GATE

THE DEW LINE

wenty years is long enough: It's time to acknowledge Michael Morley as an indie-rock

patriarch. And why not? As the guitarist and vocalist for New Zealand noise-trip trio The

Dead C and the man behind Gate (ostensibly a solo project, although Sonic Youth's Lee

Ranaldo makes frequent guest appearances), Morley is the rare artist that record-hounds

love to unearth: an isotope in the body Pop, radiating an invisible influence. With scores of

micro-batch releases and an unmistakably intimate performace idiom, he ranks in the

company of Jandek or Loren Connors, but it's Morley's geographic isolation rather than

social disengagement that has deflected his work from reaching more ears. He tends his

shambling craft in antipodean exile, in the remotest corner of the verdant backside of our

increasingly Hollywood Planet, and his international live appearances are less common

than eclipses. Still, if you don't recognize his name, you've heard his reverberations, in the

ambient post-rock of Flying Saucer Attack and Labradford, the neo-psychedelia of Bardo

Pond, and the fidelity-challenged whorl of Pavement and Sebadoh.

Recorded in 1993 and out of print since, Gate's The Dew Line is the first part of his "rock

trilogy" (followed by The Monolake in 1996 and The Wisher Table in 1999). Rock it does.

Typical Gate/Dead C no-fi guitar subduction and Morley's locked-in-the-car-trunk vocals

are prominent, but there's also a hefty amount of scraping synthesizer menace and

paleozoic riffage. The crust of noise is there, but crack open the sonic geode and you'll

discover some nifty songstyling. In someone else's universe, the gem of an opening track,

"Millions", gets play on AM radio, while "Have Not" climbs the FM charts. Full of brooding

atmospherics, The Dew Line is the most —dare we say it— accessible of any of Morley's

records, and it stands on an equal footing with his Dead C high-water mark, Harsh 70s

Reality, as an anti-rock rock classic.

"As a guitarist, Michael Morley undertakes a leap of faith similar to that of rugged individualists Keiji

Haino and Borbetomagus' Donald Miller, restoring devotion to his archaic instrument's electric threat

through the organic mutilation of volume and lethal distortion. A low-tech delay-pedal-

as-phantom-turbine is his most ubiquitous processor; an analogue synth vibrates oblique planes of

sound; songs become dust, dispersed by the mercurial rhythms of undulating mirages." —The Wire

"Napalms the entire history of rock."

—Blow-Up

RELEASE DATE: FEBUARY 7, 2006

TOE-CD-22

FORMAT: STANDARD JEWEL

RELEASE DATE: FEB. 7, 2006

FILE UNDER: Rock

CATALOG NO: TOE-CD-22

UPC: 600401022122

LIST PRICE: $18.98

BOX LOT: 25