This page is for all information related to the vegetable.machine.animal tour of Australia 2026.
May: Tuesday 26 – Turrbal & Jagera Land / Brisbane – – Cave Inn Experimental Night – line-up TBA Wednesday 27 – Dundarimba on Widjabul/Wia-bal country / Lismore – – Elevator ARI– line-up TBA Thursday 28 – Turrbal & Jagera Land / Brisbane – – talk @ Queensland Conservatorium Friday 29 – Turrbal & Jagera Land / Brisbane – – TBA
June: Wednesday 3 – Awabakal Land / Newcastle – – Beauford Hotel – w/ zipper clone, Obstructive, & pee wee 50s Thursday 4 – Gadigal & Wangal Land / Sydney – – Petersham Bowling Club, w/S.C.U.M, & Rapacity Friday 5 – Dharawal Land / Wollongong – – Van Q, Crown St. w/Saw In Half, Acaicafire, PENGUINSARNTREALANDNEITHERAREWE Saturday 5 – Ngunnawal & Ngambri Land / Canberra – – You Are Here, w/Harland Rust, Feemer, Sandy Ma, & Reuban Ingall Thursday 11 – Wadawurrung Land / Geelong – – Medusa Bar – line-up TBA Saturday 13 – muwinina Land / Hobart – – MONA Monday 15 – Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Land / Melboure – – Morbid Monday’s at The Old Bar– line-up TBA Thursday 18 – Millowl / Cowes – – Bar 151 – w/MNNQNPNTS’D, Ruinscapes, & JC Friday 19 – Dja Dja Wurrung Land / Bendigo – – Trashcult– line-up TBA Saturday 20 – Dja Dja Wurrung Land / Castlemaine – – Oni Streetwear– line-up TBA Wednesday 24 – Kaurna Land / Adelaide – – Hymn Bar, w/Wavelength (movie Film Screening), Plain Services, & ?? Thursday 25 – Kaurna Land / Adelaide – – Grace Emily Hotel, w/ Minimax, & Les Voltiguers – TICKETS Sunday 28 – Whadjuk Nyoogar Land / Perth – – live to air on the radio, w/Furchick Monday 29 – Walyalup / Fremantle – – Fremantle Buffalo Club, – line-up TBA Tueday 30 – Whadjuk Nyoogar Land / Perth – – Noizemachin!! – line-up TBA
vma will be touring with 2 new albums, available online, and from the shows – Electrical Minzu 35, & TRIO
If you would like something to happen in your area while I am around, please make contact and let’s see what we can work out. I am able to provide talks and demonstrations to interested communities, civic and academic.
…and thank you to CNZ for the funding support that provides time to make this happen.
From a rolling window, the view goes all the way to the Moon. It is so full of itself, I watch it settle down for the day, encouraging the Sun up in the opposing direction. There’s horizons to the left and right, I feel as if I am wearing the space travelers as earrings. Terrestrial mist lifts as our rock turns towards the light. Night is replaced by long, shadowed fingers stretching out in awakeness.
This train is southbound to Newcastle, Australia.
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One round of a week has passed, from Monday to Monday on the TRIO tour of the southern landmass. It’s taken this long to find this time to write.
It’s not uncommon, at the start of a major project, to have feelings that ricochet from exuberant enthusiasm to wobbly confidence. The greater the wait, the bigger the swing. So it’s fortunate then that my first show is on the first night after the first full day. Distraction redirects worry, focus is found, there’s work to do, and months of preparation and planning are now converted to action.
Show number one is at the Cave Inn Experimental music night, in downtown Brisbane. The Inn is a pizza & beer joint in what seems like a semi-industrial section of the cities CBD. I do not think many come here by accident. Arrival is intentional. It is a trans-welcoming space in an area of panel and paint shops.
The audience is hearty and attentive. I play first in a choice to bookend the evenings drummers at each end of the show. It’s a good first performance, cauterising any persisting doubts I may have entertained earlier. I have a freshly plucked mushroom from a roundabout in Tingalpa as a bandmate, and it certainly brought the magic. The second act is solo, leaving me with the impression of J-Pop-with-guitar-solos-by-The-Shaggs; the final act is a jazz-metal trio from Sydney, sax/gat/drums, they have made a massive road trip just for this night. They are robust, tight, and forthright. Tomorrow they make the return trip.
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I have no idea what shape the city takes. This bus could simply be traveling the insides of the belly of a glowworm cave for all I know. The streetlights dispense tight conical brightness, and the blackest scarf of night sits upon the lamp poles’ shoulders. I see the inverse silhouette of houses, evidence of our arrival into habitation, floating rectangles of illuminated glass, and lace in this black and wet night. This is Lismore, the destination for this bus, and my show. It seems to be a city of water and thunder.
I am collected by Michael, and swiftly enfolded into the lovely creative community that circulates the venue/gallery Elevator ARI. People gather into chairs and cushions as the first act, Noise xhurxh, assembles. It’s an open invite band. A message is sent into the ether, or at least a chatroom, announcing a show – who then turns up is who turns up, that is the band for the night. There are a collection of acoustic and electronic instruments, and the boundary of stage/audience is broken when one of the performers shares his electronic machinery with this watching audience. The watcher becomes performer. The P.A funnels hums, glitches, effected voices, drums punctuate and rattle inside it all – it sounds perplexingly Australian.
Can we call Noise xhurxh a community project? I think so. But something like this is made more possible by having regular, welcoming, and dependable access to a space – that space is Elevator ARI. The venue/gallery has been functioning for a number of years now. It was drowned in a massive deluge several years ago but has been reactivated with funding, enabling the installation of measures to enhance its flood resilience as protection into the future. Surely, this provides security and stability of space for the community who utilise it. I hope it is unlikely, with that sort of civic investment, that the doors are going to shut any time soon, at least by political administrative means, places like this are essential.
After the show I camp out in a studio/shed, I have a short sleep. I am introduced to a digesting, and wild, carpet python living, currently, in the overhead beams of the shed. I’m told it’s safe. I don’t think I’m worried, I’ve just never spent a night with one. I later discover that the main impediment to sleep is a crowd of hungry mosquito, but eventually it must become too cold and they disperse. I sleep four hours and then catch a the early Thursday morning shuttle-bus back to Brisbane.
I’m transported away, the city still holding tight the cloak of invisibility, this time it’s a tangled shawl of fog, cloud, and dawn.
— — —
Photo by Ben Shannon
I return to the city to present an ‘Introduction to vegetable.machine.animal’ to PhD. students at the Queensland Conservatory mid-afternoon. I follow on after a fascinating presentation from Sami performer, Hilda Landsman. At times, concepts from my work mingle alongside ideas she discussed, yet at other moments in the discussion, I point out that I think my work is aimed more at ‘western’ cultural perspectives – in that I mean that there are many examples of Indigenous cultures who have expressions of human life inextricably intertwined with the non-human. I reflect on my personal cultural background – that concept has been a void.
On the bus ride to Lismore, I was contacted by Leighton, who at very short notice offered me a spot to perform at an event he was hosting the next day. It was confirmed Thursday mid-morning. So, with that new addition in mind, I uber across the Story Bridge to the Institute of Modern Art, the longest running private art dealer gallery in Australia. It is an evening of quirky Pop, of which I qualify my engagement as being POPulated by microbes. I am given freshly collected mushrooms and toadstools from people who saw me play on Tuesday. These become my bandmates for the night. But they are initially cantankerous and withholding of voltage. It is an awkward beginning, but midway through the voltage picks up, and the set tumbles along swimmingly.
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Fridays show is as far from the shiny dealer gallery as you could get. It’s a squatted gig organised by ATOPOS, underneath the M7 offramp on the main motorway to Ipswich. I would never have found it without assistance. Before any equipment arrives, the site is checked to see if it is the home for any rough-sleepers, it looks like it has been in the past but not tonight. Drums, speakers, and everything else is lugged across grassy flood banks, avoiding the boggy slush hiding under the grass. Just before darkness descends, the generator arrives, and all equipment flashes into life. Sounds are checked as 16-wheelers thunder overhead. The first act is deep under the bridge. In the almost pitch black, the only visible light is the reflection caught from the surface of a mini-lake of surface flooding. It adds nothing to where we crouch. An electrical device makes a cymbal sing continuously, a violin is played quietly, almost imperceptible at times, and moving through the darkness is a voice singing something like a lullaby in Czech. There were maybe 30 of us trolls under the bridge for the performance. I’m second, playing my fifth show for this week (I also played the Saturday, back home, before I left). The night has truely fallen, all I can see are attentive silhouettes, I have a bromeliad for a bandmate and it is interestingly active even though the sun has long gone – many photosynthesising plants go ‘quiet’ after dark – bedtime, I guess. Third is an electronic set, heavy and repetitive irregular loops, the performer crouches gargoyle-like, hunched in intensity, belching a hefty bottom end from the gapping maws of speakers. Finally, a duo of improvised clarinet and electronic and irregular tabla play, a groove is suggestively hidden in the pattern recognition of the mind. People have found it and are swaying away.
I watch planes pass over, flying foxes settle in tree tops, and I feel the weariness of the first week settle in satisfaction.
The show packs up, and we do the cross-country run with gear back to vehicles, then back to home.
Thanks to: Ben Shannon, Boddhi, Yvette of ATOPOS, Queensland Conservatory, Leighton and Sandra, Institute of Modern Art, William, Michael, Swerve, Shaun and Harriet
With thanks to CNZ for the funds to make this possible
Friday 22 May :at the wonderful Pyramid Club – Jeff Henderson’s Pōneke Orchestra of Percussion, & DSLB $15 presales, $20 on door ($10 underwaged)
Jeff Henderson’s Pōneke Orchestra Of Percussion is: Jeff Henderson – baritone saxophone, Simon O’Rorke – Haken Continuum, Isaac Smith, Riki Gooch, Daniel Beban – Percussion, Electronic Percussion
New music for percussion and saxophone
DSLB The solo project of Chrissie Butler, DSLB is an improvised mash-up of ancient record players, purring keyboards, kitchen utensils and found objects. Soundtracks for short films and hand drawn comics are also residents in the lunch box.
$15 presales via UTR $20 door sales ($10 unwaged) Special thanks to CNZ for supporting Pyramid Club’s programme
Saturday 23 May: Skip the Light: Sound, Pop, & Noise Festival: Ride the tide of wgtn’s finest sound, pop and noise artisans in the classical surrounds of Dom Polski Polish Association Hall. featuring the visuals of Lady Lazer Light and Vizshun.
Featuring: Varda, Ciguatera, Welcomer, Yang Star, Coin Laundry, Jack Nicotine, Silicon Tongue, Benny’s Videos, vegetable.machine.animal with a special performance from 花溪 Flowerstream (Tāmaki Makaurau).
kindly supported by the A Low Hum – Winter Fund. Music 6pm – midnight. Dom Polski is unfortunately not a wheelchair accessible venue.
Electrical Minzu 35, by vegetable.machine.animal [vma] : a site-specific recording project, undertaken during October/November 2025, while on residence in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan.
Between the laneways off Minzu, Xinyi, Jinhua, and Chenggong Road is Ting Shuo Hear Say, a space that has sound at the centre of its purpose. For two months vma and DSLB called this residency home and a base for musical exploration, connection, and touring.
In these narrow thoroughfares that weave between the main roads, green-space is rare. Yet people install potted greenery to soften the concrete and marble, and wild-seeded plant-life thrives in the gaps and cracks. At these potted assemblies, and in close proximity to wheels of scooters and feet, vma would connect the leaves of Eternity Plants, ferns, and other flora to the modular synth via sensors. These sensors detect invisible voltage, bio-signals, inside the plants, signals that flow into the circuitry of the synth, converting the imperceptible electrical fluctuations into sound.
The environmental sounds audible to human perception are also, simultaneously, recorded. Conversations, dogs, vehicles, silence, jet fighters, and echo. The sonic interpretation of the internal world of plants, and the sound world of these laneways are then bound together, capturing moments of multiple lives lived in real time, seemingly seperate yet intimately connected.
This project takes place in public spaces: a cafe frontage, outside a Community University Project, in the carpark of Ting Shuo, and at the entrance to a local electrical repair shop. People were curious, asking questions, and were interested to listen to and interact with the process during the recording sessions. These electronic sounds, interpretations of the invisible aliveness of plants, offered an unexpected shift in perspective. Via the ears, this small part of the world just got a little bigger.
Only one recording contains overdubs. Early on in the process additional percussion was added, and then mostly removed as it added very little. There are also pre-recorded sounds stored in a sampler on the synth that were gathered during the residency; the strings of a Guzheng, the percussive sounds of tables and water containers, the plasma arc of Hsinchu artist Kai-Yu Lin’s Somatic Plasma Resonator – these sounds are all triggered by plant voltage.
Electrical Minzu 35 is released on digital, and physical [CD], format. It is available for purchase via Bandcamp and Subvert, and at shows.
Thanks: Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Nigel Brown, and Esme, at Ting Shuo Hear Say. Te Kōkī/ New Zealand School of Music for use of studio. Creative NZ for funding. Kai-Yu Lin for the sounds from the Somatic Plasma Resonator. William at Cafe Bar, Fangi Yi Liu, Chen En He, OOOnie, and Cia Himiân Lí in Tainan. Also: Lars of Colour Domes, Immanuel Dannenbring, DJ Rex Chen & Buddha Tiger Dog, Reuben Zahl, Chang Deng-Yao. Made Mantle Hood at the TNNUA, Tainan National University of the Arts. The local 7/11, and thanks always to Chrissie xxx!
It may feel like it’s been a bit hibernate-y sin ce Taiwan, but that is truely not the case.
2026 has, as I’m sure you will be well aware, well and truely started, and shesh!! The madness of king Trump, our own invisible PM in times of crisis, the upending of global habits and fantasies (USA- land of the Free…pfft) into more uncertain territory, and all the rest… it’s like some weird dystopian’s wet-dream.
We, however, have been quietly getting on with doing what we do.
SHOWS: Friday 30 Jan: vegetable.machine.animal(v.m.a) is playing at the POWER 2 PŌNEKE, a fundraiser collecting $$ for Wāhine ora o Te Waimāpihi/Wellington Women’s Health Collective. 13 Garrett St, from 8pm Saturday 31 Jan: DSLB performing on Night 2 of the Anna Fält & Ira Hadžić season at Pyramid Club Saturday 21 Feb: Quarry Concert #9: vegetable.machine.animal, Bone Chapel, and Tondo: 104 Ellice St, Mount Victoria, Wellington 6011
Anna Fält & Ira Hadžić season at Pyramid Club
Drawing blog: A beautiful new set of drawing has been posted up at chrissiebutler.com – please go and check it out. Also, we invite you to subscribe if you’d like to receive sporadic notifications into your email when new images are post.
Recording: vegetable.machine.animal has completed an intensive two-week period of recording in early Jan. The focus of this is the companion release to Guest, though this album will be collaborator-free, it will present the trio on its own.
The v.m.a recordings from Taiwan are also close to completion. Really looking forward to sharing them.
Social Media: We have set up a profile on the new platform Upscrolled. @skirted We hope it manages to unshitify the world of online connection.
Funding: Kieran is thrill to be a recipient of CNZ Creative Fellowship funding for 2026. This will free up time for much more dedicated music making and playing. If you are interested in having vegetable.machine.animal come and perform/present then please contact us at: skirtedrecords@tuta.com
The last week of the Tainan residency is coming to an end. We’ve started the packing and wrapping up of projects, ideas, and connections.
It’s been a time of many things. One such thing has been the wonderful opportunity to be based in a single location, a home-base if you will, where we can settle to concentrate on projects, as well as use it as a launchpad to tour from. A place that we can travel away from for shows over weekends and then return to familiarity to rest, reset and regather.
It’s a privilege to travel to play shows. It asks a lot from locals to spend precious time and energy on the committed organising and hosting events. We always aim to make it worth their while. Sometimes we were able to jump on an already existing show, and other-times a show was initiated in response to our interest in an area. To all those people (Lars, Fang Yi, Immanuel, Rex Chen, Reuben, Deng Yao) we offer up our thanks and gratitude.
The moving around has also provided a snapshot opportunity to witness what is happening with experimental music in Taiwan. It seems healthy and burgeoning scene. There are stable venues (as stable as a venue can be) that offer space for regular performances, there’s people on the ground with ongoing energy to organise, people with musical curiosity to draw upon to perform, and people who hold the important role of ‘appreciative audience’.
From the early stages of our organising, it quickly becomes apparent that Taiwan is well-networked. Various people freely shared information on who we should make contact with in other centres, and often the crossover of names and emails was frequent. People across the cities and regions seemed to have a current handle on who was organising elsewhere, interconnection is a healthy sign of an active and vibrant community.
Included in our tour schedule was our end of residency show at Ting Shuo. We spoke about our history of music making, through mr sterile Assembly to the current projects. Chrissie facilitated a drawing workshop, based on a practice by US illustrator Lynda Barry. Check out Chrissie’s drawings at Picture This, she’s beautifully captured to paper some of our most memorable moments. To wrap up the evening, DSLB/vma presented a joint performance to the good people of Tainan. Thank you Ting Shuo for hosting us!
In our last week, we met up with musicians Fangi Yi Liu, Chen En He, Ooonie, and Nigel at Ting Shuo for an afternoon of improvised goodness. A full afternoon of sound-making with new friends, audibly solidifying the beautiful connections we’ve made over the last seven weeks.
And finally, Kieran had an opportunity to present vegetable.machine.animal at TNNUA, the Tainan National University of the Arts. Over two hours Kieran discussed, demonstrated, and performed v.m.a to students from ethnomusicology and music departments. Alice, from Ting Shuo, brilliantly supported with interpreting skills. The performance became very cosy as the students got closer and enveloped the stage. It felt like a mutually lively and interactive conversation spanning from mycelium, punk rock, Mad Max, Bruno Latour, and tips for students wanting to explore musical improvisation.
Many thanks and gratitude to everyone we’ve met over theist two months. You all made us feel so welcome, you freely offered suggestions of things to do or places to eat, you stopped and wanted to chat, and you took interest in the projects and sounds that we brought to Taiwan. Our experience would have been so much less for not having had met you. Till the next time. And finally, our immense thanks to Alice, Nigel(and Esme) of Ting Shuo Hear Say for enabling this trip to become a possibility. It will certainly be one that remains in our memories with great fondness. Gratitude galore!!! xxx
We leave early in the morning. We came Hualien to play a show at a cute cafe called Night Cruising, at an event called 電路萬段 Electric Road. We met wonderful people and felt welcomed by their enthusiasm.
From the train window, evidence is still visible from Typhoon Ragasa’s recent visit: A super-typhoon that slammed into the Taiwanese east coast, Hualien County, only weeks ago, in September.
There are tears on the hills from slips, some of the scars are massive. Roads built on the side of river banks are broken at right angles, as the force of the wash undermined any idea of structural integrity. There’s also human-made assemblages of rocks, boulders, and concrete structures waiting in place to be used to repair some of the damage. There’s also spontaneous hillsides of elephant-sized stones washed down from torrents, thrown violently as if weightless to the might of water.
The riverbeds are occupied by machinery. Diggers and graders assemble to remove and distribute the debris. They look like tiny toys in these causeways of dry braided rivers. But Typhoon Fung-Wong is on the way, and it will blow the dry away.
The news yesterday says the super-typhoon has just left the Philippines, with nearly one million forced to evacuate, and a shit-tonne of damage left in its wake. It is the 25th typhoon in 2025 to impact the Philippines.
Typhoon Fung-Wong in the Phillipines
Hualien County is on high alert from incoming Fung-Wong. Less than two months ago, Typhoon Ragasa smashed the region, bringing death, injury, and destruction. Entire neighbourhoods were submerged after barrier lakes, naturally formed obstructions (think dam) in the mountains, breeched, sending water, mud, and rock at all that lay in its path.
Ragasa in Hualien, September 2025
We met a teacher/artist in Fenglin in a super-friendly coffee shop. She tells us how her school was devastated by Ragasa. Classrooms clogged by mud, resources ruined and destroyed in the aftermath. The clean-up is ongoing, and nothing is normal. Classes haven’t resumed, but the teacher returns to work to continue with the clean-up. She also shows us some of her artwork, illustrations for a book she is writing to help children manage and express the intense emotions they may be feeling. Her attention to care is evident. And finally, more personally, she shows us a video on her phone, a clip she filmed after they had evacuated upstairs, of the torrential floodwaters surging down the streets past her family home six weeks ago. She points out cars, appliances, and other items that float past in the deluge.
“Don’t Rain Anymore” Shizaodai– thank you for letting us share your art
We also hear the repeatable story of civic mobilisation and mutual support post-disaster. Ordinary people who voluntarily head into damaged zones to help out with cleaning, repairing, and bringing essential skills and compassion for others. Ordinary empathy is an incredible resource, worth more than all the gold and riches.
Video of Ragasa impact in Southern China
This will be my first experience of a typhoon, but here, it is an ongoing and seasonal experience for Taiwan. That said it is now without question that the frequency and intensity of these storms is increasing. The meteorological projection, for this part of the world, is that the ongoing warming ocean will continue to exacerbate the extremity of the storms. And you can’t move an island.
I live on an immovable island at a safe-ish distance for most of these sub-tropical events – for the moment. But change has arrived whether we like it or not. The impacts are with us. Back home in Aotearoa, the recent fires of Tongariro are still smouldering. And the evidence says the fires are more frequent, as are droughts, the winds, and rains. To top this off, we have a government who are acting like a bunch of slap-headed fuckwits in relation to any policy responsibility towards the mitigation from the impacts of a locally, and globally, changing climate. The islands are fixed in place, the change comes to us.
Later: I’m about to press publish. The typhoon arrives in about 9 hours. Friendly folk we have met over the last few weeks are telling us to be careful. But when we look around the laneways it all seems quite relaxed. There almost nothing I can see that indicates that people are especially worried. The only precaution I spot is that a local joss paper shop has cover his merchandise with a single tarp, and then fixed it to the ground with plastic rope and a brick. But best I don’t get deceived, the locals are experts at living with these storms. We will see what the morning brings.
I’ve never seen them. But most mornings. I wake hearing them tear silence from the sky, heaven torn apart by winged chariots dragging wheelless trailers of thunder. Or, when I’m walking, the invisible echos roll down the shiny tiled walls of narrow alleyways, lanes of lives, livelihoods, and plants.
I’ve tried to write about this several times before, three or four times at least, but it felt naive, trite, an observation of a sheltered tourist into the everyday reality of somewhere else. I discard those attempts with distain, and with the decision to wait till some other item of interest appears.
But then I hear jets, I imagine purpose, sabre-rattling, preparedness training, a deterrence-dance or defensive manoeuvres. I come from quiet skies, where fighter jets are rarely seen, and the dominant use of the overhead is for commerce and passengers. These are the naive skies of home.
Yet, the story of the jet never leaves. I cannot shake its’ company. It returns again and again, a persistent interjection that I feel compelled to consider more.
I’m told that these war machines may be in the hands of pilots in training. But we’re not certain. There is a larger airbase northward that interacts on the geopolitical frontlines over the Taiwan Strait, the identity-crisis of contested waters, are they ‘internal’ to China or international? It is a geopolitics that I am painfully aware of being under-informed about.
In a conversation last weekend, we were told about the inconsistency between the local geopolitical realities’ vs the repetitious ‘Western’ media cycle. The sabre-rattle of print, the pundit and the podcast that gets rolled out with clockwork precision to meet some other agenda elsewhere. Not of the people down here in the laneways.
There is half a bottle of water sitting on top of the fridge in the kitchen, a captured millpond of drinking water. The sound-waves of the jets reaches into the insides of the container, we see the sound of the jet ripple the fluids surface. Like a tiny earthquake, but from above. Or not. Later I question this idea, maybe I’m just connecting dots to a story that doesn’t exist. Did I just rock the vessel by closing the fridge door moments ago?
Pattern recognition is when the brain imagines a line between two dots. The line doesn’t exist, but we believe it to be true. This act of recognition is evolutionalily useful in finding familiarity, but not fact. Bias will launch the brain in to all manner of inaccuracies and batshit cul-de-sac’s, media will have us believe all sorts of distractions via approximate associations. My naivety feels exposed. It’s good to spot it in action. The best response is to, first, be quiet and then learn.
My thinking turns to others’ airspaces. Recent scrolling presented videos of the celebration of silence as the Israeli governments, eventually fraudulent, ‘ceasefire’ came into effect. Palestinian skies minus the jets and drones, monstrous machines designed for one task, to deliver earthquake munitions with heartbreak precision. For a moment, the skies of Gaza are silent, songs rise from the earth. Weeks before, videos from within the apocalypse zone, video clips of teachers teaching students to sing in tune with drones. I can not truly comprehend such coexistent bravery and horror.
We recently played a show in a cafe in Taichung. On the walls hang an exhibition of posters of invitation and resistance from Palestine, organised by local DIY, punk, and communities of solidarity.
Published 1901
The oldest image, from 1901, is a romantic invitation to Cook’s Nile & Palestine Tours. Depicted is a lone human, on top of a dressed camel, beside a river, looking towards the setting sun. On the surface of still water are sail boats and a steamship of leisure. Across the water is a building to house hundreds in restorative comfort. Perhaps the skies are quiet except for dusks birds. An invitation to tourists and visitors alike. As the posters in the exhibition move toward our current time, the imagery becomes more desperate, painful, deadly. Posters are a silent format. But in this point in time, as in many previous, they aim to tear apart the silence, sending, like soundwaves, out into the future, connecting action to meaning.
During the NZSM/Toi Pōneke arts residency, 2024, I was introduced to SOUNZ– the Centre for New Zealand Music. To be honest, I knew about SOUNZ in the peripheral cul-de-sacs of my brain but I thought it was mostly for classical music. And it is, but it is also much more.
It says about itself that it “…champions and promotes the sounds and music of Aotearoa, New Zealand.” It contains a huge collection of music score and such, but I was totally unaware that it has a substantial audio/visual component.
SOUNZ offered to come and video a number of performance associated with the vegetable.machine.animal Guest album launch, as well as a couple of the performances attached to the accompanying exhibition being held at Toi Pōneke. For free! With multiple cameras! and they would do the grunt of editing etc! Quite an amazing offer. My tasks were to perform well, and be responsible for recording the audio – this is quite likely a barrier for many but less insurmountable these days as digital recording devices get smaller, easier to use, and more available.
The video work was completed by Chris Wilson, a production team of team of one. Amazingly easy to work with, and very considerate in the way he set multiple cameras around the stage in ways that did not seem invasive or impinge on the ability to perform. A terrific experience.
I wish again to offer many thanks to the other musicians who took part in these performances: Kedron Parker, Gemma, S. Thompson, David Long, Chrissie Butler, Timothy Morel, Sophia Frudd, Andrew Faleatua (unfortunately not filmed but an audio recording was collected) and Ruby Solly. They are all incredible music makers in their own rights and are worthy of your aural attention.
skirted Records 