SkirtedRecords is a Pōneke (Wellington) based, Aotearoa (New Zealand) label, and they have released the EP “Pass-On-Ings” by a project called DSLB, which is the experimental electronic spawn of ChrissieButler, who is also one half of Mr Sterile Assembly.
So, we start on “1” with its gradual build-up of horn noise, with minute wavering within their held notes, so if one listens carefully, plus a growing drone in the background. Those held notes are intense and seemingly take on a life of their own. The warbling and rattling nature of “2” makes you think that this is a machine. What sort of machine? Who knows, but the rhythmic noises it makes are very pleasing, and sounds it makes are like the motor had lost its casing, as it is left to run.
In “3,” for the first minute, the sound is so low, you are not sure if anything is playing at all, but gradually you perceive the gentle beeping, as the music blooms, delicate and reverberating. Slowly emerging strains of melody are extruded, like a sea shanty in syrup, and maybe it was suddenly consumed by the waters, for all goes quiet. Track “4” is the loudest, though for me, it might also be the most poignant, as if there is a loneliness within the horn like sounds, calling out to the world without any reply, other than the random rhythms.
There is a fragility to the EP, with the music a mixture of instruments and electronic programming. The softest of sounds holds as much attention as the loudest, with each note and drone weaving a soundscape. DSLB is opening up new worlds with Pass-On-Ings.
First ideas are warm water. Comfortable and mediocre. Acceptable in filling a void, ok in start-making, and welcoming if tentative in water-testing. But the breathlessness of a leap into cold water has greater urgency, it’s magnificently immediate.
However, finding a constant pace in that extremity is a challenge. The thrill of the goosebump will come. I can afford myself this warm time, keeping the pending destination of a bracing uncertain front and centre. An aim is to not get swamped in predictable comfort.
It’s a rare gift to have a committed, and funded, length of time available to explore sound-making. There’s a shadow of apprehension, a flavor of imposter-syndrome, a snivel of a sense that I will make minimal more than mediocrity. I remind myself that the brain is a liar, deceitful, it fears failing. But this brain’s gravity also tends towards risk-taking and experimentation. To make something from nothing, to draw out a silhouette that pokes at the psychology of pattern recognition. To make ice water in a warming world.
This chill of being creatively lost is where I’m aiming; to be lost in thought, from habit, in someplace unfamiliar and pregnant with discovery. And I have three months to do this. I am to make recordings, to develop a show for June 2025, and to continue to discover the voice of this project. In order to do this, I’m given space at Toi Pōneke Arts Centre as part of the 2024 Creative New Zealand/NZSM/Toi Pōneke Sonic Artist-in-Residence position I hold till the end of 2024. I have a generous west facing room, a wall of windows, and three to hang pictures. A desk for drawing and a desk for musical gear. The building contains scattered occupants who I occasionally meet as they take rest from their own creative endeavours.
A first flower.
The only plant I have at present is a Peace Lily, recently repotted. It is the sole active non-human participant in sound-making so far, displaying a dynamic voltage that interacts inside the sound modules of the synth. The first recordings are encouraging. It was given to us over 15 years ago from the real estate agent who sold us our home. I noticed this morning that, in the entire time we [me and the lily] have lived together, it is about to flower for the first time
Toi Pōneke is located at the edge of the CBD. Theres two more blocks till Webb Street, with a Bypass that intersects. Toi Pōneke came into existence, at least in my memory, as a trade off between the Wellington City Council and the significant Anti-Bypass protest movement in the early 2000’s. For nearly 40 years people had opposed the mass destruction of a vibrant corner of the city which housed many artists, musicians, and oddballs. The protests took the form of squats, lock-ons, community gardens, fund-raising gigs, festival, publications and more. Many were arrested, some were hurt. It was from these community organisings that events like the Cuba Street Carnival evolved. I was involved in number of ways back then, and I opposed the council’s trade off of an Arts Centre Vs Community. But as it’s said in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, ‘You’ve got to build bypasses’. The length of road happened. It cost millions, saving only a multiple of seconds on the journey from the motorway to the airport.
So here I sit. Ruminating on this part of my past. Hoping these digestions are nutritious and enabling for whatever comes next. I have learned a lot in developing the vegetable.machine.animal project, and one such notion is the idea of ongoingness in contested, damaged, and troubled areas. Sounds a bit like everywhere these days. The dead weight of cynicism does not free us from the challenges ahead. It offers no resistance or option against a Powers sense of immobility. New stories are necessary, new directions are essential, new actions for these times. And I hope in my own small way, through this project, to contribute in this new mode, towards always something better, bracing, and uncertain.
Today is a milestone. Kieran begins 3 months as the Creative New Zealand/NZSM/Toi Pōneke Sonic Artist-in-Residence 2024. You can guarantee that this funded watershed will result in a proliferation of work in sound, in music, and in painting and will foster a clutch of unexpected collaborations with makers in a myriad of disciplines.
The knock-on of Kieran’s relocation to Toi Pōneke, is I get to stretch into an empty house for 3 months. So I feel I have scored the inaugural Happy Valley/skirted Records Sonic Artist-in-Residence 2024. Who knows what this gift of time and space will generate?
We both aim is to keep you posted as we would if we were on tour. Subscribe if you’d like to follow along.
Pass-On-Ings is a work in 4-parts that maps an arc of time: The last weeks, days, and hours shared with my mum. The “instrumentation” is a weave of found sounds, sounds that found me, field recordings and ancient keyboards. It’s a spacious, light-filled listen and I’m pretty proud of where it landed.
Pass-On-Ings was initially commissioned as a podcast for the Pyramid Club (thank you Johnny Marks). It has been exquisitely remixed and mastered by Stephen Cole from What Studio in Liverpool.
Huge thanks also to Kieran for taking my photos and making such classy artwork. And to Mobineko for awesome as ever production.
Exhibition of images opening: Pyramid Club, 272 Taranaki Street, Pōneke, Wellington Rāpare (Thurs) 8TH August 5:30PM, koha entry
The future sits on the edge of Now, and in the blink of an eye slides to a place called the Past. It is ever-present, ambiguous, haunted by terrifying possibilities and incredible potentialities.
These pictures, by Kieran Monaghan of vegetable.machine.animal, mr sterile Assembly, and skirted Records, are an unintentional outcome from a residency at Driving Creek Railway in the Coromandel, 2023. In between recording, sound-searching and experimentation, tiny vague words, missing punctuation and clarity of meaning, intentionally mis-readable, and multi-interpretable, appeared. Three or four word phrases that, sometimes, reference the connection species have to the world, and that includes us, and other times don’t.
And somewhere in the simple act of scratching a phrase onto paper, abstractions appear and offer place for unexpected color, unintended form and unplanned results.
Awhiworld: a “…transdiciplinary project [that] brings together artists, scientists, makers, hackers, and more to tackle complex issues and generate alternative realities.”
bioSignals, a part of the Awhiworld research, is an “…international collaboration between Awhiworld, the Phillipines and the UK. …bioSignals collects, processes, and transmits signals from local plant life growing at each site, embodying a shared vision of connecting isolated entities, fostering resiliance, and addressing climate change and biodiversity loss challenges.”
Toi Pōneke Arts Centre and Victoria University’s New Zealand School of Music—Te Kōkī (NZSM) are delighted to announce Kieran Monaghan as the 2024 Creative New Zealand/NZSM/Toi Pōneke Sonic Artist-in-Residence.
Kieran Monaghan (he/him) is predominantly, and persistently, a drummer and percussionist of found sounds. He calls Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington home. His first crude musical steps were in the late 1980s, playing drums in southern punk rock bands. Heading north in the 1990s opened new musical domains such as theatre with Red Mole, and its little sister Roadworks, and the diverse arrangements of free jazz that tumbled from venues such as The Space. While continuing to play assertive music, alongside developing confidence in improvisational arenas, necessity also dictated that income be made by playing multiple pub circuits in working bands.
His project, vegetable.machine.animal (VMA), is the newest iteration of ongoing musical expression. It explores the intersections between spontaneous playing, electronic music, and science-informed inter-species collaboration.
He co-runs the skirted Records label with domestic and performative partner Chrissie Butler. Together they were the core of the outsider punk group mr sterile Assembly, and Nick Bollinger named them as one of the ten great rhythm sections of New Zealand. Monaghan has toured internationally many times with the Assembly, and more recently with VMA. He has a long catalogue of solo, band, and collaborative recordings. He is a semi-regular DJ on RadioActive.FM. He remains happily hitched, and is a father to three daughters and one mokopuna.
The Creative New Zealand/NZSM/Toi Pōneke Sonic Artist-in-Residence 2024 is a three-month position that runs from 23 September to 15 December 2024. During this time, Kieran will develop a body of innovative and substantial work in the domain of sound art. His work will include a new album, performances and an installation of vegetable.machine.animal. He will become an employee of Victoria University of Wellington for the duration of the residency and may use NZSM facilities and recording equipment over that period. In addition, he will be provided with studio space at Toi Pōneke and his residency will culminate in a 4-week exhibition in June 2025 at Toi Pōneke Gallery.
I’m waiting now at the airport to return home after an intense week in Auckland. The focus of this intensity is the installing, and then opening, of the sound installation Mundane Utopia at the Audio Foundation. The Audio Foundation is an essential centre for boundary-pushing sounds explorations located in the middle of the Auckland CBD, and holds a massive role in ongoing adventurous sound making within Aotearoa, but also holds a substantial archive of what has come before. I had the opportunity to spend a week in residence there last year and this exhibition is the follow on from that.
I have never really been involved in the gallery installation process, so learning was required on the fly, but we had days to work on it as the install evolved through various arrangements. The final layout feels organic and coherent, and remarkably simple for the amount of effort required. The opening was well attended with a lot of playful interest in the sound project.
The following day was a full performance at the Whammy Backroom. The lineup was U R A Tooth, representing the home team, two drummers duelling like collapsing stars, unrelenting and explosive, plus bass and saxophone for any portion of the eardrum left unbruised. Then my turn for the first post-Java show. A nice touch at the end of my set was a gentle game of ‘have-the-audience-kick-the snare-and-ride-around-the-dance-floor’ while I let the the synth sound disappear. Very homely. And Hōhā, from Ōtepoti/Dunedin, on third to round out the sonically dense evening. Drums, guitar and dual vocals, improvised song-forms, with the last piece being only drums and processed vocals. Superb.
On Saturday afternoon, I had the chance to present Office Ambiance back in the Audio Foundation. A seminar session hosted be MEL (the Musical Electronic Library located at AF), which gave me the chance to talk a bit about the process, thinking, and science behind my project. Some wonderful discussion followed, interesting questions, reflections, and similarities with others’ own creative projects.
And finally, on Saturday evening, I hosted a screening of the independent film Jogja Noise Bombing with a bit of Q&A at the end. I offered some thoughts on my recent opportunity to perform at JNB, as well as answer questions that curious minds wanted to ask.
Many thanks to the Audio Foundation and crew, Jeff, Sam, Tash, and all the others, for their support in making this series of events possible…couldn’t have done it without you all.
Mundane 1: of, relating to, or characteristic of, the world 2: characterised by the practical, transitory, and ordinary – Some mundane online dictionary
Utopia “…we should reinvent utopia, but in what sense? There are two false meanings of utopia. One is this old notion of imagining this ideal society we know will never be realised. The other is the capitalist utopia … of new perverse desire that you are not only allowed but even solicited to realise. The true utopia is when the situation is so without [solution], without the way to resolve it within the coordinates of the possible, that out of the pure urge of survival you have to invent a new space. Utopia is not [a] kind of a free imagination, utopia is a matter of inner most urgency, you are forced to imagine it, it is the only way out, and this is what we need today.” – Slavoj Žižek, Public lecture at Universidad de Buenos Aires
What could utopia sound like? What if the mundane babble of things simply going about their livingness was how it sounded? Not in a state of idealised perfection, but a continuous and dynamic state of balancing. What if we could perceive this?
This installation aims to make audible a little piece of what is already, has been, and will continue to go on for a very long time. Just beyond ‘our’ world is the world of everything else, unfolding in its ordinary, continuous, mundane way. The machine in this exhibition holds the place of a translator. It detects signals of ongoing, other-aliveness and converts into crude signals audible to human anatomy. It is an unsophisticated interpretation. It provides no comprehension, but does enable us to perceive something that is not of us, in a way that may make some sense to us.
And how shall we interact with this. The ‘other’ knows when we are here, we can hear its signal change with interaction: touch, adding water, being neglected and dehydrating, and shining UV as if we pretend to be daylight. A mundane utopia for troubled and damaged times exists already, it’s not waiting for us.
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Opens: Thursday 13 June, 5.30pm, with refreshments by Liberty Breweries Hours: 12 – 4pm, Tuesday – Saturday Closes: Saturday 6 July
Public events: Friday 14 June, 8pm @ Whammy Backroom vegetable.machine.animal live in concert Tickets here More info here
Saturday 15 June, 1pm @ Audio Foundation Kieran Monaghan Office Ambience performance and artist talk More info here
Saturday 15 June, 5pm @ Audio Foundation, free Film Screening: Jogja Noise Bombing (Indonesia) More info here
Rāmere (Fri) 24th May | [OFFSITE] Noise at Covenant: Bloodfucker / DSLB / Eveline Breaker / Hexus
Bloodfucker: Sparkle wave pixie demon noise pop
Eveline Breaker: Pixel ambient and bitcrush pop by Lilith Ercolano of Feshh (for the girls)
DSLB: Ditzy Squall’s Lunchbox (DSLB), is the solo project of Chrissie Butler from Mr Sterile Assembly fame, whose “sideways lyrics and staked up patterns” bring a glistening glean to erogenous ears.
Hexus: @lady_stab
Covenant is an occult gallery and boutique located at 2 Adelaide Road, Mount Cook, Wellington, New Zealand
Koha Entry
Special thanks to Creative New Zealand for supporting Pyramid Club’s programme
skirted Records 