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get tix here

Green Coronet

I have a new tape available via the A Guide to Saints imprint. Here's what the label has to say about it:

"Leighton Craig is a Brisbane based musician. Over the past two decades he has played a central role in the Brisbane outsider music community. Performing in a clutch of key units, including free-rock mainstays The Lost Domain, pop miniaturists The Deadnotes and the dream-float duo Primitive Motion. Each of these groups bares the mark of his innate melodic sensibility and his uniquely understated aesthetic approaches.

As a soloist, he has pursued a low-tech approach to keyboard studies, song forms, field recording and sound installation.

"Green Coronet" is the long overdue follow-up to his solo Room 40 album "11 Easy Pieces".  Largely a live recording, GC finds Craig enjoying the freedom of a new home studio space, pushing record as neighbourhood sounds flood into the room in this dreamy suite of four cyclic jams that celebrate the fuzzy tones of his favoured Coronet Phase 2 amplifier.

From the opening track "Green Veil", where shimmering circles of keyboard and voice weave into passing traffic and holiday field recordings, GC has an immersive time-flow. When the door closes on the sound world outside, "Solar Causeways" and "Divided by Zero" map a melancholic journey within, culminating in wailing synth blasts into the void. 

With its warm keyboard and clarinet cycles, looped aquatic choral refrains and mics dangling out the studio window, GC unfolds as an unlikely sub-tropical Harold Budd homage - with a lo-fi suburban edge and noise outro!"

The tape was toasted up by Lawrence English at 158 and as with all AGTS releases, comes in an edition of 100 with screen printed covers. The Green Coronet edition is completed with a set of two tiny 5 x 7cm prints of floating beings on 300gsm watercolour paper, housed in archival glassine envelopes. When you buy from this website, the first 30 copies come with an additional third print.

LEIGHTON CRAIG - GREEN CORONET cs

Includes Postage

Australia $11.50 AUD Rest of the World $13.50 AUD

For download only purchase, click here 

Moon Moon

Recorded at Boxcopy Gallery Brisbane, 22 May 2016
                                                                                                                     Image from Sandra Selig's Ghost Pattern exhibition

You Wear Gold

Spencer Blake-Craig 2009-2016

Terminal Moraine

Portrait of the Young Man as Landscape Dronologist, Scotland '95

In September 1995, at Kindling House in Coorparoo, Brisbane, I recorded three of the four tracks on my debut release, the Terminal Moraine cassette. 

The recordings were made on my Sony Walkman, using a Casio MT 40, shortwave radio and feedback via a toy keyboard with microphone. I didn't own an amp, so built-in speakers were the order of the day. I was in effect a practitioner of quiet noise.

The second track on the cassette was made the following year with a baby monitor and Yamaha CS01 synthesiser. Following his repeat yet polite petitioning, I recently returned the synth to its owner (Tom Beaumont), nearly 20 years post-loan.

I used to think of these pieces as 'landscape drones' -  the sound of plates tectonic and glacial drift, albeit recorded in sub-tropical suburbia.  

The cassette was timidly 'released' to select friends in a micro-edition of 16, each with painted cover art. It was only a small 20 minute sample of the hours of recordings made during that period.

In a sentimental moment, I recently digitised the work from the master tape to make this 20th anniversary edition available for download. It's a noisy and wobbly old thing!

LC September 2015.

                                 

Kindling House, Coorparoo, 1995

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Bush Reich

In January 2006, before he was internationally renowned for his foot-pump controlled latex horn virtuosity and judaic origami moves, Joel Stern made a recording with me in Toohey Forest Park, a large bushland reserve in the heart of Brisbane. I was just back from a summer holiday in New Zealand, escaping the choking heat of another Queensland summer. What better way to spend a Sunday morning?

A sweltering day had been forecast, so we planned for Joel to arrive at my house in the suburbs not far from Toohey Forest at 7am.  While he's now familiar with the daylight hours before midday, in those heady days of Joel's West End bohemianism, this was a remarkably optimistic proposition. Accordingly, as 7am approached, I was still shuffling around in my garage tinkering with the lawn mower, far from ready for the scheduled expedition, when low and behold Joel's much loved and now-deceased Saab pulled into the drive way. We were on!

With back packs crammed full of instruments, we hit Toohey Forest, well off the beaten trail of sunday morning walkers and cyclists, setting up camp on a large sandstone outcrop that overlooked a gully of eucaplypt and scrub. We scattered an arsenal of battery powered gizmos across the rock, including a thumb piano, ektara, tibetan bowls, keyboard, violin and pocket trumpet. I was also sporting a tiny solar panel, recently gifted by Stefan Neville in NZ, which was put to good use powering a fan striking an egg slice. 

A morning of bush jams ensued as we communed with the cicadas and air lords (feathered and jet-powered) at an urban confluence of the natural and manufactured. Proceedings were captured for posterity onto two mini-discs, which were subsequently synced and edited at home by Joel. We finished proceedings with pancakes and coffee for breakfast at my place.

Long forgotten, the session is now available as a complimentary download from Joel's Cyprus Hillsong archive. I'm listening to this for the first time in eight years, sitting on the back deck on another scorching hot summer day, while the world's leaders assemble in Brisbane for the G20 summit, only 10kms from Toohey Forest.  I am in another time and another place, worlds away.  Come and join!

                            

Bodies of the Placid Furnace

 

New Primitive Motion song out now on 5 Years of Bedroom Suck Records double LP compilation. 

A taste of the new PM album due out in 2015.

18 Conversations in the Room Upstairs

  

Conversations recorded upstairs in Milani Gallery on 9 November 2008
Conversation titles written by Nathan Shepherdson on 14 November 2010

Eugene Carcesio: clarinet, violin
Leighton Craig: violin, keyboard

Complimentary download here

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Now available in a set of 3 x A4 prints on 300gsm watercolour paper.  Numbered edition of 10. Contact Leighton for price and availability - kindlingrecords@yahoo.com.au UNAVAILABLE

Black Coronet

Sunday Afternoon

Recording and paintings made 29 June 2014, Kindling House, Brisbane

Tie Me to this Pale Globe

To Shape A Single Leaf

Primitive Motion recently recorded the following new pieces for broadcast on the excellent Ears Have Ears program on FBI Radio, Sydney:
   EHE 20.03.2014 - Primitive Motion (BRIS) - For Ears Have Ears by Ears Have Ears

Tracks: To Shape a Single Leaf, Atom Tune, Cellular Life, Twine Towards Them, Question D

Image:  Sandra Selig, courtesy Sarah Cottier Gallery

Strange Attractor

                                      Episode 59: Leighton Craig; High Beamz by livedelay

Recorded for 4ZZZ at the Waiting Room by Josh Watson,  14 Feb 2014
Check out other shows on Live Delay here

For a free copy of  Leighton's set email kindlingrecords@yahoo.com.au

audience l to r: glen schenau, josh watson

photo: s selig

Space of One

Universe I Am by Primitive Motion

Recorded at Woodburn Laboratory 30 December 2013

Image S Selig courtesy  Sarah Cottier Gallery 

Lifetones

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                                                                                                              Pottsville, 1 December 2013