Antony Milton - Curtains 2 LP

New one from the New Zealand master of free-noise, Antony Milton.

This album was recorded during a period when I was home alone for a few months

whilst my partner Sara was away walking the length of New Zealand - The Te Araroa

Trail. This also coincided with very reduced work hours in my day job and so I seized

the opportunity to dive into recording the second Curtains album.

1 had been released several months earlier and had been explicitly referencing some of

the music of the early 90s that blew my mind and that has stayed with me over the years.

Roy Montgomery, Peter Jefferies, Flying Nun stuff, Flying Saucer Attack etc. It is

willfully nostalgic in that regard, and willfully underground-pop adjacent. The

songwriting on 1 is also in that mode and is perhaps a step removed from my

contemporary lived experience. The recording process is a lot more traditional and

'structured' than my usual fly-on-the-wall methodology.

2 starts out on that same footing, still being aware of honoring my external influences but

on this record I found I was taking the actual songwriting a lot more seriously and

ultimately it became a far more personal record. It's pretty close to being an 'Antony

Milton' record really, albeit less sketch based and more finished and arranged than most

of the material I release under my own name. I made a genuine effort to record it as 'well'

as I could.

2 was recorded around the period of Trump’s re-election with the world seemingly in

flames and flits between an impulse for escapism and a sense of responsibility to speak

up honestly in a time of peril.