Chants skip a techno beat
A Hare Krishna monk from Tokoroa made quite possibly New Zealand’s greatest techno album. By
Grant Smithies.
Ten years ago, in 2007, I wrote my first and only book. It was a knackering, seemingly endless process, taking out a year’s worth of evenings and weekends.
Named Soundtrack ,itwasa collection of caffeine-addled essays about New Zealand music, and I didn’t write it for glory or for cash.
I wrote it to give a nudge to a hundred or so albums I loved, records I thought needed more attention. Records like Inside A Quiet Mind bya humble young Maori dude from Tokoroa, Denver McCarthy, who recorded it under the name Micronism.
‘‘I read that book!’’ says McCarthy, now a Hare Krishna monk, living in Brisbane.
‘‘I really appreciated what you wrote. It was kind and thoughtful, and I felt like you’d been listening very closely. That book helped a lot of people find that record, and I was thankful for that.’’
I devoted an entire chapter to the brilliance of McCarthy’s 1998 debut album, declaring it ‘‘the best electronic album ever made in this country’’.
I stand by that assessment. Reissued this week after being unavailable for nearly 20 years, Inside A Quiet Mind remains a cultural taonga, a musical time capsule that sends the listener hurtling straight back to the earliest flowerings of the New Zealand rave scene.
When it first came out I thought ‘this is amazing! What will this guy make next?’
Answer: Nothing. Within a year of releasing the record, McCarthy had sworn off synthesisers and exchanged techno for chanting, rave culture for root vegetable curries.
After mad antics in a series of Auckland warehouse flats where acid and ecstasy were the stimulants of choice and electronic music pounded away around the clock, he embraced the quiet life of a spiritual nomad, living for many years in ashrams in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador before moving to Australia.
‘‘I sold my keyboards and joined the Krishnas around 1999, then moved around a lot, all over the world. You know, I made that album when I was 20, and I’m 41 now! I was a very different person. It’s always amazing to me when people track me down to talk about that record.’’
And yet, they do. Dutch label Delsin Records found him a few years ago and begged permission to reissue his earlier Steps To Recovery EP. And now, NZ label Loop Recordings is re-issuing this lost classic on vinyl.
McCarthy was born in Tokoroa, moving to Auckland when he was a child. In his teens, he became interested in DJing, and later, inspired by Auckland club culture and early outdoor festival The Gathering, began making his own electronic music.
Released under the name Mechanism, his early electronic tracks were almost comically intense. The more relentless and abrasive, the better.
‘‘Yeah, I used to be in a metal band in my teens, and that influenced the earliest techno music I made. But as I got older, I grew out of the harder stuff, and started to become more interested in spirituality.’’
It was this quest for meaning and transcendence that informed Inside A Quiet Mind.
‘‘I think everyone goes through a stage where they reassess the way they’re living and wonder if there’s any sort of greater purpose to their lives. And that was my time, right when I was making this album. I was reading (key Krishna text) the Bhagavad-Gita and books on Buddhism. I was spiritually hungry and looking around.’’
McCarthy recalls a revelation of sorts. There he was, in a huge warehouse flat crammed with records and musical instruments, and suddenly, he lost interest in all of it.
‘‘I had crates and crates of DJ records, yet I kept coming back to this one LP of people chanting the Hare Krishna mantra. It was suddenly the only record I wanted to listen to, so I gave all the rest of my records away and started selling my musical equipment. There was no desire to make music anymore. As my ego fell away, I lost the taste for it.’’
Looking back now over the intervening 20 years, McCarthy sees Inside A Quiet Mind as a sonic snapshot of a young man beginning a journey into the unknown, flushed with excitement and expectation.
‘‘The music is based on minimal techno from Berlin and Detroit, but what makes that album unusual is that it’s a document of someone finding their spiritual path, and using electronic music as the vehicle for that.’’
Inside A Quiet Mind is rare on multiple levels, not least because it’s a ‘‘spiritual quest’’ album that’s deep, hefty and club-friendly.
One of Detroit techno’s greatest producers, Carl Craig, once told me that his desolate, crime-ridden hometown drove local techno writers to imagine a more beautiful version of the city.
‘‘When you get a bunch of black ghetto kids reporting on what they see around them, that’s hip-hop. But when you get a bunch of black ghetto kids with electronic instruments dreaming of alternative futures, that’s techno.’’
And when you get a young Maori kid with a burgeoning spirituality and an intensely beautiful natural environment to respond to, you get Inside A Quiet Mind. It’s as if McCarthy had sat down in a shady clearing in the bush, plugged his instruments into a portable generator and got to work, distilling what surrounds him - deep green leaves, bellbird calls, smooth round stones, icy water, scuttling insects, clammy mud - into a forest of fluttering frequencies.
He had taken a musical style born of cracked grey concrete and urban desolation and employed it to express a thousand shades of green.
‘‘It’s music with a lot of emotion in it,’’ McCarthy says quietly. ‘‘There’s a storyline linking the tracks, about not being able to find happiness on the material plane, and having to go deeper inside yourself to find that elusive contentment and peace. It’s about changing the way you think about yourself and your relationship with the world.’’
McCarthy is delighted this record is about to be reissued. He’s been listening to the re-mastered version in the mornings, when he drives to work at a Krishna restaurant in Brisbane.
‘‘I play it while I drive along in my ute, and I’m pleased that I made it. But the music I make is different now. What feeds my musical fire these days is chanting, and I also learned to play several traditional Indian folk instruments. Many Indian folk melodies are simple on the surface but very complicated beneath, like electronic music, and they take you to a similar place. I used to go to these dance parties where people were taking drugs to get into a transcendent trance-like state. Twenty years later, I chant the Krishna mantra and get to that place a lot more easily.’’
It’s great to hear that McCarthy’s so happy these days, though if I’m honest, I wish he’d found time to make a few more records before he sold his instruments, shaved his head and went, as he puts it, ‘‘full Krishna’’.
But as things stand, he’s left us something very special. Inside A Quiet Mind captures the optimistic and communal DIY spirit of the early NZ dance party scene better than any other album I can think of, back before it all became so corporate, so jaded, so hedonistic.
‘‘People say to me, ‘That record’s amazing. You could have taken electronic music a lot further.’ But I found something I love more. I have a full-time job, a wife, a 2-year old son; I feel blessed that my life has gone this way. When I was in the thick of making electronic music, if someone had told me I’d end up living as a Hare Krishna monk, I would never have believed them. But it’s been a hugely positive thing in my life.’’
''There's a storyline linking the tracks, about not being able to find happiness on the material plane, and having to go deeper inside yourself to find that elusive contentment and peace." Denver McCarthy