Biography
How To Kill first gathered in a Christchurch workshop in 2003 and played a handful shows with friends Into the Void. A four year hiatus passed before the band found themselves reactivating and focusing their efforts toward an album at the behest of Failsafe's Rob Mayes, who had been moved by the emotional power and depth of their live performances. Reformed and writing new material, with the aid of a Creative NZ arts grant the band recorded their debut full-length over an intensive and creative 4 months with Mayes at his Avalanche studios and at How To Kill's headquarters in Lyttleton, where, at the Wunderbar, they performed another pair of seismic gigs with comrades-in-arms Mountaineater, flooring many with their unique amalgam of oceanic feedback manipulations and angular counterpointed melodies, McLean's and Matteers twinned guitars integrated into flexible interlocking structures by the tensile strength of Leigh-MacKenzie and Johnson.
How To Kill is an instrumental rock band, whose music draws on a diverse but resonant tradition of electric music - Earth, Can, The MC5, Bark Psychosis, Slint, The Skeptics, and Black Flag all echo in their open-ended yet propulsive ebb and flow, befitting a group whose members have individual backgrounds stretching from metal to free-jazz improvisation. Heaviness and light, light and darkness: How To Kill play songs without words and let the music speak for itself. Like Angels sings the body electric and is a carnival in witness of its passing, despite the moment of its making being, too, but a memory of its end. And all that's missing are the voices in your head.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.