A Bridge Made of Frost and Golden Afternoon Sun

Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately, along with some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken, plus some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

In normal times, I generally put together two annual recaps of my journalism and music work: a half-year recap and an end-of-year recap. Over the last couple of years, I seem to have fallen into the habit of failing to deliver the half-year recap on time. Hopefully, I’ll turn that around next year, but for now, here’s my 2026 half-year recap. It’s five odd weeks late, but better late than never, I guess.

So far this year, I’ve been lucky enough to write Q&As, articles and reviews for The Bluegrass Situation, Good Country, Audio Culture, Mixmag ANZ, Mixmag, Rolling Stone AU/NZ, Resident Advisor, and Test Pressing. Decent innings. There’s also been some cool sidequests like going on tour with Mark William Lewis, helping Auckland Library with Encore, delivering a promotions crash course with Ghost Media, plus working with all my wonderful copywriting clients. Till the wheels fall off!

Q&A:

The Bluegrass Situation: Becoming Himself, Mon Rovîa Helps Us All on Our Journeys of Becoming

Mon Rovîa has kind eyes. Unassuming and watchful, he’s spent a lifetime reading the room and taking the temperature of the situations he’s found himself in. As a child, he was quiet. These days, he exudes calm. When he speaks or sings, people listen closely. If his eyes are kind, his voice is empathetic. Soft and soothing, it embraces the listener like a warm hug from somebody who knows how it feels to be lonesome and wouldn’t wish it on another. Only a fool would take this kindness for weakness. It’s a vulnerable strength, tempered over time in the fires of resilience. Read more here.

Good Country: Buck Meek’s Musical Worlds Collide

Buck Meek doesn’t give the whole game away. It’s not guaranteed he’ll tell you exactly what his songs are about. However, he will expound, in detail no less, on how he gets himself in alignment to write them and what the mechanics of his songwriting process look and feel like. After six albums with Big Thief and four solo albums, most recently The Mirror, he has more than earned the right to hold back in some ways while sharing deeply in others. Read more here.

Mixmag ANZ: Kaishandao 开山刀: Bridging Aotearoa & Asia

Kristen Ng is a Chinese New Zealander with family roots in Taishan, Guangdong. Since 2014, she’s been based in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province, where she works on a range of music projects, including Kiwese, Kaishandao 开山刀, and Chengdu Community Radio. She’s an artist, blogger and promoter with two feet proudly at two opposite ends of the globe. Read more here.

Test Pressing: Chemical Reactions — Looking back on inrain with Rudy Tambala

In 1991, Rudy Tambala of A.R. Kane and Alison Shaw of Cranes came together to release a collaborative 7” record through the Rough Trade Singles Club series as inrain. Across three songs, ‘Grow’, ‘...And Julie Rose,’ and ‘Sleep’, they mapped out a sensibility that split the difference between dream-pop, shoegaze and the emerging sounds of trip-hop. Underscored by classical sensibilities, restrained art-pop melodies, and nods towards the UK’s rapidly transforming ‘90s electronic music landscape, their “Grow” EP was a quiet gem of nocturnal music for anyone who has ever spent the after-midnight hours wondering about the world and their place in it. Read more here.

Resident Advisor: Klymax Discotheque — Bali’s Temple of Sound

Beyond Bali’s beaches lies one of the best audiophile clubs in the world. Guided by co-creator and resident DJ Harvey, its bespoke quad-stack system renders music in ultra-high definition. Welcome to paradise. Read more here.

Good Country: Maoli Fully Embraces His “Island Country” Point of View

In an era of polarization, social division, and dissent, Glenn Awong, the Hawaiian country reggae star better known as Maoli, believes we’ve all got more in common than not. Awong came to this realization in the late 2010s while he was touring through the US with his band. Show by show, he discovered that life in the American South wasn’t too dissimilar from the cattle ranches and pineapple fields where he grew up on Maui’s North Shore. Read here.

Mixmag: The Mix 113: Debit

Debit shares an energetic mix she’s titling ‘Handling Polyrhythms Without a Jog Wheel: Time Doesn’t Exist’ and speaks to Martyn Pepperell about how much the creative landscape has shifted through her career, learning to accept her innate difference as an artist, and making “a secret third thing” on new album ‘Potpourri’. Read/listen here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: ‘I’ve Always Been a Reluctant Leader’: Ché Fu Discusses 25 Years of ‘Navigator’ and More

Despite what you might think, Ché Fu never saw himself as a leader. However, in the wake of the success of his debut solo album 2b S.Pacific in 1998, the celebrated Māori Niuean singer-songwriter, producer, and DJ realised he would have to become one if he wanted to fully realise the music that lived inside his head. The process that followed was hard work, but it paid off. Read here.

FEATURES:

Mixmag ANZ: Machine Beats - exploring the sounds of ‘80s club music in Aotearoa

At the dawn of the ‘80s, the futuristic sounds of synthesisers, drum machines, and vocoders were making their way into soundscapes of nightclubs, radio stations and record stores up and down Aotearoa/New Zealand. By this stage, the classical composer Douglas Lilburn and his academic peers had been tinkering away at Victoria University of Wellington’s Electronic Music Studios for over a decade. During that time, the spacey sounds of Moog synthesisers were showing up on local prog rock records, and records by Donna Summer, Kraftwerk, and Gary Numan made an impression on local audiences. Hairstyles, fashion and music were changing rapidly. A new era was arriving. Read here.

Audio Culture: Amelia Berry aka Amamelia

“I love the idea of creating experiences with sound,” explains the award-winning electronic musician, producer, DJ, and multi-instrumentalist Amelia Berry. “I get down sometimes about music that feels technically proficient at the expense of feeling,” she continues. “I’m just very happy that I got to learn how to make this stuff from my friends at my flat, while we were blasting records out the window, rather than from YouTube tutorials.” Read here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: Up-And-Coming Aotearoa Artists: Horn

“I think for now, I feel a kinship with fuzzy tones,” says Abigail Macilquham, the Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington-based guitarist and songwriter better known as Horn. Across her second album, Options, Macilquham delivers a taut set of post-punk and shoegaze tracks, submerging glistening guitar figures and her husky voice in heavy riffs and a driving rhythm section. There’s a thoroughly lived-in quality to tracks like “Coketown” and “Pwcca”. You can feel the denim and leather, and late nights spent in dilapidated bars. The music is all the better for it. Read here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: A Guide to Cult Folk Musician Maxine Funke in 10 Records

On “Saturdays”, the Ōtepoti Dunedin-based singer-songwriter and avant-garde musician Maxine Funke sings a lyric that deserves to be engraved into the archway above eternity’s gate: “My Saturdays are a mystical realm.” Transportive and enveloping, she pens hushed stories of the mundane and magical moments in everyday life. Fittingly, they feel like the platonic ideal of intimate bedsit folk songs, as committed to tape on a variety of multitrack recorders. Read here.

Audio Culture: Ten New Zealand Jazz Records from 2016 to 2025

For the longtime players and keepers of the faith, jazz – much like folk, country, rock, and increasingly, hip-hop and electronica – never really goes away. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, the genre, one of the great cultural traditions the United States has shared with the world, has deep roots dating back to the late 1800s. Over a century later, it continues to be a mode of playing and a source of influence for generation after generation of New Zealand musicians. Read here.

Audio Culture: Death and the Maiden

Over the last 15 years, the Dunedin dream-pop/post-punk trio Death and the Maiden has released three critically loved albums: Death and the Maiden, Wisteria, and Uneven Ground. They have made music that feels distinctly Southern, but rather than just replicating the sensibilities associated with Flying Nun, Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum, they add new electronic shades and textures to the Dunedin story. Along the way, they have cultivated a cult audience at home and abroad, while doing things on their own timescale. Read here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ Deep Dive: The Mint Chicks, ‘Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!’

In January 2005, The Mint Chicks made an unforgettable appearance at the Big Day Out music festival in Tāmaki Makaurau. Walking out with a chainsaw, Kody Nielson cut down some corporate advertising signage before the band ripped into a cover of “Ever Fallen in Love” by the Buzzcocks. Read here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: Up-And-Coming Aotearoa Artists: Hun Lynch

Over the past year, culture writer Emma Gleason has been discussing a concept she calls ‘Tāmaki Noir’. As she explained in her newsletter Crust, “Tāmaki Noir is more of a feeling than a theme or genre. Or perhaps it’s a cinematic lens. It’s probably all of these and more.” Read here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: ‘His Songs Unified New Zealanders Like Few Before or Since’: A Look Back at Ché Fu’s Second Album ‘Navigator’

By the time Ché Fu released his second album Navigator in 2001, the Niuean-Māori singer-songwriter, rapper, instrumentalist, producer and DJ was already a storied cultural figure. Even without that double-platinum classic, he would still be remembered for his work in the Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland funk-rock-rap group Supergroove, the protest hit “Chains” with DLT, and his immaculate solo debut, 2b S.Pacific. Read here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: ‘Playing with Him Is Total Immersion’: Meet One of Aotearoa’s Most Versatile Musicians

On stage, Cory Champion can be seen playing a drum kit, percussion instruments, synthesisers, samplers, or beat machines. He could be with Fat Freddy’s Drop, Lord Echo, Avantdale Bowling Club, Mara TK, or Louis Baker, leading his award-winning jazz group Clear Path Ensemble, or trying out something new. Champion also produces dub, techno, and electro-slated dance music under the name Borrowed CS. Once, he painstakingly built a hi-fi sound system and used it to host a listening party for his celebrated Clear Path Ensemble album, Black Sand. In all his practices, he’s a master craftsman who values form and function. Read here.

Audio Culture: Jazz in the Year 2025: take ten

There are always two ways you can look at a situation: from the inside and from the outside. Both perspectives have advantages and merits. They also have their flaws. As I observed in 10 New Zealand Jazz Records from 2016 to 2025, for the longtime players and keepers of the faith, jazz never really goes away. However, as someone who sits in the audience rather than standing on stage, I’ve observed a resurgence of interest in jazz with younger audiences over the last decade. Read here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: ‘The Weekend Used to Start on Wednesday’: Remembering Wellington’s Incredible 2000s Jazz Scene

In the 1990s, the celebrated New Zealand pianist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Crayford immersed himself in New York’s storied jazz, funk, and Latin music scenes, performing and recording with Kurt Rosenwinkel, David Binney, Jay Rodriguez, Bill Ware, Groove Collective, and Mambo Macoco. At the end of the decade, he returned home to Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington with a songbook shaped by the energy of the Big Apple. Read here.

Substack: Exploring the sounds of 2020s techno, electro and EBM in New Zealand

At the start of 2025, I wrote an article for Mixmag Australia / New Zealand exploring the sounds of ‘90s and early 2000s techno in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the introduction, I remembered the network of record shops, cafes, clothing stores, and all-ages warehouse parties I was lucky enough to be exposed to in Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington during the final years of the 20th century. Read here.

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LIVE REVIEWS:

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: Troy Kingi and His Community Accomplished Something Special in Wellington

Over the last few weeks, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington has been inundated with world-class concerts and DJ sets from the likes of Cate Le Bon, Chanel Beads, These New South Wales, Kelly Moran, Mei Semones, Snapped Ankles, Kavari, and Acid Mothers Temple. The vehicle for this barrage — a cluster of events that also included an absolutely bonkers Q&A after a screening of the Lydia Lunch documentary The War Is Never Over, and a bizarre avant-garde night market — was Lōemis, the capital’s annual midwinter arts festival. Read here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: Marlon Williams Takes Risks at Wonderful First New Zealand Tour Show

On the first night of his Tā te Manawa tour of Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu, famously billed as his final performances before a period of rest, Marlon Williams walked alone onto the stage at The Civic in Tāmaki Makaurau. Read here.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ: Tom Scott’s Aotearoa Tour Was a Collective Affair

Last Friday night (May 8th), the dancefloor inside Te Whanganui-a-Tara’s Meow Nui swelled as Tom Scott took to the stage. Dressed in understated streetwear, he let the band play for a moment before addressing the audience. Tonight, he told us, he wanted to get out of his head, be present, and have some fun. It was a fitting mission statement for his first live performance in the capital since releasing his debut solo album, ANITYA, late last year. Read here.

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MIXES:

At the start of this year, I committed to recording a 4-episode mix series for Mouthfull Radio called Eternity’s Gate. You can listen to the first four episodes here, here, here and here. Should I do more of these? Would anyone like me to DJ this kind of vibe in their bar or cafes?

DAZED:

Four times a year, I write a new music column for Dazed. You can read the first two editions for 2026 here and here.

ODDS + ENDS:

95bFM: GoldTooth’s Goldmine w/Martyn Pepperell

Celebrating New Zealand Music Month with 100% NZ Music selections! Featuring music journalist & DJ Martyn Pepperell for No Skip Album & Therapy Sessions. Listen here.

100 Songs From New Zealand You Haven’t Heard

Thanks to Harry Waugh for asking me to help out with this Apple Music playlist. Listen here.

FIN.