HDU: Fire down under

Their big guitar noise has taken them to small-town New Zealand and a riverboat on the Mississippi. Now HDU consider their next move. GRAHAM REID reports.

What's in a name? With HDU's new album Fire Works, it's truth in packaging. Released on Thursday, it features incendiary guitar sounds to burn, and some gentle slow flames flickering throughout the nine tracks recorded at Steve Albini's studio in Chicago. Yep, it's fiery - and it works.

Albini, the knob-twiddler behind Nirvana, PJ Harvey and the Pixies wasn't exactly behind the desk as intended, but no matter. Fire Works explodes out of the speakers, testament to the abilities of HDU's long-time sound mixer Dale Cotton, who effortlessly sat in while Albini undertook commitments elsewhere.

The deal to record in Chicago with Albini was struck when he was touring this country with his band Shellac, for whom HDU opened. Albini had long been an admirer of HDU's inventive guitar-based, trance-textured, astral-flight music and so ...

"The interesting thing, and we probably thought this too," says HDU guitarist/singer Tristan Dingemans, "is people think you have to be in the aesthetic good books of Mr Steve Albini for him to record you. That's not actually the case, he's running a studio and if you want to go and record there you can.

"People were shouting out at the Shellac/HDU shows, 'Will you record us?' And he's thinking, 'Well, sure.' The scenario that happened for us was he'd been booked and the studio needs to keep running so he did that - and his main input comes in the first three days of a session anyway.

"It was a disappointment for both parties, but the way he put it was he was a fan of our records and liked the work Dale had done. So he was happy for us to go into his studio and give Dale a chance to stretch out and work with good gear.

"It was the first time we've worked in a studio proper, previously we'd assembled a mixing desk and tape machines and hired a space and gone in there for a couple weeks or months or whatever. This was a dream come true, it's an incredible space and it was an amazing experience."

Although they had a specific time-frame, Dingemans says it was a luxurious time for them and they didn't change their way of working. They went in with two definite songs and three strong ideas but wrote the bulk of the album in the studio. It took two weeks from start to finish and Dingemans jokes about a maxim they discovered on a chocolate wrapper before a show in Wisconsin - in art, as in life, true beauty is simplicity in itself - which they took as their guiding "oblique strategy," in the manner of Brian Eno's working method.

Suggest to Dingemans that parts of Fire Works are not dissimilar to the work of Eno and Robert Fripp and he admits he's been listening to their two albums - Evening Star and No Pussyfooting - a lot over the last year and likes the tones they get going.

Their Stateside gigs, arranged around the recording sessions, cost them financially ("we took a hammering") but, typical of a band that has played the Auckland Observatory and the sci-fi weekend at the Aotea Centre, they fitted in a gig in an unusual venue, aboard the Betty Northrop, a Mississippi riverboat.

Dingemans says they always look for different places to play, especially in Auckland because, hailing from Dunedin, they feel they have to push the envelope for their judiciously few gigs.

They have also crossed into the dance-trance audience - largely thanks to the self-funded remix album Higher ++ - and are joined by Sola Rosa and others for their gig tonight.

Right now, as they wait for Fire Works to sink in, they are again considering their overseas options. The States proved too costly while, because of the Flying Nun label's connections, Europe seems more viable.

"We're not taking the same trajectory as other bands working at the same level," says Dingemans. "We're not setting out to pay our mortgages with money from HDU. We want to maintain a passion for the music by not doing 200 shows a year.

"Our peers? There's obviously no comparison in terms of sales, but [they are] people like Shihad and Fur Patrol, who we've played with.

"Shihad were very generous to us and we've played shows with them and Salmonella Dub, which broadened our audience, although we are obviously on different tracks. We have great respect for Shihad and they put on a massive show and play really hard, we're not really doing that. I should qualify that, though, because it looks like a cop-out not to be putting in that effort - but then by doing it this way we're more likely to be playing in 10 years rather than burning out."

* HDU play Galatos tonight with Dimmer, Made in Hong Kong, Sola Rosa and DJ Stinky Jim.