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So I got dropped at Katiki Beach – a gorgeous expanse of white sand and green surf just north of Palmerston on the Otago coast. I found a spot on the verge that was hidden from the road by some trees (evading some divebombing oystercatchers in the process – not out to get your babies, honest!), pitched the tent, and then lay back in the sandhills and went to sleep.

That was it, I think – I’d found the place I’d wanted to be for a good number of months, and to just be able to lie there in the warmth and forget everything, knowing I was as self-sufficient as someone can be for the next few days, no money and no property and no ownership other than mine and the universe’s involved, was absolute bliss. Having only a few days worth of water I cooked pasta in seawater – only recommended if you dilute the seawater with fresh, otherwise the pasta comes out very, very salty – and with a sauce including some seaweed collected off the beach, strummed my guitar and read my book until the sun went down, then went to bed.

On waking up the next morning I decided that, despite the clouds having set in, there was where I wanted to stay, at least until I ran out of water. I filled the day with a walk to the rocks, expedition around the rocky shore cut short by seals. Note – don’t get caught in between a seal and the water: they get very upset and agressive.

More later.

So I wrote a post a while back about some new tunes I’d put up on archive.org.

I realised that I did a piss-poor job of describing them, so here goes something a little better. I’m working on a plugin to WordPress that allows all sorts of automagical things to happen around track uploading but it might just have to wait. In the meantime:

lullaby

as the title says, a quiet meditative piece. built from a sample of a music box being played in an echoy room with some other people floating around.

profit

political punk-techno. lyrics are a little ranty, vocals are kind of a cross between pet shop boys and underworld, with a touch of superpitcher? perhaps.

recirculate

techno in 3/4. built mainly from samples of people talking, although the bass line is a squeaky fence, from the catchpool found sound project cd, slowed right down.

salientofy

deep deep dub-techno. built using multiple recordings of a roland studio system modular analog fed synth through an intensive internal digital feedback system, modulated live.

seven

techno in 7/4. the guitar and other noises at the end are from a gig my band the laptop rhythm pioneers played at happy as part of bomb the space 2005.

nuff said really

Next was a lift to Temuka. The guy who picked me up was extremely deaf, which made conversation difficult; but he showed me with evident pride a calender of the school he worked as a teacher at – the Van Asch Deaf Education Centre. We had some interesting talks about Total Communication (TC), aka sign language – did you know that people who speak TC often refer to themselves as belonging to the Deaf nation, rather than as New Zealanders or Americans or what-have-you?

It was pretty late by the time I got there, so I wandered off to the Temuka camping ground and found a spot to pitch the tent. $10 a night for a quiet little place in somewhere still very unashamdly Kiwi. I was so happy I bought greasiness for dinner and ate it by the river.

Next morning I was up and on the road by 10am – hadn’t even stuck my thumb out when a Maori guy in a very flash Holden pulled over, offered to give me a lift. He ran a roofing company and was doing the contract on the new prison apparently being built out at Milton; was also a bit of a health fanatic – as soon as he got wind of my vegetarianism and hippieness he told me about his organics-only, spirulina-chorella-based diet. In light of what I’d just been through with my friend we ended up talking about some of his whanau who had P habits. Straight edge increasingly seems to make sense, I think.

More later.

I think I’d like to say a little bit more about having a buy-nothing Christmas.

Think of it this way – by removing the occasion of gift-giving from Christmas I normalised the day, but in so doing demonstrated to myself how every day can be just like Christmas, if I want it to be.

It was a very interesting experience – because I was spending time with family, lots of people around me (including my parents and grandparents) went through phases of giving and receiving things. While these things were going on I sat by the sidelines and watched. I watched the emotions that passed over their faces — the looks of expectation and satisfaction, and disappointment and disillusion as well — and the interactions between them and the people who’d given them the present. And I realised as I was doing so that all of those emotions I wasn’t experiencing, and this gave me a kind of a sense of focussing of time – a kind of a detachment maybe? I don’t know.

But what ended up happening was that I noticed more the people I was with — the extended families I don’t normally spend much time with, as well as the immediate family members that I do spend some amount of time with (I’m remain quite close to both of my parents). It was an unusual experience in all, unusual in a good way. It has taken a number of years for the idea to actually sink in to my parents’ heads, so that they will actually not buy me presents, and don’t expect any in return. But it was worth the effort, and I heartily recommend it.

Gift-giving as a ritual has, I believe, lost much of its meaning. Possessions used to mean something, back when we couldn’t get the things that we can get now as cheaply or as readily as we can these days: to receive even the simplest gift was to get something special. Thing is, $50 isn’t really that much money if you have a job, and $50 can get you some pretty impressive possessions. You don’t even need someone to go and buy them for you — just give the salesperson $50 and they’ll give a present, just because. I suppose that’s just a fancy way of saying that it’s the thought that counts, but I’m a bit of a thinker and I like to make my brain jump through hoops.

Merry consumptive mess to you. Like the signs in the Shell stations say, it’s the thought that counts. (Shell? What?)

I hope you’re having a Buy Nothing Christmas. I did – I made presents for my whanau using bits of nature and a needle and thread. Ok, so I had to buy the needle and thread, but that’s not the point, see? Aaah, go away :-P

The next phase of hitchhiking involved staying with a friend who it turned out had a substance addiction problem. I’m not going to go into much detail but suffice it to say it was an experience humbling, and mortifying, and odd, odd in a kind of stretched, warped, but still somehow (this is the catch) normal. I hope to be able to express something of what I felt while there, and something of what I understood they were feeling, in my music. On the other hand, I’m not sure that doing so explicitly or deliberately is the way to go about these things. Doubtless it will come through. I know you’re not reading dear but all my love.

As far as the bills go: since this site has gone live, and I’ve stopped blogging over at addict.net.nz, I appear to have increased from an average of 11 return visitors a month to 50. That’s a 500% increase in one month! Be great to see how that changes over the next month… I have a goal, and that is 15,000 unique visitors a day by January 2008.

Also: have built a spreadsheet containing budgetness and am beginning to keep track of all of my spendings. I’m subscribing to The Wire, mainly for the free cds but also for the magazine itself (tax-deductible research materials!). Do you think putting my budget online, including my personal rent-paying budget, would be interesting content? It could be a nice gimmicky marketing exercise I suppose :-)

I’m on a ‘working holiday’ at the moment. That means I’m hitchhiking around the South Island, meeting people, talking about things, musical or otherwise; getting inspired by nature, recharging my batteries, filling my soul back up so that when I get back into the studio I’ll have something to express.

So far, I’ve stayed a night with some friends in Nelson and been for a walk on the beach; travelled down in their car to Massive’s Summer Soulstice party, which was great: performed and hung out with John McCallum and Simon Kong (who had set up an amazing ‘third zone’ involving microphones and speakers scattered amongst the trees to fill in the audio cold spots between the zones, to plugging the gaps in the sonic space). Sorry about the George W Bush samples Dave – I like them though, and I’ll continue using them :-)

After this I hitchhiked with a pharmacist and his wife, who were old folk musicians, out to O’kain’s Bay (population ~100) out on Banks Peninsula and got stuck there for a day while the local store was busted for apparently also being a P lab. Eventually I made it back to Akaroa. Lift from Akaroa to the Selwyn river with a man who ran his own business installing access chairs for the elderly and movement impaired – he gave me his card and told me if I was ever in Auckland and needed a place to stay I was welcome at his home, which I thought was just wonderful.

More later.

I’ve fixed up the css so it now works all good on IE6 and Firefox. Any Mac users out there? All working OK?

I’m working at the moment on a login/user system. At the moment I’m thinking you’ll be able to post comments anonymously but downloading music will require a login.

How do you feel about this? From a user’s perspective, I prefer downloading things anonymously, and if a site forces me to login to download I’m likely to be upset. On the other hand, I’m giving my music away for free, when I could be charging 50 cents or 99 cents or something for it, so getting registration, which means I can keep track of who is coming back, who likes my stuff, whether readers of the blog are more/less likely to download – things like that – which helps infinitely on the turning what I love doing into something that can pay the rent front.