Misheard Rumours 01: Announcing "Live at the Void"

Plus, explaining the launch of this newsletter and briefly reflecting on Queer Autumn 2.

This was a post from my first attempt at a newsletter on Substack. If I'm smart, I'll keep publishing my shit there too.

While I was organising the first gig in our new flat for my 21st last September, I asked Corey Fuimaono if he would be keen to film some of it - probably just so I could take clips from it for TikTok content and to chuck it up on YouTube in a few months. I’ve gotten embarrassingly little coverage of my last few Misheard gigs due to budget and energy constraints, so I figured we may as well get into the habit from then.

Corey overdelivered. The production on the night, as thwarted by the weather and dropping crew members as it was, gave him the footage and mostly clean stems from our mixer Fern Bravo to assemble a feature length concert film that showcased his skills on the camera and the beautiful chaos of the night effervescently. We didn’t want to restrict this to the internet when the footage so perfectly places you in the crowd, and the inherent narrative of the nights progression indoors leads into displays of skill from Neither Do I, Park Flyers, CCTV, and 花溪 Flowerstream throughout their respective sets. Besides, getting production credits on music documentaries is difficult enough these days.

Misheard Rumours will go out weeklyish - keep up to date with updates, ramblings, and news.

Now having edited, mixed, graded, and annotated the footage, we’re sharing what we’re working on on the 27th of April (ANZAC Day) at the Capitol Cinema in Mt Eden. We hope this project will encourage others to document and celebrate the local music community of Tāmaki Makaurau, and give the sound of Aotearoa the platform it deserves on silver screens.

I worry that myself starting a Substack is the most recent development of a white man starting a podcast.

Beyond this websites unfortunate tendency to platform fascists (not cool!), I worry the independence of this format can easily fester an echochamber of my unedited thoughts, leading to podcast hosts screaming at a microphone in a dark room for fourty three minutes - or, admittedly preferably - email chains of loose strings of poetry you could easily mistake as spam, had your mate not already asked you to mark their Substack as Important on Gmail. Unfortunately, Clementine has made screaming at microphones a regular occurrence in my adult life, so I figured I may as well take the bait while forcing myself into a bit of a structure with the content I share.

I’ll provide a bit of context, in the off chance that you’re reading this and we aren’t already acquainted; I’m Liam, a writer, editor, and producer based in Tāmaki Makaurau, working behind and between the scenes of independent media/publishing and underground alternative music. This newsletter is a new platform for Misheard, a gig promoter and general vessel for me to organise music stuff beyond my aforementioned emo band, Clementine. Before this, I produced radio, video, and other content for 95bFM for a couple years, later founded the comic zine SPECK, and took helm of the Auckland University of Technology campus publication, Debate.

Personally, I have honestly just been trying to build a good portfolio of experience across music and media coordination while chipping away at my degree. I feel like the narrative of the starving artist oversimplifies the way attempting a career in somewhat creative industries has been branded to me as a difficult, expensive, and thankless life, but I don’t think I have any other choice. I’ve always sporadically jumped between media hyperfixations and musical cycles, sitting in front of the TV or hunching over a laptop, desperate to produce something like the incredible music, movies, YouTube videos, cartoons, and Wii games I grew up on. I haven’t really been capable of sticking to a preferred discipline or medium, spending most of my childhood poorly drawing, singing, writing, and yapping into the ears of my peers and generally alienating me from wider society. Over time, these skills developed; improved is an overstatement, but as terribly as I hand wrote and drew crude explanations of the stories in my head, they tended to impress teachers enough (I got distinction on one ICAS exam and thought I was top shit). Across my various artistic attempts throughout primary and high school, the stuff I wrote in music, media, and english classes tended to stick the best.

After a COVID-induced early quarter life crisis, I signed up at the local student radio station and slowly began ignoring my recently started film degree to make zines and fuck around in the music scene. As much as I tried to get good at producing visual art with my two free hands, my intense passion for animation and film wasn’t met in my ability to operate a camera or draw a circle. I’m good enough at writing, and have enough of a hubris to pull shit together without thinking about the consequences that I force mysel fto be good at coordinating things. Since I started my degree, I’ve put that energy towards forming connections across the art and music scene, using the select few skills I had in writing and producing to take boring tasks off of the shoulders of musicians, animators, illustrators, and eventually fellow writers at Debate.

Now, my independence in writing is overdue. I’m still working at AUTSA for the time being, but since the start of the year I’ve been trying to synthesize Misheard into more concrete, regular media production - the launch of which I’ve continuously rain-checked due to gigs, the above film release, and a general post-grad crisis worsened by the state of the job market and keeping me at uni past my graduation. When I say content, I do mean a mixture of short form and long form video, audio, and other projects we’ll be rolling out throughout the year. But I’m already embarrassed enough promoting a Substack - it’ll only get worse with added TikTok content, yet it’s kind of nessacary as I continue to push Misheard into a more cooperative, community based project over the next few years. Starting out like this, I can at least reach you all in the manner that I’m used to. Unfortunately, the modern state of media relies more on the grind of content to keep up with literal machines and major companies, and chances are, these updates will be accompanied by video adaptations of the gist of what I'm saying here in no time.

Ideally, getting this newsletter to you each week means I’ll need to have something to report on - in the worst case, that’ll be whatever I yap about in the newsletter itself. The team at my day job are also encouraging things as we start publishing more Debate articles here. I appreciate your patience as I get used to the software and iron out the kinks of this account. By winter, I’m expecting to have things running a little more smoothly.

photo by Max

Thank you to Masc/Femme, The EE Machine, and Lesbian Death Slutz From Hell for their wonderful performances at Queer Autumn 2 last Sunday, and thank you if you came along. My friends got some real good photos that I need to edit while I teach myself how to use Lightroom again, so I’ll share those next week - but in the mean time, keep supporting those bands and the other wonderful queer artists of Aotearoa. If not through gig attendance, make sure you go to vote.nz and check your enrolment details. Otherwise, all your favourite artists will piss off to Australia and the next generation of emo trans kids will have to make their new scene with zero guidance or knowhow.

I’ll share more thoughts on the gig and gratitude next week.

It’s Sunday as I write this, tinkering with a couple bits of this article before I share it more widely - but I want to highlight the other mahi that delayed my proper promotion of the Substack, beyond launching a film campaign:

Finally getting on the freelance journalist train this week, as my first live review for Rolling Stone AU/NZ went out. A byline in this publication is the dream of any music writer, and I’m incredibly grateful to Conor Lochrie for his support in editing and sharing this piece.

I did genuinely love Live at the Domain, although the word count restriction of a major publications forced me to cut back on the areas the Endeavour Live team could improve on. I got lost trying to find the festival grounds from the Park Road gate, relying on others who came specifically to sing songs about getting picked on in gym class being made to walk up and down the hills of the Domain with little orientation. A couple odd choices made it bleedingly obvious the event was marketed by the R&V team, with a couple ragebait Instagram posts proving that they weren’t respecting the standards of emo and punk music and solely used the labels as marketing tactics. These nitpicks were over-shone by the passion of the crowd, the kindness of the event crew, and sincerity of the performers, proving the team could pull off a nostalgia fest like this that I do believe has the potential to revive some of the lost energy of Big Day Out and Auckland City Limits. However, that won’t happen if the team doesn’t genuinely embrace the sub-genre they’re purporting to promote. There are so many fantastic, wahine-led local pop-punk bands like Lost Vessels, Club Ruby, and Grapehouse that could’ve warmed up the stage or a smaller one on the other side of the field, and various actual emo bands like Model Home, Park Flyers, and Yon Loader that could accompany acts Australia frequently tends to attract from the international scene, like Hot Mulligan, Joyce Manor, and The Front Bottoms. I’m probably asking too much, which is why I hope I’ll be able to get around to kicking off an emo festival on our own - but for now, that’ll only happen with your support.

Independent, alternative, Aotearoa music media

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