Quad

The deeply individual, secretive soundworlds of Blenheim’s Clinton Williams, aka Omit, make for some of New Zealand’s most genuinely mind-altering music. Since starting out in the late 1980s, he’s self-released a batch of small-run cassettes and CD-Rs on his own labels, Deepskin Conceptual Mind Music and Sysecular, most of which are accompanied by his detailed, sci-fi-surrealist drawings; some also come with abstract scores for the pieces. Given how highly structural Omit’s electronic music is – on the two cassettes (or, when reissued in 1997, three discs) of Quad, think the austere-yet-cosmic electronics of Conrad Schnitzler and Klaus Schulze, with field recordings and mangled, mutant found sounds slotted deep into the folds of the compositions – it’s in some ways surprising he’s so aligned with NZ’s free noise scene, but there’s a shared ethos here, of exploratory vision, and making the most out of minimal, home-crafted and jerry-rigged equipment.