Māpura Music

Māpura Music is a collaborative and spontaneous music making program for people living with disabilities set in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. Its facilitator, Stefan Neville (of Pumice etc.), has been active in the New Zealand underground for over thirty years, personifying an Aotearoa DIY sensibility that effortlessly links melodic song formats with open-ended experimentation.  On surface level, this collection of improvised group jams verges towards the latter, but soon structures of a playfully melodic sensibility reveal themselves and references beyond the Corpus Hermeticum / Kye axis can be considered. This is neither avant noise nor is it sound collage, but it also barely adheres to any (western) folk, rock or pop song formats. 

Kinship might be sensed with other disability music projects such as Reynols and Les Harrys, the anarcho stew of London's Triple Negative and even Basil Kirchin's elaborate 'Worlds within Worlds'. But whilst Kirchin famously used the voices of neurodiverse people as source material – with all its possible implications – here we have the people themselves taking agency and center stage.

A wildly original sound vision is put forward by this fairly constant crew of ad hoc music makers (Jemima Aherne, Hugh...  more