Audiopile Review: First new album from Dunedin’s Alastair Galbraith since 2021’s Seconds Mark III, arriving only a few months after the first-time vinyl reissue of Talisman, his beloved 1995 full length of art-damaged lo-fi f art folk. Lagash is issued on the Australian-based Nice Music imprint, a multi-format label largely focusing on the far flung corners of Australian experimental music. If you’ve not checked in with much of Galbraith since the ‘90s, you’ll find his voice a bit more world-weary and the songs less fragmentary, though there is no loss of the intimacy that’s made his records so endearing to those who hold them close. Beginning with the dustbowl drawl of “Bakunin” before moving on to the eerie instrumental drone of “Air Wedding By Water”, Galbraith lands on an incredible deconstruction of Richard Youngs’ “Beyond The Valley In Flight”, turning his majestic krauty-pop song into a slow dirge of bleak gothic-folk with its searing guitar and the cavernous drums of Chris Heazlewood, fellow Flying Nun alum. The title track takes over the entirety of the B-Side, a fiery lament with Galbraith on fiddle as he saws toward a blackened infinity alongside Heazlewood’s clatter. Easily one of his best albums. But don’t just take our word for it, listen to long-time fan Sarah Davachi when she states simply, “It’s an experience unlike much else.”

Nice Music presents ‘Lagash’ – the brand new album from Dunedin, New Zealand’s legendary experimental songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and tape music idol Alastair Galbraith. His quietly stunning output in recent years includes the solo LP ‘Seconds Mark III’ (A Colourful Storm), last year’s ‘The Drum Is The Shaman’s Horse’ from his long running duo A Handful Of Dust (with The Dead C’s Bruce Russell) and a lawless scattering of self released material and ashen ephemera along the way. Throughout the years since his earliest recordings dating back to 1988, Galbraith has released LPs on Emperor Jones, Xpressway and Table Of The Elements to name a few, not to mention his epochal 22-track masterwork ‘Mass’ for Siltbreeze in 2010.

Enter ‘Lagash’, instantly a left turn at just 4 elongated tracks. 3 on the A side with accompaniment from guitarist Jackson Harry, followed by a B side entirely inhabited by ‘Lockdown In Lagash’ – a panicked dirge which sees Galbraith on fiddle, pitted against drummer Chris Heazlewood (King Loser).

A die-hard fan, Canadian composer Sarah Davachi weighs in on ‘Lagash’ and Galbraith’s legacy;

“It’s hard to describe how Alastair’s music makes me feel, and it’s something that I’ve been trying to do for myself ever since I first fell in love with his records many years ago. In a concrete way, there’s a kind of intimacy and quietude, a sort of functional aloneness, that I admire so deeply in his music and that I aspire to in my own music. I’m consistently obsessed with the production and arrangement in his records. His songwriting is so beautifully sparse in its base structure, and that’s something that I appreciate on a technical level because I know how hard it is to be simple and reduced for the sake of a specific meaning. But Alastair somehow manages to touch that negative space further and make its emptiness tangible. And I suppose that this intimacy speaks to the emotional aspects that I latch onto in his music as well – from my perspective, what Alastair is so incredible at achieving in his music is the idea that one could take a moment or a feeling, and suspend it in time as a miniature or a sculpture of sorts that you can walk around and observe and maybe just sit with for a while. It’s an experience unlike much else. The first two pieces of Lagash (‘Bakunin’ and the instrumental ‘Air Wedding By Water’) recall this feeling very clearly in that they pull you into a sound world that, for me, is so private, warm and delicate. The Richard Youngs cover at the close of the album’s first side, ‘The Valley In Flight’, is a particular highlight of the album for me, in part because it serves as the perfect bridge into the side-long instrumental ‘Lockdown in Lagash’. Alastair’s rendering of ‘The Valley In Flight’ is so markedly different in feeling and pacing from the original that it’s rather unfair to even consider it as being in reference to something else. That difference is distilled into ‘Lockdown in Lagash’ and then extended over a much longer period of time and in a much larger physical or spatial environment than I’m accustomed to hearing from Alastair. It’s overwhelming and unsettling in the best way possible and has me extremely excited about where this slower and longer figure might move to next.”