Kōtare : Wellington City Libraries presents

Welcome to the latest instalment of Books from the Vault, where three intrepid librarian explorers take an in-depth and fascinating look at some of the treasure trove of titles to be found in vaults of our storage facility, Te Pātaka.

This episode’s books are all titles from Aotearoa NZ! One of our Adults & Non-Fiction specialists Xinxin Liu selects The Boat That Brought Me by Nick Bridge, the lively memoir of a diplomat! Music Customer Specialist Sam Leamy explores The Dunedin Sound: Some Disenchanted Evening by Ian Chapman. One of our Children & Youth Specialists, Joseph Robinson brings us the 1995 cyberpunk YA novel Dream-Bite by Ken Catran.

Join us for an intriguing conversation that touches on cultural and political history as we discuss these unique books from the vault!

The selections can be reserved from our collection or accessed at the below links with a Wellington City Libraries card:

Books from the Vault EP5: Our intrepid Library Specialists dig into the vaults of our storage facility, Te Pātaka, and bring out a catalogue item that's meaningful to them and discuss it with each other.

 In this episode, it’s music only – Reece, Neil and Mark bring out CDs from the vault which are now free to reserve and borrow. Neil kicks it back to the late Sixties with the soundtrack from the film Zabriskie Point, featuring legends like Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and the Grateful Dead tracking the end of the hippie era. Mark pulls out a posthumous release from a member of the infamous 27 Club and introduces us to the influential power-pop of Chris Bell’s I am the Cosmos, and finally Reece reminisces on the first heavy record he borrowed from the library in 2005 without knowing what he was getting into, Opeth’s Ghost Reveries.

All these items can be reserved and issued for free at the below links:

Our intrepid Library Specialists dig into the vaults of our storage facility, Te Pātaka, and bring out a catalogue item that's meaningful to them and discuss it with each other.

In this episode, Karl digs into the world of urban paranormal fantasy with ‘The Clown Service’, by Guy Adams; Tess gets into the studio with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as they work through grief in Andrew Dominik’s documentary ‘One More Time With Feeling’, and Gabor shows everyone how to access our Recollect service to learn more about the history of New Zealand architecture with Ernst Plischke’s ‘Design and Living’.

The selections can be reserved from our collection or accessed at the below links with a Wellington City Libraries card:

Erika Grant is many things: a multi-talented musician, a music teacher, an astrologer, a float facilitator and has just added to her quiver of sonic talents a purveyor and creator of gong baths. She is interested in, amongst many things, how deep relaxation, rest, spirituality and music intersect.

She has played with a myriad of bands in all sorts of guises, to name just two Cookie Brooklyn and the Crumbs and the marvellous Orchestra of spheres. She has also performed in many festivals both here and abroad, such as the Fertility Festival, and has made multiple live soundtracks for the Wellington Film Society, including the recent live soundtrack screening of the F.W. Murnau 1926 black and white movie classic masterpiece Faust. She graduated from the Music and Audio Institute of New Zealand and was awarded the 2009 Chapman Tripp award for outstanding music composers.

Erika talked to us primarily about her new gong baths experience, but we did squeeze in a few questions about some of her many other musical adventures and beyond. We wish to extend our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to Erika for taking the time to talk to us about gong baths and her many other musical activities, and for providing such an illuminating insight into her world and work.

A huge thank-you also for providing an exclusive gong bath recording for the interview (you can hear that at the end of the interview). All music is copyright Erika Grant and used with kind permission.

David Long is one of Aotearoa’s most versatile and adventurous musicians, composers, and producers. He started his musical career performing in the Braille Collective in bands such as Six Volts and Jungle Suite in the late 1980s. In 1990 he started The Mutton Birds with Don McGlashan.

After touring extensively he began to compose for contemporary dance and film, including working on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and the soundtrack to The Lovely bones with Brian Eno. In addition to these projects David has composed for many TV series, including The Luminaries.

David has also won several Apra silver scrolls and produced for numerous bands. He also has made numerous albums with bands such as The Labcoats and Teeth not to mention  a number of his own works.

We wish to extend our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to David for taking the time to answer our questions, for providing such an illuminating insight into his world and work, and also for giving us permission to use I’ll Hum the First Few Bars in the interview (you can hear the whole piece at the end). All music is copyright David Long and Rattle Records  and used with kind permission.

Our intrepid Library Specialists dig into the vaults of our storage facility, Te Pātaka, and bring out a catalogue item that's meaningful to them and discuss it with our fiction specialist, Neil. 

Reece skips the Netflix re-translation and goes back to the DVDs of ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ for his animated fix of robots and depression. Joseph considers a career change to sheep rustling after reading James McNeish's novel ‘Mackenzie’ and Susan Brocker's ‘Friday the Rebel Dog’, and Ann expands on her last episode's choice with 'The Silent Migration', a group of stories from founding members of the Ngāti Pōneke Young Māori Club that provided a home for Māori moving around the country to urban Wellington. 

The selections can be reserved from our collection at the below links with a Wellington City Libraries card: 

Our intrepid Library Specialists dig into the vaults of our storage facility, Te Pātaka, and bring out a catalogue item that's meaningful to them and discuss it with our fiction specialist, Neil.

Joseph kicks this one off by establishing continuity between episodes with Sara McIntyre's (daughter of the previously discussed Peter) photo collection, 'Observations of a Rural Nurse'. Ann reads segments from the third part of Mihi Edwards's autobiography, 'Mihipeka: Karanga a te Kuia', which details Aunty Mihi's relationship with her language and integration into Pākehā society. Reece continues to choose offshore material and talks about narrative threading, costume designer spiked nightmares, and potential film adaptations of Dan Simmons's space opera 'Hyperion'.

The selections can be reserved from our collection at the below links with a Wellington City Libraries card:

Our intrepid Library Specialists dig into the vaults of our storage facility, Te Pātaka, and bring out a catalogue item that's meaningful to them and discuss it with our fiction specialist, Neil.

In this episode, Ann discusses the punishment and ongoing trauma of Māori for speaking their own language in Rachael Selby's 'Still Being Punished', while Joseph goes into the romanticised paintings of Peter McIntyre and its reflections of Aotearoa at the time from his collection 'Kākahi New Zealand'. Reece is yet to prove he can read and instead pulls an antique CD from the stacks to elaborate on the influence and atmosphere of the post-metal band Isis's watery magnum opus, 'Oceanic'.

The selections can be reserved from our collection at the below links with a Wellington City Libraries card:

I’m Mark, the Music & Film Specialist at Wellington City Libraries. Every month this year my colleague Neil and I reviewed some new material that we purchased for the Music collection at our CBD Te Awe library.

This podcast is an roundup of some the albums we enjoyed listening to the most over the course of the year. Some of these titles will no doubt feature on various Best of 2022 lists, but others are just albums that struck us as being unique and interesting.