Stormy Weather

Catching up after a flu

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, along with some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken, plus some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

A week ago, I was so sick I could barely get out of bed, struck down by the flu. How bad is the flu? Bad, right? I’d actually forgotten what it was like to spend several days tumbling through sweaty fever dreams. I’m back upright now, standing and walking around, but it’s been a gentle re-entry. My brain just isn’t quite there yet. As a result, this week’s newsletter is going to be a little lightweight on the front end. So it goes.

An Incomplete List of Things I Do When I’m Writing

Look up synonyms for words and think about whether there is a better way to describe something.

Listen to 432 Hz healing music on YouTube.

Search through my Gmail account and revisit anything I’ve written on a subject before.

Think really hard about a single sentence for 30 minutes.

Stare at a blank page.

Obsessively read over an interview transcript looking for a doorway I’ve missed.

Read things other people have written for inspiration.

Take long phone calls.

Message my friends.

Attempt lyrical analysis.

Stop writing and spend an hour sorting mp3s in Rekordbox for a radio show or DJ set.

Think about structure and form.

Write.

MOKOMOKAI and Troy Kingi present their bluesy, hip-hop soul opus The Marine Blue Social Club

Thanks to MOKOMOKAI and Troy Kingi for inviting me to write the sales notes for their forthcoming new collaborative EP, The Marine Blue Social Club. You can read the details below.

The Marine Blue Social Club is the first EP-length collaboration between MOKOMOKAI and Troy Kingi. Bringing together two of Aotearoa’s most significant contemporary musical forces, the project blends cinematic boombap production with stream-of-consciousness rhymes, sing-along choruses, punchlines, and bluesy, psychedelic soul instrumentation.

The EP’s title draws from both hip-hop history and popular music culture. “Marine Blue” nods to a Biggie Smalls freestyle, while “Social Club” pays homage to Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club and a shared ethos of communal creativity.

The relationship between MOKOMOKAI and Troy Kingi has evolved naturally over the last half-decade, with Kingi contributing to their first two albums before Manu appeared on Kingi’s NIGHT LORDS track ‘Hori on a Hoiho’. The Marine Blue Social Club, however, marks the first time their two worlds have fully merged. “This was something that we wanted to do since the first MOKOMOKAI project,” says DUSTY. “We always wanted to work with Troy. We got him to just play a guitar solo on ‘TUMEKE’. From there, I kind of always knew that eventually we would do a project.”

In advance of the EP, DUSTY created more than 50 beats before bringing them to Revolver Studios in Waiuku, where Kingi and his bandmates (bassist Marika Hodgson, drummer Treye Liu, and keyboardist Guy Harrison) replayed them as a live ensemble. Across a week of studio sessions, they reshaped the material, transforming loops and samples into fully realised instrumentals. “I wanted to create beats that a band can replay and recreate,” explains DUSTY. “That way the ethos of his thing and our thing could be combined.”

After narrowing the project to six key tracks, DUSTY and GHOS went into Red Bull Studios Auckland with the award-winning audio engineer Ben Lawson to mix them. At the same time, Manu and Troy recorded their vocals at their home studios.

Featuring guest contributions from Hales and EO King, who delivers a fiery, preacher-style spoken-word performance on the closing track, The Marine Blue Social Club is an immaculately bluesy, hip-hop soul project. Built on the foundations of friendship, shared influences, and an open-minded approach to creativity, The Marine Blue Social Club is MOKOMOKAI and Troy Kingi’s most meaningful collaboration yet. They’re not done yet either. This story is far from over.

ABOUT MOKOMOKAI

Manu, DUSTY & GHOS, better known as MOKOMOKAI, are a Māori hip-hop group with roots in Central Tāmaki Makaurau and the winterless north. Over three celebrated albums, MOKOMOKAI (2022), WHAKAREHU (2023) and PONO! (2025), they’ve made their name in Aotearoa and Australia by seasoning stories about habits and contradictions, the city and the country, and growing up fast, with side-splittingly funny punchlines and metaphors. Earlier this year, they won Te Manu Taki Ātete o te Tau | Best Hip Hop Artist at the 2026 Aotearoa Music Awards.

ABOUT TROY KINGI

Troy Kingi (Te Arawa, Ngāpuhi, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui) is an actor and a multi-award-winning, multi-genre musician originally from Rotorua and Te Kaha. A small-town boy at heart, Kingi is now based in Kerikeri, Bay of Islands, where he lives a pretty simple life with his wife and five children. Over the past decade, he has pursued an ambitious creative project: releasing ten albums across ten genres in ten years—psychedelic soul, reggae, country, garage rock, funk, folk, 80s pop, electronica, hip-hop, and beyond.

The full project will be released on all platforms on Friday 28th August 2026. Click the link to pre-save the album.

What I’ve Been Listening To:

The perfect Cyberpunk record for feverish, bedridden days.

I haven’t heard a Tricky record this good in decades.

What I’ve Been Reading:

My Cantopop Nights: A Memoir in Songs, by Emma-Lee Moss

For 11-year-old Emma-Lee, the sound of Hong Kong in the summer of 1995 is Cantopop. The Cantopop stars she idolises are everywhere - their images are on every billboard and their music spills from shop speakers onto the streets. When she and her family move to England later that year, Emma-Lee’s love of Cantopop will be pushed underground – the sound and symbol of her secret childhood identity.

My Cantopop Nights is the story of how Emma-Lee found herself in a Hong Kong bar twenty years later, listening to a Cantopop song and realising that this music was her inheritance. It’s about suffering an identity crisis just as the city’s post-colonial tensions erupt into protests. It’s a story of uncanny coincidences, magical thinking and a quest to reconcile the different sides of her heritage: Hong Konger and British, Cantopop and indie.

This is a very sweet and sensitive biography. More details over here.

FIN.