Blog
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Album review: Midnight Hours By Killergrams
An alt-country/rock band based in Arrowtown, Killergrams is singer-songwriter Tom Maxwell, singer and bassist Sam Maxwell, as well as Nick Lynch on piano and Reuben Pearce on drums. More a reintroduction than a release, Midnight Hours has an interesting backstory. A change in distribution companies saw the original album, their 2019 debut, taken off streaming…
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Music review: Merchants by Powder Chutes
Wānaka’s Powder Chutes have dropped a new single and it’s a “hell, yes” from me. ‘Merchants’ is just the thing for our times, a bundle of joyous grunge-infused angst that simultaneously looks forwards and back. Sonically, it’s smarter than your average rock anthem. Powder Chutes reminds me of the musically-sophisticated rock bros of my youth…
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Gear review: Rab’s Mythic Alpine Down Jacket
Built for reaching frost-shattered summits in the biting cold, this ultralight down jacket offers impressive warmth and mobility for mountaineers, climbers, skiers or any active winter people. This is the ideal jacket for those who want an extremely warm down jacket you can climb in, stash easily, and throw on when you need an instant…
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Book release: Ski Bum
By Sam Masters Powder Press (2024) We were excited in the 1964 office recently to receive some promotional material from Sam Masters, former editor of Powderhound and author of The Story of New Zealand Freeskiing about a new book: Ski Bum. Along with a curated collection of the world’s best ski photography, Sam promises “shocking…
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Book review: Six-legged Ghosts – the insects of Aotearoa
By Lily Duval Canterbury University Press (2024) As Lily Duval explains in her preface, Six-legged Ghosts had its inception in an art project for which she undertook to paint all of Aotearoa’s endangered and extinct species. A huge proportion of them, it turns out, are insects. But because they are little, or gross, or scary,…
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Poetry review: AUP New Poets 10 – Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake and Sadie Lawrence
Edited by Anne Kennedy Auckland University Press (2024) Each new release from the AUP New Poets series, which showcases new voices in contemporary poetry, is a must read and has been an introduction for many of us to poets that have gone on to define Aotearoa’s modern literary scene, including Rebecca Hawkes, Sonja Yelich, Claudia…
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Poetry review: Hopurangi—Songcatcher – Poems from the Maramataka
By Robert Sullivan Auckland University Press (2024) The poems in Hopurangi—Songcatcher are framed by the cycles of the Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar. Having rejoined Facebook after a six-year absence, Robert Sullivan wrote and posted a poem a day for nearly three months, poems which are now collected here, in Hopurangi—Songcatcher. They explore a period…
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Book review: Ash
By Louise Wallace Te Waka Herenga University Press (2023) Thea is a vet at a rural practice with two small children who works miracles on a daily basis just to get out the fucking door. She is choking. She is choking on the way she is belittled as a working mother and choking on the…
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Book review: End Times
By Rebecca Priestley Te Herenga Waka University Press (2023) For those of us who came of age during the 1980s, watching young people grapple with the existential threat of climate change is a dose of déjà vu. Like global heating, back then the threat of nuclear war begged the question: how do you go about…