Dean Roberts, Experimental Composer in Thela and White Winged Moth, Dies at 49

Dean Roberts, the experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist who carried out within the New Zealand noise trio Thela earlier than embarking on a sequence of solo tasks and data with Autistic Daughters, died this week, his labels Erstwhile and Kranky introduced yesterday (August 14). Roberts died in his sleep, Erstwhile’s Jon Abbey wrote, citing the musician’s sister. Roberts was 49 years outdated.

Roberts, then a teen, fashioned Thela with Dion Workman and Paul Douglas in New Zealand within the early Nineteen Nineties, rising to prominence by Auckland’s free‐music scene with a pair of albums for the U.S. label Ecstatic Peace! The primary, 1995’s Thela, was a landmark of rock minimalism, mixing post-hardcore guitar thrums with noise sonics and sparse percussion. The next 12 months’s Argentina added ambient components and glints of melody, attracting admirers of the coalescing post-rock community in addition to laptop computer composers like Fennesz, who later collaborated with Douglas’ Rosy Parlane undertaking.

When Thela parted methods, Roberts divided his output between releases underneath his personal title and his White Winged Moth undertaking, typically releasing on his personal label, Formacentric Disk, in addition to on Mille Plateaux and Erstwhile. Although these tasks tended to foreground alien frequencies and complicated noise components—significantly his improv collaboration with Thurston Moore and Dr. Chad—he additionally started to sing, turning barren soundscapes into uncanny folks laments. He continued in the identical course on Autistic Daughters’ two albums for Kranky, Jealousy and Diamond and Uneasy Flowers, earlier than taking a pause from the studio and returning, from Berlin, in 2020 with Not Hearth, the final studio album of his lifetime.

Amongst these to pay tribute was Lawrence English, who wrote on social media, “I’m going to deeply miss you. Your method of transposing the world into music. Your method of discovering the hidden voices within the instrument you performed. Your smile & that chortle…all the time that chortle. To future ballads in future locations.”