Michelle Cruickshanks presents a complete taxonomy of the types of people who’ll be descending on New Plymouth this weekend for Womad. First things first: Womad is going ahead this weekend as planned. You can find more information here, and a statement from it follows: “New Zealand is prepared and ready to deal with a Covid-19 … Read more
Summer reissue: The $800 per ticket, council-funded festival of ‘creative collisions’ has been cancelled and the company behind it has gone bust. Alex Casey reports. This story was first published on 17 June, 2019. The first problem was that nobody knew how to say it. Without any discernible vowels, pronouncing WLG-X, the name of a … Read more
The K Road festival, which turned five on Friday, has reached mainstream-level popularity without compromising its local acts focus. While the old-timers encamped in The Studio to sing the Flying Nun classics, Josie Adams went exploring. Not even the most determined and fleet-footed fan could hope to make every one of the 46 acts across … Read more
Simon Day has eaten great food in iconic cities all over the world. Nothing beats Wellington’s food scene, even on a bad day. Wellington is my favourite food city in the world. I’ve eaten croissants in Paris, and pizza in Rome, and pickled herring in Copenhagen. I’ve tried modern Japanese in Melbourne, and eaten my … Read more
Onehunga is throwing a nine-day celebration of the creativity that defines the suburb. Josie Adams reports on what you need to visit on every single day of the Onehunga Arts Festival. More than 35 events are scheduled to take place in Onehunga from the 22nd June through to the 30th as part of the suburb’s … Read more
CubaDupa festival hosts nearly 200 artists across two days in the heart of Wellington to mark the end of summer. Trip glitch, Indian jazz fusion, 80s glam, alt dream-pop, contemporary jazz Afrofuturism, German electronic jazz, postpunk dream pop, and psychedelic kraut space rock. These are just a few of the nearly 100 different genres of … Read more
Simon Day uncovers the fascinating history of New Zealand’s longest running music festival. Twenty years ago on the rugged cliffs above Karioitahi Beach, an hour south of Auckland, somewhere between 500 and 700 people gathered to spend two days celebrating the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999. It was a wild bush trance … Read more
The results of more than 400 drug tests from across the festival season are in. Who is eating what? Our essential explainer. What’s all this then? Volunteer drug testing agency KnowYourStuff’s annual results are in, cataloguing 445 substances tested with FTIR spectroscopy and reagents across seven festivals this summer. What’s the skinny? There’s more MDMA … Read more