Beats + Pieces Vol. 78

Lucien Johnson, Jess Ribeiro, Mu, listening and reading tips.

Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes, it takes completely different forms.

Before we begin today, I want to open things with a quote from the late great American writer Paul Bowles.

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

With that out of the way, let us begin.

AUDIO CULTURE: LUCIEN JOHNSON

In 2025, saxophonist, composer, and theatre maker, Lucien Johnson, won the Best Jazz Artist Tui at the Aotearoa Music Awards for his third album, Ancient Relics. Over the last two and a half decades, Johnson’s transcendent playing has taken him from Wellington to Paris and back again, with stints in Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa and New York along the way.

In the process, he has become a respected figure in Aotearoa’s 21st-century jazz, improvised music, and dance theatre communities, while cultivating a musical voice that speaks to the world.

You can read my profile of Johnson over on Audio Culture here.

Here’s Johnson’s breakout work, Wax//Wane

You also might enjoy this live recording of Johnson, Sato, and the Silvas performing live back in 2008.

JESS RIBEIRO, MIXTAPE:

A quick reminder: Naarm/Melbourne stalwart Jess Ribeiro’s new project, Mixtape, is out now. Here’s some sales text I wrote for her.

Jess Ribeiro’s Mix Tape LP is a collection of abandoned pathways, parallel timelines, maybes and what-ifs. Over eight demos and alternative song versions that were previously left on the cutting floor, she sings in her signature cinematic style about teenage memories, smoking cigarettes in the woods after dusk, late-night sorrow, the moment when someone you’ve been waiting for your whole life finally arrives, and the promise of fresh starts. Set against breezy guitars, rollicking drums and nostalgic synthesisers, her economical prose conjures up entire worlds within a few words, saying the most while saying the least.

After releasing three critically acclaimed solo albums over the last ten years and touring through Australia, America, Europe, and the UK, Mix Tape represents the end of a chapter in Jess’s life. In her words, “This release is a sharing of past processes. A demonstration of songs never performed or finished.” Gathered from Australian recording sessions with Michael Vince Moin (Tram Cops), Jesse Williams, John Castle, and James Seymour, Mix Tape also features a piece tracked in Auckland, New Zealand, with Jeremy Toy as part of the 2019 APRA Songhubs program. Within these songs, you can hear Jess exploring different genres with different people. “In another life, I'd be a writer for other artists,” she says. “For people with bigger voices, personalities.”

Opening with the hazy, lo-fi singer-songwriter sensibilities of ‘Good Behaviour Bond’ and the lush woodland psychedelia of ‘My Heart is Opening (The Trees & Me), Mix Tape unfurls into a display of expansive indie pop via ‘Summer of Love (80s Version)’, before turning introspective and driving with ‘Of Sorrow’. On the flip side, Jess goes dream-pop on ‘Half-Baked’, gets confessional on ‘Angelina’, spins things into an expansive synth-folk space on ‘Hush Baby’, and closes out on an intimate, freak-folk tone with ‘Monsters’.

Mastered by Casey Hartnett, Mix Tape is scheduled for release in July 2025 through Poison City Records.

A THANK YOU:

I wanted to express my gratitude to everyone who has read my “Remembering Mu” piece on Substack. If you missed it, you can check it out here. Much love to his family, band, friends and fans, this one will reverberate for a long time to come.

Last night, I dug up a couple of gig flyers from a classic moment in Wellington history. On the left, you can see the promo for the second MPC Heavyweight Championship. On the right, a bit of a special waterfront gig, The Nod. If you know, you know.

WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO:

Charged up modern psych-funk from Los Angeles, California’s Pearl & The Oysters. If you’ve spent time in California and explored the sun-kissed state’s rich musical traditions, you’ll hear so much specificity in Planet Pearl—one for a Sunday drive, for real.

One thing we know how to do in Aotearoa is create dreamy, spectral, and haunted folk music, delivered with an indie/alt lean. Within this milieu, a new challenger has arrived, Te Whanganui a Tara-based singer-songwriter, Frances Glass.

Across the Thirlestane Road EP, Glass renders her own take on this aesthetic through a lens informed by wavy psychedelic rock, “awkward” comedy, bossa nova, lounge music and a touch of arthouse film and television soundtrack sensibilities in the modes of Amélie and Twin Peaks.

For my money, ‘Free’ is the most moving number on here, but ‘Late To The Party’ is a lot of fun. And ‘Blue Cheese’, well, it’s an acquired taste. Hemi Hemmingway features on the title track. It’s a duet!

“freya’s folktronica songs are confessional outpourings of yearning and desperation: exploring the most vulnerable sides of love, loss, and identity through dreamy soundscapes, poetic lyrics, and moving vocals.”

Yup, Tāmaki Makaurau singer-songwriter freya’s music does exactly what it says on the tin (bandcamp page). Across seven subtle but striking tracks, freya makes a compelling case for being considered for the bigger leagues. Who will step up and take freya on tour with them?

I hope you like pastoral indie rock with rollicking countryside rhythms, optimistic, dewy-eyed vocals and sun-bleached guitar figures. We’ll probably never stop reiterating versions of this sound in Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu. I think that’s just fine. It’s a fitting soundtrack to the rolling hills, sweeping coastlines and unpredictable weather that comes with life at the ends of the earth.

London’s Gigi Wilde is one of those singer-songwriter types who seems to draw from the rich tapestry of traditions associated with acoustic folk, soul music and psychedelia in equal measure. She’s a girl with a guitar, singing songs that transport us back to golden summer days spent in the countryside, but I’m sure she’s also got a killer R&B playlist running somewhere on her phone. After all, this is the promise and potential of London. It’s a place where everything comes together, and from that milieu, new forms emerge.

As her team notes in her bio, “Gigi Wilde's music is all about telling a story. Each song zooms into a moment, inspecting it from all angles.” Across her new 7-track EP, Life At The Kitchen Table, Wilde goes exactly that, while using the metaphor of the kitchen table to explore the small moments that build us. Tender times, dial on ten arguments, parties, quiet moments, and maybe just a few moments snatched with a plate of toast and a cup of tea, yeah?

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:

Clay: A Human History, Jennifer Lucy Allan

This book is a love letter to clay, the material that is at the beginning, middle and end of all of our lives; that contains within it the eternal, the elemental, and the everyday. Honestly, after reading this and The Foghorn’s Lament, I think I’d read a book by Jennifer Lucy Allan on almost any topic. The only prerequisite would be this: she has to be obsessed with it.

On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle

The first volume of the poetic, page-turning masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time. Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.

A staggeringly readable work that offers a fresh twist on a tired trope. Even better, it’s the first volume in an ongoing series. I’m planning to read volume two this week.

No Sense in Wishing, Lawrence Burney

An essay collection from culture critic Lawrence Burney that is a personal and analytical look at his home city of Baltimore, music from throughout the global Black diaspora, and the traditions that raised him.

As journalists, we’re often taught to keep ourselves out of the story. That said, to make a personal essay connect, you really have to put yourself into the writing. No Sense In Wishing captures Burney embracing this shift. The results are splendid.

FIN.