I have tried to write this for over a year now and struggle every time, unable to express myself adequately and here I am, the night before the festival starts, emotionally drained and exhausted trying to put into words the importance of this community.

I certainly hadn’t planned on doing another Camp after 2014. I’d done a couple of parties, some of them bigger than others, but the heart and drive that is required to do a Camp, I didn’t think I could muster.

In September of 2020 all that changed when the beacon of the NZ underground music community, Reuben Winter, passed away. 

For the first time I brought myself to look at the footage from the last Camp and rewatch the footage of an abandoned movie about Camp. Reuben performed more than other artist at my events over the years, in over a dozen different projects not including the renegade room, where he spent half his time.

My initial reaction was that his passing permanently signalled the end of events for me, I couldn’t picture doing them without him. As I mourned his passing I poured over the stuff we’d done and in doing so looked through a mass of abandoned projects.

There was a part of me that didn’t want to do anything more, but a larger part that got fired up. The passion I had two decades ago when I first started a zine, that frustration of seeing people with all the talent in the world not be comfortable and recognised for their work.

I looked back at some of my own writing and started chipping away again at some of those abandoned projects. A fire started to come back.

I had stopped because there didn’t seem a purpose to what I was doing anymore.

I realised that everything I wanted to continue to work on and start did have a purpose and I could simplify it to focus the energies into one space. A project that would inspire and assist artists in knowledge and resources.

In 2011 I wrote a scrappy book called ‘DIY Touring the World’. Though seriously out of date, I have lost track of the amount of bands globally who have referenced that book to me and reached out. From the band I ran into in China at a bar while touring another band who had just come from touring Mongolia and using the book, to the US college professors who made it a focus of their teachings, that small book has helped numerous people. It’s ROI “return on investment” I believe is far greater than normal contestable funding and doesn’t pit artists against each other.

I realised this was where I needed to focus my attention again. On helping share knowledge while also sharing the fruits of such experiences to inspire new artists to create and engage in communities, to build those communities so artists had more people to connect with and more people to help them, creatively and as a support.

Though it will be quiet for me for most of 2024 as I recuperate, my plan is to strike a balance of presenting archival media that will aim to introduce people and reinvigorate communities while also helping steer knowledge sharing projects that will make resources better and more widely available. 

There are over a dozen ideas I’m currently working on, to give an idea, referencing the earlier book I talked about. I’ve always believed that a follow-up to DIY Touring the World would be a shared communal effort, gathering knowledge from people all around the world who have experience in different regions and bringing this all together, making the knowledge free, easily digestible, widely accessible and in multiple languages. 

When governments deliver arts funding results, it's often just throwing money at a wall and hoping some will stick - I believe there is a better way to assist artists and that is The Winter Fund - a pool of knowledge distribution, not money.

This only works when a community comes together. I need your help to help others.

If you’d like to know more later in the year and possibly contribute (no obligations), please put your details in here: https://forms.gle/bhBZqvm65EM3oDEN9

This Camp and the Winter Fund is for Reuben Winter, Bridget Tyson, Hamish Kilgour, Peter Gutteridge, Daphne Camf, David Adison, Scruff, Louis Amos, Peter Stenhouse, Anna Pastor-Bouwmeester, Tim Marsh, Otis Hill and all campers who can’t be with us today.