Tag: music

  • The Spotify playlist

    In this, the first of the playlists for 2025, a selection of audio pieces has been collected to go along with the blog. To listen, click on the player above or head over to Spotify and search for “Music to read a blog by”. Paying subscribers to the platform will hear all the audio without…

  • Janet Frame House

    56 Eden Street, Oamaru, was once the home of Janet Frame, the famous New Zealand author. The Janet Frame House has been restored and is opened in the summer months for visitors to experience. It is a pretty, uncomplicated building, filled with charm and crocheted bedspreads and rag rugs, a sewing machine and a typewriter,…

  • The last blog for the year

    Hello, dear readers, It is the end of another year and the last posting for 2024. What a year it has been. We have been lucky enough to travel and also fortunate enough to have stayed home. It has been a year of creativity, a new studio space, singing in waiata groups and with choirs,…

  • The Spotify playlist

    This week’s Spotify playlist features, as always, audio that relates to the articles on the blog. In addition there are some extras, it being the festive season for many across the world. To listen to the playlist click on the player above or go to Spotify on the Web or in the app and search…

  • Shooting fashion in a slum

    In November this year, an NGO in India released an Instagram video of a fashion shoot with a difference. For 41% of India’s urban population “home” is a slum. (A slum is defined by the World Bank as a group of individual people who live under one roof and lack one or more of the…

  • Waving at fairies

    At this time of year when magical things happen for many people across the globe, what could be more apt than this…? https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1037478179768402 or this…?

  • What’s on Spotify this week

    This playlist features: Songlines by Nyoongi and Rüdiger Oppermann Australia meets Europe in Songlines, a piece that combines plucked strings with didgeridoo. Songlines are the walking music that Aboriginal people memorise to travel safely and to pass on ancestral routes. In a Landscape by John Cage, performed by Alexei Lubimov American composer, John Cage, is…

  • Baboon

    Baboons, those Bad Boys of the Old World, have a reputation… Wily, cunning, vicious… these are all words that are used to describe our primate cousins. Baboons are seen as pests because they plunder houses, and farms, and take food right out of tourists’ hands. They roam freely, seemingly wherever they want. After all who…

  • The Spotify playlist

    Each week a playlist of audio is created to go along with the blog. The playlist, on the Spotify platform, is made up of songs and sounds that have some relevance to the blog. For those with a paid subscription to Spotify the music will play uninterrupted, either on the player above or in the…

  • Iconic Australian design

    In the 1980s and ’90s, jumpers in Australia became startling. Beginning with Coogi, a fashion label first established in Melbourne under the name Cuggi, the bright colours and bold patterning of these sweaters took the entertainment world by storm with The Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie Smalls) name-checking them in his lyrics and sporting the look. Coogi style…