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  It has been twelve years since Dean Roberts released an album (Uneasy Flowers, by his trio Autistic Daughters). Across those twelve years, Roberts has lived an itinerant existence, moving between Auckland, Melbourne, London, Berlin, Italy, while working in various contexts: teaching; sound installation; composition for dance performance; album producer / advisor (for Heather Leigh Murray and Victor Herrero); art installation technician; film assistant. During that time, he has balanced life in the bustling metropolis with periods of seclusion, settling down for a time in a small community forty-five minutes out of Auckland. Music
  has been a thread – Roberts has toured intermittently, and has continued to write, sporadically – but it’s tempting to read this period ‘in the wilderness’ as a slow phase of reassessment and re-evaluation, and a reintegration with quotidian experience.
  Roberts’s new album Not Fire is, by any measure then, a welcome return. If the album itself concretised around something loosely conceptual – what would a twenty-years-later sequel to his 2000 set, The Black Moths Play The Grand Cinema, sound like? – the end result is rather more curious and unexpected. In some ways, though, Not Fire picks up on various threads and practices that have run through Roberts’s series of song-based albums that began with The Grand Cinema. The terrain of this album is marked by forebears, by artists whose music (or film, or visual art, I’d imagine) holds transfigurative power in Roberts’s world. These
  heavily coded references may act as a kind of community of spirit, but their bearing on Not Fire is ultimately just one small element of the world-building undertaken by the album’s nine songs. Throughout, Roberts introduces us to elemental characters, figures of spirit, some diffuse, some eerily present. Sometimes, the songs draw on classic pop archetypes to do their bidding; elsewhere, we encounter and are moved by landscape, urban redevelopment, time passing, the heron, the wolf, the apparition... These are songs that are scored by memory, or rather, the distortions of memory that build uncertainty into our recollection, that mean we’re always at arm’s length from the actual. Transformative, alchemical phenomena arc across the album’s songs – fire; gold – in service of scenario that are limned by everyday
  intimacies. Scenes play out in doorways, looking out through windows, moving between rooms, and then out onto streets that offer both threat and promise.
  The music itself takes on these shape-shifting properties – at times, there’s a folkish lilt; elsewhere, I heart his material as a contribution to a long tradition of art song. Continually, the songs feel like vessels, spaces inhabited by a community of musicians who appear throughout Not Fire, much like the cast for a screenplay.
  The performances are taken from various places, in various contexts – iPhone recordings from a garage in Melbourne; studio material; in a forest shack outside of Auckland, an artist’s studio in Brisbane, live recordings. Not Fire’s community is many and varied: Chris Abrahams (The Necks) turns up on the closing title track, as do Paul Taylor and Emanuele Porcinai; elsewhere, Leighton Craig and Sandra Selig of dream- DIY duo Primitive Motion appear. Previous collaborators Valerio Tricoli and Andrea Belfi reappear, as does Giuseppe Ielasi, who has mixed and mastered the album with exquisite attention to detail. Roberts produced
  the album, in collaboration with Porcinai and Ielasi, after a solitary summer recording largely alone at The Pines Studio, Berlin in a loft surrounded by a mountain of vintage analog equipment loaned by proprietor David Bryant (Godspeed/Set Fire to Flames).
  At the very end of his collection of diary entries, I Had Nowhere To Go, Jonas Mekas, the late, great poet and film maker of memory and the everyday, evokes a moment of elemental emotional return: “I was sitting there and trembling with memory.” The songs of Not Fire capture something of that moment, the visceral fleshiness that memory’s manifestation makes of the self. Come and hear the way memory makes us.
  Jon Dale, Feb 2020.
  ____________________________________
  Dean M Roberts - Vocals, Guitar, Piano, Bass, Percussion, Lap-steel
  The Black Moths
  Emanuele Porcinai - Feedback Guitars, Backing Vocals
  Chris Abrahams - Harpsichord
  Jenny Lange - Piano, Backing Vocals
  Leighton Craig - Reeds
  Sandra Selig - Vocals and Effects
  Valerio Tricoli - Organ
  Lucky Paul Taylor - Drums
  Andrea Belfi - Drums
  Additional: Erin Lang - Bass, Vocals
  Boris Hauf- Piano
  Andi Stecher - Percussion/Drums
  Ekkehard Ehlers - Advisor
  recorded and produced by Dean Roberts, Emanuele Porcinai and Giuseppe Ielasi
  recorded at The Pines Studio,
  
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  Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of fire in an unlit room (live 2019), Auditions : Red Memory. Dean Roberts & Valerio Tricoli, Paul/Kids E.P., All Craked Medias:Redux, And the Black Moths Play the Grand Cinema, and Moth Park/Soundtracks to Utopia. , and , .

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