My favourite colour is Saturday

Bandcamp, Mixmag, Test Pressing, it don't stop.

Hey there. I hope your week is going well or going, or something. You get the general gist of what I’m saying - the cut of the thrust, etc. Wellington’s Newtown Festival came and went (it was lovely btw), and a few articles I’ve been working on popped up on websites; hence this mailout. Photos, words, photos, more words and some links. As below, so above.

WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING:

A couple of months ago, Mixmag asked me to write a feature story about dance music in New Zealand during the pandemic. Thanks to distance, dumb luck, and arguably some decent leadership, life has been pretty normal here since around June last year. And when life returns to normal, concerts, club events and festivals return. Nature is healing, blah blah. It isn't a story I would have pitched to an outlet, and I was on the fence at first. Eventually, I relented and started interviewing promoters, venue owners, and DJs before promptly slipping down a concrete staircase in the rain and ended up laid up for three weeks with swellings the size of golf balls on my lower back. Long story short, that sequence of events nearly got the feature reassigned to another writer, but somehow I pulled through. Anyway, it's in the world now, and you can read it (here).

In the late 70s and early 80s, two Jamaican singers and musicians, Norman Watson and Stanley Shaw formed a duo named The Pearls. Although they were roots reggae disciples, in 1980, they recorded and released a couple of very early and very funky disco-reggae-rap singles through Norman’s own record label Reality Hits. 41 years later, they’re getting reissued through Adelaide’s Isle of Jura record label. I got on the phone with Norman and talked to him for a feature for Bandcamp Daily. You can read it (here).

Mysterious new group releases mysterious debut album on a well respected record label. Sounds like a good pitch, right? I wrote about “Enter The Zenmenn” by The Zenmenn for Test Pressing. It’s out now in digital and LP formats through Music From Memory. You can read my review (here).

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:

Nyshka Chandran, Meet the sonic experimentalists bending Asia’s folk traditions into fresh shapes(NME)

Just like ‘world music’, terms such as ‘East-meets-West’ and ‘Eastern fusion’ feel outdated. Whether it’s BTS topping Billboard charts or Higher Brothers selling out shows in North America, it’s clear that the East is already in the West and vice-versa.

Inspired by their heritage, electronic artists around Asia are deconstructing traditional folk music using funk, ambient and four-to-the-floor rhythms. But don’t call it fusion – these are shapeshifting sounds that blur the lines between past, present, analogue and digital (read here).

Ana Leorne, This underground SF newspaper printed 125,000 copies of an issue. Then it disappeared (SFGATE)

No other publication epitomized the alternative ideals of a generation quite like the San Francisco Oracle. Featuring everything from full page ads for the Grateful Dead to interviews with Timothy Leary, entrepreneurial hippies would receive ten free copies to sell on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, then use the earnings to re-up on more to sell. It epitomized the alternative ideals of a whole generation, and incarnated a new way of utopian living that for a millisecond actually seemed like an enduring possibility (read here).

Cat Zhang, The Radiant Slowness of Ana Roxanne (Pitchfork)

The Met Cloisters houses some 2,000 works of medieval art—silk tapestries and woodcut illustrations, stained glass from Austrian castles—but for the moment, Ana Roxanne is not in a rush to see them. Instead, we’re on our umpteenth lap around one of the museum’s small gardens, as if we’re circling a thorny existential inquiry. “I hope it’s OK that we’re just walking,” she says softly. Because it snowed a few days before, the glass panes enclosing the garden are frosty; rows of potted plants line our path, lending warmth to the space. Tentatively, I ask her why she gravitates towards towering concepts in her quiet, methodical music. She hesitates at first, her voice trailing off as she tries to articulate her thoughts. “We’re so small—our lives are just a fraction of a second,” she says. “I think about this when writing, maybe there are depths within ourselves that we won’t ever know in our lifetimes.” (Read here)

LOOSE ENDS:

I’ve become a guy who owns Synecdoche, New York on DVD.

Earlier in the week, I spent five minutes talking to the lifeguards at my local swimming pool about Dub Techno. The Rhythm & Sound Dub Techno.

NTS Work in Progress (NTS WIP) is open and taking applications from artists or bands to be part of NTS WIP 2021 (submit here).

THAT’S ALL FOLKS!!!