EYE - Prophecy & Black Ships 2 LPs + Zine BUNDLE Deal (PRE-ORDER)
Co-released by Grapefruit Records & Carbon Records
Release Date: December 5th, 2025
Special bundle includes both LPs (Prophecy and Black Ships) and a limited edition 32-page (8.5”x11”) full color zine, including a collection of photos and flyers, along with writings from Andrew Scott (Metal Rouge, only vernal pools, etc), Bill Direen (Bilders, etc), and Bruce Russell (The Dead C, A Handful of Dust, etc). And all for a special price!
Black Ships LP description:
As Stapleton's illness progressed over his last years, instead of lamenting what doors had closed to him, Stapleton with the truest, highest understanding of what free improvisation suggests, asked himself what doors remained open and walked through them. Stapleton entered a grand tradition of master improvisers for whom changes in physical ability were approached with the same practical acuity that a great improviser approaches their instrument with every time they play: what are the tools at hand? And what can be said with them? This was not a leap of faith, but an understanding – an understanding based on a lifetime spent in love with the promise of art. This approach is the highest application of the practice of improvised music. In his ability to turn a physical limitation into the driver of avenues previously unexplored, Peter Stapleton resides in the company of such masters as Masahiko Togashi, Derek Bailey, Linda Sharrock, and Keith Rowe.
And as a result of this we have with us this gift of an album, Eye's final: Black Ships. But the truth is, Peter had been exploring drumless electronic abstraction for two decades – his drumming was so startling that few noticed his electronic tendencies. And so in Black Ships we have the pleasure of hearing a direction in Stapleton's work at length that was only previously hinted at. Languid pools of mystery and menace circle nebulously. Guitar and synth spread and flatten, slipping in to the cracks of your surroundings as if they've been waiting for the tension to let up for just this very purpose. Porteous' guitar continuums draw one into the frosty warehouse chilblains of Dunedin. Practice spaces from which the chill never departs unless the band generates sufficient energy. The cool darkness, the intensity, the gothic drama – without the relentless forward motion of Stapleton's drums – it's all still here. The only tragedy is that it makes one realize how much ground Eye still had to cover. Black Ships is a triumph. Clutching the thread of the moment in the face of adversity and from that thread making something utterly, absolutely alive. A surging triumphant affirmation of art as a tool of human agency and self-definition. A celebration of being truly, radically present.
Prophecy LP description:
Prophecy finds Eye in form familiar to those who've had the good fortune to hear their 2016 album Other Sky, but even more compacted and condensed, a band simmered and reduced to their pure essence. And then the volume increases. Prophecy is a pummeling din of guitar clouds shot through with electronic disruption. Stapleton's relentless motion drives Porteous' icy guitar streams in leaping waves. 'Catch Them' opens the album with Peter's vocals, croaking out from the synth-lit shade – as far as I'm aware only the second time we've heard Stapleton deliver his own lyrics (the other being 'The Moon In Your Eyes' on Other Sky). After spending forty years as one of New Zealand's most distinctive lyricists - his visions of the gothic south, the Canterbury plains alive with soft menace in the moth lights eerie glow. His lyrics were a foundational element of the unclassifiable Xpressway stable legends The Terminals (of which Peter was a founding member). To finally hear Stapleton's lyrical vision at length over two albums directly from the horse's mouth is a revelation.
The entirety of the second side of Prophecy is given over to 'Nacred' which in its unyielding, pounding aggression resembles the grey downtown guitar of Sonic Youth circa 83, as if 'Sonic Death' was extended by the most lightning-struck incarnation of the Blue Humans. This is a side of Eye previously hinted at but never truly revealed until now. The two Peters lock into each other. A heaving morass of raging rockist noise which one hesitates to call 'minimalist' even as it searches for what more it could possibly leave unsaid in its oceanic roar. A dense ball of pure unbridled roar coated with Chapman's synth darting like sleek fishes on the surface of the sun. Unbelievably, Prophecy even features a cover: Eye present a radical turning inside-out of Dadamah's classic 'Too Hot To Dry' – Peter's smoldering claustrophobia offers a stark contrast to Kim Pieters’ wide open desert-sky delivery on This Is Not A Dream.