Midnight Singers by Blowfly Saint

Stefan Neville: strings, pings and pipes
Leighton Craig: sticks and skins

Recorded late at night 15 January 2006, Kingsland, Tāmaki Makaurau, Aoetearoa

Cover art by Stefan. Teapot art by Leighton.

Kin 27 - split release with Stabbies Etc (stabbiesetc.bandcamp.com)

Memory is a strange thing. I can't remember the third item I'm meant to buy at the supermarket, but I vividly recall the details of this evening twenty years ago. Making music is the glue. I was holidaying in Aotearoa with my family and jumping on the opportunity to have some jams with Stefan, who I'd met about a year earlier at the What is Music? Festival. We'd already had a couple of sessions during my visit, making a racket that ended up on our Duck ST/ULP cassette on Epic Sweep, then I'd been away in Northland and was back in town before flying home. We'd also been to see The Puddle play one evening with Stefan's housemate, the famed book head Kiran Dass from Ngāruawāhia.

I dropped by their Kingsland household after putting the kids to bed, and Stefan and I watched a performance of Odetta singing Waterboy with her take-no-prisoners vocal/guitar thwump. Suitably inspired, we took to setting up the drums and gear, which were stashed in a kind of weird long cupboard in Stefan's basement bedroom. In fact, I feel we considered recording in the cupboard. I'd been drumming in The Deadnotes that year, and fancied myself as non-drummer drummer, which I remain to this day. So the scene was set for something primitive.

As with all Blowfly sessions, we spent as much time setting up as playing (it's part of the ritual) and with Kiran most likely reading and drinking tea upstairs (an unconfirmed but reasonable assumption), we took to recording as quietly possible - a short sleepy jam of acoustic exchanges. Stefan's playing was typically “on” with his taped together guitar and foot instrumentation. The session finished with a thwump and a cup of tea.

Back home in Meanjin I gave it the Kindling House production values of the day, then talked about releasing it as a 3” CD-R. Then talked about it being a 10” lathe. Then finally got it mastered by Antony Milton and lathe-ready. Then Peter King made lathes no more. So here it is to stream and beam into your speakers or headphones, complete with the full suite of our respective artwork. It's short and sweet and took less time to make than I've now spent writing about it. Also available from Stefan's Stabbies Etc Bandcamp page, which you should lose a week or two exploring. Enjoy!

Leighton, Arthur River, 15 Jan 2026.

Kindling is an imprint based in Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia releasing small run editions.

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