Home again after four weeks on the road. Unpacked, reassembled, and now time for minor maintenance, repairs, and reflection.
It was a first to embark on such an extensive local tour. One that spanned both islands and explored venues from house gigs, chapels, record stores, bars, galleries, and community spaces. There were a bunch of new towns and venues, and a few familiar favourites. This tour also felt like a grand opportunity to get an update on what’s physically happening in other centres, build new, and reconnect with older, networks, and to experience a bunch of active musicians and bands around the motu. 13 shows were booked, two fell through but picked up a improv show in Lyttelton, and a Live-to-Air on Radio One in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, so, luckily, 13 remained. The log offered zero complaints.
Now in this post-tour-state, I am left with my optimism uplifted. There are strong pockets of community interest and activity who seemed to be interested in experiencing fungi-impregnated and log-powered music. Loads of fascinating conversations happen after the shows. I certainly had a brilliant time and feel confident that the many-varying audiences enjoyed the spectacle as well.
Many thanks to: Sam and Glory [especially for the log!], Tonamu and the Kirikiriroa/Hamilton crew, Jeff and AF, Mark and the rest in Heretaunga/Hastings [unfortunately didn’t get to play but seems like a great network and hope to go there soon], Campbell, Sarah, Snails, Porridge Watson, Ben and Hanna, Zac at Common Ground, Matt/George et al in Te Waiharakeke/Blenheim, Matthew Plunkett, Ruben Derrick, Te Atamira, Fi and the crew of Radio One, Mads & Liam of Hōhā, The Crown crew, Jordan/Matt of Murgatroyd and Threes and Sevens Records – Waihōpai/Invercargill. Also, to Radio Control, Ben at IN sessioNZ, Mark Amery at RNZ, and Radio One, for the radio interviews. Extra special thanks to Fergus Nm for the image for the poster. And to all the bands, bedding, and bonding, it was very much appreciated, let’s do it again sometime soon.
It’s been a fair while since I hit the road. And with that said, I’m really excited for the coming months of shows around the length and breadth of this motu. I still think live is such an essential way to experience music. Information is conveyed in the moment that can never be captured to record. There’s a bunch of place I’ve never played and it’s a real privilege to get back out into the provinces.
Immense thanks at the outset to all those that have helped out with practical efforts and encouragements.
Massive thanks to the wonderful artist Fergus Nm who is the creator of this brilliant image on the poster. [By his stuff]
I have a nice swag of merch with me, the new album, the book SOUNDBITTEN, and a bunch of other skirted releases.
July Thursday 17 – House Party, Patea – with Jack Tamakehu & Unknown Rockstar Friday 18 – Last Place, Kirikiriroa/Hamilton – with Moon Hotene and Halcyon Birds Saturday 19 – Instore – Flying Out Records, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, 2pm Saturday 19 – Audio Foundation, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland – v.m.a with Taekyung Seo, O/PUS and Oksen Ox Thursday 24 – Common Room, Heretaunga /Hastings – with Invisible Plain Friday 25 – Snails, Te Papa-i-Oea./Palmerston North – with Powers, S.D.W. Saturday 26 – Porridge Watson, Whanganui – with XRVR & ROC///OPT/ Sunday 27 – Common Ground Presents, Pae Tū Mōkai/Featherston – with indigogue browne Thursday 31 – Brayshaw Park Chapel, Te Waiharakeke/Blenheim – with Twin Rudders
August Friday 1 – Space Academy, Ōtautahi/Christchurch – with Cuticles, and Haunts Wednesday 6 – Te Atamira, Tāhuna/Queenstown – solo Friday 8 – The Crown, Ōtepoti/Dunedin – with HōHā, Sewage and Murgatroyd Saturday 9 – Threes and Sevens Records, Waihōpai/Invercargill – with Murgatroyd and Hattford
GUEST has grown into a beast, a beautiful, shimmering monster-body of work that is a full culmination of the 2024 residency.
GUEST has become an album, excerpts from collaborative recording sessions October-December 2024, edited and mixed into 13 tracks, to be released on LP, CD and digital. The album launch is May 30 at Pyramid Club. Performing alongside vegetable.machine.animal with be album guest musicians Chrissie Butler, indigogue brown, Kedron Parker, Timothy Morel, Gemma S Thompson and David Long.
GUEST the exhibition opens at Toi Pōneke on Friday May 30, 5.30pm. There will be a short vegetable.machine.animal performance, but mostly it’ll be a celebration. The exhibition will be centred around hound interspecies sound installation. Alongside this will be images painted during this process, Leadlight window, and the launch of the book SOUNDBITTEN, personal sound stories capturing earworms, aural observations, accidental hearings and imaginary backing tracks.
There are four weekend event during the performance, three concerts and a panel talk. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to perform again individually with DSLB, Ruby Solly and Andrew Faleatua. The talk, called A Guest among the Guest, facilitated by K Monaghan, Assoc. Prof. Dr Julie Deslippe [Victoria University School of Biological Sciences] and Dr Eli Elinoff [Victoria University School of Social and Cultural Studies].
And then we go on tour!!! All date below but will continue to be updated as more events finalised.
Many thanks to Te Kōkī – New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University, and Toi Pōneke for the ongoing support in completions of this project, Audio Foundation Records, Pyramid Club and to all there others who have helped out along the way!
PRESS RELEASE
What would it sound like if we could interact musically with plants and fungi—if humans stopped to listen and respond? vegetable.machine.animal is an interspecies improvisational trio exploring this question through a hybrid sonic language of biosignals, modular synthesis, and live drums.
Led by drummer Kieran Monaghan, the project transforms living data from plants and fungi into voltage, translated into sound via modular synthesizer. Monaghan responds in real time, creating a feedback loop between human, organism, and machine.Their debut album, GUEST, was recorded during the 2024 Sonic Artist Residency (Creative New Zealand / NZSM / Toi Pōneke) and emerged through open-ended, intuitive sessions.
A diverse group of collaborators was invited to join the process, including Kedron Parker, Nico Buhne, Bill Wood, Ruby Solly, Indigique Brown, David Long, Andrew Faleatua, Andy Wright, Gemma Thompson, Timothy Morel, Mo H. Zareei, Tae Kyung Seo, Issac Smith, and Chrissie Butler.Rather than guiding the music, contributors were invited to follow it—adding their voices to a living, shifting ecology of sound. The result is an album that is rhythmic, irregular, immersive, and alive.GUEST is co-released by Audio Foundation Records (Tāmaki Makaurau) and skirted Records(Te Whanganui-a-Tara).
Kieran Monaghan is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist, writer, recording artist and sound engineer based in Te Whanganui-A-Tara. He is a prolific creative and organiser, with an irrepressible DIY ethic, known for his experimental and innovative approach to performance and sound making.
ALBUM RELEASE TOUR
May Friday 30 – ALBUM LAUNCH – Pyramid Club – with Chrissie Butler, indigogue brown, Kedron Parker, Timothy Morel, Gemma S Thompson and David Long – TICKETS
July Thursday 17 – The Blue House, Patea Friday 18 – Last Place, Kirikiriroa/Hamilton – with Moon Hotene and Halcyon Birds Saturday 19 – Instore – Flying Out Records, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, 2pm Saturday 19 – Audio Foundation, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland – v.m.a with Taekyung Sea, O/PUS and Oxsen Ox Thursday 24 – Common Room, Heretaunga /Hastings – with Invisible Plain Friday 25 – Snails, Te Papa-i-Oea./Palmerston North – with Powers, Saturday 26 – Porridge Watson, Whanganui – with XRVR & ROC///OPT/ Sunday 27 – Common Ground Presents, Pae Tū Mōkai/Featherston – with indigogue brown Thursday 31 – Brayshaw Park Chapel, Te Waiharakeke/Blenheim – with Twin Rudders August Friday 1 – Space Academy, Ōtautahi/Christchurch – with Cuticles and Haunts Sunday 3 – Union Chapel, Ōhinehou/Lyttleton – Tropical Hot Dog Night! – with Greg Larking, Beth Hilton, Taipua Adams, Gemma Syme, Nic Woollaston, Rory Dalley, Dave Imlay Wednesday 6 – Te Atamira, Tāhuna/Queenstown – solo Friday 8 – Live to air on Radio One Friday 8 – The Crown, Ōtepoti/Dunedin – with HōHā, Sewage and Murgatroyd Saturday 9 – Threes and Sevens Records, Waihōpai/Invercargill – with Murgatroyd and Hattford
The residency was open in terms of output. No external pressure to “make a thing”, just a chance to nudge some ideas into the light. After a few days of pulling a random array of instruments out of cupboards and off shelves, I settled on working with 6 organs, a prepared piano, a glock, a selection of bowls and sound makers kindly lent by Chris O’Connor and two metal trolleys.
Jeff Henderson, AF director, generously mic’ed everything up, set me up with a recording session on Reaper, we set levels and he left me to it. It is rare that the gig room at AF is unscheduled for such a long period, but the clustering of stat holidays resulted in a gig void, some time off for the AF team and an empty room for me.
It was a new experience recording in a large space for days at a time alone. It took a while to drop into that mental space where the rest of the world fades and your focus narrows to only what you’re making. I value these times out of time so much.
I didn’t really have a plan. I knew I wanted to bring home a collection of tones and drones but beyond that I just played for hours, listened back, culled the dross and kept ideas I felt I could develop. Once I had a first cluster of ideas down from each instrument, I moved everything from AFs computer to my laptop and began overdubbing. This was a more familiar way of working, layering new sounds and ideas up in real time, playing along with myself.
When I’m working like this I often take and make videos. They help me see the sound as well as hear it. Below is an example.
Huge thanks to the Audio Foundation (especially Jeff and Sam) for the invitation and opportunity to spend 8 days researching and developing new work. Thanks for making me welcome and making it easy.
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
skirted Records 