Birchville Cat Motel - Biography
Birchville Cat Motel, the alias of one Campbell Kneale, is one of the most interesting recent projects in the grand tradition of New Zealand noise rock deconstruction. Built on seething layers of caustic drone and spectral ambient drift, Birchville Cat Motel’s sound takes cues from NZ legends like the Dead C, Gate and Handful of Dust and further subtracts the traditional rock elements to arrive at a unique place where the paths of minimalism, DIY noise and free form rock intersect. Since the mid 1990s, Kneale has explored this sound over countless releases and collaborations. In the process he has created an extremely idiosyncratic body of work.
Sometime in 1995 the first self-released Birchville Cat Motel cassettes started to appear. Created in a suburb of Wellington, NZ, these recordings fit right in with the country’s unique strain of heavily art-damaged noise rock. Kneale had previously played in a few unknown indie rock bands before he became more interested in the textures of feedback and the trance inducing drones he encountered after hearing bands like Bruce Russell’s the Dead C or Michael Morley’s Gate. Kneale left his bands behind and embarked on what would prove to be an extremely prolific career crafting powerful noise-rock inspired minimalism. He christened this new project Birchville Cat Motel after seeing it written on a sign in a rural NZ town.
The first BCM releases were issued on Kneale’s own Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label. In ’96 the first vinyl releases appeared, often in odd sizes and with beautiful lathe cut artwork. The first widely available CD release came in ’97 on the NZ based Insample imprint. The self-titled album features six lengthy tracks of heavily processed guitar drones, acidic noise and dark, swirling ambience.
1998 brought a slate of tape and vinyl releases on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon and labels like Secret Safari and American Tapes. That year’s release for the excellent and sadly defunct Drunken Fish label ranks among Kneale’s best. Siberian Earth Curve is a deeply inspired set of dark ambience and haunted dronescapes. These five tracks are among the most carefully measured music of any BCM release, featuring a spatial openness and at times a gentle musicality. Crafted mainly from heavily processed guitars and floating fragments of percussion, tracks like “Snakes Bark Maple” and the throbbing “Lux” move beyond noise music’s inherent climax of brutality to arrive at an eerie ambience inspired by Brian Eno’s classic On Land. Siberian Earth Curve is the best entry point into BCM’s dense discography and is arguably Kneale’s finest effort.
The end of the decade showed no slowing down in BCM releases with ‘99’s Lion Of Eight Thousand Generations a particular highpoint. Kneale took the project into the next decade with a release on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label. 2000’s Cranes Are Sleeping boasts some seriously dense and heavy guitar drones merging for a gritty ride through earthbound mysticism and late ‘60s psych-out minimalism. The following year brought at least six new albums as the hyper-prolific Kneale proved that his release schedule produced not only quantity but also quality.
For the majority of this decade each year averages around five Birchville Cat Motel records. While some of these appear on other labels, most of them are issued through Kneale’s own imprint. Of this later work, ‘03’s Summer’s Seething Pulse, ‘05’s Stellar Collapse and ‘07’s Seventh Ruined Hex stand out. As if this wasn’t enough, he also finds time to record as Black Boned Angel and collaborates with the likes of Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Bruce Russell and Yellow Swans. Recently Kneale has inaugurated a new project titled Our Love Will Destroy The World.
With an aesthetic focus mirroring that of minimalist pioneer Tony Conrad and a prolific release output in line with Merzbow, Birchville Cat Motel has created one of underground noise music’s strongest collections of work. Fusing elements of psychedelic noise-rock, classic minimalism, drone metal and dark ambient music, Kneale has formed a very singular take on deconstructed art-rock. His best work not only ranks among the classics from his own country but the global noise community as well.
