Cirrus

Auckland, New Zealand, 1977

Information
These are the only recordings left from that band in the 1970's. Recorded live, in a studio, onto a four track tape recorder. The vocals over-dubbed later. The songs were all much longer than these recordings but for the sake of brevity and studio time we savagely cut the music down to these lengths. It's a pity there is no record of the longer versions. Oceanus, especially, was twenty minutes long and you can hear passages that appear to not make sense in the overall structure. What is left, in those cases, are the short bridges to other parts of the music that was cut, for this recording. There were a number of other songs, of similar length, that have been lost forever. I remember one song that had a flute duet (with Lee and me playing) in the middle of the piece of music. That always gained the attention of an audience when music as loud and as complex as this stopped for two flutes. The Classical guitar song was done on a separate day with just Lee and I in the studio. We spent over eight hours trying all sorts of instrumentation to add to the song and after that time all that we left was a few swelled notes from the electric guitar. The music wanted to be simple but it took us a lot of stuffing around before we understood that.

The MP3 files can be downloaded here:

Phaedrus (8:34)
Sometimes (6:35)
Classical guitar song (3:01)
Oceanus (8:12)

Performers
Lee Herrick - Vocals, flute, acoustic guitar
Don McGlashan - Keyboards, mellotron, vocals
Dennis Mathews - Bass guitar
Paul Crowther - Drums
Mark Macpherson - Guitar, classical guitar, vocals