZ
Mastering by James Plotkin

for PS, who couldn’t make it with us