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Thanks to Creative New Zealand, Altmusic 2009 was funded to tour artists to Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. In each of these cities a team of NZ practitioners organise and host the events .
See AF About page under the "People" Section for those involved in each region.
Tennis Coats
Gudrun Gut
Grouper
Oren Ambarchi
Chris Watson
Documentation is here
Chris Watson is a heavyweight in the avante garde world for his work with field recordings. A founding member of late '70s techno and synth-pop innovators Cabaret Voltaire and, later, ambient-industrial fusioners the Hafler Trio. In something of an odd switch, Watson left the music industry behind in the 1985 to work as a sound recordist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He quickly branched out into production for film and television and has since handled field recording for a number of nature programs and documentaries, including David Attenborough's "The Life of Birds" which won him a BAFTA for best factual sound in 1998.
In 1996, after collecting hundreds of hours of location recordings from less accessible regions of the world, Watson returned to music production, releasing his first-ever solo album "Stepping into the Dark", on the Touch label. Actually a compilation of recordings of natural settings spanning from Inverness to Kenya to Venezuela to Cumbria, the release was lauded internationally and received an Award of Distinction at the Prix Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. His second album "Outside the Circle of Fire" was released in 1998 and "Weather Report" from 2003 was listed amongst the Guardian newspaper's "1000 albums to listen to before you die".
In 2006 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Technology degree by the University of the West of England "in recognition of his outstanding contribution to sound recording technology, especially in the field of natural history and documentary location sound"
AUCKLAND - 7th Oct @ The High Seas with Richard Francis and special guest
DUNEDIN - 8th Oct
CHRISTCHURCH - 9th Oct
WELLINGTON - 10th Oct
Venues and local acts TBA
Oren Ambarchi is an experimental musician whose work explores the effect of music of tremulous beauty played at brutal volume. Born in Australia, he has a long history of challenging, absorbing solo work, and collaborations with some of the most prestigious artists working in the field of contemporary music: ranging from the high art seriousness of Keith Rowe, Evan Parker, Sachimoko M, Phil Niblock and Christian Fennesz, to Dave Grohl and the satanic majesties of experimental metal, Sunn o)), with whom he has recently toured. Ambarchi also played on their recent ‘Monoliths and Dimensions’ and 2005’s bleak masterpiece, ‘Black1’, plays with Greg Anderson and Attila Csihar in Burial Chamber Trio, and released the ‘Grave Temple’ album with Stephen O’Malley. Ambarchi also co-curates the essential ‘What Is Music’, Australia’s most important festival of experimental music.
Wed May 20th
Oren Ambarchi solo
+ Our Love will Destroy the World
+ Sign of the Hag
9 pm @ The Hole in the Wall
154 Vivian St
Wellington
Thursday May 21st
Oren Ambarchi solo
+ Expansion Bay
8.30 pm @ Dunedin Public Art Gallery
The Octagon
Dunedin
Friday May 22nd
Oren Ambarchi 1pm 'Lecture'
@ Elam lecture Theatre
Auckland
Saturday May 23rd
Oren Ambarchi solo
+ Roy Montgomery
+ Alex MacKinnon
8 pm @ Artspace
K Rd
Auckland
Grouper and Pumice Tour
Auckland - March 12th
Whammy Bar
Wgton - March 14th,
Happy Bar
Christchurch - March 19th
St Lukes, corner of Manchester and Kilmore
Dunedin - March 21st
Chicks Hotel , Port Chalmers
with CJA/Smokehouse
Grouper (Portland) is the project of Liz Harris. In a short space of time, Grouper has become the name on the lips of the underground music world having captured hearts worldwide with her distinct blend of noise, ambience and a dream-pop sensibility. She submerges her songs in a shimmering haze of hiss, looping chorals and decomposed guitar feedback, but somewhere in there you can hear the ghosts of My Bloody Valentine or possibly Slowdive.
Grouper’s music makes you think about time; how her freeform drones seem to transcend it and how her digital aging processing inevitably links to it. With the future uncertain and the present almost inevitably forgotten as soon as it happens, Grouper maintains that special though not unique hauntology that grants her a spectral connection to the past as chanting ghosts bemoan tomorrow’s solace today.
These unforgettable harmonies and vocal lines that embed themselves into your consciousness before you even realize it are the key to the Grouper’s success and the reason why she makes such a lasting impression. There is something to Liz Harris’ music that defies time and makes you sit up and listen.
Stefan Neville’s Pumice work throughout its ten year plus existence, remains as one of the most relevant and prolific in the New Zealand experimental music scene, and undeniably significant in the psych/outsider/free folk scenario. Although Pumice has always had charm in the ways of ramshackle pop and dusted lo-fi noise excursions, his work has shifted into different sonorities and styles from the mid nineties to the present time.
Pumice cruises the convergence of pop, folk and noise strains with bona fide inner mystique. sputtering sub-underground skiffle aims for outer zones, diamond cuts of nervous guitar with pesky hooks that sting and tickle tread rough hewn punk turf, pop tangents, and woozy synth blurts & drones thread the patchwork patterns with hulk-like grace.
Gudrun Gut in collaboration with The Goethe-Institut
Christchurch - Feb 25th
Marsupial 150 Lichfield St
Saya and Taskashi Ueno [JPN]
Occasionals [CHCH]
Wellington - Feb 27th
Mighty Mighty, 104 Cuba St
Stef Animal (WGTN)
Public Toilet Ltd (WGTN)
Auckland - March 4th
Cassette Number Nine, 9 Vulcan Lane
Mr Hayday (AK)
Disasteradio (WGTN)
GUDRUN BUT (BERLIN)
Gudrun currently runs the Berlin-based Monika Enterprise Label, was an early member of Einstürzende Neubauten and most famously founded the 1980s band Malaria!
Gut became practically a thread unto herself in Berlin's underground art and music scenes. She explored cross-sections of new wave, techno, spoken word, multimedia art, and experimental rock in bands like Mania D, Matador, and Project Miasma. There have been film scores, radio plays, videos projects, gallery exhibitions, remixes, a record label, DJ gigs, and the eclectic, collective radio show "The Ocean Club".
Featured in prestigious UK magazine ‘The Wire’ recently:
“This is a story about a’ geniale dilettante’; a punk and a No Waver and an early adopter of computer pop; a girl from German heatherlands who moved to Berlin to become one of the city’s central figures – feminist agitator, festival organizer, entrepreneur. Plus of course musician, performance artist, DJ, radio presenter, club organizer, cultural ambassador and label owner. She has done all of this largely by maintaining her independence. Not in the rejectionist strain that characterizes knee-jerk American individualism, but rather by creating and attending to niches and spaces of possibility in the interstices and the margins.”
http://nz.youtube.com/gudrungut
http://www.myspace.com/ggut
Tenniscoats and Rachel Shearer with Dean Roberts and Sean O'Reilly
Auckland - Feb 21st at the Cross St Studios
With thanks to ROOM40
Tokyo's Tenniscoats centre around the duo of Saya and Taskashi Ueno, a married couple who have been making music since 2000, and together run the highly regarded Japanese label Majikick Records.Tenniscoats manage to reign in the sounds of the avant-garde and knit them into accessible and wonderfully listenable vignettes in which you find yourself going back to again and again. Their starting point is pop songs, but with a staggeringly free approach: psychedelic folk tunes, complex instrumentals and short pop jewels side by side, everything is possible. A song can be performed in a myriad ways.
Tenniscoats have become one of the hippest bands on the underground scene, though their vast legion of worldwide fans probably indicates that 'underground' is no longer applicable. Such renown is helped, of course, by an ability to produce the kind of music that grabs your attention whatever you're doing.
Actually, 'band' is something of a misnomer for Tenniscoats. In essence, they are a duo; guitarist Takashi Ueno works with Saya on all Tenniscoats recordings and performances. They collaborate freely and regularly with an eclectic group of accomplices, seemingly incapable of not making music.
Rachel Shearer has released a series of projects and performed live under the moniker Lovely Midget since 1997 with a 10” vinyl release on US label ‘Ecstatic Peace’, a CD on NZ label Corpus Hermeticum in 2000,a 2003 CD release with US label Family Vineyard.
Earlier experience harks back to the late 80’s/early 90’s with releases on NZ cassette label ‘Xpressway’ as part of the group Angelhead, Flying Nun and Siltbreeze releases with all girl avant-goth-rock group Queen Meanie Puss.
Rachel will be joined by Dean Roberts and Sean O'Reilly.
Voice and data, negative realm. Ice crystals in the morning sand, pacific endless and awake on the other side of awake. Black holes are friendly, space between stars is not. Historically, about songs about cats coming in from the hailstorm, about hailstorms themselves, and one endless smoke. About hands full of noise to give to silence, stacking pebbles in a bell. About the hammer, the pick, the glass and the stairs. About single tone, dry reed, thin cipher oppressive sky. About post dangerous lifestyles, pre extinguishing blips along the event horizon
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