ON TOUR Who: HDUWhere & when: Wellington, May 15, San Francisco Bath House; Auckland, May 17, King's Arms; Dunedin, May 29, Backstage; Christchurch, May 30, Al's Bar.Album: Metamathics is out nowIt's been a long time coming, but a new album and tour from HDU is likely to bring plenty of appreciative fans out of the woodwork.Guitarist and vocalist Tristan Dingemans, bass player Neil Phillips and drummer Dino Karlis, have been doing their own thing for a while but have also kept HDU ticking over since forming in Dunedin in the mid-1990s - despite some challenges.The creation of the newly released Metamathics album took a big setback when Karlis learned the hard way about why anything significant saved on a computer hard drive should be backed up."Basically I was a complete idiot and didn't back up my work for a long time and lost pretty much all the mixes and overdubs for a finished record - or about 90 per cent of it," Karlis admitted.
That was about four years ago, and at a stage where the band were already beginning to get a bit frustrated about how long it was taking to transform their music into a finished recording.While most people can relate to the frustration of losing work through technological failure, Karlis' experience was towards the top of the scale and took some coming to terms with.He said his reaction was "denial, bargaining, anger ... I ended up with acceptance somewhere along the way".His bandmates were nevertheless "polite" about it.Karlis said he moved on from the experience by coming up with new ideas about how to develop the music they had.He was living in Auckland at the time and was able to draw on the talents of a few musician friends, who contributed in various ways to the songs on Metamathics.It was an approach that got the thumbs up from Dingemans and Phillips and has added another dimension to the album.Karlis said the songs on Metamathics were quite different now than they had been shaping up to be before the computer incident."They're more experimental and less self-conscious," he said."There are new elements there and new approaches to the songs."It's the first album where we've used hand-claps, the first where we've used saxophone and the first where we've used piano."It's complex, but structurally very simple. In terms of instrumentation and sounds it's quite complex."HDU have gained an almost cult following here and overseas for their sound, which drifts between delicate soundscapes and intense and drawn out barrages of guitars and drums.The band were bemused to find legendary British radio DJ and journalist, the late John Peel, once labelled them "one of the 10 best bands in the world you've never heard of".
