Niko Ne Zna are New Zealand’s very own Balkan Gypsy brass extravaganza. Formed in Wellington five years ago, the band has been stunning audiences ever since with their exuberant, dynamic performances.Comprising trumpet, saxophone, accordion, trombone, sousaphone, drums and percussion, Niko Ne Zna are a truly authentic ensemble. They can roam while playing, and enchant the audience into dancing, singing, clapping and stomping all night long. The band consists of some of Wellington’s finest instrumentalists who come from a wide array of musical backgrounds that unite together to produce a cocktail that will make your ears rise to attention and your feet move in a frenzy. Their music is high energy with dark undertones and sexy gypsy style. Niko Ne Zna are a world class act with exotic tunes, fantastic grooves and exciting solos.

The band have played extensively in Wellington with performances at The Wellington Fringe Festival, International Jazz Festival, Cuba Street Carnival, Wellington Summer City Festival to name a few and have been a staple of the Wellington music scene with regular performances all over city.

SUMONE PRODUCTIONS presents the epic music video for Polkapocalyptic featuring The Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band. Filmed in Berlin 2009. Written produced and directed by Nathan Taare and Dylan Bakker. Music from The Benkas debut album ‘Polkapocalypse‘.

A psychedelic Afro-Soul explosion in 12 parts, The Hot Grits cover the stylistic ground between deep Funk, Soul and Afrobeat. From Meters-style struts superfast deep funk assaults to churning Afrobeat Soul. This music is designed to hit you in your soul, your face and your dancing equipment. My Rites is the third single (and video) from The Hot Grits’ debut album ‘It’s Too Drunk To Be This Early‘.

‘Too Drunk to F**k’ is the second single to be released from The Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band’s debut album ‘Polkapocalypse’ and is their version of the much loved Dead Kennedy’s song.

Hailing from the slums and ghettos of Auckland, New Zealand (the Prague of the South), The Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band bring their unique brand of highly theatrically East-European Apocalyptic Debauchery to those in need, wherever they may be. At a live performance one can expect spontaneous combustion in the audience, clothes thrown off in frivolous rampage, macabre stories, legs turning into snakes, much musical and physical inebriation, and dancing, dancing, dancing…
Having just returned from neing based in Berlin for five months, the band will be returning to NZ in December for an epic 30 date ‘Gypsy Fever’ summer tour before touring Australia and Europe in 2010 to promote the release of their album in those territories.

Their previous music video for the song ‘Dance of Death’ stayed in the top 5 most watched videos for over a year on NZ music website Amplifier.

The live segments in this clip were filmed during a frenzied Gypsy Fever gig at the Kings Arms in May 2009.

Director Campbell Farquhar has been working as a freelance editor since he left film school. He’s worked on TV programmes, short films and three digital feature films. he also makes his own films, mostly abstract experimental pieces featuring animation, dance and explorations of movement. This is his third music video.

Lorazopam is the fourth single from Renee-Louise Carafice’s debut album ‘Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight’ which was recently included in Nick Bollinger’s new book 100 Essential New Zealand Albums.

The video for Lorazopam is by Chicago-based director Israel Alpizar, who also directed the acclaimed clip for Renee’s first single, Bodhisattva.

Says Carafice -”This song was originally intended to be so melodramatic that it was funny. ‘Sometimes everything in you tells you to break out into the night’… come on really! But as the song got heard by more and more people, people’s response to it was quite different, they found it very sad, some people even cried listening to it. This interpretation is okay too. I hold a firm belief that life is a very funny and very sad thing.”

Renee-Louise Carafice is a dark-folk-pop songstress born in New Zealand, based in Chicago. With a bitingly honest and brutally fragile voice, she sings of her ‘messy rollercoaster ride’ of a life, over rich and complex melodic structures. She sings with an alarming openness about desperation, love, loss, homelessness and longing, all the while maintaining a sense of glorious hope at the end of the road.

‘Silver’ is the second single from Bond Street Bridge’s critically acclaimed debut album ‘The Mapmaker’s Art.’

The song and the video tell an epic story of folly, adventure, and eventual insanity.  A well-dressed but confused-looking young man pushes a mannequin in a post-apocalyptic shopping trolley through a desert populated by dessicated skulls, poisonous snakes, and cantankerous alchemists. With only a deck of cards for guidance, he’s searching for a mysterious potion – presumably he’ll know it when he sees it.  As in most ill-conceived endeavours, things go wrong quite quickly.

The video was shot in lush black and white by Briar March, and directed by Nigel Braddock.  Sam Prebble, the one-man multi-instrumentaliser behind the Bond Street Bridge project, wrote the script and provided art direction.  He explains ‘the logistics of the shoot were a bit of a nightmare, but since it was my idea, I couldn’t really complain about having to push a severely distressed shopping trolley up a sixty-foot sand dune.  At least, that’s what Briar and Nigel reckoned – I decided to complain anyway.’

The bulk of the shooting was completed in one very long day at Bethell’s Beach, on Auckland’s west coast.  Racing to fit so much action into one day of shooting gave the finished product exactly the epic qualtiy the team was aiming for.  ‘I wasn’t acting by the end of the day,’ says Sam. ‘All that rolling around and falling over towards the end of the video was a pretty good reflection of my state of mind by that stage.’

The video was edited by Campbell Farquar and features Sam Prebble and Derek March.

Sixteen year-old Colin Lepper from Canada created and directed this clay animation music video for Renee-Louise Carafice’s third single “To Run” during his school holidays.
It took him 3100 still shots and two months to put together the beautiful end product.

“To Run” is the third single from Renee-Louise Carafice’s debut album “Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight” released on Monkey Records.
Written when Carafice was nineteen years old and having just read “Wuthering Heights” for the first time, this song was an attempt to express the discomfort she felt becoming a young woman and feeling trapped into a certain mould.
Although it fits so powerfully alongside Carafice’s songs of institutionalization, this is a song written long before those experiences, and it speaks of a more universal battle being played out: the battle between what you pretend to be and what you inherently are.

The debut album from Bond Street Bridge, ‘The Mapmaker’s Art,’ was recorded with one microphone and an old laptop in a falling-down villa next to Auckland’s northwestern motorway.  The circumstances of the recording had a strong influence on the content of the record; and this is particularly audible on the track ‘motorways,’ the new single and video from Bond Street Bridge.  Most of the songs on ‘The Mapmaker’s Art’ are about ways of traveling, and this song is inspired by the motorway at night, wet from the rain.

‘Motorways’ is a lush track. The glitchy beats, driving strings, and rolling bass surround a sinister tale of misadventure on the open road, delivered in a hushed an impressionistic vocal.  There are bones, there’s poison and knives, and the wet road follows powerlines through the mountains to an unspecified destination.

In the video, shot in grainy black and white by Sam Duckor-Jones and Tim Sissons, a car travels aimlessly through dark streets, with streetlights and road markings melting into abstract patterns reminiscent of Len Lye’s experimental film work.  The sequence is dream-like, with moments of lucididy cutting in and out through a haze of lens flare.

Sam Duckor-Jones is a visual artist based in Wellington.  His work includes painting, sculpture, puppetry and animation, as well as video work.  He exhibits at Bowen Galleries. Tim Sissons has collaborated with Sam on a number of video and photography projects; this is their first music video.

The Hot Grits is putting the party back into political party with their new video for the bFM chart topping single ‘The Ballad of Joe Stalin’ from their debut album ‘It’s too Drunk to be this Early’. The video takes the form of a party political broadcast and the Grits look certain to breathe a bit of fresh air into what has so far been a rather dull election campaign.

While their policies are yet to be announced, an idea of their political agenda can be gleaned from the video as the ministerial portfolios of the band members are revealed. Just exactly what the Minister of Kittens is responsible for is anyone’s guess, let alone the Minister of Spring Break but it can be guaranteed if the Hot Grits come into power there will definitely be changes in how this country is run.

The video was shot on a Sunday afternoon outside the Beehive after a highly successful gig/political rally at the San Francisco Bathhouse in Wellington the night before. After being turned down twice for permission to film the video on parliament grounds the Grits tried to set up there anyway but were repelled by several rather large security guards, eventually filming just outside parliament under the watchful eye of security personnel and police. It would seem that the government is justifiably afraid of this popular new party and will do anything they can to stop them.

“House on Fire” is the second single from Carafice’s debut album “Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight”. It was written for Texan alt-country singer Micah P Hinson who Carafice met while supporting him on his New Zealand tour in 2005.
“We were instant buddies and got on extremely well,” Carafice explains. “For me that was quite a rare thing at that point in my life. We’d both been to hell and back and maybe you can attribute it to that.
“He’s a person who just tells it like it is, both in his music and on stage… he uses profane language and smokes endlessly and is just a very vivid personality.
“I was very impressed upon that this young guy who had so much in common with me was traveling the world with his music.”