#Otepoti

[dec0mposing]

Fanny Wimperis, Marion Scott playing the Piano (1904) Glass negative photograph.

Marion Scott playing the piano at Carlinwark beneath a pastel portrait of her deceased mother.

[writtenonbone]

To people in Ōtepoti Dunedin 💕

[andrewlong]

For the sonically adventurous of you, the experimental music festival is on this week. This event has been running in Otepoti for over 20 years and attracts international performers and fans. Many of the performances are improvisation and noise using a variety of instruments and equipment. Certainly challenging but frequently beautiful.

[unitedstacey]

Late afternoon light #dunedinnz #streetart #otepoti (at Dunedin NZ)

[basersocialmedia-blog]

A little taste of Unity Pacific at #coolrunnings bringing summer to midwinter #otepoti (at Macandrew Bay, New Zealand)

[pretendingtobeangry]

@maythefoursbewithyou replied to your post “yo wellington cricket ppl, kane is gonna be at kilbirnie sports from...”

Pls send jimmy back home he is needed in otepoti urgently

i’ll do my best to get him to pass on this very important message

[dailymailcoid]

Manfaatkan Cangkang Kepiting Jadi Perhiasan, 7 Hasilnya Mengagumkan

Manfaatkan Cangkang Kepiting Jadi Perhiasan, 7 Hasilnya Mengagumkan

Liputan6.com, Jakarta Membuat sebuah karya dengan memanfaatkan sebuah barang bekas bukanlah hal yang baru. Saat ini banyak pula masyarakat yang berkreasi untuk membuat perhiasan dari barang yang tidak digunakan lagi.

Bahkan, dilansir Liputan6.com dari Boredpanda, Rabu (11/12/2019) seorang seniman bernama Meg Van Hale yang berdomisili di Otepoti, Selandia Baru ini membuat sebuah karya seni perhias…

[dec0mposing]

William Meluish, Princes St, Dunedin (1861) Photography reprinted 1883.

[writtenonbone]

Really great turnout for otepoti dunedin

[jezfletcher]

1000 Albums, 2018: The Top Ten

10. Skerryvore - Evo

(Celtic rock) Right in my wheelhouse is the confluence of Celtic folk, pop and rock, and Evo from Skerryvore really delivers exactly that. It’s has a kind of rousing stadium sound to it, but performed with some trad twists that always makes it sound fresher than your average kind of pop rock. Much like my #1 album of 2016, The Space Between from Jamie Smith’s Mabon, this is the kind of album which was always going to vault up the ratings. My pick of the tracks it Hold On.

9. Orbital - Monsters Exist

(techno) A pretty monumental album from Orbital, 90s beatmakers extrordinaire, which manages to wrangle all of their dark, thumping electronica, and their humour into one tight little package. My pick of the tracks is the sprawling Monsters Exist, but you could just as easily fall in love with tracks like Hoo Hoo Ha Ha or P.H.U.K.. This sounds a little bit like their 2001 album The Altogether, which is one of my favourite albums of all time. This won the week easily the week it came out; so easily that I didn’t necessarily think about it much. But when it came time to relisten, I appreciated anew just what a fine album this is.

8. Dudley Benson - Zealandia

(contemporary chamber music) This was something of a revelation to me. This was one of Sam’s picks, and something that I’d failed to find in my screening. But this is really quite wonderful music, akin to the Mercury-winning Benjamin Clementine we listened to last year. It’s music with a real sense of novelty to it—music that sounds like music will sound in the future. It’s based around chamber music ideals and baroque instrumentation (harpsichord features prominently), but it maintains a kind of pop structure that adds an accessibility to it. That might make it less academically complex as Clementine, for instance, but it also makes it the kind of music you can devour wholeheartedly. I have two particular picks: Birth of a Nation and It’s Otepoti’s Fault.

7. The Fratellis - In Your Own Sweet Time

(indie rock) I’ve actually never listened to the Fratellis before, although they’ve had a somewhat illustrious career before now. Coming into this album fresh though is quite an experience though. You feel a little bit as though they’ve completed everything they wanted to complete, and now, with an album like In Your Own Sweet Time (their fifth), they can just let rip and have fun. And this absolutely comes through in the music—it’s riproaring stuff, just full-throated and unapologetic about what a good time they’re having. It’s also daggy, but it’s done with such abandon and sincerity that I was dragged along with it, grinning every step of the way. There’s lots of pick on an album like this, but even amongst all the goodness, there’s a big standout in Starcrossed Losers.

6. Cosmo Sheldrake - The Much Much How How And I

(baroque pop, art pop) A wonderfully quirky album from a very talented musician, The Much Much How How And I is the debut album from Sheldrake, after a teaser of his style in his EP Pelicans We, which we also listened to this year. A multi-instrumentalist, Sheldrake must play around 100 instruments on this thing, ranging from plinky strings to oddly tuned percussion, to clarinet, all backed up by his affected vocals. It’s chamber pop in some sense, but it’s also mixed with the music you’d find in a turn-of-the-century circus, or the soundtrack to the inevitable approach of the clockwork army. It’s utterly unlike anything else we listened to this year, and that’s enough to propel it this high in my list. My top pick is Wriggle, but I also rate Birth a Basket, Hocking and Egg and Soldiers.

5. Jeremy Messersmith - Late Stage Capitalism

(orchestral pop) From the first moments I started this album, I could tell it was going to be a yearly standout. It’s a kind of effortless throwback pop rock, which both manages to sound evocative of 60s pop, while having the clean, crisp edge that makes it feel fresh and modern. On top of that, there’s just some really classic songwriting in here—tracks like Purple Hearts feel like the kind of track which could have been a hit in any era since the 1950s. While Purple Hearts is a big standout for me, I’m also very fond of the melancholy ambivalence of Monday (“Monday, you’re not so bad”, he croons), and the swooning All The Cool Girls. It’s a really quite wonderful album.

4. Moon Taxi - Let The Record Play

(indie pop) I’m pretty surprised to see this so high—it’s the highest album on this list which didn’t end up taking out an Album of the Week award the week it was released—but on relistening I was shocked at how bloody good it is. This is, absolutely, the kind of album which I have just devoured in the past. It’s pop rock with jazz and funk influences. It’s got a prominent horn section. I mean, even just look at that cover art. You know it’s going to be fun. But the even better part is the density of top tracks. Even many months after hearing it, I not only get my top track stuck in my head (Two High, which is awesome and you should go listen to it), but I find myself humming along to Let the Record Play, Good As Gold, Nothing Can Keep Us Apart and Trouble. This is the sort of thing that’s going to get me in just about any week of the music project. And yet it didn’t win the week when we listened to it. Funny about that.

3. Kyle Craft - Full Circle Nightmare

(glam folk) Kyle Craft had my #2 album of the year in 2016, with his debut Dolls of Highland, which was a revelation, and just a bloody good album. He’d released a couple of respectable, but somewhat underwhelming filler singles in 2017, so I was approaching his sophomore effort with some trepidation. But boy oh boy was I wrong to worry. This is every bit as good as his first effort, recapturing all of the energy and glam swagger, and putting it forward with his brassy bombast. Here we have tracks like Fever Dream Girl and Heartbreak Junky which run the gamut from melancholy introspection to punchy full-throated sass. This was absolutely the album I wanted from Craft to follow up on his exceptional debut: it’s more of the same, to show that he can pull out the same style and verve that made the first album so good. If there’s one reason that this is #3 of the year when the previous album was #2, it’s that it does lack that delineation from the first album. But that, as I said, is a strength as well. I feel like I’m expecting something new from album number three though, and given Craft’s talent, I can imagine a bunch of ways it could go where he really ratchets it up to the next level. I’ll be waiting.

2. Jukebox The Ghost - Off to the Races

(power pop) This is an amazing collection of music, and has a density of quality songs that beats just about anything on this list apart from my #1 album. Unsurprisingly, that’s why it’s in my #2 position of the year. You know you’re in safe hands from the very beginning, with the Queen-channelling, raucously complex opening track Jumpstarted (which will also be featuring prominently in my Top Tracks of the Year list). But the hits keep coming, with the power pop Fred Astaire, almost chamber-work like Time And I and plaintive Diane. There are more I could mention. This is just exactly the kind of music I’m here for—and for them to give me so many different flavours of it across the album is a real treat. A very worthy #2 of the year from me.

1. The Go! Team - Semicircle

(vaguely alterna-J-hip-poptronica) In the end though, I can’t go past this pretty awesome album from stylistic provocateurs The Go! Team. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed some of their previous work (although I’ve not done a proper deep dive into it), but even this album is pushing them somewhere different. Recorded with a youth choir and what sounds like a high school marching band, it manages to capture their same style but package it up in a different way and the results are fascinating. But beyond being academically interesting, it’s just great fun. We have tracks like the steel-drum infused If There’s One Thing You Should Know, the plunderphonic Mayday, which incorporates a Morse code beeping into its main driving rhythm, the tight jazz-rock stylings of All The Way Live, or title track The Semicircle Song, which climaxes with a bunch of the singers introducing themselves with their name and star sign (because why. the hell. not). This was a strong winner of Album of the Week the week it was release (and the reason why Moon Taxi didn’t get a look-in that week), and I think I’ve always been quietly considering it my Album of the Year from when it was first released. But there’s nothing like making it official, and it feels good to finally make an honest album out of Semicircle. There we have it for another year. There were genuinely some amazing albums this year, and I find it very, very satisfying to look over the best of them. It absolutely makes the effort and the time we spend on this project worth it. Tomorrow, I'm going to post my top tracks of the year, without commentary, and also post a public playlist of all of my top tracks, in case you want to give it a whirl. Believe me that 2018 (like 2017 and 2016 before it, and maybe even years before we did our 1000 Albums project) was an excellent year for music.

[nextpostnews-blog]

Pro-Polisario Activists Protest Moroccan Phosphate in New Zealand

Pro-Polisario Activists Protest Moroccan Phosphate in New Zealand

Protest in New Zealand against Moroccan phosphate cargo

Rabat – On December 16, activists from the Environmental Justice Otepoti organized “a low-key gathering as a show of solidarity for the Sahrawi people” to protest the arrival of the “Triton Valk” carrier on Sunday.

The NGO published a statement claiming that the bulk carrier is “carrying tonnes of phosphates stolen from Western Sahara.”

A…

[artbodycreative]

One of my favourite places to visit - Otepoti see you soon ❤️ #moko #mokolife #mokomaori #dunedinnz #mokoindunedin #southernmaori (at Dunedin, New Zealand)

[annytrolove]

The Bad Hair Day, and Gigantic Decorative Wombs

The Bad Hair Day, and Gigantic Decorative Wombs 6/12/16 Princes St, Otepoti, Aotearoa. By Angela Trolove

I am drafting the world. I am rewriting despair in reverse, it is aerobic writing, with air, it is very air-eager. I show up for the afternoon shift. Let’s give it a try. The bookmark, harakeke folded in such a way. Thanks be here is the street, and my dressings are harmonised with the climate, a soft singlet and a light wind. On a warm afternoon cold water has come to me. I am loading my glass. Nicolas has learned the difference between loading, charging, and filling, and I have lost it.

It felt intimate this afternoon, making a fieldtrip into the blues. Being taken in a car and dropped in a remote part of the city, the industrial area, being left to wander around with the blues. Something non-urgent, something balsamic in acceptance.

Some are agents of change. I am an agent of stasis. I tell Nico I am having a good hair day with a child’s spirit. I say this to improve my disposition, while the bobby pins drag on certain strands and a hair tie won’t wrap enough times to secure anything.

Here, see this, these are the arcs of a female’s diary, which bend down once a month to kiss the sadness, and then they loft up to glide lightly for a few weeks.

I was enamoured. I drew a plastic chair, which had blown into the pea stalks, close aside my boyfriend to be near him, and I mentioned my sadness, to get it out. He prescribed goals and fabrication, regarding my writing, to bring forward the sense of actuality. It was sound advice, peripheral though, to the sadness.

I was immensely relaxed hearing him, seeing tandem my labour and the currents of emotion which guide my raft. As a writer I’d do well to disembark. But that would be to renounce my femininity! Instead, I slowly ransack the garden of grass shoots. I put bread in the toaster that I won’t eat and water in the kettle that I won’t drink. I taste the salinity in my mouth and the seven grams of tears withheld behind my two eyes. I notice my poverty of vision under the cloudy weather and I enrich my sight with crystal dry glasses.

I accomplish no writing. Earlier Nicolas had interrogated me about my production and playfully I had cried in his arms, then suddenly worried I was enacting a self-fulfilling response.

I see sunlight across the street and my eyes whip up like a dog who’s sniffed wet meat. The seasonal decorations seem to be baubles and greenery in the form of the female reproductive organs. I love this, giant festive fallopian tubes strung above the street in eye catching series, red and gold. To follow through with the symbol, the offices become stores of potential and the conversations of pedestrians drift up like ethereal sperms to catch and blister in the wreaths, to bloom there, and be born (like Jesus) in a few weeks. It becomes a game to think good thoughts, to fertilise the city in collaboration with the civic decorations. I feel proud, to be a little writer, with my newfound duty of making some benevolent thoughts, alongside my task of observing; the pavers foot smoothed, the bollard a savoury dark green.

The other day reading an edition of Le Montagne Divertente, I could feel the temperatures, the energy, the cosmos of each word. I thought I saw “mutilated”, and it stank. I realised words aren’t neutral, they aren’t counters, they aren’t scrabble pieces; they are organisms. Words are organisms. Words are in fact ecosystems. Each one is.

It’s not mutually exclusive, 1. that Nico is unequivocal: I am beautiful, and 2. I do need to wash my hair. My hair is flat and I do need to wash my hair. Would a mystic have ever written that? It’s not impossible.

They sparkle, the baubles. I put my hands on my chin and watch them. They’re more fun than a static artwork. They lift my spirit, when I let them.

It is appreciation which makes an artifice an artefact.

I leave my writing place in order to find public toilets. I stop in at an exhibition by artists who have made use of a studio for those/us with mental health. There are some pieces which really please me. I notice a gift card called “Bad Hair Day” where a sheet is covering someone, like a statue. Ironically it’s a really pretty picture. I take it with me, to keep a little honour for the bad hair days, the way our feelings can rise and fall like a tide, can bring us the blues or perfect magnificence, many times over in one day.

Walking from the gallery to the library, wherein to continue my writing shift, the city feels as though filming is over. The sun glows hot in the piazza and I pass a few friends I’m glad to be reminded of. My discomfort had let up long enough, and surrendering to my fondness of scribbling ink on pages, I had both accidentally and intentionally accomplished several paragraphs.

In the public toilets I had noticed my hair was smuggled down my thermal, the thermal itself was saggy, and my trousers were carrying residues of this or that filth. Strangely enough, my life felt tidy. I am doing what I want to do. One letter at a time on the keyboard.

[dec0mposing]

Eileen Mayo, Pigeon in Winter (1974) Relief print on paper