percussion
The Winter: Exit Points
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
Simon Sweetman
Simon Sweetman is the drummer/percussionist for The Winter
He writes about music at www.offthetracks.co.nz
and podcasts at https://soundcloud.com/off-the-tracks
Ngumbang
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
Dave Black, originally from Taranaki and active since the late 90s on the NZ underground music scene, began by fusing acoustic songs, noisy postpunk, spoken word and avant-garde improvisation – and has diversified further from there. Notable performances include the award-winning 14-piece Ascension Band, appearing as an international artist at the Liquid Architecture Festival in Brisbane, Australia, and teaching a thousand Okinawan school students to perform a haka. www.fiffdimension.com
‘Ngumbang’ is Read the rest of this entry »
Bali, Indonesia
There’s my first video from Bali, from footage taken on my earlier visit in August. Note the gamelan (bronze percussion) and rindik (bamboo percussion) soundtrack.
I left my job in Perth and am on my way home to New Zealand, so I’m nervous about jobhunting & starting all over again (again). On the way home I’m spending a week on a smaller island, Nusa Penida, doing conservation volunteer work with www.fnpf.org If you’d like to help me afford to stay longer and make more of a contribution ($20 = 1 day’s expenses) please 
– or even better, buy some of our music.
in the non-idiomatic idiom in Norway
A few years ago I wrote a chapter of Jazz Aotearoa, a book about New Zealand jazz music history, discussing the free improvisation and avant-garde jazz scene in Wellington at the turn of the millennium.
in the non-idiomatic idiom in Norway is a collection of improvised 
instrumental music with some of the musicians in that scene, from the point of view of my own attempts as an untrained outsider to fit in with these advanced jazz players – including Jeff Henderson, Blair Latham, Paul Winstanley, Dan Beban, Julie Bevan and more.
It was partly recorded in 1999 and partly in 2014, to show an evolution. An easy way to tell them apart is that Simon O’Rorke played percussion on all the 1999 tracks and synthesiser on all the 2014 ones.
Featuring
Simon O’Rorke – percussion, synthesisers
Paul Winstanley – synth bass
Blair Latham – alto sax, bass clarinet
Jeff Henderson – clarinet
Bridget Kelly – tenor sax
Dan Beban – electric guitar
Julie Bevan – acoustic guitar
Michael Hall – alto sax
Chris Prosser – violin
Dave Edwards – electric and acoustic guitars, bass, electronics, tenor sax
Read the rest of this entry »
The Winter: Flying Visit
Acoustic instrumental music by Wellington, New Zealand, improvising trio The Winter.
Mike Kingston: charango, guitar, clarinet
Dave Edwards: ukulele, sanshin, tenor sax, piano
Simon Sweetman: xylophone, percussion
Our most recent recordings to date
The Winter: 2011
