When Matador Records celebrated its 21st birthday at the Palms in Las Vegas in 2010, locals were treated to sets from ’90s indie titans like Pavement, Guided By Voices, Cat Power and Belle & Sebastian. One key band from the era that didn’t make it here for the party, however, was New Zealand’s Bailterspace.
That rock trio, which began life as The Gordons in 1980 before re-emerging under its new name in 1987, released a string of noisy-yet-hypnotic albums on Matador in the U.S. and on the seminal Flying Nun Records in its home country. The band has been less active in recent years but still releases new music and performs on occasion—and on April 23, Bailterspace will play its first-ever Las Vegas show, at Artifice in Downtown’s 18b Arts District.
The Weekly tracked down singer/songwriter/guitarist Alister Parker for a rare interview from his home in New York City, a few weeks before the group headed out for a six-date U.S. run.
You’re only doing six U.S. shows, and Las Vegas got one. How? So, like, three months ago, I decided we should do a show in New York. And we sorted a sellout show, actually, at the Mercury Lounge. And then I thought, I’ll put together six shows around the U.S., just to say, “Bailterspace are present. Here we are.” We wanted to play in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and I said, we’re gonna need one other show [on the West Coast]. [And our booking agent said,] I can get a Las Vegas show for you. And I’m like, yeah, never been there. So this is a first, a new one for Bailterspace, and something very exciting.
If things go well with these gigs, might there be more? Yeah, that’s sort of the idea. We love to play. And I think it’s gonna be a really sensational evening in Las Vegas. We’re gonna play some beautiful music.
Without spoiling anything, what might the setlist feel like? At the moment, I have a pool of songs written down on bits of paper, about 24 tunes. And then normally, I chose the songs on the night that we play, and then off it goes. It’s a sonic thing, and it’s got a movement to it, if you like.
The band name … sometimes it’s on the album artwork as Bailter Space, sometimes Bailterspace. Is either more accurate? Well, we started off with a three-word name; we had this word “Nelsh” in front of it. And then we changed it to Bailter Space, two words, and that’s how we released pretty much everything on Matador. And then we decided to contain the name into one 12-letter word—B-a-i-l-t-e-r-s-p-a-c-e. That’s our latest, greatest, but it’s the same thing.
Matador reissued the band’s fifth album, 1995’s Wammo, on vinyl two years ago, but most of your catalog remains out of print. Are there plans to press more? Definitely, but it’s not the same as it used to be, where I could just call up a record company and go, all right, we’ve got this ready to go. So we’re gonna press our own vinyl, like we pressed our own CD release of [2020 album] Concret.
Let’s talk about that latest album, which to me fits nicely into your catalog as a whole. How did the recording process work for it? You and drummer Brent McLachlan live in the States, and bassist John Halvorsen lives in New Zealand, correct? That’s right, Halvorsen lives back in New Zealand, so we’re touring with [bassist] Eric Klaastad,who we played with at the Mercury Lounge and we’re rehearsing with at the moment. He’s fantastic.
But we managed to get to New Zealand, and we booked this fantastic studio and knocked Concret out in like five days, rehearsing, doing vocals, and then there were a couple more days mixing things there.
You’ve also been putting quite a bit of old material up on Bandcamp—live shows, demos and such. Is that something you enjoy, the archival aspect? Oh, I love it. It’s been a marvelous thing for the group, and it’s hit a spot with people all over the world. There’s gonna be some new things turning up on Bandcamp shortly. We’re getting some archival tapes transferred at the moment. I really like keeping it going.
The band’s 1993 album, Robot World, has become something of a cult favorite among shoegaze listeners. Do you have any particular affinity for that one? Absolutely, that’s a beautiful record. I printed the lyrics to Robot World on the inside, because I think we mixed them a bit low (laughs). We recorded that in New Zealand as our first world release for Matador. And then we jumped on a plane and came to New York.
You guys lost a friend and a former bandmate earlier this year. When you reflect on your time with [founding Bailterspace drummer] Hamish Kilgour, what comes to mind? I miss Hamish, and I grieve for him. He was the most amazing person to work with, and we played a lot of stuff together, him and I, and wrote together a lot. He was quite the artist, mate.
A lot’s been said and written about the New Zealand scene and Flying Nun in the ’80s, but what did that time mean to you? We had a really amicable relationship with all of those groups, The Clean and Straitjacket Fits, the whole lot, but we knew that we had our own thing going. We used to call ourselves an art movement (laughs). But there was total respect between all of those groups.
You know, one of the things that we used to do was, we would walk into a venue, ring the room and then make it sound really loud. It wasn’t all that loud, really—it just sounded loud. We just used harmonics, and rang the room out. It’s about resonance and we’re, I think, quite good at it. We’re a bunch of engineers, in a way, so we listen to the room and then we know what it’s gonna turn out like later. And then you know, give the sound engineer a bit of a talking to (laughs).
BAILTERSPACE With The Acid Sisters, Orange Eats Creeps. April 23, 8 p.m., $15-$20. Artifice, eventbrite.com.
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