Here are a few excerpts of things that have been written about me (blink) and A LOW HUM.

Blink and you’ll miss it by Aaron Hawkins

http://www.critic.co.nz/showfeature.php?id=3798

A LOW HUM has been rumbling away at the New Zealand rock underground for a few years now, and in 2004 alone 22 bands were chaperoned around the country, for roughly three weeks out of every month, all courtesy of the tireless work of one, perhaps insane, man. His name is Blink. And, as with all good creative endeavours, the project was born out of a frustration with the limitations of that most insipid of genres - the mainstream press.

“I was doing the occasional photographic job for Rip It Up, and at one gig shot, like, 3-4 rolls of black and white film and got some amazing shots. I gave them to them to be published and they said “we pay for colour paper, so we only wanna print colour photos”. This pissed me off somewhat.”

But that still begs the question, how do you progress from getting your mates to hand out a black and white Xeroxed zine, to touring the finest in mainly unreleased recordings and music videos?

“I realised after doing half a dozen zines that the magazine was almost redundant in that most of the bands I featured, there was no way to hear their songs as they weren’t being played on radio and they weren’t being released, so I figured I had to release a CD of all the artists in the magazine with each issue. I realised that these bands couldn’t afford to tour the country since the turnouts were usually to low, so I figured it was my responsibility to show them the country as well.”

Hold on, a responsibility? It is about this stage that you realize Blink is not your average music promoter. His sense of duty about preaching the aural gospel to the good people of Aotearoa is almost unnerving. But if anyone tells him so, he almost recoils in modesty.

“At a show in Dunedin, both Robert Scott (of The Clean, The Bats) and Robbie Yeats (Dead C) came up to me and told me that what I was doing was one of the most important things for good local music they’d seen. Almost had me in tears, Jesus, The Clean and the Dead C telling me that what I was doing was important. Holy shit!”

But it is important. Very important. If it weren’t for Blink, I doubt that I would ever have heard of, let alone seen, such gems as surf-rock gurus The Chandeliers, or the devilish electro-rock of Disasteradio. Things my life would feel incomplete without these days.

If his reverence for the glory days of the past seems a little, well, fanboy, it is only matched by his passion for forging a musical collective for the generations to come. During the recent tours, All Ages shows have been introduced, to the delight of both bands, ten-year old rockers, and Blink himself. Fewer drunken munters, y’see.

Would he consider himself a personal refuge for the disenfranchised six-string-meets-MySpace set in this country?

“Haha. I’d like to think of A LOW HUM as a community. It’s what I’ve been aiming for all this time, for people to come every month, for people to get involved with the project and party their asses off at every show. I love and hate MySpace, it’s extremely clique-y, yet at the same time, I think it’s potentially the most important networking tool for bands since the invention of the Internet.”

Not that you would imagine running groups of bands around the country to be an easy job, but it certainly has its - moments.

“Dunedin was probably also the place of my biggest nightmare. For the Christmas tour with Gerling, they landed in Dunedin and all their gear was still in Australia, but with the help of Tom Bell, we rounded up an entire backline. The DVDs I was releasing that night were still in transit from Taiwan, and then, just after Operation Rolling Thunder played, before Dead C and Gerling, the PA blew up. Haha, the PA blows up before the Dead C play, what an irony. That night I was shitting my pants.”

The love isn’t going to be coming your way forever, though, so you’d best be in quick. “The touring format of A LOW HUM was never intended to go on forever, I had always planned to do this magazine/CD/Tour thing for two years. I have heaps more crazy ideas that I want to try out, A LOW HUM will continue doing stuff, but just not the tours.”

So what are you waiting for, fool? If you still haven’t checked the rampant bull that is A LOW HUM, you’re in luck this week. Connan and The Mockasins, the Whipping Cats and country-rockers Grand Prix hit Re:Fuel this Saturday night. Two shows - All Ages from 6-9pm, R18 rock’n'roll from 10pm. Ten bucks gets you a double CD and magazine, flush with Blink’s photographic gold, and coverage of all the bands you should have heard, but haven’t.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7