6 piece world jazz ensemble Mundi hit the road over summer…

“Unique and bursting with creative genius” Presto Arts & Culture
“…Fresh…funky. Intricate, multi-layered works…dynamic solos”   The Press
“They give us their all, and send us home with an indubitable sense of passion and conviction, giving us a taste that we’ll certainly not be soon to forget.” Craccum

Prepare to be transported! With inspiration from as far afield as the deserts of North Africa to the Amazon basin and beyond Mundi takes you on an unforgettable journey…
Currently celebrating the release of their second album “In the Blink of an Eye”, Mundi has expanded to feature an exciting array of instruments including flute, sax, banjo, marimba, voice, bass and world percussion. This original world-jazz band is not to be missed!

A well travelled bunch, they have covered almost every continent on the globe between them, taking the pulse and flavour of some very exotic regions. Mundi has toured and performed widely including in Sri Lanka where they recorded part of their debut album in collaboration with traditional Sri Lankan artists and had a TV special devoted to them.
Their music is often heard on National Radio, has been featured on the Air New Zealand play list and on Australia’s ABC network as well as being showcased on Concert FM’s hour long show “Global Sounds” and Kiwi FM as “Indie album of the week”.
Recently art became life for Mundi, as composer and flautist Tamara Smith explains when describing their new album :
“I was intrigued by the small vignettes we see on a daily basis. Little fragments of another’s life; a small segment of a story about to unfold, captured like a still frame in the blink of an eye. In the time frame of the world, civilisations have risen and crumbled, and this too has been in just a “Blink of an Eye”. This became a little more real to us in the early hours of a Christchurch morning when the earth rumbled for less than a minute, but in that time, changed the face of our city and the lives of many people… “
Despite setbacks of an earth shaking variety, a birth and other life changing events, the new Mundi album is finally here! While utterly original, it is a synthesis of many global colours and influences. It takes the listener on a musical journey…traversing landscapes rich with texture and surprise; allowing them to experience through their own imagination other vignettes of the world…

MUNDI SUMMER TOUR DATES

December

Thu 29: Le Cafe, Picton
Fri 30: Southern Cross, Wellington*

January

Sun 1: Prana Festival, Opoutere (tickets here)
Wed 4: The Yot Club, Raglan
Thu 5: Festival of Lights, New Plymouth*
Sat 7: Marahau Park Cafe, Marahau
Tue 10: Mussel Inn, Takaka*
Wed 11: Playhouse, Mapua
Sun 15th: Christchurch Summer Times Festival, Botanical Gardens*

* denotes free entry
All other gigs doorsales only

New Zealand expatriates, Chloë Lewer and Elliott McKee are the indie-folk musical duo, ‘Charity Children Berlin’. After moving to Germany mid 2011, without speaking a dribble of German, they started busking around Berlin, as they couldn’t get any jobs and music was the only profession they could hold down. With their endearing, intimate style, they have managed to build up quite a following during summer from their busking sessions, most notably at the Mauerpark markets on Sundays. Their ukulele-driven sound also features harmonica, melodian, xylophone, hand percussion and anything else small enough to fit in their suitcase when they go busking. However, what really sets Charity Children Berlin apart from other acts in a similar vein are Chloe’s beautiful, ethereal vocals and their poetic, whimsical lyrics.

They are currently recording their debut album in their lounge in their apartment in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Anthem For All the Dead Dogs is their first video.

Rats, the second single from Bond Street Bridge’s sophomore album Spring Summer Awesome Winter , is a disturbing track. Driven by distorted analogue synthesizers and clicking lighters, washed in waves of static, the chanting, mimalist vocal and the ambient soundscape recall the sitting in the rain on the kerb outside a club at four a.m, trying to decide whether to go back inside and dance or call it and go home: It happens to us all.

The video is a black-and-white stop-motion animation which Sam put together with a cast of ceramic owls, bug-eyed rabbits, a flirtatious monkey and a mean-eyed dinosaur. If the song is about sitting outside in the rain, hearing the bass through the wall and obsessively flicking a lighter, the video is what is going on inside the club. Owls dance, monkeys spin, and everybody gets eaten by the dinosaur. Most people who see the video report feeling as though they have experienced mild concussion.

New Zealand expatriates, Chloë Lewer and Elliott McKee are the indie-folk musical duo, ‘Charity Children Berlin’. After moving to Germany mid 2011, without speaking a dribble of German, they started busking around Berlin, as they couldn’t get any jobs and music was the only profession they could hold down. With their endearing, intimate style, they have managed to build up quite a following during summer from their busking sessions, most notably at the Mauerpark markets on Sundays. Their ukulele-driven sound also features harmonica, melodian, xylophone, hand percussion and anything else small enough to fit in their suitcase when they go busking. However, what really sets Charity Children Berlin apart from other acts in a similar vein are Chloe’s beautiful, ethereal vocals; their poetic, whimsical lyrics and the pairs strong onstage connection and rapport.

Charity Children Berlin recently signed to Monkey Records and are currently recording their first album in their living room which sees their sound suitably enhanced with the addition of horns, strings and a children’s choir.

This June 20th, Monkey Records and Banished from the Universe are proud to present Spring Summer Awesome Winter, the second album from Bond Street Bridge and the follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2008 debut The Mapmaker’s Art. Pre-order your copy here and be the first kid on the block to have it.

Bond Street Bridge is the solo project of Auckland-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Sam Prebble.  Since the release of The Mapamaker’s Art, Prebble has been busy, touring extensively in  New Zealand, Australia and Europe and playing shows everywhere from dive bars to art galleries and festival stages.  As well as his solo work as Bond Street Bridge, Prebble plays violin, mandolin and guitar for Reb Fountain and the Bandits and the Hannah Curwood Band, and is a long-standing member of Auckland folk-pop group The Broken Heartbreakers.  In 2010, he hit the road in Europe, touring first with Tim Guy and then as stand-in violinist for Berlin-based NZ psychedelic post-rock ensemble An Emerald City.  Along the way he has played shows alongside North American psychedelic heavyweights Black Mountain and the Black Angels, New York art-pop duo The Books, and Californian alt-folksters The Mountain Goats.

Despite his involvement in this range of other projects, Prebble kept Spring Summer Awesome Winter a resolutely solo affair. He worked on the album in spare moments over a period of two years in between stints of touring and recording projects with other bands, capturing the whole thing with one microphone on an old laptop in the lounge or bedroom of a succession of tumbledown central Auckland villas.  Crafting the record from the ground up, Prebble wrote the songs, played all the instruments, and engineered the  recordings, involving other people only at the mixing and mastering stages.  At that point Jamie Newman (Cinema 90) came on board as mixing engineer, and together they took the tracks to a studio in a barn north of Auckland, where Newman worked magic and made them sparkle.

The solo approach gave Prebble the freedom to experiment with sounds and arrangements, producing a collection of songs that is at once intimate and unique.  Using a sonic palette consisting of fingerpicked acoustic guitars, lush strings, chiming mandolins and glockenspiels, warm vocal harmonies and analogue synthesisers, antique organs and pianos, and found-sound beats from staple-guns and key-rings washed out with rich reverbs and tape delays, he created intricate soundscapes to surround his trademark wry observational lyrics.  These songs tell stories from the fantastical to the mundane: love and distance, storms at sea and the crying of the gulls, history, memory, loss and wasted youth, getting to bed on time so you won’t be tired in the morning, and the feeling that any minute now somebody’s going to realise you’re bluffing. As the title suggests, most of the songs on the album deal with the passing of time and the changing of seasons in various ways. The album is brought to life by superb hand-painted cover art by Emily Cater.

Video for the second single from Chris Hurn’s debut album “Too Busy Dreamin” filmed during his album release tour around New Zealand in March 2011 by Aaron Ly.

Thick black smoke slowly dissipates from the towering chimneys. The quitting time whistle blows solemnly.  The Factory doors swing open. Sean and Matt stumble out into the cruel sunlight to present their latest work, the Operator’s Service Handbook. The Handbook distills problem-solving techniques into six distinct sonic passages.

What happens when your bark-stripping machine is misaligned on Arbor Day? Turn to the section labelled Peel Forest. What if, by some stroke of misfortune, the trajectory of your ball-bouncing gun is off by a few degrees? Ping-Pong has your answer. And if everything you’ve been working on diligently for an age blows up in your face and you just can’t handle the stress? Close the Maltworks and Start Again by moving to Corsica. The answers are all here.

These six tracks comprise a number of different approaches to making music; self-imposed time limits, challenging each other to record a certain instrument a certain way, or simply pure collaboration. Whether the instrument being used is a guitar or a ping-pong ball, the principle remains the same: a harmony of rhythm and melody is the constant element and common goal in these pieces.

When you write a track called “Ping Pong” and the beat is made up of ping pong ball sounds, then it’s probably a good idea to release a video that stars Factories’ Matt and Sean playing ping pong! Filmed by Factories’ graphic designer Sarah James, and painstakingly edited by Matt, the video was shot in Christchurch’s own pragmatically named “Table Tennis Stadium”, then sliced and slivered to smithereens and synced to the beat.

From Factories’ debut ep “Operator’s Services Handbook”.

Now We Are 28 is the new single and video from Bond Street Bridge.

This song is about getting older – older than Percy Shelley, older than Kurt Cobain, older than the illustrious roll-call of bright and doomed artists who made it to 27 and checked out.  It’s about hoping that maybe there’s more to life than looking at things and trying new drinks, but suspecting that there maybe there’s not. It’s about remembering fast cars and the feeling of being ready for whatever, and it’s about the feeling you get when it slips away, and you have to start going to bed before midnight or getting up in the morning will be even more of a pain in the ass.  For all that, though, it’s got a spring in its step and a sparkle to it.

Now We Are 28 is accompanied by a web-only video shot (and edited) by Monkey Records’ boss Nigel Braddock on a rather basic camera while touring with Bond Street Bridge and Tim Guy through Germany, France, Switzerland and the UK between July and September 2010. Says Nigel, “It’s more or less just a montage of images and impressions from the tour in no particular order but I guess you could say it’s also a journey of the main character from the cities to the countryside with recurring images of wind turbines, fire, rampaging farmyard animals and driving – lots of driving…”

Now We Are 28 was the first single to be released from Bond Street Bridge’s sophomore album Spring Summer Awesome Winter.

Monkey Records is proud to present “Too Busy Dreamin”, the debut album from a major new song-writing talent, Chris Hurn.

Chris Hurn is a twenty-one year old folk-pop singer/songwriter from Lower Hutt, New Zealand.  After playing in various local bands, including Play it Strange 2007 winners “The Lunch Box Boys”, a 60’s style indie-pop band, he discovered a love for folk music and decided to go solo in late 2009.

Inspired by the likes of Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen he began to write a collection of songs that would soon become his first album.  Although heavily influenced by his folk heroes, he draws upon a wide range of genres and styles of music.  As well as having a soft spot for modern pop and rock, Chris has spent a considerable amount of time soaking up 60’s pop groups, notably The Mamas and the Papas, The Beatles and the Kinks.

Coming from a multi-instrumental background, Chris commenced his musical endeavours at a young age with the piano and a cheap plastic recorder.  His first album is heavily based around the acoustic guitar but whistles, clicks, claps, harmonica and harmonies also play a big part in the sound.  Astonishingly, Chris plays all the instruments on his debut as well as mixing and producing it himself.  His lyrics reveal a world-wise maturity far beyond his years and coupled with his knack for writing catchy melodies, he seems sure to secure himself a place amongst New Zealand’s fine new generation of singer/songwriters such as Liam Finn, James Milne and Connan Mockasin.

“Too Busy Dreamin” was recorded in 2010 in his Lower Hutt home studio, and mastered by Dave Cooley (Serge Gainsbourg, Polyphonic Spree, Opensouls) in LA. The suitably summery music video for the first single from the album “Whatcha Got” has also been released recently.

When not playing folk music, Chris works as a composer writing orchestral based scores for video games and films.