INTERVIEW WITH PETER STAPLETON
PARTS 6-10
INTERVIEWED BY ZOE DRAYTON FOR THE AUDIO
FOUNDATION ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
27 September 2009

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Interviewer:
10 years ... that’s quite a long time?

Peter:
Mm yeah.

Interviewer:
This wasn’t an actual real farm, this is just land with a house right?

Peter:
Yeah it wasn’t a farm at all. it was less than an acre ... it was quite a large section with farmland around it which we could walk over and stuff which was good, to go and get wood ... there were trees and that! I sort of got used to it after getting over being depressed for quite a while, I think ... I had the use of a really nice room in the Octagon, in the old Regent building, probably for 10 years.

Interviewer:
As a studio?

Peter:
As a studio, yeah.

Interviewer:
Do you think that your music helped with your depression?

Peter:
I did music regardless. I’ve always done music regardless of anything, just all my ... ever since I was 17 or 18 I’ve never not done music. And I didn’t know I was depressed or anything but I remember Janine came and stayed with us and she said to Kim that I was depressed and she was right, yeah. Nobody else noticed ... it was just more normal.

Interviewer:
But you started the label at that point?

Peter:
Well about a year later. What happened, was Flies played quite a bit ... it was pretty good but it was still in that thing in transition from songs ... it was mainly improvised ... well they weren’t songs but there were some lyrics. Kim did some vocals, I even did a vocal or two and there were kind of very basic riffs or motifs or something ... but mostly improvised and then Danny went away to France. This woman that he ...

Interviewer:
Was it Viv?

Peter:
No Margot was her name. He had a sort of relationship with her and I mean sort of because it was sort of off and on and that, Anyway, she went to France and he went over there and was in Europe for maybe six months or something like that ... Belgium I think. And in the meantime Brian ... we sort of fell out with Brian which was sort of strange. I can’t quite remember why but it might have had nothing to do with ... it might have just been that he wanted to concentrate on the Renderers. At the time but we sensed he had a real ambivalence about the improvised thing ... whether he wanted to do that or wanted to do songs. I remember him talking about what the Renderers were doing and it was to be more accessible at the time but ...

Interviewer:
You were almost going in an opposite direction weren’t you?

Peter:
Yeah. Then Danny came back and so the three of us continued playing and we called it Rain. That was ... there was ... we got a real buzz out of it for some reason just the three of us playing all improvised stuff. It just worked better and so you know we got quite a buzz out of it. We did a single with Peter King ... you know a lathe-cut single ... and decided to start our own label, which we’d been thinking of doing for quite a while. At this stage Bruce had moved on to Corpus Hermeticum and in mid ’93 I played ... I think it was ’93, I might be wrong ... it was either ’93 or ’94 ... I played for the first time with A Handful of Dust. That was a very interesting experience because Bruce ... I saw Bruce or got a phone call from him or something and he said do you want to play at this time and place. I said ‘Ok yeah’ and I thought that sounded quite interesting because I knew what they did or what their previous stuff had been like. I said ‘When are we going to practice?’ and he said ‘We don’t practice. You just turn up at the gig.’ And I thought at least we’d get together and get familiar with each other’s playing. No, no, that was against the rules so I turned up at the Empire and then they ... the other rule about A Handful of Dust was this really strong dope! So they take me down the street and we have this really strong dope. We come back and there’s quite a few people there ... this is the Empire, playing at the Empire ... we come back in and whoever the other band is are playing and there’s way more people than I’d expected ... sort of completely stoned. Anyway ...

Interviewer:
It must have been good though, you must have had a great time?

Peter:
It was interesting yeah. It was kind of scary, it was quite scary because it was completely ... obviously with Flies we’d had little bits of structure but not many but there was none of that with Dust.

Interviewer:
And did it work?

Peter:
Well that’s on ‘The Philosophick Mercury,’ that performance or part of it ... I think it’s on that, or maybe that’s the whole of it, I don’t know. So it was good to do that. But Rain became quite a strong thing, I think, and the label ... I think we were pretty convinced ... I remember Kim had talked to Michael Morley because Michael had the idea a couple of years beforehand about starting a label and about some of the mechanics of it. Then Kim and I when we ... not long after we moved here we became co-editors of the University Literary Review with Caroline McCaw who’s a local artist who’s done a lot of stuff, sort of published a lot of stuff. Like she was the main person responsible for Spec, the Radio One magazine ... I should show you some of those actually. And she was increasingly into that David Carson-type typography with unreadable text and stuff like that and was always getting into trouble with poets and writers for messing up their texts so you couldn’t understand it. But we became quite good friends with Caroline and the whole Literary Review thing was quite good fun because we could only work after Critic ... that’s the university newspaper ... had finished at night so it was like the sessions that we did on the Literary Review started about eleven or midnight or something. And Caro worked those hours anyway and so from midnight to three or four in the morning or something which is a whole different way of working. But there was also a CD with it and so it was a huge production ... it was amazing ... and somehow we managed to wrangle all this money out of the university. So we put together ... Kim and I put together a CD and it was the first time we’d done that and we just got all the info about it from Bruce or Michael or somebody ... how to get a CD manufactured in Australia and did it in a package

Interviewer:
Was it through Lucas Abela?

Peter:
Probably ... I know later on we always dealt with him. I’m not sure if it was that first time. That CD had people like Alastair Galbraith, the Sandoz Lab Technicians, Nigel Bunn, Douglas Bagnall, Sandra Bell ... a whole lot of people from that whole scene.

Interviewer:
Were you kind of setting up, you weren’t setting up as competition to Bruce obviously but were you kind of filling the gaps that he was leaving maybe?

Peter:
I think we thought of it a bit like that because by that time Bruce had moved to Christchurch and he was starting to release more people from overseas. We thought ... first of all though we started just wanting to release our own stuff ... it was more like a self- release thing, but under a label name. And we were really interested in a whole label aesthetic ... I mean I related to it to the mid 70s/late 70s DIY thing with the small labels and Kim from an art point of view with the artwork and graphics and everything having some kind of unified aesthetic. So that was really exciting and our first release was the Rain album ‘Sediment’ on CD.

Interviewer:
Did that do very well?

Peter:
Well it did actually and it just got all this attention. Flies had previously released an album. Just going back again, although probably not so much in time ... we’d fallen out with the guy from Majora, Nick Schmidt, over ... There was a guy from Chicago who came out and he had a label Kranky ... called Kranky ... and he wanted to release a Dademah CD. We said ‘Well we’ve broken up but we’ve got this Flies ...’ We said okay we’ll see if you can do a compilation of all the Dademah stuff, which was just an LP, two singles, and a one minute track from the Xpressway one minute compilation ‘I Hear the Devil Calling Me,’ which is great one minute tracks by a whole load of people ... and put them all on one CD. Because Nick hates ... the Majora guy hated CD’s and wouldn’t have anything to do with CDs ... he was a purist, he was a total purist. But he got quite pissed off because originally he was going to release the Flies Inside the Sun album and so Kranky ended up releasing both. We got a really mixed reaction for the Flies Inside the Sun album because people who liked Dadema didn’t really like Flies Inside the Sun. Dademah had had quite a lot of ... sort of acclaim almost ... we were mentioned a lot by other bands and stuff like that. It was just that we’d coincided with some kind of revival that had been happening in the States which we didn’t know anything about at that time in the early ‘90s. But Flies didn’t fit into that at all and people couldn’t really work it out because it was partly songs ... that first album was partly songs and partly improvised stuff. But the Rain CD, the first Metonymic release, got a lot of really good press and sold out, yeah, and it was successful in that way I suppose. And so the ...

Interviewer:
You covered costs?

Peter:
Yeah and we could pay for other releases and stuff. And the first few Metonymic releases we did ... the second Flies Inside the Sun album which I actually think was much better than the first and was probably one of the better things that we ever did, That did pretty well too and we did a Total release by an English guy called Matthew Bower who played in Skullflower who wrote to us wanting a release on Metonymic. We started to get people wanting to have releases on Metonymic.

Interviewer:
Outside New Zealand as well as ...

Peter:
Yeah, from outside New Zealand. And we did some other things. That’s right ... at the same time I still wanted to release some song stuff but it didn’t really fit with the Metonymic aesthetic. So I started a label called Medication just to do some song things and did a ... mainly archival things actually ... that was ... we did a live Terminals and we did a Victor Dimisich Band retrospective which had a whole lot of live stuff and the original EP on it plus some practice stuff and things like that. So there was quite a lot of stuff, but unfortunately when that was released our house burnt down and so for the second Rain album and the Victor Dimisich Band album most of the pressing was destroyed in the fire, plus a lot of master tapes and recordings and stuff because the house completely burnt down. It was ...

Interviewer:
How did it burn down?

Peter:
Well it was sort of weird. What they traced it to ... I suppose it’s still speculation ... but the fire people traced it to Kim burning incense. We went into town and she left incense burning in her studio because there were really strong paint fumes in there and ash from it must have dropped on some paper and then there was all that flammable paint and stuff and it just took off. And the house being so old just completely ... and sort of out of town ... it just completely burnt to the ground.

Interviewer:
That must have been devastating.

Peter:
Yeah it was. It was just sort of traumatic, just to go back there and there’s nothing there. Just completely gone.

Interviewer:
And you’d put ten years of work into it?

Peter:
No, at that stage that was only ... that happened in ’97 or ’98, I think ... yeah so we had only been there for four years. But there was a lot of stuff destroyed. Kim especially had a lot of photographs and things and all her art stuff and then all my music stuff so that was all gone.

Interviewer:
How did you manage to pick yourself up from that?

Peter:
Oh just by keeping on going. I think we were both like that ... by just keeping on doing what we did. Quite quickly, Kim’s brother ... it was quite lucky Kim’s brother is a builder and he offered to come down and build us a new house!

Interviewer:
That’s phenomenal.

Peter:
I know. And he came down with her nephew as well and two other guys came down.

Interviewer:
For free?

Peter:
We just had to put them up while they were here and feed them and stuff and we paid for all the materials. But we paid no or very little ... I think we paid some ... but very little labour costs which you’d normally have to pay. So it was an incredibly generous thing to do and we helped them and built a new house, quite quickly too. They were quite amazing actually.

Interviewer:
You basically could build a house to whatever you wanted then?

Peter:
Well yeah ... and that was a weird thing that we never thought we’d have.

Interviewer:
You could build a studio for both of you?

Peter:
Which we did yeah ... and all that ... and so we built a house that suited the way we lived. Kim already had a studio and I had ... well I suppose I did too but they were parts of the house you know and we could have them a bit separate from the house, which we did, and got into a routine of ...

Interviewer:
And you were still in Rain at this point weren’t you?

Peter:
No. Rain finished just before that because Danny went away, moved away, I think he moved to Hamilton ... that’s right because I remember he wanted to be near Raglan so he could surf.

Interviewer:
That’s where I met him.

Peter:
Probably ’97 ... that was just before the fire. Brian and I ... we’d started playing together again. Whatever happened with Brian soon got forgotten about and we started playing together again and that was alright ... that was fine. We just kept playing music and we’d also started at that time to play with Susan and Nathan. Su Ballard had been in a band called the Sferic Experiment who were ... Xpressway had released a cassette, I think ... definitely one of the bands at that time around in that ... Su being really young then ... I think she was just out of school at that time but there were other people in the group who did stuff later on too. There was Sean O’Reilly, Chris Heazlewood and there was Greg Cairns, so it was an interesting group. I never saw them in their original state. I saw a couple of reunion sort of versions of them, which were good too.

Interviewer:
And wasn’t actually Stefan Neville down here at that point and Andrew Moon and all that lot they were all here too weren’t they?

Peter:
Richard was but I didn’t know him. I don’t know Andrew Moon but Richard ... I remember talking to Richard subsequently and we’d been at the same ... he’d seen us play and we’d been at the same gigs and stuff but I didn’t actually know who he was. But we knew Stefan because I have this memory of seeing Stefan in the Union Hall, the university hall, at lunchtime. They used to have lunchtime concerts there and this is with a whole lot of people eating and trying to ignore him. He was doing his one-man-band thing in this place and there was Kim and me and there were about half a dozen people who were there to see him and everybody else was trying to ignore him and some of them were yelling out rude things to him but he was just playing on regardless. We really liked what he was doing and he was part of that whole mid-‘90s Dunedin thing. There was also a group called 303 Concrete Method.

Interviewer:
Who’s that?

Peter:
Well that was Sean O’Reilly and possibly Chris Heazlewood and Brian played with them for a while actually ... all these hot-shot guitarists! And Greg Cairns was drumming. There were ... right through that there were various versions of the Puddle. As far back as Scorched Earth Policy we’d played with the Puddle both in Dunedin and Wellington. Actually we played with them ... a version of the Puddle ... there was a really good version with Lesley Paris drumming, a couple of Look Blue Go Purple, and a horn player who died ... I can’t remember his name. They continued with different line-ups right through that whole period and still continue to this day. They were occasionally amazing although you never knew quite what you were going to get with them. Who else? I’m trying to think who else was around then ...

Interviewer:
Was Clayton Noone doing stuff at that point?

Peter:
I think in Invercargill but not in Dunedin. Yeah I think we’d heard of him and heard of Matt, both were putting out tapes from Invercargill.

Interviewer:
And Clinton?

Peter:
Did Clinton come from Invercargill?

Interviewer:
Maybe he’s just there now. No he’s down in the place beginning with ‘B.’

Peter:
Blenheim?

Interviewer:
Yes. Isn’t he there?

Peter:
No it’s up there ... getting near Nelson ... up the top of the South Island, yeah.

Interviewer:
So Rain had finished?

Peter:
Rain had finished and Flies had re-emerged or whatever and we also were playing with Susan and Nathan ... Kim and I and Susan and Nathan were playing as Sleep. We started to play as Sleep before the fire and then after the fire we just continued playing and played quite a lot of music which was a good way of sort of getting over that. We were playing in Christchurch with Flies Inside the Sun ... I think at first we played here and Brian ... I think Brian somehow reflected what we were feeling, not that we were feeling violent or anything, but he did these really violent performances. I remember him putting stones inside his guitar ... he had a semi acoustic guitar, I think, and having it all miked up and kicking it round the floor and things. And we did this at the Dux in Christchurch which is ... I played there with A Handful of Dust and both those performances were really ... the Dux is a regular kind of meat market venue that people go to ... so both playing that kind of music at the Dux and specially that kind of performance! I think had quite an impact ... it was quite good to do that! And Kim and I played with Bruce in PRS at that stage and we played in Christchurch I think. So we played quite a lot of music in the period after the fire.

Interviewer:
And Kim was painting still at this point as well?

Peter:
Well Kim was painting more and more. Kim ... I first met Kim when she was painting in Christchurch. She started painting a lot, like everyday, and she had ... we went up to the North Island and she got interest from dealers and stuff although it was funny because she had never been to art school and the Brooke Gifford in Christchurch being a sort of snobby gallery wouldn’t have anybody who had never been to art school sort of thing. It was quite funny yeah ... but people at some of the North Island galleries weren’t worried about that. They were only worried about the work and she had two shows with Greg Flint.

Interviewer:
She was starting to get successful at this time?

Peter:
Yeah she got quite a bit of recognition and she was also part ...

Interviewer:

Sorry, how were you actually living all this time, what were you living on?

Peter:
Mostly on the dole. I mean at first I had some money because I also had superan(nuation) from the wharf but mostly on the dole with the odd job but not regular. And Kim believed in that too, that you should live on it, that you should first be an artist and then live.

Interviewer:
Ideally it’s great.

Peter:
It’s pretty funny. But yeah, in practical terms it can be quite difficult. We lived on next to nothing, very frugally, and we had a garden and stuff. She was starting to get quite a bit of recognition but then she decided that she didn’t want it. It was sort of weird, you know, the whole Auckland dealer gallery ... Wellington and Auckland dealer gallery thing. Then she sort of pulled back from that when we moved here. She was still doing stuff but I think she got less interested in the dealer gallery thing. She probably started making films from about then too ... she had been yeah ... just those sort of Kim films, a very slowed down, usually very contemplative, kind of film. Yeah I’m just trying to think ... she did have some shows and she had a show here called the Dereliction show, which was great ... that would have been just before the fire. She just got a space, a warehouse space in town, and had I think her Dereliction paintings ... I’m not sure ... they were similar to that. They had very little on them and they ... oh, maybe they got burnt up in the fire ... some were out I think ... I’m not sure, a lot of those things got burnt up. But and she had them around the wall of this space and then she had just drawings, small drawings that people could buy for five dollars, all over the place. I think that was just at the stage when she was not having anything to do with the dealer gallery system and had this thing that people could bypass them. Flies played and Donald McPherson played ... he was this mysterious guy that we’d heard about who the Sandoz people knew but he’s so much more talked about than ever seen. He’d released a number of Peter King lathe-cut records in editions of 15 or 20 or something and reputedly destroyed any remaining copies of anything of his at different points. We tried to get him to play in public with us and he did a couple of ... I don’t know what you call it ... he got stage fright when he got up there and when it appeared he was going to start playing he’d just get up and walk off ... things like this ... especially one time when Tom Lax was out here he did that. So he didn’t want to play live but he was a very good player and later I released a thing on Metonymic.

Interviewer:
Yes it’s a very beautiful piece yeah.

Peter:
He was one of the people there ... he played at the Dereliction show. So there were things like that ... events you know ... right through this whole period there were sort of Dunedin events, quite good and usually multimedia ... usually with film, music, some other sorts of visual art and things. It was pretty good and just doing stuff after the fire sort of kept us ...

Interviewer:
Sane?

Peter:
Yeah.

Interviewer:
Yeah it’s a really big deal losing everything like that. Do you need a break now?

Peter:
Yeah.


Interviewer:
As we’ve just been discussing, you clearly chose to be artists rather than parents at this time?

Peter:
Yeah well it definitely came up at some point and I think Kim had originally wanted ... she comes from quite a large family and she had thought that she would have a large family and especially for her then it was a decision, a conscious decision that we couldn’t afford ... we couldn’t take care of children and still be artists you know because we were poor and doing what we did there was no prospect of us not being poor, put it that way.

Interviewer:
Do you ever regret that at all?

Peter:
Oh very occasionally.

Interviewer:
And of course Dunedin is one of the few places that you can actually do that too isn’t it?

Peter:
Yes because people ... I think there are a number of things about that here ... because it’s a smaller place and there’s more of a community thing that, even despite what I said about the divisions between the noise and the song crowds, you still end up seeing people quite often and there are village-like things. So to exclude people with children or people without children would be silly because it’s not ... you get art openings where there’ll be children running around and Caro’s sons are just terrors! ... Miro the eldest one must be about 12 now but I remember him leading these packs of children through these art openings with people holding drinks and art works around. But it was just normal, usual for Dunedin, and nobody was offended by it at all ... sometimes people from outside were and found it difficult. They weren’t used to having children ...

Interviewer:
And of course on the opposite side too it was probably just as acceptable to be an artist and not have children because you can live that cheaply in Dunedin, which in other places in the country it wouldn’t be possible.

Peter:
Most ... a lot of the artists ... and that includes us ... live for a lot of the time on the dole with occasional supplements from jobs and things and that was possible with the relatively cheap rents. Like we owned our own house and at that stage houses were quite cheap to buy or had been until ... then they just sky-rocketed. So you can live cheaply here and that’s probably a factor too.

Interviewer:
Where were we with the, you were in Sleep?

Peter:
Yeah we were in Sleep ... we’d started playing quite a lot with Sleep and they became our main group. Kim had given up music before the fire actually. I think because she’d ended up doing a whole lot of the graphics ... everything ... it was not actually playing the music but more all the other stuff to do with the label. She did a whole lot of work for the label like designing things and doing graphics and I think that she felt that was taking up too much of her time and taking away time from her painting which was the main thing that she wanted to do. So she stopped playing music probably for about a year before the fire but after ... except for Sleep and that was very occasional before that but after the fire it became more regular and she still played. She still played occasionally with Brian and me too as Flies. We played as a trio or just a duo ... like at Kim’s Dereliction show Brian and I played as a duo and we probably played a few shows like that. That’s quite good fun playing with a really small group ... it’s much more exposed but it’s good. I quite like that.

Interviewer:
And of course all this time the Terminals were still running?

Peter:
Yeah the Terminals still continued. We had that really ... the period between 1990 when John and Brian joined the band and when both Brian and I moved to Dunedin which was like ’93 ... there were those three years where I think musically we made big strides. We had live shows we played where we were sort of incorporating the whole improvisational noise thing into the song thing. It became, you know, quite a well-integrated sound in that period and that was probably our best period creatively, both in terms of sound and in terms of songs. In that period we did two albums on the German label Raffmond, ‘Touch’ and ‘Little Things’ and we played live. That performance at the Gluepot was funny because we played with the Puddle ... we played before them at the Gluepot ... I think we swapped over in different places ... except we just ... I think our show was pretty wild and Mick set fire to himself! It was this weird thing when we were doing ‘Do the Void’ which is a kind of ... I don’t know ... one of our most out-there kind of things, which he sings and suddenly in the middle of it ... I’m behind the drums so I’m not really taking much notice of what Mick’s doing ... suddenly he runs over in front of me and I see this flash of flame. I couldn’t quite work it out. We were playing a thing that’s got quite a momentum so it was hard to take much notice but I remember being just quite puzzled and then John poured beer on him or something ... grabbed a glass of beer quickly ... and it just kept on going. It all just kept on going. So there’s kind of a flurry and a burst of flame but after we got off everybody was talking about this and what Mick had done was that he’d put a candle down his pants and put lighter fluid on it or something. It was so weird because he usually wore clothing that was so flammable, rayon kind of clothing, and he could have gone completely up in flames. Of course it caused a big stir. Then after that it was very difficult for the Puddle to play and there was a review somewhere and the reviewer raved about this thing and stuff like that.

Interviewer:
So it was actually deliberate on his part?

Peter:
It was just him going wild. There was a performance in Dunedin where he completely destroyed, literally destroyed, a keyboard. He was holding bits of it up and it was still on so it was making all these sounds. I don’t know why he didn’t get electrocuted or something. He’d tend to do things like that quite often. So in that whole period through to ... probably through to about 1995 or ‘96 ... Terminals’ performances got quite, probably closer to Dead C territory really. Even though we were still doing songs they got noisier and noisier ... we used to play at the Dux in Christchurch and in that small room with people packed up to the stage it was just so loud, it would be just deafening and with all the doors and windows open. Those kinds of performances ... I remember we’d start off and I’d think ‘God this is so full-on’ from the start. It was just that whole period where things got like that but I think the songs were getting lost by then. It became a noise and we’d sort of ... as we got noisier we kind of shed the whole Flying Nun song crowd ... the older people wouldn’t come and see us anymore and we got this whole new crowd of younger people who were more familiar with noise-rock stuff ... like Guy Treadgold was one of those ...

Interviewer:
Really?

Peter:
There were a whole lot of those people ... often art students and people like that. So we got a whole different crowd which was quite odd and those other people still went and saw the Bats or something like that but wouldn’t go and see us because we were in a different category by then.

Interviewer:
And the line-up stayed the same?

Peter:
The line-up was still the same. But yeah ... but then with Brian and me being in Dunedin and us doing more and more improvised stuff, I think there was sort of ... with Stephen and Mick becoming increasingly unhappy with the whole noise direction or the extent to which it had gone I think there began to be differences between us. Although we still played every year we didn’t have any ... well we didn’t get together often enough to develop any new material so we just were doing our greatest hits or greatest non-hits each time we got together. So things became quite distanced between us. Then I said I didn’t want to play live with the Terminals anymore because I felt we were just doing the same thing and I think Mick, especially, took that as a real rejection, because for him ... and I didn’t realise it at the time ... the band was quite a family thing you know. I just saw it as a musical group and didn’t really think of it in that way but it was an important part of his life and sort of taking ... he felt that was being taken away from him. They ... Stephen and the other Christchurch Terminals started a group called Minus Two which was just guitar, bass, maybe some cello ... because John played the cello sometimes ... and organ. I think Mick gave up playing the synth and went back to play the organ because it’s a traditional instrument. They wanted to get back to doing traditional songs and they wanted to get back to doing songs first, you know, and so there was quite a division between us. But the only years we didn’t actually play were, I think, ’99 and 2000. I think two years that we didn’t play but every other year we played, still played, usually two or three shows in Christchurch and Dunedin. So that time was sort of ... I was pretty much seen as being in the other camp and I probably saw myself in that way too and I think the Terminals were like a ... they became a lower priority compared with the Improvisational stuff.

Interviewer:
You were pretty busy at that point anyway weren’t you?

Peter:
Yeah doing Metonymic as well. And that became more and more too because we’d sort of started up again after the fire and still did stuff even although we’d lost a lot of stuff and that really set us back. We never actually sold that kind of numbers again. I think around that period things changed with the distribution ... I can’t remember why ... but some distributors stopped and some of them folded owing us money and stuff. It was much more difficult from ‘98/’99 round there. Maybe some of the thing too that there was a kind of ... New Zealand had been the flavour of the month when we started, around that time, but it was no longer. So it was kind of ... things had changed a bit I think ... we still released stuff but it was much harder to sell and to keep to that thing of releasing stuff from around here. Often it was stuff that nobody had heard of overseas and increasingly they wouldn’t listen to anything they had never heard of, a circular thing. They weren’t interested ... the distributors weren’t interested in taking stuff that didn’t contain ... it wasn’t viable if it didn’t contain somebody that they already knew because people were ... there was so much stuff out there by that stage.

Interviewer:
That’s right, it was the beginning of the sort of digital age really wasn’t it?

Peter:
Yes. There was just more and more stuff.

Interviewer:
So that’s 2000 we’re talking here?

Peter:
Sort of the end of the ‘90s, really. And the whole label thing had changed too ... labels overseas had stopped too.

Interviewer:
Is that a good place to stop?

Peter:
Yeah.

Interviewer:
We’re up to the year 2000 year and Peter what would you say was the difference between your and your personal practice between the song-based work that you’ve done and your more improvised work?

Peter:
It’s sort of interesting because it was a gradual thing for me in that ... that whole transition to being able to play totally improvised music. I think, as I mentioned before, I’d played bits and pieces, particular songs or parts of songs with song groups like the Vacuum and the Terminals but there’s a real leap when you go to playing totally improvised stuff. So it’s sort of like ... it’s a leap of faith because you’re sort of jumping off, you know, into the deep end. You’ve got to make decisions in the moment so you’re not making them consciously ... it’s all quite unconscious. It’s not a call and response sort of procedure but you’re playing parallel to other people ... with other people ... and I just found that tremendously exciting, that you could go anywhere at any time. At the same time you’re negotiating musically with other people so you’ve got to be a lot more mentally active.

Interviewer:
And present too.

Peter:
Yeah very much too, Also another ... just a point coming from that ... in different ... playing in different places you can actually adjust your playing much more to the place and you’re actually conscious of your environment, as well as the other people you’re playing with and your instruments and um different instruments sound different on different days and in different places. You can adapt much better to the environment so it’s much more in tune with where and when you’re playing. I found with songs, often you tend to impose your structures on places and sometimes it just doesn’t work. I remember here at the Public Art Gallery, which is a great venue downstairs in the foyer with a massively high ceiling just sort of verging on the cavernous but on the good side of cavernous to play in. I remember we played there with improv. groups and various touring people and things sound great there because they kind of inhabit the space but I remember when the Renderers played there it just didn’t work. It didn’t work for a group playing straight songs. They couldn’t handle the natural reverb of the room and stuff like that.

Interviewer:
So it got pretty much dissolved?

Peter:
Yeah and it just ....it really didn’t suit ... just as an example. There’s a whole lot more thinking but it becomes unconscious ... that goes into playing improv music compared with the song groups. Playing songs ... like I enjoy playing songs and, as a songwriter or co- songwriter, it’s quite exciting when you have a new song and it suddenly appears and you play it. That’s good, but then after a while there’s a not a lot you can do with it, Now I know of groups, for example the Velvet Underground, who played songs differently in different places at different times. They’re probably the best example of that. We’ve tried to do it with the Terminals too and we have done it, but it’s never to the same extent. So basically you’re talking about the same song each time. It’s not radically reworked unless you consciously do that. Then the whole thing of structures ... well I like Brian’s songs and Brian’s songs tend to be very simple and depend more on feel and intensities. So they’re much more abstract if you like than Stephen’s structures, I’ve played with Stephen for so long now that I understand his structures but other people playing him often find them quite difficult because he does changes, often reasonably complicated changes. I mean as a writer of music, he’s probably one of the best around, I think. I always think of him and George Henderson as being able to write melodies, but it’s a whole different way of thinking and there’s a pre-arranged structure that you have to adhere to. So yeah, playing improv or whatever ... I always have difficulty with the terms for this ... we got round to calling it ‘experimental’ music because that’s sort of an overall term but at one stage we’d always call it ‘noise’ music, ‘free noise,’ or improve ... but playing that music is more rewarding from a playing point of view.

Interviewer:
Right. I find it really interesting. I noticed this yesterday that because you’re a drummer and I’ve noticed this with other drummers that there’s always this rhythm going on in the background when you’re speaking so you’re actually, just so that the people know this is recorded, Peter’s foot is going in time to what he says the whole time he speaks. It’s fantastic.

Peter:
I used to drive people mad by tapping on tables and things!

Interviewer:
Yeah and I’ve noticed it with Stefan and Rosie, they both tend to drum while they talk because it’s sort of like, it’s this impetus I think yeah that ...

Peter:
Well I guess it’s our way of expressing ourselves percussively.

Interviewer:
Yeah, but it’s interesting how you must have rhythm in your head or body the whole time going on and it just comes out when you’re slightly more unconscious. So in terms of drumming it’s such a structured activity anyway, how does that work in an improvisation context?

Peter:
I found it difficult at times. I was always a pretty ... I never had much technical training or anything ... so I was a pretty basic self-taught drummer and I drum fairly linearly. The drummers I really liked were Maureen Tucker from the Velvet Underground and I liked Jackie Liebezeit ... I’m not quite sure how you say his name ... the Can drummer ... and drummers like that who drummed a kind of pulse. That’s often quite linear drumming and to actually drop that constant rhythmic emphasis and to be arrhythmic was quite a step at times. It’s not really being arrhythmic but I know I went through a period with A Handful of Dust of consciously trying to be arrhythmic so to just drum sound and intensities. I think at times it worked and at times it didn’t, but just using the drums as a colour instrument. Say with A Handful of Dust, Bruce especially, or both Bruce and Alistair, were quite rhythmic anyway so it didn’t really need drums to be rhythmic. I think what I’ve come round to now is a bit more of a synthesis of the two that I’ve gone back to playing quite rhythmic improv music ... and I’ll talk about it ... but it is probably more linear than say Sleep or Flies or somewhere in between.

Interviewer:
When you say linear, as opposed to what?

Peter:
As opposed to rhythms broken up, shifting rhythms,

Interviewer:
So you’re talking about continuous rhythms?

Peter:
Yeah, where drums would be used more as colour and to accentuate ... yeah that whole thing of ... I suppose the free jazz thing of playing parts of phrases or whatever on the drums, whereas the rock thing is being in there on the beat. So I think it took me a long time to integrate those things and it sort of made me a little bit uncomfortable that I was playing song music and drumming a particular way and then drumming in a completely different way in playing this other type of music. I kind of wanted to integrate them a bit more and play ... so I probably ended up playing more structure in the improv and less structure in the ... or more improv in the structure ... somewhere in between a bit more.

Interviewer:
Do you find that because you have such an emphatic rhythm that you tend to lead where the improvisation is going or?

Peter:
Yeah, I’ve probably found that mostly with Eye ... at times Eye has become quite drum-led and partly that was because ... especially when ... I suppose I should talk about Eye a bit more?

Interviewer:
When was Eye formed?

Peter:
2003. Yeah, right at the end of 2003. But we’ve had different phases. It started off with Nathan and Peter and me ... this is after Kim and I broke up and Sleep had finished. I think Nathan, especially, wanted to do something that was a bit more rocky, Sleep wasn’t rocky ... Sleep was a sort of weird experimental chamber music or something. It’s really hard to describe but at times it was quite complex and I don’t think we were technically adept enough to play the complexities that we were trying to play.

Interviewer:
Interesting, I haven’t actually heard much of Sleep so I can’t comment.

Peter:
Partly because Susan had ... she was playing the viola and then the synthesiser but she probably had a knowledge of ... just a bit of classical training, I think ... which interested me but I think Nathan had never been in a band where he could rock out. Like Sandoz were always quiet boys ... sort of ... that’s what we used to call them ‘the quiet boys’ and they played little bits of sounds and stuff at that stage. I think they got louder later. But we did some rocking out which kind of amused me because I’d played in bands that rocked out like Scorched Earth that, you know, were really full-on at times and Peter and ...

Interviewer:
This was Peter Porteous?

Peter:
Yeah Peter Porteous ... because this is post-Lines of Flight.

Interviewer:
Which we’ll come to later ...

Peter:
He came down and played with Empirical from Auckland with Marcel Bear and they played at possibly the first two Lines of Flights, I think. Then Peter and Alice moved to Dunedin ... I’m not quite sure of the year ... well it must have been then ... it must have been 2003. We got on quite well so thought we’d play some music together. So that version of Eye, the first version of Eye, was Peter, Nathan, and me ... them playing guitars and I was doing stand-up drumming, which is something I did ever since I moved to Dunedin, to almost like set myself a task of doing something different to get out of a rut or just to force myself to do something different. I stood up and I’d have the kick drum mounted on a stand facing up and had like two toms and a snare and I’d be standing up drumming and after ... you know the fashion of Maureen Tucker who did it with the Velvet Underground

Interviewer:
Which is really hard on your back I would have thought?

Peter:
Well a lot of people said that but I found that when I sat down again I got a sore back and I’d never had a sore back in my life. Because you’re hunching when you’re ... if you stand up straight like you’re supposed to it’s like virtually anything ... if you’re sitting at a computer or something ... you need to sit up straight while you’re drumming and relax. It’s the same rules as for anything that you use your back. But it was physically exhausting because I tended to move around the drum and I did that from ... I first did that with A Handful of Dust ... when I played with them ... and then with all the improv groups. I even did it with the Terminals for a period, which disconcerted the others a little bit because they no longer had a kick drum. That kind of threw everything a bit adrift, which I kind of liked, because it sort of put it into a different area and that it was good from a more physically expressive point of view, being able to move around. Also from the ... probably from Rain and early Flies I started playing samples ... usually environmental samples and stuff, recording and playing them and then later I processed them, so I could do that as well and just do a bit more and move around a bit more and play the short-wave radio which I used to do and different radios.

Interviewer:
When did Ryan come into the Eye?

Peter:
Okay so we’re going back and forth quite a lot.

Interviewer:
Sorry, I just suddenly thought short-wave radio because he was using samples too wasn’t he?

Peter:
No what Ryan was doing ... well we had Eye with Peter and Nathan on guitars and me on drums. But Nathan ... soon after that, I think in early 2004 he and Su went to Sydney and there was ... so we had to decide about getting somebody else in. And Ryan Cockburn was this young guy ... I think he’d been a masters student of Su’s actually and his practice was ... he was a turntable player although he didn’t want to be called a ‘turntablist’ ... he refused to be called a turntablist because of the connotations. You know it was kind of a fashionable thing to do! What he actually did was cut records in half and then put them back together, different records back together, which I think is possibly a Christian Marclay thing. He loved Christian Marclay and was quite open about his, you know, admiration for him ... but a lot of his practice was derived from Christian Marclay and other people doing that kind of thing. He had a radiogram, a beautiful old radiogram, which I think was pink in part ... it was painted pink! So he was a very atypical turntable player, if you think of the sort of hip turntable player with the flash turntables and all that. He had this kind of antique turntable and he cut up records. So Peter and I started playing with Ryan and Ryan also performed solo as Spit ... because he lived on the Spit at Aramoana, which is right out on the end of the sand which is shifting, falling into the sea ... there’s a house on the end of it. So we played and that was really interesting ... quite an exciting period for us because it just put us into a whole different area because it was a very skeletal sound with Ryan doing his turntable stuff and there’d be unexpected things and also humorous things like I remember playing at the Physics Room and Peter and I would be rocking away and then suddenly there’s all this opera singing comes in at some point and it’s Ryan. He had a whole lot of sound effects records that he got from ... maybe old radio records ... yeah various sound effects, radio sound effects ... things like that. And so it sort of ... there was a little bit of reflexiveness that came into it too, so sort of almost looking at the medium. So that was quite interesting. I think in that period the drums became the lead instrument because Peter doesn’t really lead the band ... he’s sort of happier ... but I think Peter’s guitar is the sound of ... he’s got this lovely guitar sound. We actually played a lot in that period because of Ryan being young ... we had three generations in the band too ... there was me who was 50 whatever at the time or about 50 and Peter who was probably in his late 30s and Ryan who was in his 20s ... which was quite strange. But that’s also a thing about improv music. There’s a lot more mixing of generations ... at least here in Dunedin ... I’m not quite sure if that happens everywhere but I think maybe it does. Whereas you know in say rock groups ... I’m not actually talking about old family groups or anything like that or even that ...

Interviewer:
That was one of the things that I really enjoyed about this community when I first became aware of it and that unlike the music industry when if you get over a certain age you’re gone, you’ve lost your career, it’s almost here that people understand like jazz and classical music the older you get the better you’re going to be and there’s a lot more respect for the elders

Peter:
Yeah. It’s just about playing music. The other thing of course is the marketing of pop and rock music ... the young person is the target audience. But yeah, so that’s a bit about Eye. We played a lot in that year. We played a few shows at the Public Art Gallery supporting people. We played before Alan Licht, Tetuzi Akiyama and Oren Ambarchi and played with a few other people who came and toured. That was really enjoyable. Having Ryan’s energy, his youthful energy, was great too. We played in Christchurch ...

Interviewer:
So that spanned what, from 2003 to?

Peter:
It was probably through 2004 and 2005, I think, probably a couple of years. Then Ryan went to Melbourne and we continued our exchange programme with Australia when Nathan came back and rejoined. At the same time, before they went away ... I think we played before Su and Nathan went away ... Su, Nathan and I played in a group called PSN. No prizes for guessing what the initials are but again it’s having to find a name. PSN Electronic was the idea that we would play only electronic instruments, like old electronic, or new electronic instruments. So then we were doing, I guess, sort of soundtrack stuff with samples. There was a bit of synthesiser ... Su was playing a bit of synthesiser and I was doing radio and samples.

Interviewer:
Right so you weren’t playing drums at all?

Peter:
No, no traditional instruments at all.

Interviewer:
At this is what you played at ISEA?

Peter:
Yeah. So when they came back ... it’s been a very occasional group ... but yeah that’s the group we played with in 2008 in Singapore at ISEA ... Nathan and me in person and Su by Skype from Port Chalmers! She was too pregnant to travel at the time and she played ... for her it was something like four o’clock in the morning ... from the living room. Shall I talk about that?

Interviewer:
If you want to, yes.

Peter:
It was an interesting experience going over there and playing. We were playing after the opening of the New Zealand exhibition at a place called the Substation which was like an alternative gallery venue.

Interviewer:
In Singapore?

Peter:
In Singapore. Probably quite alternative in Singapore terms, from what we could work out.

Interviewer:
What was the larger context of this, was it the ADA?

Peter:
Yeah, the New Zealand show was organised by ADA ... I can’t remember all the people.

Interviewer:
There was Zita Joyce and ...

Peter:
Oh yeah, the organisers were Zita Joyce, Stella Brennan, and Su ... they were the three organisers ... but I can’t remember all the people in the show.

Interviewer:
Oh right, there was quite a few wasn’t there?

Peter:
Yeah. There was Et Al, Len Lye ... which is kind of strange being in an exhibition with Len Lye! There was Stella Brennan.

Interviewer:
Wasn’t Bruce in it as well?

Peter:
Yes. The three sound works in the show were by Bruce Russell, PSN and Adam Willetts. So we helped set those up ... just the listening works ... and we were to perform, Adam and us were to perform late at night after the opening in another part of the building. Actually, the venue that they had there was a sort of dedicated venue. It was an interesting day because on the day of the opening the street outside ... it was sort of a side street ... was completely blocked off for a performance by a guy who had got second in American Idol and his band. It was ... so it was a big quite high-powered thing ... they had these big canvas barriers and everything. You could walk down the side and get into the gallery, but pretty much the whole street was taken up with this large structure, sort of scaffolding and a huge PA. They might have had some seating but not much. I think people were herded into this space in the middle and there were maybe four or five Singapore support bands before, so they were going from about midday. Talking ... we got quite friendly with the gallery people and at different times they’d tried to get the street blocked off, just to have a street party, because it wasn’t an important street or anything as far as traffic went. It was just a side street and they’d always been refused point-blank but because this guy was sponsored by Sony ... I think it was ... and Singapore Telecom he’d no trouble at all and with all the security people wandering around being officious and stuff the gallery protested against them. That was a big deal in Singapore because evidently the previous director of the Substation had been put in jail for being part of a protest against the treatment of maids in Singapore and there are a few sort of fascistic aspects about Singapore, the government in Singapore, and the whole thing against any sort of protest or demonstrations is one of them. So it was actually quite a big deal ... it meant something that they were doing this protest against this sort of imposition. They put up a big banner that said ‘We were here first’ which was great and they had a musical ... a sort of series of acts playing in the ... sort of in the doorway of the gallery space which was facing directly at the canvas wall which was about six foot high around this blocked off street. They had... it was a bit like Dunedin actually, it reminded me ... They had kind of ... what would you say ... sort of indie rock and pop groups, but some of them had women in them which I think for Singapore it was a bit more of a big deal and street theatre and poets and stuff like that.

Interviewer:
This is what the gallery had?

Peter:
Yeah the gallery had organised this more alternative music.

Interviewer:
Right and were they totally drowned out though?

Peter:
Well, this is what I was going to say ... I think you could hear them, I don’t know how much you could hear this stuff inside the thing but the most effective protest in terms of sound was two of the guys and one of them was the sound mixer, who we got quite friendly with and who later mixed us, played some synthesiser very loud, right outside the gallery and was actually interjecting into the performance. Now I’m sure some of that could be heard. This went on for quite a while and then security men starting walking around talking in their walkie-talkies and the police turned up. At least they weren’t arrested, they were just told to stop. The Singapore support bands were alright, but the main act was hideous. We looked him up on the net and it was a guy called Christ Daughtry and his band. He hadn’t even won American Idol ... at the time we were told he’d won American Idol but he was the second place getter or something. Anyway after all that and in-between it all there was the opening in the gallery which went really well, with quite a lot of people there. Then Adam and we played afterwards starting about 10.30 at night and by that time they’d finished outside which was good. Adam played first and it was really fantastic ... I’d never seen him play so amazingly ... he was very theatrical and the place was packed. That was quite weird because we were thinking well how many people are going to turn up to this, it’s so obscure.

Interviewer:
ISEA is full of obscurity isn’t it?

Peter:
Yeah. Of course a lot of them were delegates from other ... but there were actually quite a few Singaporean people there too, because we’d spent quite a lot of time with the gallery people, the Singapore musicians and the guy who was mixing us ... talking with them because we hung around there most of the day. So there were some Singaporean musicians, which was good, and Adam played and then we played afterwards. The whole thing with Su was quite funny because when we were trying to have a bit of a sound-check we just couldn’t ... she didn’t come through. She’d come in bits ... little bits would come through and then there was ... it was quite frustrating. So we’d almost given up on it and thought we’ll just play anyway but for the performance she actually came through fine, although she said later that she could hardly hear us and at 4 am from her living room in Port Chalmers... But that was part of our whole media thing too ... we were interested in working with different media. It went really well and people seemed to like it. It was interesting because their PA and the facilities were so good and the mixer was so good, compared with what we had here. We thought we were playing quite loud but then when we heard a recording of it ... we made a recording of it ... it actually sounds very peaceful and restful and people who were there said that. So it was kind of odd that we had a different idea of what we were doing. I don’t know whether that was because we were quite ... probably quite keyed up by the whole day ... although the sounds we were using were kind of radioish sounds, pretty much all drifting radio sounds and stuff like that.

Interviewer:
You were flown over to Singapore?

Peter:
Well that was a really weird thing too. You play here and you get $20 or something and then suddenly just out of the blue you get flown to Singapore and get put up for a week ... to hang around for a week! We were supposed to also do a talk which never eventuated, not because of us but just because of the organisation but ...

Interviewer:
And paid to do this as well?

Peter:
Yeah!

Interviewer:
You got a fee for it?

Peter:
Yeah we did. It was bizarre.

Interviewer:
Yeah really cool though.

Peter:
Going to Singapore on a junket ... which was quite good in the middle of winter in Dunedin!

Interviewer:
Do you mind if I just stop there?




Interviewer:
Was that your last performance of Eye at Singapore or not?

Peter:
PSN yeah. We’ve only done two PSN performances but we’re doing one next Thursday playing before Chris Watson at the DPAG. It’s going to be another of our playing-with- media performances. Many years ago, the first Sleep album ... in about 1998 I think ... came back as a faulty pressing and it skipped all over the place and so we had 500 CDs. We got it redone but we had 500 CDs that we never had anything to do with, that were redundant, and just the other day Nathan had a very good idea that how about we use these as our source material for the show next Thursday night. So we’re only going to use those ... each of us ... Su, Nathan and I will just set up one CD player, one effects pedal, and ...

Interviewer:
And each using the same CD?

Peter:
Yes, but they skip in different places, but we’re also going to put tape on them and scratch them and do different things. We’ll probably do part of that live and just see what we come up with ... which is really sort of putting us in the moment, that we have to do something, so it’s not prepared or anything.

Interviewer:
That sounds great.

Peter:
That will be the third PSN public performance. I guess we started in late 2003 so it’s a very occasional thing. We’ve just put out a CD. All our pieces are called ‘Teleporter.’

Interviewer:
Right 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Peter:
Yeah. Twelve of them.

Interviewer:
It’s more of a recording artist thing than performance?

Peter:
I think we quite liked the idea of it being a soundtrack too. I think when we did play both here and in Singapore we played with film ... here we played with a film of ... I can’t remember ... probably Su’s I think. Also in Singapore we played with ... that was quite interesting ... I guess you’d say found footage of somebody’s home movie. We think, just judging by the clothes they were wearing and the cars and stuff, that it was the early ‘60s or late ‘50s from the Alexandra Blossom Festival and there’s somebody’s dog digging in the back yard and things like that. So that was kind of interesting to play a sort of home movie from New Zealand, maybe from around 1960, in Singapore in 2008. Yeah it had that kind of grainy feel of old Super 8.

Interviewer:
Nice.

Peter:
That’s quite interesting and that’s part of the PSN thing. Eye also use film pretty much every time we play ... either by Kim, Nathan, or Susan and that’s very much part of both those groups’ practice ... the visual thing.

Interviewer:
Do you look at what you’re producing visually before you play, are you working with the film?

Peter:
No. Although generally we do look at the film we’re not consciously playing with the film or working out things. It’s probably more the other way round. We probably think well this film will suit what we do or what we think at the moment.

Interviewer:
Sound is always a priority?

Peter:
Yeah. We leave it up to co-incidences ... which there always are. So that’s fun ... when you’re playing live we’re probably conscious of changes in the density and stuff and changes in light and stuff.

Interviewer:
Talking of film and sound is this a good time to look at Lines of Flight?

Peter:
Yeah.

Interviewer:
Can I just ask what brought you to start Lines of Flight off?

Peter:
As with most things, a series of coincidences ... it was in 2000 and Caroline McCaw ... who was a good friend of ours ... she’d been editor of Spec and as I mentioned the other editor of the Literary Review when we did it. She was part of the fringe ... I guess she was on the Fringe Trust board ... and they were setting up a Dunedin Fringe Festival in 2000 and she mentioned it to us and we didn’t sort of think much about it. It was just like ‘Oh yeah that’s good to know.’ At the same time there were a couple of ... I can’t remember who they were ... maybe Campbell Neale and maybe somebody from Auckland ... who were interested in playing down here. Now there hadn’t been ... we felt there was a kind of real lack of that ... that Dunedin was almost off the map in terms of people from the North Island coming down and playing. There had been, I think, two or three shows organised by Michael Morley at the public art gallery ... I’m not sure when, maybe two or three years before. I’d played in A Handful of Dust with Empirical ... I think Empirical but I might be wrong there. Definitely Dean Roberts was White Wing Moth and it was Gate and a Handful of Dust. So there was a little bit of an exchange there and we played shows on two nights at the public art gallery. That was quite interesting. At that stage we were starting to be able to play in galleries and after feeling a bit ... well it was never a problem in Dunedin to play at the regular rock venues or not too much of a problem ... but they didn’t suit a lot of what the more experimental groups were playing. For example, if you play quietly and the level of the crowd noise is much greater than the band and if there are a lot of people just hanging around talking they generally just want people to rock out or to play a regular beat or something. We were doing abstract fragments of stuff and it would just get lost and sometimes audiences don’t appreciate having that kind of music on their night out ... it’s not a good time for them! Probably around the same time ... partly to do, I think, with the change in people at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery ... although there had been shows before occasionally at the old Logan Park venue. But they were interested in the whole experimental music scene here which various people at the gallery seemed to think was the most interesting artistic thing about Dunedin. I know a lot of visual artists were not happy with that but I think perhaps at the time overseas there was beginning to be awareness in the whole gallery system of sound art. I remember hearing something on the radio around that time about the new director of the Australian National Gallery who was Scottish and she was talking about sound art. They asked her ... it was an interview ... what was the new thing and she said ‘sound art.’ So it’s interesting that the gallery people had picked up on that and they had shows there. But sort of backtracking and going back again to Lines of Flight, I think it was the coincidence of firstly the Fringe Festival beginning, the people, and a couple of people from up north wanting to play down here.

Interviewer:
Anthony Milton was one wasn’t he?

Peter:
Not at that one. I didn’t actually know Anthony until a bit later ... probably two or three years after that. We were interested in getting some people down here too and so we said ‘How about we put it all together?’ I think in the end we said we’ll put it on during the Fringe Festival and call it something and so we had eight artists in the end.

Interviewer:
And so the Fringe Festival provided funding to bring these people down?

Peter:
No. We did get a small grant from them but I can’t remember how much. I might be wrong but I think the people paid for themselves or maybe we gave them some money from the grant that went some way towards it but I don’t think it paid for their entire fares at that stage. But the venue was amazing. It was this old theatre called the Athenaeum, which is in the Octagon and is never used for anything. It’s in the back of the Octagon ... there’s a shop and a bar and stuff ... it was one of the original buildings in the Octagon. We saw a photo from about 1900 and the Athenaeum was there. It’s also mentioned in Janet Frame’s autobiography. She won a prize ... possibly for a poem or something ... a subscription to the Athenaeum in Dunedin. So it was a library and there’s still this library there but it’s sort of like the library that time forgot. You’d go in there and there’s still a librarian but there was nobody there and there was still all these books. It was kind of odd, you’d go out the back...

Interviewer:
What sort of books is it, what sort of library is it?

Peter:
I don’t know. We were a bit amazed by this and we didn’t even look at the books. We were a bit uncomfortable going in there and there was this ... it had been obviously built as a theatre so it had a stage and great acoustics but with a roof that leaked and stuff like that. It was kind of falling down. The Fringe Festival people actually fixed the leaks, which was good, and we used the Athenaeum for the two Lines of Flight shows. We called it Lines of Flight ... obviously that comes from Deleuze and stuff. We get asked about that and it was Bruce Russell’s thing about how we all get called ‘egg-heads!’ He was talking about himself and how other music people think of us as egg-heads ... too intellectual ... but it was really just a name that happened to fit in well with the whole improv/experimental music.

Interviewer:
And bringing people in from different areas of the country for the first time?

Peter:
That’s true. So it’s like the films, you can sort of attach all these things after the fact. Yeah, those shows went really well. It was very intense in that space because the acoustics were so good. You could stand on the stage and you can be heard speaking at the back of the room easily and they’d actually paid attention to theatre acoustics when they built it originally. That was great for music and we had film as well, mainly by Kim. I think there was one artist who objected to having film ... they were the CM Ensemble from Christchurch ... and only one of them objected to the film ... but there’s always been that thing that film distracts from the music, you know how they work together and stuff but it went very well.

Interviewer:
Essentially that’s really the first time that a gathering of artists in this type of community has been brought together really isn’t it?

Peter:
I suppose so yeah. I’m not sure what had happened before that.

Interviewer:
Well I think that every sort of city had it’s own community but in some ways by doing this I think you created a nationwide community rather than ...

Peter:
Yeah, because they did come from different places.

Interviewer:
So connection is very new, new connections were made through this?

Peter:
Yeah and it felt like that. In a lot of ways it went so well and there was that feeling of community. I think previously a lot of us had been ... there’d been some correspondence and also some with people overseas too. One of the things about this whole area of music was that the kind of network thing was not only people in each town, city, or country but there was this kind of network of people all over the world. You’d exchange stuff you released and so there was quite a lot of that going on.

Interviewer:
Right, through the mail?

Peter:
Through the mail, yeah. That’s probably ... did we have email then? I can’t remember.

Interviewer:
It wasn’t something that a lot of people seemed to use in the early 2000s, it was used but it wasn’t sort of commonplace to use it as communication.

Peter:
Yeah. So a lot of those things were packages in the mail, which is always quite exciting ... something in the mail! That was quite good because there was a feeling of isolation in Dunedin that we felt a bit ... and so it was good to have people down from Auckland and Wellington.

Interviewer:
Was Richard Francis part of that festival?

Peter:
No.

Interviewer:
I’m just trying to figure out who was there.

Peter:
There was Birchville Cat Motel ... there was Campbell and I think Stephen Clover played with them actually and broke somebody’s amp! There was Empirical ... that was Peter and Marcel. There was CM Ensemble from Christchurch. I’m probably forgetting somebody. There were ... let’s see who from here played? Flies ... well I played in three groups, Flies, Sleep and A Handful of Dust. Matt Middleton played and advertised his website too! He did this short kind of sax set, sort of hyper as he was a lot then, and then went into a spiel advertising his website which is great in that context. I might be forgetting someone ... I think there were eight people overall.

Interviewer:
So the next one was, it was like every two years pretty much wasn’t it?

Peter:
Yeah. After that we started having it in conjunction with the Fringe Festival every two years and it grew, quickly grew, to be quite a lot bigger. I think it doubled next time. There were a lot more people from up north and we got more money. I think after that first one we raised our own money. We either got funding from the DCC Community Arts ... Creative Communities it’s called ...

Interviewer:
And was it mainly you and Kim that was organising at this point?

Peter:
Yes, the first two were Kim and me. There were a lot more people. I think we had most of the shows the second time at Arc ... I think they were all at Arc, which was the local alternative music venue. Therefore there was food and drink and stuff and that was quite good. The pros and cons of Arc were that it was a regular venue, which was sort of good and bad, whereas the Athenaeum was special and nobody had ever played there and that was kind of unusual.

Interviewer:
But you weren’t allowed to use it again?

Peter:
No. We tried to but there were various things going on. It was administered by a firm of lawyers but it was never used for anything. I think all they were doing was basically sitting on it until ... I think there was talk of the council buying up part of that area for some sort of venue ... I don’t know what ... a sort of arts venue or sports venue or something at one stage but I don’t think that ever happened. So they were paranoid about people damaging it, which was ironic as the Fringe Festival people had actually fixed up quite a few things about it and we certainly hadn’t damaged it at all. It was hard to damage anything there anyway.

Interviewer:
There’s just that fear of the fringe.

Peter:
Yeah, a fear of all these weird people coming in and doing something! So after that Lines of Flight became a regular thing in 2002, 2004 and then 2006 and it became quite established quite quickly. I think we were a bit shocked at how quickly it became established and we had people wanting to play at Lines of Flight. So by the second or third time we were sort of having to ... I guess to choose people. We weren’t really choosing people, we were mainly going on a first come, first served, sort of thing ... we weren’t really. And then there were certain people who were at most ... like they played each time ... I think Birchville Cat Motel Motel played each time until this year’s one. And Rachel Lovely Midget played ... she missed one in 2002 but played at most I think and they played as Xe this time.

Interviewer:
And Anthony was there every time, well the ones I’ve been at the last three he’s been ...

Peter:
Anthony wasn’t this year and he wasn’t at the first one but he was at the others, both as himself and as part of the Stumps in 2006. It all gets a bit of a blur ... we were pretty much getting up to 20-odd artists and five shows for each of those 2004, 2006, possibly 2002 too, so it got quite big.

Interviewer:
It felt curated to me in a good sense in that you were trying to find people. It felt to me like you were inviting people from all areas of the country but also quite diverse ranges of practice as well?

Peter:
Yeah. We were quite conscious of that, although we’re mainly hearing about people through word of mouth and some artist might suggest somebody else. I think we became quite conscious of representing a diversity of styles, of people doing different things. It’s quite funny to go through phases ... I think maybe around 2004 there were a lot of laptops and then there was a sort of move away from that.

Interviewer:
That was quite interesting that year because the further up the island you got the shorter the set was as well, the more electronic and shorter it was!

Peter:
Yeah! I suppose there were those stereotypes of Dunedin being more traditional instruments and Auckland being more laptops.

Interviewer:
Yeah well it wasn’t just a cliché it was true.

Peter:
You had those kind of divisions and I’m not quite sure where Wellington fitted in.

Interviewer:
By this stage I really think that Lines of Flight had created a community of people essentially, that every second year these people would meet and for four days they’d be networking.

Peter:
Yeah. So that’s the difference of actually meeting in person, even though I think each of us had had some contact with each other, probably from time to time in person but mainly through letter at first or email or exchanging things that we’d put out. So there’s a quite a difference in connection and a feeling of connection and it was really good for us in Dunedin to feel part of the rest of the country too because there has always been that feeling of isolation here. I think it does cost quite a bit to go to the North Island. That was the main reason we didn’t go up there much ... obviously peoples’ lives, jobs and children and stuff like that ... we don’t travel very often.

Interviewer:
It was a nice place to bring people to though I think, Dunedin, there’s always a sense of timelessness to Dunedin.

Peter:
Well, part of it is the thing you mentioned that there are still old buildings here because nobody could afford to gentrify it. It didn’t really go through that whole thing that happened in other cities in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s where a lot of old buildings were pulled down and replaced by horrible examples of whatever the current architecture was at the time. So there was that feeling here and so I think Lines of Flight did have something to do with kind of solidifying a community and it still does ... it’s become a bit of an institution in that way.

Interviewer:
You organised it with Kim for the first two years, and who else was helping you with it?

Peter:
I think Kim has always ... since then but not so much for the last one ... she’s handled the film side of it. The thing was after the first one, where she did most of the films, we started getting in other filmmakers. A number of the artists were also filmmakers, like Rachel Shearer and Campbell Neale, then later there were some other people. Most people brought their own films ... by somebody that they knew or somebody within the group ... and we organised some filmmakers from here who wanted to put music to film. Film became almost compulsory and that became an issue, I think, in 2006. Afterwards we had a big talk with some filmmakers about whether Lines of Flight was actually a music and film festival or just a music festival with film as a ... and I know one particular filmmaker from here felt that it was a music festival and he felt that film was devalued a bit. There are sort of different views on that. I probably agree that it is a music festival ... we haven’t put
the same energy into the film side of it and so the film is probably secondary to the music, but on a number of occasions, I think, especially where people made their own films, film and music have just worked really well together in that context.

Interviewer:
It’s still pretty much the only thing of it’s kind isn’t it?

Peter:
I think so yeah.

Interviewer:
Because the emphasis although it’s not as much, it’s still on film. Obviously there’s loads of shows and events and things that are multimedia but in terms of an ongoing really specific style of practice it’s got a long history now and a precedent has been set.

Peter:
Yeah, there was actually. The last one ... the 2009 one ... the Fringe Festival had previously been biennial and in 2007 they changed to being annual and at a different time of the year. We missed one year so the last one was in 2009, so a three-year gap. I wanted to have less to do with it. I was kind of getting a bit ... because it was quite a lot of work and I was busy, I think, at university by then. But Peter Porteous who’d been the co- organiser in 2006 ... Kim still pretty much organised the film side of it ... but Peter and I, I suppose, did most of the music organising in 2006. He was still really enthusiastic and then Alex McKinnon who is a younger guy ... we sort of refer to them as the None people here ... None is a large warehouse space where a number of mainly artists live. It’s been a flat with different people, probably ever since the beginning of Eye ... from about 2003 there’d been people there doing and organising things and a different general mix of visual artists and musicians. So it’s been great and it has that tradition. It’s been a gallery from time to time and with the Blue Oyster becoming much more ... the Blue Oyster was originally an artist-run gallery, so much more of an experimental space, but it became less that way when it got annual funding and much more established as an institution. I think None took up some of that in being more an experimental space for visual art and music. Alex McKinnon ... often people would move down from the North Island and one thing about Dunedin is there’s always been that changeover of people. I remember that was quite different from Christchurch where you got many of the same people there and stayed there most of their lives. Here there’s quite a lot of change which has been a really good thing for the music scene because we had people coming down, different generations of people. And Alex was one of a group of people at None Gallery at the time with energy in organising things and playing experimental music. He was in different ... he did solo recordings and he played in different groups. First of all with Jim Currin who’s an Australian guy ... a few Australian people move over here too because it’s like the opposite of where they come from, I think, of some of the places they come from. And he had a group called Khomet ... I’m trying to remember the people in it Toki, Alex, Jim and a couple of other people who I can’t remember. They were a sort of great noise-rock group who had a lot of electronic stuff going on in there. Then there were various versions of Ray Off, Jim Currin’s group which often had more acoustic stuff in it, violins and things like that. Then I think Jim left and there was a group called Dirtroom with Alex and Aliki (Boufis) and ... I can’t remember ...

Interviewer:
Yes those are the two I remember as well.

Peter:
I don’t know the others. I think Rachel Blackburn was also in that group and somebody else.

Interviewer:
Edie Stevens or was she part of the ...

Peter:
No. Another good group based around None at the time was Rory Storm and the Invaders and Edie was in the Invaders and they were good, with Jon Chapman, Rory, and again some other missing person ... a horrible thing to say! They were great. So it was a kind of music scene based around None and we were part of that because we used to practice at None too ... Eye did, especially in the basement there which is amazing. There’s this kind of old stone basement that’s sort of crumbling stone. Some of the people from None had an artwork there where they just dug this pit and just kept on digging and eventually it filled up with water. They’d do things like that. Somebody built a wall in the basement and it was kind of anarchic ... the whole feeling. So it’s a great sort of alternative energy. It’s in the tradition, I suppose, of places like ... Dunedin artists venues like Chippendale House and Super Eight and Everything Inc. which was another one but less formally organised. I think for that reason it worked a lot better based around the energy just of people who felt like doing stuff. Anyway Alex was part of that whole group of people and this year in 2009 the three of us, that’s Alex, Peter and me were the organisers for Lines of Flight.

Interviewer:
And you also formed a committee for Altmusic didn’t you?

Peter:
Yeah us ... with Su Ballard also ... are the Dunedin branch ... the committee for Altmusic. Just organising people playing here, the Dunedin shows.

Interviewer:
Alt Music is really different to Lines of Flight because Alt Music is about international artists coming over here whilst I think Lines of Flight has promoted local artists like nothing else has really in New Zealand, that’s what’s been so wonderful about it, is that it has created that network of local artists.

Peter:
Yeah you asked about that before ... why we didn’t have people from overseas. I think Marco Fusinato played in 2004 with Bruce ...

Interviewer:
It’s just so expensive though.

Peter:
That was actually the main reason. There was no reason that we ... no particular reason that we didn’t but we get a certain amount of funding generally that just covers travel expenses for people coming from the North Island. We looked at getting people from Australia ... Marco played because he was already in New Zealand on an artist’s residency ... but it was just too much. It would just take up too much of the money that we had. We had money from the council, in 2006 we got money from Creative New Zealand and this year we were back to getting money from the Fringe but at a better level than they’ve ever been able to provide before.

Interviewer:
You actually applied to Creative New Zealand for this latest one did you?

Peter:
No. For this latest one we wanted to cut it down a bit and we agreed that it had got too big ... in 2006, for example, there were five shows.

Interviewer:
That’s quite a marathon.

Peter:
Yeah I think in 2004 too actually. So that’s Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights, Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon and we felt it was too much. It was like this kind of exhaustion ... It was just too much and we wanted to cut it down, both from the point of view of being manageable and we’re all busy doing other things ... for it to be manageable for us and also for the audience. We had the feeling that at the Sunday afternoon show 2006 people were just sort of wandering around like zombies. They were so exhausted.

Interviewer:
It was really good exhaustion. You’d experienced everything you could possibly experience in four days.

Peter:
Also it was tough for the artists who played on the last day because people just couldn’t ... they didn’t get their full attention from the audience.

Interviewer:
Do you think you’re going to keep going with it?

Peter:
Yes I think so. I was ... I never thought of stopping but I wanted to have less to do with it and perhaps a bigger gap than three years. I was thinking maybe four years between 2006 but Peter’s and Alex’s enthusiasm sort of ...

Interviewer:
Cranked it up again?

Peter:
Yeah! And so we had one this year instead of next year and we’ll keep having them every two years, as long as we can.

Interviewer:
Shall we have a break?


Interviewer:
Is there anything else you’d like to add Peter?

Peter:
I suppose I should talk a little bit about ... I sort of got increasingly ... before I went back to university in 2006 I was getting increasingly interested in sound art.

Interviewer:
What’s the difference for you between sound art and noise?

Peter:
Generally prepared sound as part of soundtracks for installations or soundtracks for films but there’s not a hell of a lot of difference because I do many of the same things with Eye as well. Mainly field recordings and stuff like the recording of the Octagon bells that I used in Singapore ... I thought I’d get some sounds from Dunedin! And I did a sound track to a film of Kim’s at the Blue Oyster which had recordings from the main street of Dunedin at Christmas time over several years, made up of that.

Interviewer:
The one you did for the Lux Lucis Ut Sanus exhibition in Auckland, Kim’s piece there, what was that from?

Peter:
I’m trying to remember what it was. It was a bell? No hang on, I’m trying to remember which one. Oh yeah, I know, it was a piano.

Interviewer:
Sound art for you is when sound is made in an art context?

Peter:
Yeah it’s sort of a definitive thing. I’ve done soundtracks for a few exhibitions, a Christchurch one ... she’s Swiss actually but she lives in Christchurch ... for Katharina Jaeger, I’ve done soundtracks for a couple of her exhibitions, one called Lift and one called Pool, at the Physics Room and then at the Campbell Grant Gallery in Christchurch. That was kind of interesting because my only knowledge was ... I went to her studio when she was making the work which consisted of ... for example, the last one Pool had a lot of animal bones and skulls and things that she’d sewed a sort of stocking-like material around them so she had these kind of shapes of animal skeletons. I think a lot of her practice involves sewing things and for the first one ‘Lift’ she sewed appliances, household appliances, into sort of like old stocking material, that flesh coloured stocking material and so I put sound coming out of them as well. That was quite good fun and it was interesting to do. I went to her studio when she was making the things and we talked about the ... but they were pretty much done separately. It seemed to work quite well, just having a general idea of what she was doing. I did one with Kim and Caroline McCaw ... they had a show and they just wanted bird song in the ceiling and stuff like that which has been done many times, I think, but that was nice because the show was called Shimidsu Sakura, the cherry blossom I think ... sort of the symbols of spring. It was a springtime show. And a number of soundtracks for Kim’s films and I curated a sound show at the Blue Oyster Gallery using a number of the Lines of Flight people, just doing it in a sound art context with no visuals at all. The Blue Oyster Gallery is kind of like a ... it has a number of different spaces ... it’s like a bit of a rabbit warren and just had different sounds coming out of the walls in different parts and out in the alleyway beside it too. That got an interesting reaction from people because it was an art gallery with no visuals at all ... which is what I wanted ... but it sort of got a mixed reaction. Some people loved it and some people didn’t like it because there was nothing to look at.

Interviewer:
How did you cope with the sound bleed, was it on headphones?

Peter:
No, deliberately not on headphones. I really liked the sound bleed and there were spaces where you’d get a whole mixture of sounds. Because there were separate spaces you could actually hear most of them individually as well but definitely there were spaces where you could get real ... I think with ... that’s an interesting thing with a lot of the artists, like Rosie Parlane, Rachel Shearer, Richard Francis, Anthony Milton ... there’s some commonality in the sound of what they do too so they actually blend quite well. Maybe we all sound the same but it’s different kinds of shades of things. But that worked alright, although the reviewer in the ODT didn’t like the way the sounds ... he thought that you should be able to hear each individual sound or something. That’s an art reviewer and it’s always a thing with sound shows because I know the Physics Rooms had them and at the Singapore show you had headphones.

Interviewer:
That’s how people usually cope with it isn’t it?

Peter:
Yeah.

Interviewer:
It would be nice if there was a gallery that was constructed specifically for sound.

Peter:
Yeah.

Interviewer:
That it had soundproof areas, so that only one person could be heard, I don’t think there’s anything like that in the world is there really?

Peter:
No because there’s something different between putting on headphones in a kind of artificial atmosphere I feel and so sitting in the middle of the room you hear a sound and you can kind of get into it more naturally.

Interviewer:
Yeah, if you could lie down would be perfect.

Peter:
Yeah, which I know some sound installations have in different places around the world.

Interviewer:
Sound art is something you want to continue with then?

Peter:
Yeah it’s something I’d like to get back to a lot more.

Interviewer:
And of course there’s a large history isn’t there, of sound in an art context?

Peter:
Yeah and I think increasingly. I’ve sort of talked about the gallery thing a bit before but we do fit in quite well within the gallery context and perhaps more naturally than the music thing. Though it’s interesting with groups like Eye. Eye can rock out and we sort of do both ... I guess we juxtapose small bits of sound, little fragments of sound, with big slabs of rocking out and so it’s kind of an odd combination but it’s sort of interesting. I remember we played at a benefit. It was actually for the anarchist bookshop Black Star Books and the other groups were all punk bands, contemporary versions of punk bands, or electronic people and so it was interesting for us playing in that context. And we played quietly and we could hear the crowd noise the people talking were louder than us so we just built it up and built it up and did our loud rock thing which we could do quite easily. Eye can adapt to that situation because we are loud but it wouldn’t suit some of the other groups that I’ve been in, PSN or people like that. Yeah so I suppose we can play in rock venues.

Interviewer:
And with Terminals of course you can as well?

Peter:
The Terminals are a rock band!

Interviewer:
They can’t go any other way.

Peter:
Yeah, the Terminals have had a sort of difficult relationship to art over the years. There’s two almost schizophrenic forces going on in the Terminals.

Interviewer:
Do you think they’ll be resolved in the future?

Peter:
No it’s never been resolved. What happened with the Terminals ... after us becoming I guess a little bit estranged ... we still play together. Probably in the early 2000s we came back more together. We hadn’t recorded an album since 1996 and we did another one more recently on an American label called Last Visible Dog in 2007 ... I think it was released then ... but those songs had been around for about three years before that.

Interviewer:
That’s right he was in love with you guys wasn’t he?

Peter:
Oh yeah. He wants to release everything we do, which is really nice. I think by that stage ... I think perhaps I realised that the Terminals are a song band and especially after playing with Eye who are a kind of rock/improvisational band and PSN are completely different. So probably the main noise forces in the Terminals are Brian and me in terms of ideas or just pushing it in that direction. Mick, as I mentioned, is sort of schizophrenic between the way he thinks and the way he plays so he’s constantly sort of fighting against it. But I think we came to a sort of accommodation and the latest Terminals album is more song-based, although we did a North Island tour at the end of 2007 and I think especially the Wellington show had long improvised passages too so it’s still there. There’s always this kind of to and fro, the balance between the noise elements and the song elements, but I think that’s sort of resolved again. So the Terminals continue, although there are problems with Mick’s sort of mental illness. He’s ... he’s at times more or less there mentally and physically but yeah ...

Interviewer:
What are your plans for the future for everything? Are you just going to pretty much keep doing what you’re doing? Is there anything you’re going to drop? Varsity?

Peter:
No. Oh well, I’ll finish at varsity some time. I’m doing my honours this year and I’ll probably do a masters next year but as I said I’d like to get back more into doing more sound art, soundtracks and stuff like that, and the sound/film thing interests me a lot. So just more of the same really.

Interviewer:
Thank you so much Peter.