Motion Capture

Motion Capture: A mix of techno from Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu (1992-2002)

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.

Mouthfull Radio: Motion Capture

On Thursday night, the good people at Mouthfull Radio aired my latest DJ mix, Motion Capture: A mix of techno from Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu (1992-2002). Thanks to the efficiency of their systems, it’s already archived for playback on their Soundcloud and Mixcloud pages here and here.

Conceptually speaking, Motion Capture is a companion to an article I published with Mixmag ANZ earlier in the year, Exploring the sounds of ‘90s and early 2000s techno in Aotearoa. You can read it here, but I’ve included an excerpt below.

Growing up in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington—the capital city of Aotearoa/New Zealand—my first exposure to techno came in the late ‘90s through a network of record shops, cafes, clothing stores, and all-ages warehouse parties. On inner-city dance floors, the upfront sounds of Detroit and Berlin often shared space with Chicago house, UK jungle/drum and bass, trance, and other adjacent dance music genres. Thinking back, I recall overhearing conversations in 24-hour cafes about UFOs and hacking, reading William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel ‘Neuromancer’, and attending early virtual reality demonstrations. I also remember listening to specialist electronica shows on the local student radio station, Radio Active FM, hearing stories about a short-lived electronic venue called Biosphere that served smart drinks instead of alcohol, and hanging out at a self-styled oxygen cafe. This was the milieu within which techno was bubbling up here.

Over the course of Motion Capture’s one-hour running time, I share material from Matton, Peak:Shift, Signer, I.C.U. - Aquatic, Nebulus, Micronism, Nemesis Dub Systems, Son.Sine, M8, Aspen, and Dooblong Tongdra. As I noted in my IG blurb, expect dubby machine beats, sci-fi textures, beautiful synthesiser melodies and low-slung basslines.

Test Pressing:

If you're looking to be transported back to the best of 1970s Paris, have I ever got the impending reissue for you. As the story goes, Freh Khodja was born in 1949 in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria. Growing up in the "Little Paris" of North Africa, he developed an early passion for music, studying saxophone and theory, before eventually travelling across the Mediterranean Sea to France in 1968, where he continued his musical training at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. Of course, alongside his musical education, he experienced the unsettling realities of immigrant life in France.

In my latest for Test Pressing, I wrote about WEWANTSOUNDS forthcoming reissue of Ken Andi Habib by Freh Khodja and Les Flammes. You can read more here.

Space Ghost & Teddy Bryant's quietly anticipated first album sees the California/South Carolina-based duo building on the transcendent street soul, boogie and new age funk sensibilities of their debut EP, Heaven Sent.

Although Conway, South Carolina singer-songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Teddy Bryant and the Oakland, California producer and DJ Space Ghost have never met in person, you wouldn't guess it from the musical chemistry they show off across their debut EP Heaven Sent and their forthcoming first album, Majestic Fantasies. Both children of the '80s and the '90s, the two file-transfer and instant messaging era collaborators are committed stylists with a deep love for the rich histories of Black dance music on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, however, they're forward-facing artists who, although they use nostalgia as part of their palette, are always looking for a new trick to deploy in the studio.

In another recent one for Test Pressing, I wrote about Space Ghost & Teddy Bryant’s forthcoming new album, Majestic Fantasies. Read the full review here.

So, funny story, the first time I listened to Footprint Affair by Palace Pasador, it was by accident while trying to tap in with Lexx's recent record. I'm still not really sure how it happens, but as it turns out, these self-styled frontrunners of "Switzerland's underground Dub Pop movement" have really got it going on.

You can read my review of Footprint Affair for Test Pressing here.

FIN.