Essential New Zealand Albums: Bressa Creeting Cake

To a listener who was tuned to Auckland's bFM in the mid-1990s, the self-titled debut of Bressa Creeting Cake might not have come as quite the surprise it did to everyone else. 

But even if you knew it was coming, the album was full of surprises. And it still sounds surprising today.

The first surprise was the name of the band: Bressa Creating Cake. What kind of a name is that? And there was the fact that the album was on Flying Nun, a label still strongly identified with South Island guitar bands and DIY mavericks like Chris Knox.

But mostly the surprises were in the music.

Fifteen finely crafted songs with absurdist narratives threaded through maze-like melodies. Intricate guitar lines and rhythms that lean towards the exotic.

It was the era of grunge and techno, gangsta rap and boy bands, but this music clearly conforms to none of the above. Bressa Creeting Cake seemed to exist in its own musical biosphere, independent of prevailing fashions.

But if they seemed to come from nowhere, the three musicians who would make up the group – Edmund McWilliams, Geoff Maddock and Joel Wilton – had all been students at Avondale College in West Auckland, which is where they first played together.

McWilliams, at that time, had the most experience.

"I had two other bands”, he recalls. "One of them was called The Gutter Wizards. We had a song on the top 10 on BFM. The Gutter Wizards used to practice on top of the Newmarket car park. You used to be able to drive to the top, and there were some electricity outlets, so we'd just plug in there. We did get a complaint once from someone on Mount Hobson. So we must have sort of been beaming out there a bit.”

Maddock had grown up on an exclusive diet of classical music. Wilton had learned from local jazz legend Frank Gibson Jr and played in various school bands, which had sometimes included either or both Maddock and McWilliams. He had also studied the Indian tabla.

But it was only after the three had all left school that they really became a unit. With both Maddock and McWilliams writing songs, and all three contributing to the arrangements, they started playing small gigs around Auckland, usually as support for other groups.

They also made their first recordings. As McWilliams had already had his youthful success at BFM, the student station was the obvious first stop for the newly formed trio.

Flying Nun furnished the band with the budget to make an album. There was just one condition.

The name the trio had given themselves – Breast Secreting Cake – had to go. At the time, the label was making inroads into Europe and America, and that name was apparently considered just too unappetising for the global market.

The band's answer was to change the spelling without really changing the name. They became Bressa Creeting Cake – a sort of phonetic version of their old name – and adopted new surnames to match: Joel Bressa, Geoff Creeting and Edmund Cake.

Looking for a studio suitable for making their album led this wilful trio to the North Shore home of recording engineer Joe Gubay.

Maddock remembers that, as well as chickens and Gubay's children, the studio was filled with unusual instruments, which at various times found their way onto the record, like the mandolin and wooden marimba that feature in what would be the album's opening track, 'Palm Singing'.

If there's an absurd, almost-surreal quality to these songs, it's got something to do with the way the mundane meets the fantastical.

They sing about petrol stations and make them sound like strange netherworlds. When they describe attending the Mountain Rock music festival in the song 'Rocky Mountain', it is as though they were anxious anthropologists encountering some previously unknown subculture for the first time.

Bressa Creeting Cake never made another album, although Geoff Maddock went on to form Goldenhorse, in which Joel Wilton also played.

Their first album Riverhead features in another episode of Essential New Zealand Albums.