Bruce Russell has spent the last 20 years refining a unique approach to musical practice which owes much to more esoteric disciplines such as sound art, free ‘noise’ improvisation and electro-acoustic composition. Coming from a ‘rock’ background, he has broadened his interests, methods and arsenal of techniques to include practices and approaches to sound that have moved him to a position outside any musical mainstream one could care to name.
At the same time he has done much to network like-minded New Zealand artists, and to actively promote these artists in the international music scene. He is now a minor but firmly established fixture in the international improvisation underground, known both for his own work and as part of the Dead C. He has also curated the influential record labels Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum, and self-published periodicals and books of cultural criticism through the Ekskubalauron Press. He writes music criticism for UK magazine The Wire, and is a frequent contributor of album liner notes and essays for exhibition catalogues.
He began his career in sound in Dunedin, NZ, shaving an amplified guitar with an electric razor in 1984. The bemused punters were expecting a rock band. In 1987 he joined one, called the Dead C. The other members are Michael Morley and Robbie Yeats. They have gone on to record over a dozen albums for labels all over the world, and to regularly tour internationally to play at experimental music festivals. They have been described in England’s pop weekly the Melody Maker as ‘alongside Fushitsusha, the most important rock band on the planet’. This is not true. They remain largely unknown in their own country.
In 1990 Bruce began recording a series of albums with a totally improvised noise group called A Handful of Dust. This group is centred around a constant core of Russell, Alastair Galbraith (also well known as a solo artist) and Peter Stapleton (The Terminals, Rain, Flies Inside the Sun). Bruce Russell also records and performs as part of the improvisational trio Pieters/ Russell/Stapleton.
In addition to all of the foregoing, Bruce Russell has also found time to perform and record as a solo artist in his own right. He has also been commissioned to complete several radiophonic compositions for both New Zealand and Austrian public radio. Russell’s solo performance focuses on the integration of instrumental improvisation with electro-acoustic elements. His most recent albums are a pair of ‘electro-acoustic blues CDs’ recorded on open reel analogue tape and hard drive processing in collaboration with German composer Ralf Wehowsky (rlw, P16.D4).