THE MAGAZINE FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
Elsewhere is a concept and a place, and for many years Graham Reid has been going there for his wide angle travels, writing, music review columns and interviews with writers, musicians and artists.
Elsewhere is an ever-expanding on-line magazine for people curious about new music, different travel, interesting arts and much more. This site is dedicated to the diversity and possibilities of Elsewhere. It is an equal opportunity enjoyer. Subscribe here (it's free) for a weekly newsletter and be in to win CDs, DVDs, books and more. Welcome . . .
Latest posts
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JOE MEEK'S I HEAR A NEW WORLD: Checked out in a moonage daydream
18 Mar 2019 | 5 min read
Right up until the time he redecorated his recording studio-cum-living room with the contents of his skull after a self-inflicted shotgun blast in 1967, British producer Joe Meek heard the world differently. In the late Fifties and early Sixties most British producers were just technicians who pushed “record” once the artist was in front of the microphone.... > Read more
Glob Waterfall
JM Kelcher: Actual Disorganiser (Thokei Tapes)
18 Mar 2019 | 2 min read
John Kelcher was the bassist in the key iterations of Sneaky Feelings (from about '83 to their break-up in '89), left to live in Germany then returned home and currently works at the Nga Taonga sound archive, but most crucially was on the re-formed Sneaky Feelings album Progress Junction in 2017, a wonderful and unexpected return to prior form. But in '91 when back in... > Read more
Sinker
The Veils: Us Godless Teenagers (2011)
18 Mar 2019 | <1 min read
For Elsewhere's money, with this singular song Finn Andrews – now a solo artist – captured something rare and insightful about the loneliness of being a teenager and the small comfort of friends when the outside world seems indifferent or critical. We see these kids everywhere, in parks and public transport, on street corners and sitting alone. Being a... > Read more
GUEST WRITER MITCH MYERS considers a great musical mash-up by the late Harry Nilsson
18 Mar 2019 | 2 min read
While attention has doubled back onto the late singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson thanks to the integral use of his 1971 tune Gotta Get Up in the Netflix hit Russian Doll, his knack for getting inside your head and capturing the zeitgeist with his music has been happening for more than half a century. In 1967, he created a sort of Russian doll of his own,... > Read more
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Zero 7: Simple Things, Special Edition (New State/Southbound)
18 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
This debut album by the British electronica/production outfit of Sam Hardaker and Henry Binns saw the duo nominated as best newcomer at 2002's Brit Awards (Blue won) and the album nominated for a Mercury Prize in 2001 (it lost to Polly Harvey's Stories from the City/Sea). With its orchestrated cinematic sweeps – real James Bond music stuff or downtempo mood pieces... > Read more
Likufanele
Caroline Easther: Lucky (bandcamp, other digital outlets to come)
16 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
Given her impeccable pedigree – the young Verlaines, a classic early Chills line-up, her own Let's Planet, and others . . . and the recently re-formed Beat Rhythm Fashion – singer-songwriter and drummer Caroline Easther has waited a while for this album under her own name. But as we learned from the excellent Spaces Between by former Look Blue Go... > Read more
Find Me
Graeme James: The Long Way Home (Nettwerk/digital outlets)
16 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
Although expat Kiwi singer-songwriter Graeme James is billed as “modern folk” he in fact sometimes sounds much closer to very old traditions with mandolin, ukulele and violin alongside guitar on his sometimes chirpy melodies and story-telling songs. Way Up High here for example sounds like one of those songs from Woody/Dustbowl days with its refrain... > Read more
The Difference
Cinematic Orchestra: To Believe (Ninja Tunes)
15 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
It has been more than a decade since the previous Cinematic Orchestra album Ma Fleur and the landscape for lush, soulful, romantic and sometimes quasi-ambient music has changed. Not the least by artists on the Erased Tapes label, for example, who have sometimes a brought a not dissimilar ethos to bear in music which can be, or is, used in soundtracks. For Cinematic... > Read more
A Caged Bird/Imitations of Life (ft Roots Manuva)
Howe Gelb: Gathered (Fire/Southbound)
14 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
The always interesting and often great Howe Gelb – perhaps most familiar in his Giant Sand iteration – has a voice which gets darker and more melodic with every passing year: dry and careworn like a Dustbowl-raised Leonard Cohen (he here covers and embellishes Len's Thousand Kisses Deep with M Ward, Gelb playing the monochromatic growl over the Spanish setting of... > Read more
Storyteller
Tom Russell: October in the Railroad Earth (Proper/Southbound)
13 Mar 2019 | 3 min read
Among the many artists Elsewhere has championed over the decades, often to general indifference or for others to belatedly discover (Nilsson, Joe Ely, Richard Thompson, Badfinger, Pere Ubu and others for example) has been Tom Russell who has been making some of his finest work in the past decade and is well past pensionable age. At 72, Russell remains one of the greatest... > Read more
T-Bone Steak and Spanish Wine
Seafog: Animal Lovers (Zelle Records/digital outlets)
12 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
Available as a limited edition double vinyl set from Zelle Records, a record label out of Vienna which releases New Zealand artists (Bill Direen, Jay Clarkson, Marineville and Vorn among them), this is quite a swathe of music by Seafog out of Port Chalmers. Recorded in 2017 at the Anteroom in that capital of alt.whathaveyou near Dunedin, these 16 songs are propelled by a... > Read more
White is Not a Colour
EPs by Yasmin Brown
12 Mar 2019 | 5 min read
With so many CDs commanding and demanding attention Elsewhere will run this occasional column by the informed and opinionated Yasmin Brown. She will scoop up some of those many EP releases, in much the same way as our SHORT CUTS column picks up albums by New Zealand artists, and IN BRIEFdoes for international artists. You can read her previous... > Read more
HOTEL MUMBAI, a film by ANTHONY MARAS
12 Mar 2019 | 2 min read
On the far wall of the luxurious lobby of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai/Bombay there is a list of names. To see it you have to get through the strict security outside – cars checked for concealed explosives, bags scrutinised – and then walk past the casually wealthy sitting in the spacious and airy lobby where staff are impeccably dressed and... > Read more
THE STAIRS RECONSIDERED (2019): Through the past, smartly
11 Mar 2019 | 3 min read
And suddenly, they they were, all The Definite Article bands. After years of single-name grunge outfits (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Tad etc) the post-Britpop groups appeared with “the” in front of their names. This wasn't new, of course, but in that Brit-pride world which had musically looked back to the Sixties for reference points (the Beatles, the... > Read more
Flying Machine
TWO TRAINS RUNNIN', a doco by SAM POLLARD
11 Mar 2019 | 2 min read
This extensive 90 minute doco turns back time to America in the early Sixties when segregation was endemic, Northern white folk singers were becoming engaged by obscure and rare country blues by Southern black artists and the Civil Rights movement was on the rise with Martin Luther King at its head. At that time activists and music lovers converged in the Southern... > Read more
The Famous Elsewhere Questionnaire
THE FAMOUS ELSEWHERE QUESTIONNAIRE: Wallis Bird
11 Mar 2019 | 3 min read
Berlin-based award-winning Irish-born singer-songwriter Wallis Bird comes with a lot of hyphens, right? At 37 she has five studio albums behind her as well as a couple of EPs and live one, but has been quiet on the recording front since her 2016 album Home which was nominated for Ireland's Choice Music Award and has overcome considerable early adversity. As a... > Read more
Hedvig Mollestad Trio: Smells Funny (Rune Grammofon/Southbound)
11 Mar 2019 | <1 min read
But first we draw your attention to previous releases on Rune Grammofon, an interesting label out of Norway which ran from mainstream but innovative jazz to odd and interesting electronic sounds. Here however is kettle of entirely different meat: a power trio of fiery guitarist Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, bassist Ellen Brekken and drummer Ivar Joe Bjornstad. Somewhat... > Read more
Beastie Beastie
The Famous Elsewhere Questionnaire
THE FAMOUS ELSEWHERE SONGWRITER QUESTIONNAIRE: A.U.R.A
11 Mar 2019 | 2 min read
AURA is a man (Albert Mikolaj) and AURA is a band touring soon (dates below) to back up the excellent new Secret Intelligent Light album. It is a finely crafted album of songs given interesting and appropriate settings of quasi-ambience or lightly-delic sounds from multi-instrumentalist Mikolaj and produce Ben Lemi. Mikolaj manages to locate his songs between... > Read more
Nature/Nurture
Tamburlaine: Say No More/Rebirth (Kiwi-Pacific)
11 Mar 2019 | 2 min read
This collection of both Tamburlaine soft-rock/folk-rock albums dates from the time of flares, aviator shades, lyrics like “a whiter shade of pale” (yes, they appropriate that here) and when a woman was “a lady”. Strange days? Indeed. This period – the early Seventies – saw the flourishing of post-Crosby Still and Nash acoustic... > Read more
Sleeper Awake (from Rebirth)
Tommy Castro and the Painkillers: Killin' It Live (Alligator/Southbound)
11 Mar 2019 | 1 min read
Long-serving blues singer/guitarist Tommy Castro has been a winner of the BB King Entertainer of the Year (among many accolades) and this one recorded crisply in various venues in California, New York, Michigan and Texas finds the four-piece in typically incendiary form on mostly originals but also a funky take on Sleepy John Estes' Leaving Trunk and an eight minute workout... > Read more