claypipe: a daylight blessing

MIE are delighted to be releasing A Daylight Blessing, the seventh record by Claypipe, the New Zealand noise/drone/pop duo of Antony Milton and Clayton Noone. Released in a run of 300 LPs on vinyl. The record has been mastered by James Plotkin and will come in a silkscreened sleeve made out of recycled card. "Clayton and I finally met in person back in 2001 when he came up to play a festival in Wellington and stayed at my house. We had been trading records for a year or so. It was inevitable that we would wind up recording together. I set up my 4-track on the lounge floor that afternoon and we recorded the Crescent LP (PseudoArcana). We live 100s of miles apart and so our get-togethers have been rare,but when we are together we usually record. We're an improvising project, sometimes noisy, sometimes drone-y but somehow playing in Claypipe draws a blessed-out sunny pop sensibility from both our natures, something neither of us are particularly well-known for in our other bands and projects. It's possible this is a direct response to nature itself -- the Claypipe methodology frequently involves taking battery-powered and acoustic instruments outside -- to a grassy hillside, stream edge, or in the case of this record, the sandhills by the beach down the road from Clayton's place in Dunedin. There's a hippy utopianism present here that I think perhaps catches us both a little off guard. But it works and I know for myself that I'm reluctant to interrogate it too closely for fear of casting too much light on a fragile magic. A Daylight Blessing was recorded over a few days in October 2010 while preparing for a gig supporting Richard Youngs. It was mixed and edited over the next few months in Christchurch where it gave welcome and happy distraction from the earthquakes and their aftershocks." --Antony Milton, January 3, 2014