Just last February I was in New Zealand visiting family for the first time in 20 years. It was a weird trip for a number of reasons I won’t get in to here, but it was also illuminating. Walking through the free Dunedin museum with my uncle—a former professor in Dunedin—we came upon an exhibit that was all old music videos of New Zealand bands. I stood there watching these videos loop for about an hour. My dad had to pull me away. There’s something about all that music—a weirdness that reads as knowing and a bit tongue-in-cheek. Making music that far away from where things were happening in a pre-internet age must have been so frustrating, so freeing.
A few days later I was at a record store in Auckland, eyeing a copy of Peter Gutteridge's Pure, which I didn’t buy because with the exchange rate it was so expensive. I figured I could get it in the states, which I could, but then didn’t. My main memory of the record was coming upon a blog post about it very late at night a few years ago, and going down a YouTube hole, listening to every track I could find. There’s something so appealingly tossed off about it, but not in a way that it feels extraneous or lazy. It just feels like Gutteridge is exploring, and that exploration, that enthusiasm for downer moments can come off as really beautiful, and often transcendent. It’s infectious.
At a wedding a few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who knew Gutteridge. He said that he was in New York because the Clean were playing a show. He had a shopping bag full of guitar pedals, and when I heard this, I wanted to see what he’d do with those pedals.
He ended up playing a solo show, but I didn’t go. I’ve been packing for a move and I’ve been stressed about it. “I’ll have other chances,” I told myself. “There will be a next time because there is always a next time.”
“Ocean” sounds like an ocean, hence the track name. But there’s more to it than that: a meditative pounding that ebbs and flows and pulses. It sounds like a whole life.
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