The Postgraduates

The incestuous Wellington music scene is well-known for a few "barbeque reggae" bands, all of whose members contribute tiresomely repetitive dub stylings to each others' tedious side projects. Scratch beneath the surface however, and this supposedly "vibrant" scene is revealed as nothing but an empty facade - the trite noodlings of the "Fly My Black Freddies" crowd wither to insignificance beside the breathtaking, towering audacity of The Postgraduates.
The Postgraduates, a musical collective comprising two shadowy figures known as Bob Roberts and Rob Boberts, have recorded 8 albums since 2005 (to say nothing of a pair of EPs and the maxi-single SUVs: The Fat Person's Car). Every album was conceived, composed and recorded in the space of a single day.
While Roberts and Boberts are reticent about their visionary work, we at Academic Records believe that theirs is a voice that MUST be heard - as matter is to antimatter, so their staggering corpus of musical utterances forms a vibrant parallel to the bloated efforts of their oblivious Wellington contemporaries.
PROFILE
The Postgraduates formed in October 2002 in The Beyond, on the outskirts of Dunedin. A meeting of musical minds took place between two unemployed academics, Bob Roberts and Rob Boberts, who dwelt on the same street on opposite sides of the River Leith.
Boberts and Roberts initially produced the limited-release EP Get Hired (Academic Records) in November 2002 - a release so limited, in fact, that only seven copies of this seminal recording exist. Whilst the EP is, in a word, brilliant, this epoch-making, genre-defining musical statement remains virtually unknown to all but a few.The seven copies are the work of art. Together with the seven listeners, the seven copies are the art. If that changes, the art is destroyed, my goal is defeated, my life is meaningless - like yours.
(Bob Roberts, 2003)
Lengthy legal battles ensued, to no avail, as Academic Records sought a court injunction to release further copies.
The pair of savants were now rumoured to have been involved - musically and, we regretfully understand, physically - with the famous South Island composer and musical impresario K. Carlin Schönberg although, if any such collaboration ever occurred, the results have never seen the light of day. It is hard, of course, to imagine that three such intensely ambitious and driven (some might say 'pompous') individuals could work together for very long, given the amount of compromise necessarily involved in group collaboration.
The Postgraduates resurfaced in 2005, in Wellington, composing three albums in quick sucession: The Postgraduates: Teach You A Lesson, The End Of Music: The Beginning Of Power, and The Postgraduates: Colon. Each of these three masterworks - for this, indubitably, is what they are - was created in the white heat of a single day, the longest period that Roberts and Boberts were now able to remain in the same location without causing one another mental or physical harm.
The year 2006 saw the release of Osmium (The Heaviest Metal) and A Weekend At The Factory. The recording session for the latter album involved Academic Records advertising to pay a sum of money the residents of a student flat to vacate their home, ostensibly for a "party", but in fact to allow a meeting of Roberts and Boberts on completely neutral ground. Five Aro Valley residents were happy to spend a night sleeping in a public bar while their home was overrun by a collective of musical misanthropes. The result was brilliant, controlled chaos, as the Postgraduates took inspiration from the feral surroundings.
By Royal Appointment (a tribute to H.M. the Queen) and Trivial Pursuits (the Penus Edition) were released in 2007, and so far in 2008 the Postgraduates have pipped Guns'n'Roses to the post by releasing their 8th long-playing record, Chinese Democracy.
It is rumoured that the Postgraduates are planning a further assault on the conventions of music as they are generally understood - a prospect to which we look forward in awe and craven anticipation.
Until such time as we are graced with the aural fruits of any such collaboration, we leave you for now with (appropriately) six tracks in which may amply be discerned the ineffable musical genius that is The Postgraduates.
Academic Records, May 2008