THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

Photo: Tim Gruar Tonight was all about EDM - forest sprites let loose on the dancefloor. Ripping up the grooves with an ecstasy of beats and pieces provided by two essential beatmakers. That started with our own home grown e xperimental electronic duo , Umu, the project of soundscape artist  Daniel Beban and (I think) Rikki Gooch - both long-time collaborators from the Welly scene (It was impossible to tell if it was Gooch as tonight's drummer wore a mask). Set in the middle of the floor, with the audience gathered around, like buskers in the street, the duo blended live percussion and analogue electronics into modern tribal beats.  The energy was raw and physical, with drums driving deep, looping rhythms from a bespoke electronic kit and two blocks of wood, with pick ups, mounted on mic stands, all hit in the traditional way but bent and manipulated on Beban's desk. That set up, like the lab bench of some mad professor, was scattered with an array of knobs, vintage synths, pi...

Lydia Lunch - Photo: Tim Gruar Tonight the high priestess of No Wave, Lydia Lunch brought Suicide & Alan Vega to life in Wellington.  She's been a catalytic force in underground culture since she blasted out of New York’s No Wave scene in the late ’70s. As the teenage frontwoman of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, she helped define a movement built on abrasion, minimalism, and confrontation. Her early work wasn’t just music — it was a rupture. Since then she’s sprawled across spoken word, film, photography, and literature, becoming one of the era’s most relentless cross‑disciplinary artists.  I first encountered her through zine culture and her brief but unforgettable stint with My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult — a perfect collision of her sleaze‑drenched provocation and their Wax Trax!‑era industrial‑disco hedonism. Her snarling guest vocal on Cuz It’s Hot was a staple on my radio show, a fusion of No Wave bite and electronic decadence. It was one of those rare crossovers wh...

Bryce Galloway’s Zines NZ: Punk to Present (Massey University Press, 2026) is both an archive and a love letter to Aotearoa’s rich, unruly, defiantly independent zine culture. Across its 300-plus pages, packed with reproductions, fragments, and visual ephemera, the book does more than document; it immerses the reader in a culture that has always existed just outside the polished edges of mainstream publishing.    Galloway, himself a lifelong zinester and author of the long-running Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, positions zines as a living, breathing form—messy, personal, political, obsessive. The book traces the lineage of zines in New Zealand back to the early 1980s, when punk’s DIY ethos collided with cheap technology and a burning need to communicate.    At the heart of this origin story is the explosive emergence of punk fanzines. Publications like Richard Langston’s Garage stand as foundational texts. Produced in Dunedin and closely tied to the rise of ...

Asher Emanuel : Photo - Ebony Lamb Out now via Bridget Williams Books, The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City finds Wellington writer and lawyer Asher Emanuel digging deep into the realities of Aotearoa’s justice system. After studying law and English literature, he was first exposed to the inner workings of the criminal justice system as a judges’ clerk at the Wellington High Court, later going on to work in investigative and legal roles while writing about justice issues for publications including The Spinoff and the New Zealand Herald . That background helped lead him to write his new book, bringing together his legal experience, reporting instincts and close attention to the human realities behind the system. The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City is a work of immersive narrative nonfiction built from more than two years of field research and hundreds of hours of interviews, following the intertwined lives of Nathan, Rikihana and their overstretch...