A Million Pleading Faces

INTERVIEW: Post Punk heavyweights Ringlets on Influence, Wellington, the Future and more.     if you have a functioning brain and any amount of taste, the music of Ringlets should need no introduction. i've spoken about them at length before and i'm hesitant to do it again. also, i've got a coffee date in 20 minutes as i type this and i haven’t taken a shower yet. below is my exclusive interview with Laszlo from Ringlets . another member makes an appearance by the end. read on. First off, will you tell our readers who you are? I’m Laszlo from Auckland. We are all from there. I play guitar in Ringlets.  how did all of your members meet? my sources told me you all come from other bands, were you fans of your band mates early work? We all met either through mutual friends or on the gig scene, or some hazy, deep-in-the-past mixture of the two. to me, ringlets music sounds dense and uncompromising, while being spacious and lush at the same time. i can hear notes of bands li...

INTERVIEW: Electronic Experimentalists Ripship discuss synthesizers, songwriting and sucking.   if you haven't been baptised in the murky ocean depths that make up a Ripship live show, allow me to describe it for you. up the front, we see guitarist, singer, synth player and lead moustache Callum Lincoln , who projects himself at you like a 3D movie, glaring at both you and his electronic flock of noisemaker devices when they start to shift from the intended path. if you can pry your eyes away from him, you find drummer, singer and stage banter expert Eva-Rae McLean , sitting cool bathed in the glow of the stage lights, pounding out the polyrhythms and odd time signatures that power the Ripship . i’m sure from reading this you’re already excited by this band, but if you aren’t quite there, below is an exclusive interview with the band, which should put you in the mood. i was blown away by them live, so this is the first of many interviews i've set up by badgering the band in ...

LIVE REVIEW: Twine w/ Keeskea, Bleeding Star. 22/2/24, Meow, Wellington.   sometimes i just like to have a nice night, ok? for our first wellington gig feature (i live here now, there’s gonna be a lot more of these), i wanted to take myself to a show i actually wanted to see, so i jumped for joy when this bill presented itself. 3 bands. 3 good bands. some i had seen before, some i had seen only recently. The common thread seemed to be that they all shared the stage the previous weekend at Camp A Low Hum , or, at least, they were scheduled to ( Bleeding Star a no show at the first weekend due to circumstances). i started my night by getting completely lost on the way to newtown, which was great, but after a 45 minute walk i finally got to where i needed to be. i wanted to arrive early on purpose so they’d enough time to grab a beer and chat with the various emerging faces in this particular scene, but my delayed entrance cut the time i wanted in half. It felt like everyone from ou...

rejoice kiddies! Camp A Low Hum ! the big cheese! the independent music festival you actually wanted to go to! did you go? i went! i drank beers! i saw bands! i punctuate my sentences! i don't care enough to type out a full review like i did for welcome to nowhere, and i was definitely in a pleasure, not business (despite the fact i was playing there, which went very well, thank you for asking.) plus, i was only able to attend weekend one of two. so here's a hot and not list, like the ones in those awful women's magazines. what do you want from me? scram. enjoy this while i work on writing features you'd actually want to read.   HOT 360° stages Macho Macho showers at music festivals  kitchens at music festivals  cell reception at music festivals  spending 15 minutes driving in circles around something referred to by the directions as The Square. Peroni . watching So So Modern and then seeing a photo of yourself in the crowd when the guitarist from So So Modern intr...

as a serial music fan i often find myself depressed i can't be at every gig at once. short of kind of cloning device, my dreams of perfect show attendance were basically impossible. thanks to the employ of our new, dunedin based correspondent, however, my dreams have started to come true. today, we bring you a special report from the apocalyptic wasteland hidden 700 kilometres from the AMPF HQ. without further a do, i present...     LIVE REVIEW: Cuck, Denudes, the Wendys and Mandate. 9/02/24, Crown Hotel, Dunedin. from guest writer and AMPF dunedin correspondent, Nico . Making the voyage to the Crown Hotel on a Friday night just felt right; arriving at the venue was another story in itself. The guitarist from Mandate decided to play some Boyz 2 Men on the jukebox, giving the beginning of the evening a light, almost romantic, feel. This was immediately followed up by Ace of Spades by Motörhead, appropriately setting the tone for the rest of the bands to continue the fast-paced...

INTERVIEW: Genre bending cabaret Sleeping Village tells all.   stumbling, bored and looking for entertainment at this years welcome to nowhere (R.I.P), i found myself at the back of a small crowd gathered, transfixed at the small, "camp stage", near the portaloos. i couldn't see the band behind the throng of people, but every five seconds, i heard new and interesting sounds wafting from the PA. a dreamy slide guitar, dense heavy metal riffing, multiple violins, something referred to as a "mask mic"??? i thought i was hearing an absentminded sound guy flipping through his music library, or perhaps two bands soundchecking over each other? maybe some shortwave radio interference was being beamed in via a faulty cable and these rabid fans were drawn to its free form musique concrète abstractions. wrong on all counts, i was, because the band i heard and subsequently got blown away by was Sleeping Village . as soon as they started their set i knew i just had to interv...