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.
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.
skirted Records 