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
Out now!! the new collaboration with even more legendary & underground NZ artist Snake Beings.
Ngumbang is the first collaborative album by two of New Zealand’s more unusual artist/musician/filmmaker/ethnomusicologists – performed on guitars, bass, banjo, percussion, saxophones, clarinets, harmonicas, synthesisers, Okinawan sanshin, ukulele, violin, loop pedal, piano, drums and spoken word. The album was recorded in and near Auckland, New Zealand in 2014–2015 and includes live performances at Vitamin S and the Audio Foundation.
Emit Snake-Beings, who over several decades has travelled intensively in Spain, Holland, the Middle East, Mexico, America and Japan, is a New Zealand / British experimental filmmaker and musician who has produced over 40 independently released film soundtrack CDs and made a number of short experimental and narrative films in Spain, U.K. and New Zealand. www.snakebeings.co.nz
Whereas Gleefully Unknown: 1997-2005showed a youthful kiwi fusion of songs with avant-garde spoken word and instrumental pieces, Fame & Oblivion: 2005-2012 documents me in my late 20s and early 30s moving beyond these parameters.
My approach became less introspective and more journalistic – thanks to new influences from years spent living abroad in Australia, South Korea and Japan. New elements include the banjo, electronica, field recordings, multimedia performances, and touches of traditional Asian music. I also adopted the moniker Dave Black, to differentiate from my earlier works.
The third part of the trilogy, Other Islands: 2012-2018, documents my return to NZ via other Asia Pacific countries, and more recent works.
2011 – year of the Christchurch earthquakes, the Arab Spring, the Fukushima disaster, the shootings in Norway,the Queensland floods… and the Wellington (New Zealand) winter was colder than usual.Acoustic improvisations on guitar, ukulele, banjo, clarinet, piano, harmonica and percussion by The Winter (Simon, Dave and Mike).