New Zealand's pulsing electronica

Last year it was guitar pop bands on major labels, this year the story in contemporary New Zealand music is the coming of age of DIY electronic acts. STEPHEN JEWELL
asks Sola Rosa, Concord Dawn and sjd - the leading lights of the scene - what makes them tick (and bleep and buzz).

Close your eyes and you can hear it as it wafts from under the doors of suburban garages and through the small windows of inner-city warehouses.

The sound has a pulse that can be hypnotic, with a touch of dub reggae or lounge music about it. Or it comes with hard-edged beats which nail you to the wall.

This is the sound of electronica - the music people make when they put down the guitars and start punching keypads. It's music for the new millennium, some say, and certainly the chosen vehicle for a new generation of New Zealand musicians.

And as with so many other musical movements in this country - think Flying Nun and Chris Knox, the early rap of Upper Hutt Posse, and bands literally recording in the garage - there is a powerful, typically New Zealand, do-it-yourself ethic at work here. It might be electronic, and the images it conjures up futuristic, but it still works from the same old premise: people with little money and a lot of ideas getting together to create their musical magic out of few resources.

With a small flood of albums from our dance/electronica acts imminent, we thought it a good time to survey the class of 2001.

Sola Rosa

Who: Andrew Spraggon (30)

Sound like: Crystalline, downbeat electronica, which includes touches of everything from Latin beats to dub and reggae.

Recordings: Starter for 4 (self-released 1999), Entrance to Skyway EP (self-released 2000, re-released Festival 2001), Solarised album (Festival).

Before: Spraggon provided vocals and played lead guitar in Auckland rockers Cicada for six years before catching the electronica bug. "I was extremely surprised by just how well the EPs did," admits Spraggon. "After playing in a guitar band that really struggled ... Cicada sold 500-odd CDs, but I was distributing them and it was hard work. After that, I assumed that it would be the same with Sola Rosa but I didn't have to work quite so hard. It gave me a bit more of an aggressive edge to go out there and play live."

On himself: "I hate boundaries and the attitude that, 'I'm into this and that's where I draw the line.' If you're going to make music, you should never have that attitude or you'll cut yourself off from so many wonderful learning experiences."

On making music in NZ: "I want to make music which is of an international quality. I don't want it to have 'it's good for New Zealand' stamped on it. I'm always trying to improve my sound and composition, everything. It's what drives me."

Connections: When he's not busy working on Sola Rosa, Spraggon plays bass in the live lineup of Shayne Carter's Dimmer, and he admits that Carter'sI Believe You are a Star and Solarised share a common musical aesthetic. "Shayne and I have similar beliefs in what music should be about. Shayne likes really moody, dark, spooky, empty music. My stuff is not as empty as his but I'm the same." Solarised also features contributions from HDU drummer Dino Kallis, ex-Hallelujah Picasso John Paine, Dimmer guitarist Ned Ngati and Miranda Adams from the Auckland Philharmonic, and is mixed by HDU engineer Dale Cotton.

Yes, it's true: The name Sola Rosa, which translates as "sun rose," stems from Spraggon's interest in Central America. "It's a fluke really that the Sola Rosa name is starting to meld with the actual Latin sounds," says Spraggon. "Cuban and Brazilian music has lots of deep, soulful emotions running through them. It's dark, mysterious, organic and spooky. I love percussion. I'm a percussion freak. I could get geeky talking about percussion just as other electronic artists get geeky talking about their gear or Macs."

"I buy lots of old vinyl to sample, like Irving Berlin goes Latin, that have got drum loops and Latin rhythms and instruments to sample - so that's why they appear throughout the album."

Live: "I've got a long-term vision to turn Sola Rosa into a live band. I want to move away from twiddling knobs and actually play more live instruments. But I don't want to go out on stage with my guitar and play to a backing tape. It's too lonely, guy. At the moment, it's just me with my effects and sampler. I play off CD a bit but spend three to four weeks in the studio, working on and extending each track before I play live. I don't just go out and play my tracks off the album. That would be really cheap."

Concord Dawn

Who: Evan Short and Matt Harvey (both 23).

Sound like: Techno-flavoured drum'n'bass of the extremely hard, pummelling beat variety. No lightweight, jazzy jungle here.

Recordings: Concord Dawn (Kog Transmissions 2000), Disturbance (Kog, 2001)

Before: Short and Harvey met at intermediate school before meeting up again at audio engineering school and forming Concord Dawn after discovering a mutual love of drum'n'bass. Harvey has played drums in various hip-hoppy, ambient, acid jazz groups, while Short plays guitar for hardcore metallers Day One, who are set to release their debut album, Less than Perfect, through Kog's new, guitar-based offshoot label, Midium.

On themselves: "Disturbance relates to how we've hopefully disturbed and shaken things up, and not just in the drum'n'bass scene," says Short. "I don't think we've been shining visionaries or been better than anyone else, but we've definitely created some positive and negative reactions to what we do. Any reaction is a good reaction. If it's a negative reaction it brings conflict, which always has a resolution and that resolution is usually better than what was before it."

On making music in NZ: "We've also shown that two kids who weren't really hooked up in the dance scene beforehand can come out of nowhere and write an album which sells heaps of copies," says Harvey. "It'll be good to see that happening in house and techno music as well. People bursting out of left field and going, 'Here we are."'

Connections: "We've both been doing the music thing for over 10 years now so it's good to have recognition and response back," observes Short.

"Not just from people who know us but also from people who are anonymous to us ... people who didn't buy our records or are coming along to gigs because we are their friends and they're our regulars.

People who are giving us the message, 'We like your music and we're going to come see you play.'

Yes, it's true: Along with the album's opening track, Cloud City, Disturbance is also a crafty tribute to the pair's love of Star Wars. "It's a vague reference to the Force," says Harvey. "But I haven't had as much time to spend on Star Wars nerdery over the last year."

Live: During the past year, audiences have turned up in their droves to see Concord Dawn play out. That's why the first album has continued to sell well, says Short.

"But it didn't all happen straight away. We kept on doing a lot of gigs and if you look at the acts on Kog, how well they've sold, the people who do lots of gigs like Epsilon Blue and Pitch Black, they're the people who keep on selling. People who haven't done a lot of gigs, the momentum stops."

* Concord Dawn's Disturbance and sjd's Lost Soul Music are out now. Concord Dawn play Oonst at the St James on June 29. Sola Rosa's Solarised is released on July 12.

sjd

Who: Sean James Donnelly (33)

Sound like: An antipodean Badly Drawn Boy or one-man Beta Band. His Lost Soul Musiccombines everything from loungy electronica to catchy folk tunes into one delicious whole.

Recordings: 3 (self-released 1999), Lost Soul Music (Round Trip Mars, 2001).

Before: Donnelly originally self-released his debut album, 3, DIY-style as a CD-R before signing to Stinky Jim's Round Trip Mars Records. "It was done for the purpose of finishing something and getting it out there," explains Donnelly. "I started making music in my bedroom in my early teens, just mucking around with keyboards and stuff, and then I moved into playing in bands and writing real songs. Then in the last few years I've come full circle and got back into pottering around in my bedroom again, having realised that the band thing is not for me."

On himself: "Lost Soul Music is more electronic than 3 but it's also more acoustic. The first album was a good 60-70 per cent sampled sounds, sampled off vinyl and CDs and cut and pasted together. This time around there's a lot more music generated by me, acoustic instruments, real drums, ambient sounds, found instruments, and it's a lot more pure electronic sounds. It's less constructed on a computer."

Tracks like the sumptuous Boy display a beguiling childlike quality. - "That's very important to me," says Donnelly. "It's an antidote to cool. I'm not into coolness in music at all. It's a William Blake thing for me. Music is about innocence and experience. You'll always hear experience in music, but innocence and naivety need to be represented as well."

On making music in NZ: "There's a disadvantage in terms of connecting to an audience because New Zealand is a small country and you can't really survive off a cult audience. But having said that, the cultural isolation and the fact that you probably aren't really going to make it add an imperative to achieve on a more aesthetic level, as opposed to a more financial level. If you don't think you can succeed any other way, you've got to try and be true to your heart."

Connections: Donnelly is a part of the Sideways community of like-minded musicians whose excellent first compilation was released through Round Trip Mars last year. "I relate to so many of these people, Sola Rosa, Dooblong Tongdra, International Observer, Phelps and Munro, who are all making great music and their starting point is the bedroom," says Donnelly, who shares a special kinship with Sola Rosa. "In a way, what he's doing and what I'm doing are quite complementary. But at the end of the day, he's making mainly instrumental music and I'm mainly making mutant songs."

Yes, it's true: "Second-to-last track Colin Meccano is a wry tribute to Colin McCahon. The song is like build your own Colin McCahon kitset. It was one of those misheard, overheard things. It fits the song in the way that the song travels as it goes on. It's like going through some kind of landscape and an expressionist one at that. There are a lot of acoustic sounds and a lot of gnarly electronic sounds on that track. I've often thought of my music like as if you're out in the country in a landscape, but there's a big pylon in the background, like a combination of nature and human edifices."

Live: "It's like Sola Rosa, he turns up, plays CDs and augments that with samples. I sing live as well and play keyboards and mix in samples. Also when I play live, I give the tracks a bit of a remixing so it's different each time people hear it and it's spontaneous to a degree."