Music Plus with Winston Watusi [email protected]

I must say, I do like me a bit of weird. There is real appeal to art that pushes boundaries, that makes grand creative gestures. Part of the appeal is simply the pushing of boundaries.

You can argue all you like – as people have for nearly a century – about the artistic merits of Marcel Duchamp exhibiting an upside-down urinal signed “R. Mutt, 1917″ and titled Fountain; but it certainly pushed boundaries.

But extreme art need not be just a gimmick; it can also be revelatory. I saw the eight-hour black and white Hungarian film Satantango in the cinema. It is dauntingly slow, opening with a 10-minute shot of cows emerging from a run-down barn.

But by halfway you’d entered a different world, you were living in that film; and you could only do that by sitting through four hours of people trudging along muddy country roads. You had to do it to feel it.

A trance

There are similarly singular albums: Gavin Bryar’s Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971) is 74-minute piece, composed entirely from a 15-second loop of an unknown homeless man singing a four-line gospel fragment. He is joined by building harmonies of strings and brass and in the final movement Tom Waits singing. It’s kinda amazing, a weird meditative trance.

Or take Scott Walker’s final album. Yes, the Scott Walker, who created sublime 1960s power pop with The Walker Brothers’ The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More. He went all weird after that, culminating in Soused, a collaboration with Seattle guitar drone extremists Sunn O))), where ugly, distorted soundscapes meet Walker’s operatic stylings and baffling songs.

Scott Walker. Photo / Jake Walters

Grand gestures are to be applauded, I reckon. Less scary but equally grand is 69 Love Songs from The Magnetic Fields, which does exactly what it says on the tin: three CDs each containing 23 love songs. If you ever wondered how many different ways you can write a love song, here’s a living lesson.

Locally, it’s why Loserpalooza is so cool, with bands such as Threat.Meet.Protocol, Grown Downz, Everything Is F****ed, and False Waltons testing extremes.

Out of the ordinary

Such extremes are not usual in Tauranga but let me offer something a little out of the ordinary. Scottish music meets jazz in a concert led by a drummer. That’s John Rae’s Celtic Roots, coming to Tauranga Boys’ College’s Graham Young Youth Theatre on October 2. I have no idea what this will sound like but given the pedigree it should be simply brilliant.

John Rae. Photo / John Rae Collection

Any concert offering “a journey through Scotland’s landscapes and New York’s vibrant jazz scene” should be interesting.

The musicians with Rae are bassist Jack Harris, pianist Ben Wilcock and Oscar Laven on sax.

I know – not that weird.

But on October 7 another drummer, Kieran Monaghan, under his moniker Vegetable.machine.animal, performs at The Mount Tavern, where he jams with biosignals produced by plants, a live “conversation” between plants, fungi, machines and human musicians. Local acts StellaVision and Violetta & the Vendettas are opening.

Hear Winston’s latest Playlist: