“With elements of punk, post-punk, jazz, classical, straight rock, opera and music hall, the Ascension Band are that rare thing: Something Wholly Other. They retain avant garde cred and still manage to rock harder than AC/DC.” – www.varsity.co.nz
l’ll play a live soundtrack myself as a solo performance, to evoke each country… it’ll be a culmination of the travelling and field recording /world music direction I’ve taken over the past decade.
Phantasticusis a 5 piece high-energy gypsy-flavours ensemble hailing from Wellington, the Gypsy-Balkan capital of New Zealand.
The lineup combines the fearless fiddling skills of Ana Christie and Alex Hills, matched by the awesome forces of Michael Kingston* and Rick Shaw on guitar, all wrapped up in the powerful bass boutique of Jacqui Nyman.
With an album of delicious original tunes under their belt, Phantasticus are taking the world by storm. These musicians are so well-seasoned they will leave you asking for ‘Kiwi-hot please’.
*Mike Kingston is a key member of The Winter. He plays guitar or cello on several fiffdimension tracks
A pleasant surprise this week to get a small (single figure) royalty payment from APRA for radio airplay for the shortest track from The Marion Flow, recorded back in 2001!
That goes some way towards recovering the $600 or so I spent recording the album (a lot of money for a broke student back then). I can’t claim it’s a prescient political satire that predicted this week’s news events, but maybe like the album as a whole it’s just timeless…
If you’re a fan of World Music, Blues or Jazz, then ‘The Woods’ are a must have for your collection. With influences from John Lee Hooker to Pharaoh Sanders, from Africa to Peru, their music will take you some place else…
Today is the last day of winter in the southern hemisphere – so to celebrate, here’s the fifth album from The Winter – a New Zealand free improvisation trio of Mike Kingston, Simon Sweetman and Dave Edwards… with a sound that swerves from acoustic folk/blues with hints of Asian, Celtic, and Balkan influences, to electroacoustic soundscapes, abstract dissonance, and pots & pans percussion.
Mike Kingston: guitar, bass, clarinet, electronics Dave Edwards: guitar, bass, banjo, harmonica, ukulele, sanshin, electronics Simon Sweetman: drums and percussion, electronics
Presenting the second new solo album for 2015 from Nat da Hatt!
Volume V follows hot on the heels of Kleptomania
and his previous 2012 solo masterpiece, Twango
Nat da Hatt is a political refugee from New Zealand who has settled in Japan where he spends his days in a cave creating tone paintings on an array of devices and instruments including: guitar, thumb piano and a Korg vocoder.
He’s also collaborated with fiffdimension’s Dave Black on the 2014 explicitly Japanese psychedelic album
Mike’s contribution included cello and electronic composition, electric guitar, acoustic guitar and slide whistle. The album builds from intimate acoustic pieces towards the electric climax of “Parataxes 9”.
In 2005, Mike and Dave both relocated across the Tasman.
After Maths & Sciencesis an Australian double album recorded in Melbourne, Sydney and Gosford in 2005–06. Mike played acoustic guitar on the Melbourne half.
It’s a very different record from Loose Autumn Moans or Parataxes. It’s more like a musical travel diary — part field recording, part improvised music, part electronic experiment and part documentary.
There’s also a nice thread connecting the records: a different version of “O Henry Ending” was recorded in Melbourne, with Mike on acoustic guitar and Francesca Mountfort on cello.
fiffdimension 