Trailblazer with plenty of bite

By GREG DIXON

Nosferatu is wearing a frown. I've asked him why he did it, why all those years ago he filed his two front teeth into vampire-like fangs.

He seems slightly put out. Perhaps it was a little pointed; probably he's just sick of being asked.

"Do you want a real answer or a bullshit one?" asks Jed Town, owner of those distinctive gnashers and the leader of the late, great local cult band Fetus Productions.

The real one will do, I say. "I think I was searching for some sort of self-identity. You know when you see an artist and he looks and sounds like someone else. I didn't want people to do that. I wanted to create my own identity."

No question it worked. For those of us of a certain age, Town will always be remembered as that musician guy who filed his teeth. But his work with Fetus Productions deserves a much better epitaph. The group, a collective of musicians, designers and artists led by Town between 1980 and 1989, hold a unique place in our music history.

They were trailblazers. Their innovative melding of pop, industrial noise and electronic soundscapes with scary, provocative projected images during live shows took sound and vision to places it had never been before.

Town's creative use of a file was part of a wider, weirder and singular vision, ideas that will once more be explored with a three-week retrospective exhibition at Artspace gallery.

Titled, appropriately enough, Fetus Reproductions, the multi-media show will use a blacked-out room, digital projectors and visual material from scores of Super 8 films made by Town and the collective during the 80s. Album covers, clothing, recording equipment and original screen prints from Fetus Productions will also be on display. It should prove confronting stuff still.

"They were totally ahead of their time," says Robert Leonard, who has developed the show. "Some of his video work from that period is remarkable, especially the award-winning [clip for the song] Flicker. While Chris Knox is well known for his auteur clips from this time, Town is not - he should be."

Town, too, believes the group he started with Mike Brookfield and Sarah Fort was seriously underrated. Flying Nun, the home of the so-called Dunedin Sound, was Fetus Productions' record label but they never had a record deal with them, he says.

"We didn't feel very accepted by the industry that was supposedly releasing our records, we didn't feel supported very much at all."

Town and the collective's influences were broad: Punk rock, the music of seminal German electronic outfit Kraftwork, David Lynch's film Eraserhead, Patrick McGoohan's TV series The Prisoner and Christopher Lee's Dracula. Discovered sounds roughly recorded were also important, a technique which predated by a decade the current trend for electronic sampling.

It was also the use of graphic, often horrifying images of birth deformities and, during one period, an autopsy film as visual backdrops for their live shows that separated the group from all others of their time. "There was quite a lot of antagonistic reaction. Why are you showing these fetuses? But then there was an inspiring element to it as well. People thought twice about why we were showing these things, thought twice about what being human is."

Fetus Productions achieved little commercial success across their nine-year, seven-album life span. True to their cult status they were an acquired taste enjoyed by a select few.

So who was interested in such cutting-edge experimentation way back then? "Probably a lot of confused young people I suppose, all wondering what the hell was going on," says Town. "But you got a bit of heart as well, so either way you came out feeling good."

* Fetus Reproductions, Artspace, opens tomorrow at 6pm, until June 29; floor talk by the artists, June 15 at noon.