Building on the success of the Concord LP, this first compact disc release on the then-nascent Corpus Hermeticum label really sorted the sheep from the goats. Featuring two sets recorded in 1993 at the Empire Tavern, the first (March) is a punishing violin/microphone feedback duet, followed by Peter Stapleton's thunderous first session with the group (October).

Alan Licht wrote the following notes for a projected Dust re-issue in 2008. They still cover the ground pretty well.

Q. Are you interested in chance music?
A. No. I’m far too into my guitar to pack it up and twiddle knobs.

--Eric Clapton, interviewed by Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone 1967

Hahaha! Dude, don’t you realize you can keep the guitar out and twiddle knobs at the same time? Just ask Keith Rowe…or, better yet, Bruce Russell. Rather than starting off as a Chuck Berry/Freddie King copyist (hey, those were different times), Bruce seems to have innately recognized his place in (post-punk) rock and roll as an electroacoustician, skipped the fingering exercises, and logically embraced the guitar as an accessory to his amplifier. (Not just any amplifier; a Concord, as immortalized on his 1993 Twisted Village album of the same name). That’s what I call progress.

Indeed, when Bruce began cutting these “sides” in the early 90s he was essentially sui generis in New Zealand—with no noise scene to speak of he recruited other renegades from the then-prevailing Flying Nun indie rock corps, namely Alastair Galbraith & Peter Stapleton, to accompany him in his alchemical quest beyond the tedium of band rehearsal to rock-contextual free improvisation. He called it “free noise,” but his efforts should one day be recognized as New Zealand country music—the sparseness of the recordings, the high, lonesome sound via howling feedback, capture the remoteness of the South Island (which is practically at the bottom of the world) like little else. A decade and a half after he initiated A Handful of Dust and issued his one-voice-in-the–wilderness “What is Free?” manifesto, the Flying Nun bands are ancient history and the New Zealand noise scene is (reasonably) active. Like I said, progress.

Alan Licht Brooklyn NY May 2008