I’ll start with a new single from a reasonably new band.

No Reply are a nine-piece spread between the Mount, Pāpāmoa, Hairini, Matua, and Ōtūmoetai. With one horn player in Cambridge. Word is he moved there from the Mount for love. Tough choice.

They originally formed to play ska covers for a party then grew into their own dub-reggae/hip-hop songs. I caught them at the Fringe Festival and they were a breathe of fresh air, a perfect summer party band.

Their third single, Big Bad Takeaway, is now available everywhere, an infectious horn-driven slice of hip-pop with a hint of melancholy behind the big choruses. It was recorded, mixed and mastered by Nate Sowter at the Mount’s Link Flamingo Studios.

Let’s list the players for posterity: they are singer-guitarist Andrew Fredrickon, backing singer Toni-Lee Hawira, guitarist Jimmy Bennie, bass player Joe Stodart, drummer Matt Hegan and horn players Hamish McClean, Fraser Hungerford, Phil Wooding, and Rich Clarke. You can catch them at the Vegan Vibes Festival in October.

Also on CD and elsewhere is Kokomo’s new album, Futura, a temporary change of direction for the band. It’s a companion-piece to the previous Workhorse album, sharing some songs but in radically altered versions, a dispatch from an alternative universe where Kokomo create blues-electronica. The title track is a 12-minute epic.

Kokomo.

Moving along, I keep hearing of a new documentary about Brian Eno, the sound pioneer who started as a keyboard manipulator with Roxy Music and went on to a solo career, along the way popularising ambient music and collaborating with Talking Heads, Bowie, U2, and more artists than I can mention.

It’s simply called Eno and is making waves because every viewing is different. In a cinematic first the film is “generative”, coherently rearranging its hundreds of hours of interview and archival footage into one of 52 quintillion possible iterations, no two screenings the same. I confess to not really understanding how this works but reviews have been glowing.

Brian Eno in his younger years.

There’s no word on when it’ll reach New Zealand but there’s a previous Eno documentary available in an unlikely place: on the streaming service Tubi, which has the distinct attraction of being both free and ad-free. Just download the Tubi app.

Brian Eno now.

You’ll discover Tubi doesn’t exactly have Netflix or Disney’s range. But what it does have is documentaries, specifically some really good music documentaries. The relevant one here is Brian Eno: 1971-1977 The Man Who Fell To Earth, which is a bit dry and lacking actual Eno interviews but at two and a half hours gets through a lot.

Best of all on Tubi is Without Getting Killed Or Caught, the fantastic film about late Texas singer-songwriters Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, and Guy’s songwriter wife Susanne. For three years it has been impossible to see in New Zealand. Now here it is for free and it’s as good as they say, heartbreaking and mind-boggling, essential viewing for followers of either Guy or Townes.

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