Sola Rosa: Haunted Out-Takes and Conray: Mefasolate

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

Sola Rosa: Haunted Out-Takes

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Label: FMR


Conray: Mefasolate

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Label: Turbine


Just when it was beginning to look like New Zealand music had forgotten to deliver a genuinely inspired local electronic album this year, along come two at once.

Both are from one-man bands who, when they aren't twiddling knobs in their own studios, have had other musical lives involving guitar bands of artistic dispositions.

Conray is the nom de studio of Dale Cotton, a producer-engineer who has helped to make sonic sense of the likes of HDU, the Subliminals, Dimmer and Cloudboy.

He's also worked with Andrew Spraggon, otherwise known as Sola Rosa, here on his second album after his 2001 debut Solarized.

Sola Rosa's first album was impressive but was something of a spindly affair, especially when compared to the more robust sound and bigger personality of Haunted Out-Takes.

This one seems a more hip-hop album, with its scratchy edges and liquid basslines and an approach that can remind of the big-picture beat-instrumentals of masters of this sort of stuff, like DJ Shadow.

Like the debut, Haunted Out-Takes likes to spice up its conversation with a spot of Latin, giving especially good cha-cha-cha on the likes of Ready Now (complete with a blast of Tijuana brass), before it heads out into the big dunes on Terrorgosa. Elsewhere, it veers towards the dub-powered and noir-ish on the likes of Scratch Apprentice, Rain (all swirling vibraphone, and exploding strings), and the slow-fused Sleepwalker.

And near the end, Sugar Lines picks up the left-overs and crams them into a colourful jagged jumble before the start of closing track Deepwater unfortunately echoes a famous soap opera theme, rather breaking the spell. Still, a downbeat album to get very upbeat about.

By contrast with Sola Rosa's dubbed-into-Latin style, Conray's Mefasolate is harder to define. But it's still a highly listenable set of sample-delica mixing guitars, electronics and a bent towards Asian flavourings in its cut'n'paste decorations.

That's best heard on the strangely lovely 7th Folding Space, The Flower Fair which neatly mutates and funks up the sort of sounds usually heard in cinema ads for nearby Chinese restaurants, and Alice in Sitarland's cool breeze of flutes and sitar sounds over a gently undulating electronic backing. Add in the brooding, serious cellos I Lost You and the shadowy hydraulic bass of Lime Pickle and Mefasolate manages a little hint of nightmare to offset its general dreaminess.

It too is a very good album, hypnotic in mood, but rich enough in detail to keep you enchanted and awake in case you miss anything.