Voodoo Hex - UFO Bike. 1994.

Voodoo Hex. Voodoo Hex. Named by Mike (Michael J. Hex) Brassel, in the early ninties. Michael has retrospectively developed, gained, earned a place in the pantheon of Kiwi-South-Island-sound-icons. I've just watched a bunch of youtube clips of his, Brett Lupton(Squirm) and various other scuzzbuckets from those early nineties days in Christchurch. Playing at Warners, Quadrephenia, The Subway, The Dux De Lux. I stumbled into it all by chance. I started playing guitar and drums at 19, no prior music making except for singing as a boy in the school choir (I recon I must've been pretty atonal and quite choir singing when expected to sing under scrutiny). I Started playing drums (on cardboard boxes, with chop sticks), teaching myself from a book, joined my first band, from an ad in the newspaper and got straight to work. Teamed up with the singer, Shane and moved at his suggestion into 112A Lichfield St, upstairs, downtown Christchurch. Met the neighbours, discovered all sorts of new things that hadn't been on my radar, and generally got my naivety smashed beneath oceanic waves of 'counter culture'. Looking at the growing historical record of these times, presented on the internet by peers from those several-life-times-ago I'd say that I stumbled into it all by chance, many who were there were looking for something, for the things they'd read about in magazines or between the covers with authors with whom they may have confused process and out-come. Certainly there were many who turned the process into a way of life, and there were also those who were genuinely talented IMHO, even if I have no command of the tenets of their aesthetic, culture or religion.
This track is a band track, Mike, Chris J. and myself, at Hex Central on Barbadoes St, earlyish 90's, during a regular afternoon jam. When you sit round on the dole all day, the afternoon jam and its accoutrements can be the highlight of the day, perhaps second only to a late night bowl of hot porridge, or a scoop of chips and three deep fried mushrooms. It's a band track with no vocals. Vx and radio static for artistic effect were over dubbed later.
The Hex went on a field trip to centres around the South Island in support of Ape Management, I think entirely because Mike was playing bass for them. We played some transcendentally awesome shows to nobody at Super 8 in Dunedin (Pumpkinhead were playing the same night elsewhere in town) and to some brave locals at the Penguin Club in Oamaru. Other shows were less cathartic, specifically The Bonsai Pizzeria in Greymouth. We'd gone on an outing to Blackball to observe the local flora and fauna and returned to a packed house that got to watch us die on stage. At least the local flora, and the fauna for that matter, lived up to their reputation.

I entered that world by chance, by mistake, made my contribution with a naive desire to belong to something, something to which I didn't, and couldn't find my way out even when I needed to; until I finally crawled back into the light of the day to discover that the descent into the underworld is a classic tale.