The Gathering archives blog

We first met Sharon McIver when she was a journalist writing for the Christchurch Press. She partied with us at The Gathering 98/99 and wrote an awesome full-page review entitled Dance ’til you drop – and more.

She’s currently at Canterbury University doing a PhD and is the first student ever to register a PhD thesis in Cultural Studies in this country, researching on contemporary New Zealand music. At Honours level in 2001, she worked towards this with an outstanding research paper on Locating a sense of place: the representation of landscape and culture in a selection of New Zealand music videos.

Hopefully she won’t mind me quoting from it, as two of the music videos she covers include footage from The Gathering – Salmonella Dub’s For the Love of It and The Nomad’s Where Are You?.

About the For the Love of It video Sharon writes:

The sense of unity and positivity associated with the song’s message is also present in the video clip of For the Love of It, which was filmed at the 1998/9 Gathering and around Takaka during the band’s downtime afterwards. Unlike the other videos from Killervision which followed a set storyline (both Johnny and Drifting feature the band in a parody of a gangster film), the montage creates an impression of the images speaking for themselves through the shots of the band and fellow gatherers simply soaking up the atmosphere of the event. The sense of linear time being replaced by an overall impression of a number of separate occurrences that add up to a whole (due to the carnivalesque, 24-hour nature of the Gathering it can be difficult in hindsight to pinpoint when exactly separate events occurred) is represented by fast-moving, quick-cut images, and flash-frame images (the sequences change every 1-3 seconds) of the crowd and the band with their family and friends. Just as the song pays its respects to the Jamaican recording industry that inspired it, the video pays its respects to all those who helped get the band to that point. There are shots of David Harrow and other Salmonella Dub collaborators such as Nomad, Mad Professor, and VJ Helm. The sense of family created by the video is emphasised by the scenes of the group swimming and on the beach, and of a kitchen where a sizeable meal is being prepared, and represents an antidote to industrialisation. The footage of the Gathering, which shows hundreds of people all dancing and playing at the three-day event is a visual representation of the cultural landscape of Aotearoa’s dance scene. The sense of community shown, of which Salmonella Dub are a part, also suggests that, unlike the references to alienation and isolation present in the earlier videos, the music industry in New Zealand is in a healthier state than it was when JPSE and David Kilgour released Ray of Shine and Beaches.

And for Where Are You? she says:

Just as the video of For the Love of It represented the sense of community associated with dance music, the video for The Nomad’s Where Are You? can be read as a metaphor for the idea of time as a non-linear, abstract concept. A musical hybrid of dub, hiphop and breakbeat forms, the main vocal (sung by Lotus, although others appear at the beginning as a distorted background) features one line which is repeated and manipulated in places throughout the song: “All you have to do / is be you / and you’ll find me”. Filmed partly at the 1999/2000 Gathering, and partly in various urban areas, the lyrical suggestion of allowing things to happen in their own time is emphasised by the video, which shows images of people standing still while the rest of the world moves around them.

Nice to see NZ electronica ending up the subject of academic study! Go read it!

Tags: academic study, film and video, music