Evolution (2005) by Ascension Band

https://www.fiffdimension.com/ascension-band

"With elements of punk, post-punk, jazz, classical, straight rock, opera and music hall, the Ascension Band are that rare thing: Something Wholly Other. They retain avant garde cred and still manage to rock harder than AC/DC.” - www.varsity.co.nz
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"Dave Edwards (fiffdimension) and Nigel Patterson (http://theblackseeds.bandcamp.com) were at the head of The Ascension Band; captaining a ship that featured 17 Wellington-based musicians.

"The 50-minute piece of music, broken down into six movements, was performed live over a few nights for the Fringe Festival in 2005; the group taking out the Best Music Award.

"It was stunning. Discordant guitars were choked, drums clattered and crashed, voices mingled with percussion and keyboards - but this form of free-improvisation had a structure to it. It had movement, it had a plan. It was a great beast of a song that writhed and wriggled and often managed to run downhill, away from the players - in the best possible way.

"Here, the show has been recorded onto a CD for posterity - and it begs discovery. It's an intense listen - but that's to be expected from a group of players who took their name from one of John Coltrane's toughest listening albums." - Simon Sweetman
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"Evolution” is a five-movement symphonic piece tracking the history of evolution, and combining a macro classical form with modern orchestration. It’s basically a symphony in the standard form – but instead of using violins and woodwinds etc, we use two electric guitars, two keyboards, two bass guitars, two vocalists, two trumpets, computer, tone generator, piano and drums.

“Evolution” draws its sonic palette from experimental, free-jazz, noise, industrial, punk and contemporary classical musics. It’s less free-improvised than our previous performances – it’s an attempt to compose a piece allowing for improvisation within a macro structure.

"Often with modern improvised music the listener is almost totally reliant on the absolute properties of the music: E.g. the new weird and wonderful noises that you never knew that instrument could make. But by utilizing a programmatic approach we hope to create a piece of music that is both stimulating in an absolute context – I.e. sounds and textures – as well as realizable in a programmatic context, by telling the story of evolution. our main objective: A realizable statement of modern music." - Nigel Patterson

Outsider music from Aotearoa NZ and beyond, by Dave Edwards and collaborators (from 1856 to 2025).

Spans acoustic & electric noise, folk, spoken word, postpunk, free improv & ethnomusicology.

fiffdimension.com
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