Dimmer "I believe you are a Star" 2001

It has been written into New Zealand music lore that after Shayne P. Carter ended Straitjacket Fits, he returned home to Dunedin, and had “a lost weekend” that lasted five years.
During this time, he started venturing into electronic music under the new name of Dimmer, which puzzled a fair few people, before heading to Auckland and making four intensely, and often quietly, beautiful records. As it turns out, that’s only half the story...
...In January 1994, Straitjacket Fits played their last show at Auckland’s inaugural Big Day Out, by all accounts upstaging headliners Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden. Soon after this final show, Shayne Carter returned to Dunedin, completely disillusioned with the music industry and rock music in general, wanting to do something different under his own steam. “I came back here, I’d done a lot of travelling, and I guess I just basically wanted to come back home and regroup, really,” he says.
Learning to love music again, Carter looked to electronic music as a new and different direction. He spent significant time investigating early Kraftwerk and Brian Eno records, as well as European electronic bands Oval and Autechre. “To me that is great spooky shit,” he told Rip It Up in March 1997, “and it’s got a lot of qualities I’ve always loved in rock music. It’s got mystery, it’s got intrigue, and it’s got menace, but it’s coming from a completely different angle.”
It was a darker vibe that Carter was searching for, and he explained the name Dimmer to New Zealand Musician in 2001 as “I kinda wanted a spooky, claustrophobic vibe to it, that’s the whole Dimmer ethos … I wanted it shadowy and noir, I just wanted to be a bit creepy.”
Noir was a fitting descriptor for his new music, with the sonic landscapes mining a different, darker sound to that of his previous work. “I started developing this idea of completely minimalist, hypnotic music,” he says. “A lot of that stuff was like a primal essence of human pulse, it’s breathing, it’s sex, it’s walking … I try to bring that to the music.”
While Dimmer was a solo project revolving around Carter, he used a fluid line-up of musicians best suited to the style of music he was making. The first instance of this (with Peter Jefferies and Lou Allison) was the ‘Crystalator’ single: three incendiary minutes of guitar effects. Its B-side ‘Dawn’s Coming In’ was quieter, creeping, insistent, built around a wiry guitar line, and scattershot rhythm. The single was released on Sub Pop records in 1995. Dimmer’s first live performances were in 1996, with a short national tour.
Around this time Carter tried to record an album in Dunedin. “[It was] as early as 1995 when I tried to do the first Dimmer album, and I think around the same time, we did the ‘Crystalator’ single” with a new line-up that included Chris Heazlewood, Cameron Bain and Robbie Yeats. That album didn’t eventuate, due to the sessions ending, as Carter told Pavement magazine in 1997, in “tears, soap operas, that kinda stuff.”
However, some material on I Believe You Are A Star, including ‘Seed’, originated from these sessions (an early version of ‘Seed’ appeared on a 1995 Australian-only cassette Star Trackers), as did ‘Don’t Make Me Buy Out Your Silence’, the title track of the Dimmer EP release (1997).
Don’t Make Me Buy Out Your Silence was a step further in the Dimmer electronica-heavy, noir pop direction: the title track was shady, and menacing in tone, with a Goodfellas style video to match. One of the B-sides was another combustible guitar instrumental, ‘Pacer’, while a third was a fuzzy cover of Canned Heat’s ‘On the Road Again’, a song Carter liked because of the way it didn’t deviate, and stayed in the same groove. In between these tracks was a small piece titled ‘Intermission’ added to the end of ‘Pacer’, a short and beautiful instrumental of chiming electronica.
By the time the EP was released, Carter had moved back to Auckland (where the recording sessions for ‘On the Road Again’ occurred). “I woke up in Dunedin in the middle of my second winter, and I was living above somewhere out by the wharf, and it was so fuckin’ freezing, I thought ‘I don’t actually have to do this’,” he laughs.
His discovery of Pro Tools via Dale Cotton around the same time only added to the new musical direction. “I had been trying to get bad versions of what I envisaged, and I was so sick of trying to explain it … because I’d been fascinated by electronic music, I thought maybe this is the way to approach it.” The first song they worked on with Pro Tools was ‘Seed’, adding drum loops and repeating them for the entire song. “I thought “that’s all I need… put on the bass, put on the guitar, did the vocal, there was the tune.”...to be continued... - Amanda Mills and AudioCulture
trax:
01 Drop You Off 02 All the Way to Her 03 Seed 04 Evolution 05 Smoke 06 Drift 07 I Believe You Are a Star 08 Pendulum 09 Powercord 10 Under the Light 11 Sad Guy
…served by Gaius…