Uneasy Flowers

VINYL FORMAT. Uneasy Flowers is the second album by Autistic Daughters, the intercontinental trio of Dean Roberts (guitar, vocals), Martin Brandlmayr (percussion, computer) and Werner Dafeldecker (guitar, bass). It is also the fourth in a series of records in which Roberts, having begun in more abstract territory in New Zealand's mid-1990s "free noise" ferment, has embraced song, lyric and voice as vessels for topographic and psychoanalytic tracings of the impacts of territory and nomadism on the subject. With Uneasy Flowers, Roberts traces the internal and external workings of one protagonist: or, rather, a protagonist who "contains multitudes," a figure that dissolves the unified self. There are traces in the lyrics - traces of addiction and desire, myth and transformation - that are obliquely reflected in the music's structure, its uneasy tension between the pop song (the "moment") and experiment (the "process"). - Jon Dale