The difficult third album – recorded during a time of intense introspection in 2002. I locked myself in my room in Wellington for all of November with an analogue 4-track cassette recorder.The results rapidly put an end to my promising New Zealand music career!
Wellington, New Zealand
In 2002, a year whose digits are an anagram of this one’s, I locked myself in my room for a month of self-isolation.
One in a series of quickfire improvisations with video effects. Rather than finish an album before releasing anything in 2019, I’m opening a curtain on some of my demo ideas in progress.
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
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.
Bali is (once you get away from the main city and the tacky resorts in the south) an almost absurdly beautiful place… frangipani and Indonesian flags (preparing for the August 17th independence day celebrations) everywhere, majestic hillsides lined with centuries-old rice terraces, and too many Hindu temples to count (each family has t…heir own). That plus the many international flights, and entertainment options from adventure sports to nightclubbing to traditional arts make it easy to see why it’s such a popular destination (I read somewhere that 80% of visitors to Indonesia go to Bali and nowhere else, which makes me glad I saw Java first).
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.
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).
The debut album by The Winter: instrumental improvisations from Wellington, New Zealand, 2003. The band emerged fully formed on winter solstice day in June.
Builds from acoustic intimacy around the winter fireplace to the electric blizzard climax of ‘Parataxes 9‘.
“Derek Bailey on acid!” – Anthony Donaldson, Primitive Art Group
The Winter live at Photospace Gallery, July 2003 (photo by James Gilberd)
The Winter live at Photospace Gallery, July 2003 (photo by James Gilberd)
The Winter live at Photospace Gallery, July 2003 (photo by James Gilberd)
Simon Sweetman with The Winter, live at Photospace Gallery, July 2003 (photo by James Gilberd)
The Winter live at Photospace Gallery, July 2003 (photo by James Gilberd)
The Winter live at Photospace Gallery, July 2003 (photo by James Gilberd)
The Winter: Parataxes (2003)
The Winter live at Photospace Gallery, July 2003 (photo by James Gilberd)
The Winter live at Photospace Gallery, July 2003 (photo by James Gilberd)
Simon Sweetman with The Winter, live at Photospace Gallery, July 2003 (photo by James Gilberd)
Photos by James Gilberd, from The Winter’s first gig at Photospace Gallery, Wellington NZ, August 2003.
Mike Kingston– cello, electronic composition (1,4,7), electric guitar (2), acoustic guitar and slide whistle (8)
Dave Edwards– acoustic and electric guitars, harmonica
“The Winter are a Wellington based improvising trio, and Parataxes is their 1st release. It documents both acoustic and electric live sets that drift from eastern sounding cello led pieces to fairly extreme feed-backy noise. Continue reading “The Winter: Parataxes”→
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