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Tanaka-Nixon Meeting

Biography

Mid 1990’s free-noise duo made up of Danny Butt (Flies Inside The Sun) and Michael Morley (The Dead C etc). Released three ultra-rare Peter King 8″ lathes on Morley’s Precious Metal imprint, along with 2 albums and a single.

The Ark visits the quieter recesses of improvised music and explores the relationship between background noise and isolated foreground sounds. As Butt’s cello accents and tests the peaks and valleys of Morley’s soft waves of quiet guitar noise, the album slowly defines the contours of a lo-fi, ambient garage ‘scape.

Brian Whitener on the The Ark (AllMusic)

An exercise in barely-extant low-fi scrape and dense ambience via cello(?) and guitar.

Bruce Russell on the ‘Blessed’/’Tanks’ 7″

The duo were named after the historic 1972 meeting between the Japanese (Kakuei Tanaka) and US (Richard Nixon) Presidents during the Vietnam War. Both presidents were accused of corruption at some point during their respective careers.

Starting out in 1993 sounding much like the Dead C – minimalist noise based around drones, feedback and random noises, by the time the group had recorded 1998’s ‘Twelve Inches Heaven’ the duo had taken a sharp left turn towards more electronic, glitch-based sounds. At the time Morley had a fascination with electronic dance music and the results are essentially broken impersonations of dance floor bangers.

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