little skull: ubique

One more top mysterious trace from the Little Skull legacy: Dean Brown's album Ubique (i.e. "everywhere" in Latin) marks the passing of time and people. This sense of loss is very present though the whole record; not getting around to saying the things we meant to say and making sense of the leftovers. Screaming calmly, Dean Brown's Little Skull has shrunk, even more, until his head is almost just sore meat - this music sounds like it was made to soothe that inflammation. Currently living in the UK, Little Skull is Dean's long running solo project. He plays all of instruments, even if it sounds like he is barely touching them and yet, his obscure personal fingerprints are all over the place. His instinctive spontaneous playing finds ways to make them glow and fizz and ripple. The very complicated hand-made cover is astonishing. It incorporates religious imagery and patron saints expanding in space and creating a three-dimensional architecture filled with mysterious presences. Dean Brown is a New Zealander from Hamilton. A joke city to much of the rest of New Zealand, but its feral mongrel out-of-it-ness is well known to those that have lived there. Dean coped with Hamilton through his bands Negative Eh and Nova Scotia and then buggered off to other cities and other countries. After several privately produced lathe-cut editions and a sold-out LP on Elica, Ubique is reissued here on LP in a one-time-only pressing limited to 250 copies.