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John Mayall: Blues From Laurel Canyon (1968)
8 Sep 2024 | 3 min read | 3
In the wake of '67s Sgt Pepper's the new thing in rock was "the concept album" and at the tail-end of that decade and well into the Seventies a long list of bands weighed in: the Pretty Things with SF Sorrow,The Who with Tommy, The Moody Blues, Genesis, Yes . . . Mostly these were musicians with an art school background and so testing themselves over a 40 minute album was... > Read more
John Mayall: Fly Tomorrow
Pitch Black: Echoes of the Night; The Adrian Sherwood Remixes (digital outlets)
6 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Elsewhere at Elsewhere Mike Hodgson – one half of Pitch Black alongside Paddy Free – explains how these four remixes of their material came into being. Have a look here. So here let's just acknowledge how very different the results are from the source material on their 2007 Rude Mechanicals album. The haunting opener Transient Transmission is twist of a twist: remixer... > Read more
Transient Transmission
GUEST MUSICIAN MIKE HODGSON OF PITCH BLACK AND MISLED CONVOY reflects on 40 years of music and a special new release
6 Sep 2024 | 3 min read
In 1984 I moved to Christchurch and began work at the Court Theatre as a props designer. Over time I met local artists and, in my time off, we would meet up and talk about music. I was very much into the industrial scene and on one occasion was describing a 23 Skidoo record, The Culling is Coming. As my description didn’t sound like what my friends thought the band sounded like, we... > Read more
Third Light by Pitch Black, Adrian Sherwood dub mix
Peel Dream Magazine: Rose Main Reading Room (digital outlets)
6 Sep 2024 | <1 min read
Across 15 seductive songs this LA-based trio offer what sounds like lush miniatures which blend languid vocals, warm synth washes, minimalist repetition and understated melodies. The sort of music you could imagine playing quietly in a reading room. They aren't averse to glistening pop (I Wasn't Made For War) and we might guess the band's songwriter Joe Stevens had an affection for... > Read more
Machine Repeating
MIDAS MAN, a film by JOE STEPHENSON
3 Sep 2024 | 2 min read
Among the many big problems for a film like this – a biopic of the short, fast life of the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein – is that many of the characters in it are so familiar: four of them among the best known faces in the world, even now. So invariably some responses default to: well he (Jonah Lees, Phantom of the Open) does look a bit like John Lennon but he's far too short;... > Read more
I Just Don't Understand
CHASING ME TO MY GRAVE by WINFRED REMBERT
2 Sep 2024 | 3 min read
It is said that history is written by the winners, and that is largely true. But it is also written by academics with access to files. Notes, documents and the work of other academics. Many of these researchers are dedicated and intent of getting to the multi-dimension truths of events. A writer/researcher like Antony Beaver is someone whose view from the battlefield to the cabinet... > Read more
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF: Another invisible city
2 Sep 2024 | 2 min read
To be honest, to this day I couldn't tell you what it was all about, but I spent the best part of an afternoon trying to figure it out. It was in Amsterdam and I had done all the right art galleries and museums, and had been to one of the hidden churches in the red-light district. Tomorrow I would leave so on this warm afternoon I settled in at Rasta Baby, a popular coffee shop on the... > Read more
OUT FROM THE UNDERGROUND (2024): Steve Wynn far beyond the paisley years
2 Sep 2024 | 4 min read
Popular music as we know it is 70 this year, we're seven decades on from Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock, Elvis' That's Alright Mama and Blue Moon of Kentucky, Big Joe Turner's Shake Rattle and Roll, Ray Charles' I Got a Woman and Hank Ballard's Work With Me Annie. We're also 70 years on from Chet Baker's My Funny Valentine, the Moonglows' Sincerely, Errol Garner's Misty and Billie... > Read more
What Were You Expecting
Rodrigo Amarante: Tuyo (2015)
2 Sep 2024 | 2 min read
For a Netflix series awash with drugs, guns, bloodshed, serial smoking, violence, impossibly large amounts of money and hedonism, the theme song to Narcos by the Brazilian singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante is ineffably sad. The narcocorrido ballad – a style of music from the borderlands of Mexico and the US which alludes to drug smuggling – was written by Amarante (who had been... > Read more
Troy Kingi and the Cactus Handshake: Leatherman and the Mojave Green (digital outlets)
2 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
Troy Kingi can at last see the finish line of his 10/10/10 project: 10 albums in 10 genres in 10 years. He's knocked off classic soul, reggae, cosmic rock, folk . . . This impressive double album – which debuted at the top of the New Zealand charts – is number eight in the projected series and in the TVNZ+ documentary series Troy Kingi's Desert Hīkoi about its creation, Kingi... > Read more
Mezcal Eye Drop
LacLu: self-titled (digital outlets)
1 Sep 2024 | 1 min read
LacLu is guitarist Keith Price (academic/teacher in the jazz faculty at Auckland Uni) and two recent graduates, saxophonist Francesca Parussini and drummer Maximillian Crook, recorded here in the Kenneth Myers Centre in Auckland, the former IYA radio building on Shortland Street. The four spare, considered and spacious pieces hint at their nature through the titles of Price's originals the... > Read more
Friends and Whanau
MIKE NOCK, INTERVIEWED (2024): The art of having serious fun
31 Aug 2024 | 1 min read
For a man who has spent his life in the earnest art of jazz, Mike Nock laughs a lot, enjoying his deep well of anecdotes, appreciating a joke at his own expense and – when it's suggested a hallmark of his diverse career is that there's no obvious hallmark – laughs until he's breathless. It's no surprise Norman Meehan's 2010 biography of 83-year old Nock was titled Serious Fun.... > Read more
Peter Skandera & Dave Maybee : blue grit & rhyme (digital outlets)
31 Aug 2024 | <1 min read
Last heard on record together in 1994 (the album Acoustic Spirit), Raglan's harmonica player Skandera and guitarist Maybee here bring their considerable skills and years to a collection of funky blues, country blues, old folk and gospel (Jesus on the Mainline) from the likes of Johnny Cash, Little Walter (his Juke a showcase for the exceptional playing of Skandera), JJ Cale, Mark Knopfler,... > Read more
First Acquaintance
WHERE THE SPIRIT MEETS THE SAX (2024): You got a problem with Muriel?
30 Aug 2024 | 3 min read
Saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Muriel Grossman is a problem at this point in the 21st century when the culture of complaint is peaking, grievances real or imagined are given oxygen and the merest suggestion of a slight is taken as a declaration of war. Pity poor Muriel then, all she wants to make is spiritual jazz, as on her 2023 album Devotion. And right there some... > Read more
The Famous Elsewhere Questionnaire
THE FAMOUS ELSEWHERE HIGHLY PERSONAL QUESTIONNAIRE . . . Frau Knotz
26 Aug 2024 | 6 min read
We have to hand it to Lauren Nottingham from New Plymouth, when she adopts her Frau Knotz electronica persona something special happens. Her songs can be lush but refined, cleverly 3D in production and her voice has a mysterious quality while still being along the axis of pop, yet almost alluringly operatic. Her debut EP Nextraterrestrial is just one aspect of a multi-media project with... > Read more
The Heart of Spring
FANNY: THE RIGHT TO ROCK, a doco by BOBBI JO HART
26 Aug 2024 | 2 min read
It is strange and happens more often than you might think: we write about someone rather obscure or pull an unusual song From the Vaults . . . and a few weeks later that person or song appear in other media, often a British rock magazine. Or we profile someone who is well off the radar and the next thing you know they pop up on other people's websites or social media. Or worse, we write... > Read more
Mike Hall: Nothing Stands Still (digital outlets)
26 Aug 2024 | 2 min read
To paraphrase Milton: They also serve who only stand and play bass? Although Johnny Rotten once glibly dismissed the bass as just a big booming noise in the background (he was talking about his friend, the unschooled Sid), we at Elsewhere don't diminish the important role of bass players. Because from Bill Black through Paul McCartney to Jaco Pastorius, Jah Wobble, Bill Laswell, Tina... > Read more
Stop Dragging Me Around
The Cure: A Forest (1980)
26 Aug 2024 | <1 min read
Because it is so familiar – the band play it at almost every show and it is the go-to song for archetypal Cure – it is hard to remember how innovative and different it seemed at the time. Melodically and in its tone, it wasn't too far removed from their debut single, the often misunderstood and Camus-inspired Killing An Arab. But the swathes of keyboards and prominent bass... > Read more
A Moving Sound, Ethel: The Wheel of Life (ARC Music/digital outlets)
25 Aug 2024 | <1 min read
Perhaps a little confusing so let's explain: A Moving Sound is a group from Taiwan with singer Mia Hsieh, and Ethel is a New York-based string quartet. As the title suggests, this is a concept album which is Buddhist in inspiration and is about the soul's journey from out there and into this world then out again after death. It can be melancholy (Crying Song) or – because A Moving... > Read more
First Thunder of Spring
Favourite Five Recent Releases
Tomasz Stańko Quartet: September Night (ECM/digital outlets)
25 Aug 2024 | <1 min read
The late Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko (d. 2018, age 76) had long been a fixture at Elsewhere for his elegant albums on the ECM label (with a regular quartet, which has an estimable career outside of that) and it was a pleasure to interview him in 2009. His album Lontano has been a special favourite but every album we've heard has had something to recommend it, whether it... > Read more