Wet Wings

You're Not Video

2011-08-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

Tom Hutchison kindly made this new video for You're Not.

Reviews x19, I/Vs x2

2011-07-30T17:55:00.000-07:00

Glory Glory press:

The fast-paced energy cosmogony presses and lays the groundwork for the mutation, giant harbinger of the setting sun, spring evening before and after the golden afternoon, what could upset me now?

MonthlyMusic.It [translated from Italian]

It is a folk toy, their, reinterpreted in electro, poptimistico hundred percent, with detour tropical diving summer

StoriaDellaMusica.It [translated from Italian]

Everything is whispered melodies, instruments touched and inspired craft on the first album of Wet Wings, who reveals himself fully on the day of its release on Lil' Chief Records.

MagicRPM [translated from French]

The first feature format, Glory Glory, is an allegory to the sweetness and the mixer. The rustling of the reeds and the caress of the sand you are familiar with?

Lords of Rock [translated from French]

Pasta Primavera, Under the Radar, Cheese on Toast, Rose Quartz, Einstein Music Journal, Listen Before You Buy, Guerolito Music, Zen Tapes, Musical Coma, Wears the Trousers, Their Bated Breath, Glo-Fi Must Die, Crack in the Road, Me Hace Rudio, Music is My Radar

Interviews: Under the Radar, Tonight We Dance, Tomorrow We Cry

Buy Glory Glory through Lil' Chief Records or Infinity Tapes.

Infinity Tapes Cassettes

2011-07-27T03:42:00.000-07:00

Infinity Tapes have been incredibly supportive of Wet Wings - last year it produced 100 cassettes for Skin to Soil (now sold out). This year Infinity Tapes have made another 100-limited hand-numbered cassettes for Glory Glory.

The cassettes come with download codes and you can buy here for US$7 before everyone else buys one (and to take advantage of the weak US dollar!).

Video from Album Release

2011-07-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks everyone for walking through the southerly rain to come to our Wellington album release party with Mount Pleasant and City Oh Sigh. If you missed it, you can attend a virtual album release party:

Step 1: Watch the following videos that the talented Rachel Brandon took:

Step 2: Buy our album online: compact disc, cassette, or digital.

Glory Glory

2011-07-03T18:07:00.000-07:00

Image: Used with kind permission from Dutch artist Sebastiaan Bremer, who has some pretty amazing works on his website.

After months of recording and mixing in the crumbling Cranmer Court we can finally show our eleven-track album, Glory Glory.

You can buy it in ~~four~~ three forms:
1. Compact Disc, with mp3s through Lil' Chief Records;
2. Limited-edition Cassette, with mp3s through Infinity Tapes. Limited to 100;
3. ~~Limited-French-Vintage-Postcard-Edition Cassette, through~~ ~~Atelier Ciseaux~~ ~~and~~ ~~La Station Radar~~ ~~Limited to 30; and~~ sold out
4. Digital download, through Bandcamp.

Thanks to everyone who has helped us make the album. These people include (but are not limited to) our parents, Jon Lemmon, Matthew Scobie, Jonathan Bree, Matthew Reinertson, Fleur & Rémi and everyone we've played with or borrowed instruments from.

Album-release Eve

2011-07-03T03:19:00.000-07:00

Lil' Chief Records are releasing our album Glory Glory tomorrow (July 4)!
Not really sure what this will mean on release day.
Imagine it'll feel properly ~released~ at the release shows.
Buy Glory Glory here.

Limited-Edition French Cassettes (sold out)

2011-07-03T03:02:00.000-07:00

Our friends from La Station Radar and Atelier Ciseaux (Jeans Wilder, Best Coast, Dirty Beaches) have put together a very limited cassette release of Glory Glory. These cassettes, hand-tied with string, come with scenic postcards found in French antique shops.

~~Be quick, as there will only ever be thirty copies sold. Buy online from~~ ~~here~~ or ~~here~~. Sold out: but we still have cassette tapes available from Infinity Tapes.

The Things We Miss About Christchurch

2011-06-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

December last year Indie Rock Reviews asked us to write a guide to our home town. This was after the September earthquake which disrupted the city for a month but before the February earthquake. The city is still blocked off with fences and barbed wire. In December Lucy and I were preparing to move to Wellington and wrote about the things we'd miss. Now many of these things (Bar Antonio's, The Lyttelton Coffee Co.) the whole city will miss. Here it is:

The Things We Will Miss About Christchurch

Christchurch is the city where scientists and soldiers make their last departure to Antarctica. This perhaps indicates how far south the city is, and how we sit on the border between the international community and parochial isolation. It’s easy to hide yourself here. The way the suburbs spread around a weak centre encourages solitude. Christchurch is a grid-like city, with straight lines reflected in its streets, architecture and people. The university specialises in engineering. We’re a community drawn on mathematic exercise books. Lucy and I are leaving Christchurch soon for Wellington, a city which seems more of a life form—lichen colonies in weird corners—than a concrete grid. These are the places and activities in Christchurch we will miss.

Bays: Corsair Bay. This is a bay which seems to have been carved out of the Banks Peninsula especially for families to swim in and picnic around. This photograph of Corsair Bay was taken in the 1920s and the view on a hot summer day today looks almost identical.

Cafés: The Lyttelton Coffee Company. This is a café with tall ceilings, nice staff, interesting music, and bread they bake on site. I don’t know the difference between ‘good’ and ‘average’ coffee so I won’t claim they have great coffee but I’ve heard other people say that Lyttelton Coffee Company’s coffee is nice.

Bars: Bar Antonio’s. Bar Antonio’s, “The smallest bar in Christchurch”, is so insanely and naively kitsch that it’s almost the equivalent of outsider art, in bar form. An outsider bar. It was founded by a Japanese man, Antonio, who moved to Christchurch to pursue windsurfing, snowboarding and flamenco dancing. He started a cultishly successful Japanese restaurant called Osaka (“Cheap but yummy”) and began piano lessons in his mid-60s. If you’re lucky, Antonio will play his interpretation of Celine Dione’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ on the bar’s digital piano.

Sports: Cycling. Christchurch city is completely flat, with well defined hills surrounding it. So road cycling is totally easy and wind is minimal. This year my route to university passed through two parks (Cranmer Square and Hagley Park) and a native reserve (Dean’s Bush) with generous cycle lanes in between. The pine-plastered hills have some great mountain bike trails as well.

Activities: The Lyttelton market. Lucy and I took a traveller here. Some of the things that were for sale: a box of cassette tapes, a translation of Mein Kampf, a silver Stalin bust, and a miscellaneous iron tool which looked like a long beak with scissor handles. We tasted some super tasty smoked cheese but refrained from buying it as it would have perished in the car’s heat.

Festivals: The Chinese New Year Lantern Festival. Wandering around here I feel like I’m in some anime film. It seems as if a dark/magical-realist adventure is about to pounce onto you in a dark corner.

Architecture: University of Canterbury. Christchurch’s architecture comes in two varieties: gothic revival or brutalism. The University of Canterbury is relentlessly adorned with concrete slabs, forming a village of brutalism which looks not too dissimilar from a gulag. It’s a style that tends to polarise people—it’s rough, dirty and square. Much like Christchurch itself, brutalism is criticised for its precise edges, its utilitarian functions, and its perfunctory materials. But these buildings and the philosophy from which they were built in the 1970s will be the parts of Christchurch we’ll dream about.

Feeeel It

2011-06-12T14:59:00.000-07:00

Today we've 'released' the first single of our album, Glory Glory. It's called 'Feeeel It'. I guess this means that you'll be able to request it at your local easy listening radio station. (Here's the contact details for The Breeze.)

Johnny Lyon and Sophia Jenny have kindly made this video for the song:

Pre-orders for the album can be made here, or limited cassette here.

RQEQ

2011-03-25T03:35:00.000-07:00

Just as we had left Christchurch we heard that there'd been another big earthquake back home. I sent a text to my mother and father saying 'how was the earthquake?' The only indication I had of the scope of the damage was that it was '6.1'. News websites were down and Twitter only had apocryphal claims that 'the cathedral [was] down' and blurry phone-camera photos of dust and smoke in the air. I was at work, in an office. I just wanted to know if my parents were all right. That seemed all that mattered.

Lucy and I have been fortunate enough to not have anyone we were close to die in the February 22 earthquake, but some of our friends haven't been able to say this. It seems that a lot of people have lost their homes and businesses. The apartments--a converted Gothic 19th Century school--where my parents lived and where we recorded most of Skin to Soil and Glory Glory have suffered pretty extensive damage, was red-stickered, and face an uncertain future. Lucy and I are safe for now in Wellington sitting on the Southern fault line. Until then we walk to work and University past beautiful towers looking increasingly ephemeral.

Richard from Rose Quartz made a Christchurch-earthquake fundraiser compilation which features some sweet Christchurch bands and other cool bands who have played in Christchurch. You can donate to Red Cross here, and then (once you've made a generous donation), download the compilation here. We've contributed the first song, 'Feeeel It', from our upcoming album, Glory Glory. (It's all done, it's just getting mastered now!) It's a nice mix, including Shocking Pinks, Grouper, and our friends Canterbury Rams, Mount Pleasant, and With Moths.

News x4

2011-02-18T02:55:00.000-08:00

CALH 2011: Thanks Blink and everyone who helped make Campus A Low Hum 2011. Reviews here and here.

Album: All songs are recorded. We just need to add bass to 'Last Day of Summer'. If anyone in Wellington wants to lend us a bass for a few days that would be sweet ^_^ Mixing continues...

Show: Playing on Monday night at Happy on March 7 supporting The Ocean Floor and City Oh Sigh. Hopefully the show will start and end early so that people can safely go to work or university on Tuesday morning.

Tapes: Skin to Soil has sold out online, but there are seven copies left which we'll sell at the show. Once these are gone, they will be gone. I think it would be disingenuous/reflect poorly on Wet Wings if we were to produce more tapes as they were promoted as 'limited edition', so we won't.

End of Year Lists

2010-12-21T13:14:00.000-08:00

We've been included in a few end-of-year lists:

Gorilla vs. Bear's Songs of 2010

Salient Top 5 (NZ) Songs
RDU's The Sheep Technique Top NZ Releases of the Year

Radiated Sounds Top Songs and Albums of 2010

We're going to Melbourne

2010-12-16T19:27:00.000-08:00

Good day. We're visiting in Melbourne in January 2011. We're privileged to play three shows with some great bands. These are the shows:

1. Thursday January 13th, Bar Open with Otouto and Pikelet, free

This is the poster (thanks a lot to W. Duignan) [too late to change Pikelet's replacing The Ancients] :

This is Otouto:

2. Friday 14th January, The Workers Club with Tiger Choir (TAS), The Parking Lot Experiments and Tantrums, $10

This is The Parking Lot Experiments:

3. Saturday 15th January, The Toff in Town supporting Mountain Man (US). Buy tickets here

This is Mountain Man:

After watching Adventureland, we're pretty keen to hit Lunar Park. Send us an email (wetwingswetwings at gmail) if there's anything else we should check out/if you want to hang.

Christchurch Summer Shows

2010-11-15T01:50:00.000-08:00

Wet Wings will play two Christchurch shows this summer:

1. El Santo Porteno, Friday December 3rd, $5

Poster design thanks to William Duignan who, as well as a talented designer, is Boy Scout

Wet Wings will play a new set as a two-piece using a viola and vocal loops, keyboard and guitar.

Canterbury Rams will play as a three-piece rock band featuring Sam Ellis (Jimmy Zoom & the Beytown Grifters), Jonathan Phillips (Mount Pleasant), and Darryl Something (Mustard).

Boy Scout is like Nate Dogg/Paul Simon/Final Fantasy/Bon Iver/The Christchurch Cathedral Choir.

2. The Dux de Lux, Friday December 10th

Wet Wings will play as a four-piece band with Sebastian Warne (The Unfaithful Ways, Bibi Anderson) on bass and Matthew Scobie (Black Market Art, The Undercurrents, Valdera, The O'Lovelys, Woolston Brass Band, T54, Mmdelai) on drums.

When I emailed to book this show I was told that our band wasn't rockin' enough. So we asked Magic Eye to play as well. Magic Eye are certainly rockin' and, furthermore, will also bring the party.

We're also playing a low-key daytime set at the Arts Centre on Saturday December 4 from 12pm to 1.

Our cassette will be on sale at both these concerts for $12.

These will probably be our last Christchurch shows for a while.

Skin to Soil reception

2010-11-10T18:04:00.000-08:00

Since releasing our tape last month some people have said nice and sometimes (via Google Translate) unintentionally humorous things:

Here are two beautifully misty/haunting tracks from the tape, “the diary of two young people who have heard mortality rattling.”

Gorilla vs. Bear/Altered Zones

Weird poem of my childhood, secrets and loneliness. An unbelievable choir is telling me about that immense nature, from New Zealand, morphing suddenly into a dove or a she-wolf. Skin To Soil is covering us with charmful strokes. Unforgettable strokes.

Delicious Scopitone (bizarrely translated from French)

Mirage perfume transported sand and covered with royal blue like the intense summer nights. Wet Wings - duet from New Zealand - made with all the satellites of sweetness.

MagicRPM (again poorly translated from French)

So. This is maybe a conflict of interest. Darian Woods is one half of this Christchurch duo and he is also a friend of mine. I don't think it matters though, as the quality of this release sort of transcends friendships and things like that. This is so good that you could be listening to it, and your least favourite person could also be listening too it, and you'd both admit that you like it and probably bond or something.

In Unison

They have kind of a New Order vibe, but if New Order liked to hang out at the beach a lot and they might have been hippies. I swear, these are compliments.

Kitsune Noir

“Sleep Tight” is a real achievement in gothic folk. The song writhes with utter devastation, plunking along sparsely before being joined with an equally as distraught cello—a truly inspired piece.

Death + Taxes

Their moody, dream pop effect is perfect for late night cuddling.

Modern Mystery

It sounds like sunshine on the back of your neck when you're sitting alone on a beach watching waves.

The Press

When you come across bands from New Zealand, you automatically expect to have some sort of knifing guitar line, but that’s not the case at all with Wet Wings. The group has a much quieter approach to writing their music, as if they’re high upon some cliff, watching as the waves slowly crash upon the shore.

Austin Town Hall

It’s all about the rise and swell. One sound joins another, then falls off before another eases into its voided space. It’s a beautiful record.

Their Bated Breath

More: Boom Boom Chik, Pop Dines With Portman, Sick Off the Radio

So the Skin to Soil tapes are disappearing fast. Literally vanishing. I put one on my bookshelf and now it's gone. That's how hot the demand is right now. We'll have a few left for our shows but at the rate the cassettes are being ordered we should be sold out by the end of the year.

Visit Infinity Tapes to buy.

All orders come with an emailed instant download code.

RNZ Interview

2010-11-08T00:14:00.000-08:00

David Klein interviewed us for Radio New Zealand National's Music 101. Listen here.

Selected transcript:

D: Our new direction could go in two ways: either more pastoral with more viola and ... real instruments, or the opposite, with backing tracks and choreography.

L: Um. No, not going to happen.

Skin to Soil

2010-10-11T15:32:00.000-07:00

We've released our cassette EP, Skin to Soil. We have made 100 which are hand-numbered and include download codes. You can order it online here. They're US$7 + postage. (About NZ$10 + postage.)

Alternatively, if you just want the mp3s, you can download the EP from our bandcamp for $7.

Thanks especially to Matthew Reinertson from Infinity Tapes.

Jon Lemmon Remix

2010-10-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

We remixed Jon Lemmon's song 'steppenwolf, pg. 247':

<a href="http://jonlemmonmusic.bandcamp.com/track/steppenwolf-pg-247-wet-wings-remix">steppenwolf, pg. 247 (Wet Wings remix) by Jon Lemmon</a>

You can download it free here: bit.ly/jl_steppen_wetwings

He remixed our song 'Whisper Always':

<a href="http://wetwings.bandcamp.com/track/whisper-always-jon-lemmon-remix">Whisper Always (Jon Lemmon remix) by Wet Wings</a>

You can download it free here: bit.ly/d3DM0i

I wrote about Jon Lemmon here.

Winter 2010 Press

2010-09-25T21:16:00.000-07:00

Running Like a Man and Whisper Always reviews/mentions

Gorilla vs. Bear: mention and mix tape
Delicious Scopitone
Einstein Music Journal
Prefix Magazine
Tough Love Records
No Fear of Pop
5 Score Pachyderm mix tape
mixtraxx
ArizonaColorado
Litel Wonderland
Very Telling
Plato's Face
Unholy Rhythms