What’s ya buzz?

When I was a kid and leading into my teenage years I would become obsessed with a musician, put them up on some sort of untouchable pedestal and treat them like a god. I wonder if this is partly from coming from a small town, and not really being exposed to any sort of hub of musicians outside of a Boys’ High school in the South Island — until I moved to Wellington. I’ve now lived in Wellington for 3 years, finished a music degree and moved on to postgraduate study in Ethnomusicology. If there’s one thing I have learnt outside of the fact I’m in debt 30k, it’s music is as much about the people it represents than the quality of the music itself. Wellington is a creative hub, no doubt, and in amongst the street dwellers asking for a durry every minute on Courtenay Place, there are some talented musicians making waves.

One of my friends from Christchurch once said to me that “I think people just envision Wellington as this sort of ‘thing’ where people have to be buzzy and creative because that’s what Wellington is assumed as”. This is could be true, but in my opinion this is what makes Wellington such an interesting place for a music scene. People bring their own buzz and it’s crafted through the mingling and working with others, with different or similar experiences. A lecturer at Victoria Uni once wrote a paper on this, Geoff Stahls ‘DIY or DIT!’ in which he wrote that the lack of an identifiable music scene made people in the capital work together as up-and-comers, avoiding and rejecting the big scary ‘industry’.

What’s cool is, the amount of niche groups that choose to prescribe to their chosen aesthetic or identity creates a very real diversity of groups in a city that in a global sense, is fucking small. Everyone’s buzz might be slightly different, but it all comes together to give Wellington it’s own distinct — for lack of a better term — vibes.

I started this blog because personally I wanted to know other perspectives on our local scene, why people choose to craft the music they do. We’re not in Atlanta, why the fuck are you making trap music? We’re not in the UK, why are you making Drum and Bass? I think in our geographic isolation and our hyper-connectivity to the rest of the world through the internet, in a place like Wellington we don’t run the risk of mass cultural appropriation. Or maybe it’s because there’s so much going on that it’s not as obvious, or maybe, just maybe, not enough people care. Well, I hope they do. Because shit’s crazy out here. There’s some talented musicians cracking it.

The point of this blog is to garner different perspectives and figure out why people do what they do in their music. But I don’t wanna limit what the artist has to say for themselves, I just really want to know — what’s ya buzz?

• Andrew Witty