From an upcoming Lumiere feature:

"I've always rather liked the term post-rock for its audacity to state the obvious, namely that music-as-it-is (in this case rock, but why stop here?) can and ought to be transcended and followed by something better. I mean, let's call a spade a spade: popular culture is hideous, nauseating, flat and mundane, and it's high-time we demanded more from it and its music." (...)

"Ultimately, it's a matter of deciding what the purpose of popular music should be. Is popular music to be an easy-listening alternative to what many academics have called "serious music", or should popular music be understood more as a sociological term, without necessarily implying commercialism and the dumbing-down and simplification of our inherited musical language?"

Full feature coming soon...

A Low Hum feature:

"I love this world, yes, but not despite the shit and the piss, the idiocy and irrationality, but because even the basest elements of life are ultimately part of this one unstoppable wave of existence that ever-so-often fills us with appreciation and a sense of awe. I want my music to reflect in a microcosm the way I perceive this world, and thus, despite moments of tenderness and beauty, to find solace also in dissonance and ugliness, noise and desperation."

Read the full feature...

Chart interview:

Chart: Your live show incorporate several experimental elements, tell us about that?

"Generally speaking I am very fond of weird electronic noises and modern synths, but at the end of the day I still feel drawn to the simple fact that natural instruments, too, can be exciting and harbour unexplored sounds. Given my primary instrument is the guitar, I tend to try and experiment as much as I can with means and ways of producing sounds that go beyond picking or strumming a few strings. Some of the toys I use on guitars, for example, include violin bows, e-bows, chopsticks, spoons, and bottle caps to twist on the strings - NZ milk bottle caps are the best for more chug, and I can highly recommend coke or pepsi caps for more subtle melodic work!"

Read the full interview...

Cupcake Monsters interview:

Cupcake Monsters: You were trained as a guitarist in the classical tradition, at what point did you begin to play or write music that (although still informed by compositional ideas) deviated from that tradition into more experimental areas?

"Well, to be fair to classical music, I think that's where 90% of all western musical innovations stem from. Take for instance modern electronica and it's tendency to incorporate glitches, and slicing and rearranging beats and musical material (think Autechre and Squarepusher etc.). Almost everyone making music in that genre is under the mistaken impression that these techniques are largely the result of modern computers and audio software. However, the foundations for these techniques lie in tape compositions dating as far back as the 1940's, where people like John Cage and Pierre Schaefer were taking tape recordings and chopping the tapes up into hundreds of tiny fragments and gluing them back together out of order. Now you just download some free-ware plugin that automatically chops up your audio for you in seconds. But being avantgarde was hard work back then!"

Read the full interview...

National Radio interview:

National Radio: Now this is quite a challenging album isn't it? I mean, it would have been easy for you to take that big sort of post-rock doom and gloom formula, with safe chords and predictable structure, but this album tries so many different things...

"I never set out to make The Enright House post-rock. (...) I just started experimenting and trying things that I wanted to hear for myself. More complex time signatures, more complex structures, more... I don't know, I guess more intimacy sometimes. I feel like pop music has this glossy barrier, and I wanted something that was more disturbingly personal. That's why the album is so eclectic... because I really wrote it for myself."

Read the full interview...

Under the radar interview:

Under The Radar: The state of music in NZ is..?

"Very, very healthy I'd say. I've come across so many fantastic New Zealand musicians and bands during the last two years, it's hard to wrap one's head around... Shocking Pinks, Over the Atlantic, Jakob, Break Mission Kills, Misfit Mod, Kill The Zodiac, Die! Die! Die!, Graysom Gilmor, i.Ryoko, A Flight to Blackout, Ejector, HDU, Dead Pan Rangers... this list could go on in infinity."

Read the full interview...

Radio interviews and features:

Whilst on tour in September the band spoke with Miles Buckingham, of Uncharted, about the new album and the tour. Download an mp3 the Uncharted interview (14MB).
National Radio interview with Mark on the making of A Maze and Amazment. Available as streaming audio from National Radio (duration: 14'51"), or as a slightly edited transcript.

Print and online media:

Cupcake Monsters interview (out November, 2007).
National Radio interview transcript (October 2007).
An interview with Chart (June 2007)
Under The Radar interview (2007)
A feature written by Chris Andrews for A Low Hum, Series 3, Issue 8 (October 2006).

Album reviews and write-ups: