Great (really) Sounds Great

Great Sounds Great, Wellington’s multi-venue festival spanning one night and 11 venues, is returning this Saturday. The festival’s lineup is full of NZ royalty, heavy hitters and up’n’comers, with the addition of Friday’s The Night Before across 3 Newtown venues, shining a light on local emerging artists. Tasha Tziakis talks to Ben of Eyegum about the festival and what it means to Wellington, the role Eyegum plays in the music scene and how it’s evolved over the years, and the festival landscape at large. 

Photography by Lewis Ferris

Eyegum Music Collective started in 2013 by way of throwing parties in Wellington flats. Thirteen years later, what does Eyegum continue to do that keeps its finger on the pulse of both Wellington and New Zealand music? 

Our main two flagship projects are Great Sounds Great, which is at one end of the spectrum being a bit more high-profile with a wide range of different types of acts, but with some, fairly big name headliners in the mix. And then there is our weekly free showcase nights at San Fran every Wednesday night, give or take 40 nights a year for every year for the last 11 years. That is really focusing on showcasing largely sort of younger up-and-coming artists and that specifically really helps us stay connected with new artists, younger artists, what is sort of coming up through the scene and what's popular. 

It's really interesting over that period of time to see the changes and then we do a bunch of other stuff, sort of smaller products and more sort of sporadic projects as well. For example, the Scenic Tours which we try [for] one to two of those a year where we take two bands - normally bands that might not have done a national tour before or are reasonably new to touring - and we normally take one from Wellington and one from outside of Wellington and tour them around normally six locations. And that's great because it gets us out, you know, I mean Eyegum Wednesdays, you know very much a Wellington thing.

Although we get the occasional visiting band asking to play and we can sometimes find them a slot. Great Sounds Great is we're bringing everyone to us from around the motu and Scenic Tours is good because it gets us out and about and staying connected with other scenes and other centers. We have really good relationships with people in the Tāmaki community, Dunedin, Christchurch to a lesser extent, but still have connections there as well. For such a small country, and with all of everything else that we're involved in, it's really great to be able to see our friends in those places and to see new bands as well. Or bands we might not have seen come down and play in Wellington, it is really awesome. 

Over the past 13 years, Eyegum has steadily expanded their offerings from housegigs, to Eyegum Wednesday, Welcome To Nowhere, and more. Has this kind of expansion come from the demand of your audiences or was this kind of always the dream?

I think it's a mixture. I mean certainly some things start off as things that we'd really like to do because we think they're cool, but we're also very conscious of trying to be serving the community and meeting their needs. I think Eyegum Wednesdays is a good example of us doing that and even things like Welcome To Knowhere. If you go back to the start, the house parties were born out of the closure of a lot of more traditional venue spaces, and so there was a need and a demand for alternative live music venues and gigs. When those venues came back online, we shifted into the Wednesdays. But similarly, Welcome To Knowhere came out of several Eyegum members who were involved with previous festival Chronophonium and with their volunteering at the last version of that festival and said ‘well, this is stopping, why don't we do something similar but closer to home?’.

We don't hide from the fact that we copied the format from The Other's Way up in Auckland [for Great Sounds Great], and that’s out of us really loving that festival and the format and thinking it could really work well in Wellington given how many venues we have in close proximity to each other and in Te Aro.

What's the kind of relationship management that Eyegum has with the participating venues? Do they ever feed back to you on what Great Sounds Great could be doing in the future? Do they share what the festival has brought or introduced to their own doors? 

Absolutely. We try and keep that dialogue very much open both during the lead-up to the festival and immediately afterwards, or really at any time. We ask for their feedback and they're often very willing to give it to us about how it's working for them, what ideas they have, what they would like to see change or improve. 

We also get their feedback about what it means to them and how they think it's a valuable event, a valuable project for celebrating Wellington venues, and for the scene as a whole. They're very much the ones on the coalface of the scene and its various challenges and troubles which have been well traversed in recent times. So that's really invaluable and we love those relationships. 

They're very important to us and a lot of them were existing, you know, we've been operating in Wellington as you say, 13 odd years, and there's the obvious one with San Fran through the Wednesdays. But over the years we've put on lots of gigs at Valhalla, Meow, all over the place, so we're really stoked to be bringing the festival to Newtown this year. Because obviously we always felt a bit sad about leaving poor old Moon out of the event and we're really stoked to be able to bring it to them because they deserve celebration alongside the Cuba precinct venues.

Photography by Jechtography

The Night Before is a new addition to Great Sounds Great and it's a really beautiful way to open the festival weekend, especially with younger and smaller acts. How did The Night Before kind of come about for the team? 

It's something we kind of talked about from the beginning about how we would love to include Moon. Especially as it just wouldn't be feasible in terms of the format of the festival. So it's something we thought about in the lead-up to last year's festival and considered if we could add it last year, but it was a little bit too late in the race. It was just an idea that we kind of tossed around and talked about and developed. We're always thinking about ways we can grow the festival in a way that's sustainable, organic and ‘makes sense’, and not just for the sake of growth because I think that's a dangerous path. We thought you know, ‘well what's the best way of doing this?’ and with that in mind, we're keeping this first year's relatively small scale, it's three venues 12 acts and we've decided to to keep it focused on the sorts of acts that play Eyegum Wednesday shows. We always try and include them in the main festival lineup as it is, but it's great to give more of those bands a platform as part of the festival and potentially as like a pipeline through to the main lineup as well.

I was going to ask if that's how The Night Before may have functioned, like looking at it as being a way to upskill and put these bands through their paces of what a festival feels like in case they hadn't been programmed on something like Newtown Festival or Cupa Dupa before.

Absolutely, that's been a big part of the discussion and obviously we'll see how it pans out in future years, but that's part of the intention definitely. Not just for the artists, but for the crew as well. We've sort of given this as a project to members of our team who are less experienced with organizing festivals. We're obviously still with it in the oversight of the whole group, but we've had quite a few long-standing Eyegum members move overseas recently, which has led us to think about sustainability. What's the word I'm thinking of?... Sort of succession planning. That's something we're trying to do through The Night Before as well. That's not to say we see it as a lower or a lesser event, but by keeping it slightly smaller scale, it gives us that opportunity to try things out a bit more. And although it's relatively small this year, we intend to, if it's successful and it works and people come and enjoy it, then the plan is to try and grow there as well. There's lots of other spaces in Newtown that we could add if we wanted to in the future, which is really exciting. I mean Great Sounds Great, the “main event” was like this in the beginning. We started with five venues, but we knew we could easily at least double that, if not more, in the future. So it's great to have room to expand relatively easily. 

Photography by Lewis Ferris

You personally have been with Eyegum for about eight or nine years now?

Yeah, I moved to Wellington at the start of 2016, so right in the tail end of the House Party times and then joined as part of the organizing team for the second year of Welcome To Nowhere,well what was then called A Gathering In The Forest, but later became Welcome To Nowhere.

How do you nourish yourself to keep giving back to the music community?

It's tough. [laughs] Yeah, it's hard. We're a volunteer run group, you know, the margins are pretty thin and it does extract a lot of time and energy and human resource. But I think whoever does this really loves it and loves music, Wellington music, and whether they're doing it to build skills for a future career or as a hobby or something in between, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. 

For me personally, I think one of the things that's kept me going is that we're always constantly coming up with new ideas and growing and evolving. I think if either we were standing still or going backwards, it would be harder to keep going. On a personal level, I've learnt so much every year. I learn more new things and meet more awesome people. From a financial perspective, I've not benefited. But personally, it's been a hugely positive part of my life and continues to be so.

You’ve got the big Kiwi royalty names like Bic Runga and Savage who are seasoned pros at this. How does Great Sounds Great find and then liaise with the more developing acts?

Yeah our lineup and programming is a sort of phase of the organizing process. We try and have it quite democratic amongst the team. We always make sure within our team we have people from various parts of the scene, different ages, different interests. We obviously have our core interests that Eyegum always has had, and probably always will, in terms of styles of music. We kind of open it up to get suggestions and ideas of who we could book, like who's coming through that maybe other people in the team haven't heard of, who would be exciting, who's generating a lot of noise? Who would we love to bring from other cities or other places in New Zealand that haven't either been to Wellington before or that we think would work really well in the festival.

It's also quite interesting when we're programming a festival like Great Sounds Great. We kind of come up with this broad list, but then when we're narrowing it down, we're also thinking about the venues and how they all work together. There's lots of other things we're considering like representation in terms of gender, ethnicity, genre. And we always want to be trying to be as relevant and fresh and current as possible.

How far out does that programming and curation process start for the Eyegum team? 

We try and get on to it as early as possible, especially for those sorts of headline acts. Often they might have a tour planned or are potentially overseas. And so if nothing else, we try and get that started maybe nine, ten months in advance. But we'd like to have things largely programmed six months before I would say.

There's been quite a huge resurgence of live music attendance, especially with the Massey University bands taking off. What do you think has inspired such fervor in the next generation?

That's real, that's definitely the case and it's awesome to see. I think it's really great. We're really lucky in Wellington to have two universities with music schools attached but particularly Massey. I don't know if I have much of an idea of what's driving it, whether it's a reaction in a post-covid world against so much stuff being online and things like that. But we've seen the really strong attendance consistently at our Eyegum Wednesdays. Not only attendance, but interest of bands playing really ever since that first lockdown. That's been really really strong and it hasn't subsided, which is awesome. And it's largely those university ages that are driving a lot of young bands coming through. It’s awesome, I really don't know what the answer is, but all I can say is it's great to see and we have a really strong connection with Massey for Great Sounds Great.

They provide us with gear, like PA equipment, in return for internship spots for some of the students mostly for sound technician roles, as well as some other roles as well. Some of the team have also been involved with things like meeting students to talk about Eyegum’s work and our role in the industry. Myself and another member of the team did a Q&A for a group of first year students a week or so ago.

It was really cool to see those students at that early stage really engaged with the scene and what's going on and keen to get involved.

As festivals come and go, like The Others Way shutting down for a bit, but also Tora Bombora coming back, what is Eyegum forecasting for its own future? 

Is that your way of asking if Welcome To Nowhere is back without asking it? 

Photography by Lewis Ferris

No, Eyegum already has a wide range of projects and products. I'm interested to know if you guys are in a planning process or if you’re holding the fort right now and allowing the disruption in the artistic landscape to kind of wash over Eyegum rather than joining in on restructure. 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a really good question. I only ask that because we get asked that question. 

Oh, I bet. 

It's been a crazy time, as everyone knows and has been talked about a lot recently.

We were so sad to hear the news about The Others Way and we don't even live in Auckland. But then, as you say, festivals coming back, like Tora Bombora, WOMAD, obviously Camp A Low Hum, is great news. It's awesome.

I think we're really lucky in Wellington. We haven't really been losing venues and we gained Meow Nui, which is a game changer. We had an incredible couple of months earlier this year with international touring acts and things. So there's a lot of bad news, a lot of hurt and challenges out there, but there's definitely some good stuff happening as well. I think for us, we're really comfortable where we are with our current work programme.

Within those things, we're always looking at ways that we can grow in a positive way. But then we're also thinking about other things. So, whether we join a resurgence of indie summer festivals, it's not an impossibility.

We have some other projects, Wellington-based projects, that we have been talking about for a while and kind of waiting and seeing how things are going and waiting for the right time. We've also been in a bit of a transitional phase within our organisation, as I said. We had a few old heads depart overseas. So we've been kind of rebuilding, but we're now in a really good place. I would say definitely watch this space in terms of new things coming in the future. We're definitely still here.

We still plan to be here for the foreseeable. No guarantees. This thing is such a fickle business, but that's certainly our intention to stick around for a wee while longer.

Photography by Jechtography

Are there any acts that you'd encourage people not to miss? 

My job is programming and artist liaising because I love it, it's my favourite, and the scheduling. So, I don't want to play favourites with any of the artists. But I think there's a few special things that we're quite excited about.

Meow Nui as a whole. We've tried to really put together a line-up that starts our relationship up with them with a bang. So obviously Bic Runga and Savage. But there'll also be a couple of other artists at Meow Nui who I think are going to be awesome on that big stage. 

St. Peter's Church on Willis Street, we added it as a new venue for the first time last year, and it was a real highlight. Not only because of the amazing artists that played there, but the lighting and sound crew did an incredible job of making it sound and look beautiful. I think it's a really special venue for us, and so we've tried to curate quite a specific, unique line-up.

So we've got Kane Strang opening with his new solo project, More Blue Noise. We're going to have the Spectre Collective doing live-scored cinema for the third year in a row in the Church which will be cool. Hemi Hemingway is going to play. And then Jess Chambers will be finishing it off, and there'll be a cool sort of audio-visual element to that.

So really exciting about that line-up. One other thing off the top of my head, I'm personally really excited to see Silicon. And, you know, obviously massive Mint Chicks fan, massive Kody Nielsen fan, not seen that project of his live before. So that's going to be closing out the live section of the night at Nui. I'm really hoping I can make time to catch at least some of that set. 

And as an avid live music goer yourself, what are the three must-haves that people should be bringing with them along to this year's Great Sounds Great?

In terms of three things people should bring, a charged phone. Everyone gets a physical schedule and map, but we also have running updates on our Instagram page. Plus some people like to have the schedule on their phone. And with so much happening over such a packed night, you know, you'll always lose your mates. So you'll need that communication. We also had a secret set that happened last year that was teased on the night on our Instagram. Can't guarantee that will happen again this year, but, you know, never say never.

We have a new merch item, which is a bum bag that you can buy to store all your essential items, such as earplugs, drink bottle, your schedule and map. So that could be something you can take around with you.

And if previous festivals are anything to go by, a rain jacket. But fingers crossed we get lucky with the weather, but even if it rains, the great thing about doing Great Sounds Great is even though we're doing it early September where the weather is not guaranteed at all to be even somewhat clement, is that it's all inside. So it doesn't really matter. And people in Wellington are a hardy, hardy bunch. People should still come out and have a good time. 

Thanks to Ben Jones for having a chat with us!

You can find tickets to Great Sounds Great here

Tickets for the Night Before, are found here