The Gathering archives blog

I’ve put a bunch more news items in the media coverage sections for The Gathering 96/97, 97/98, 98/99 and G2000. And there’s still more to come! I went to the library a couple more times last week and got a whole lot more. I’ll try and put them up over the next week or so.

I’ve also updated The Gathering documentary 97/98 page with new links to previews and reviews in the media.

There’s also a scan of the G2 flyer in the G2 Gathering artwork section. Thanks to Ritche Nelson aka DJ Domino for sending the scans to me. I’m still looking for any other artwork for that year – were there stickers,  a poster, or a booklet for that year? Do you have them?

Here’s how to send us stuff if you have anything that can fill gaps in the website.

Thanks heaps.

Tags: The Gathering archives website, What's new

So I had this brilliant idea as I was heading off to bed last night – all to do with the spoken word.

I was thinking how we don’t have very many stories on the website yet, and that for some people that might be because they don’t like writing stuff down. Or at least, they don’t feel very inspired to write stuff down if they think it’s going to take a while. Too much like homework, maybe?

So… I’m thinking… seeing as I’m going to the Canaan Downs Festival this year and there’ll be a bunch of Gathering crew in attendance – why don’t I get myself a little tape recorder and do some interviews? Then I can put them up on the website as sound files which you can listen to.

Oral histories!

And then I thought… I could probably find Gatherers too and do the same thing… and then I thought… I could invite you to do the same and send them in to me and we can put those up too!

I’ll have a chat with the guys at Shift on Monday and figure out the best way to do it – what digital format is best, how we access them on the website etc – and I’ll create a new page on the website in the How to send us stuff section – with instructions on how to do it and what I need you to send me.

What do you reckon? Think it might work?

Tags: interviews, The Gathering archives website

If you refresh any pages within the G2 section of the site, better be prepared with some good dark sunnies – it’s all gone yellow. Thanks heaps to Ritche Nelson, aka DJ Domino, for sending me a bunch of stuff the other day which included, amongst other things, scans of the G2 flyer. Yaay! I’ve based the design for the G2 section on it. Hope it’s not too wildly different from the rest of the artwork from that year.

I’ve also added some of Ritche’s photos to the site – you can find them here (G2000) and here (G1). Enjoy.

If someone – anyone – has any big, dramatic photos of G2, I’d love to see them – as Dave Isdale kindly pointed out that the photo I have on the front page of the website for G2 is actually G1 – oops! I’ll take it down as soon as I find one to replace it…

Other new stuff on the site – the Trance, Hardcore, House and Ambient timetables for G2 are half-complete (thanks to Ritche sending me a scan of The Package from G2) – I need cities and DJ/live info for these zones (for all zones actually) if anyone can help.

Still working on the additional media coverage I’ve unearthed – I truly had no idea there was so much… maybe all done by the end of the weekend… and then I have to put together the  scans of The Package from G2, and put the flyer up and and and…

Fantastic! Keep it coming, folks!

Tags: The Gathering archives website, What's new

The very lovely Simon Kong has put a lovely post up on Obscure today – Archive of Dreams – Unfolding the Gathering story, which includes the memorable quote:

Personally I was involved with five out of the six events and all I have to show for it is a couple of Tech Crew T-shirts, a few stickers and a G frisbee. Plus a small and very precious collection of old photos. So the archive is a incredible resources that I already cherish.

He goes on to say:

What is remarkable to me is how strong the work of the Gathering stands, how bold the art work was and how real the hopes and dreams of the party remain. Be nice humans! Despite the financial breakdown of the event the memory that has stood the test of time is one of a radically positive life changing experience.

How true! Check out his post – and thanks heaps for the mention, .simon!

And while we’re on the subject – a huge big CONGRATULATIONS to .si and Megan on the birth on 12 November of their 9.11 pound baby girl, Georgie Queenie Kong. Yaay!

Tags: links

I’ve added scans of the G2000 CD to the site today – they look great! Thanks so much to Andre who spotted a gap in the site, knew he could fill it, and promptly scanned all the various bits of the CD and emailed them to me. You rule, Andre!

I’ve also been working on a whole bunch of new newspaper articles about TheG – spent a few more hours in the National Library today, searching through the microfiches. New articles should be up online in the next day or so I hope.

Tags: The Gathering archives website, What's new

I’ve put a bunch of new photos up on the site from G2000 – taken by Matt Camp who emailed me the other day. They’re great! There are a few taken in Ambient, which is really cool because we didn’t already have any Ambient G2000 pics. Thanks heaps, Matt.

You can access them from the G2000 photos index, or go straight to Matt’s page. He’s also letting me have a bunch of images from G1, which I will add to the site over the next few days.

I’ve also been adding a whole lot more media coverage from various years. I have the text already – now I just need to go to the National Library and search through the microfiches to find the articles themselves. I’ll put those up sometime later in the week once I have thumbnails of the articles.

I’m also meeting up with Steve from the Sure to Rise parties, who’s going to let me have some posters and stickers from The Gathering 96/97. Yaay! Thanks heaps, Steve.

Keep those emails and comments coming, folks – there are lots of gaps to fill!

Tags: The Gathering archives website, What's new

So it’s been a couple of days now since The Gathering archives website went live, and the stats are looking very good. What’s interesting to me (and very satisfying from a web author’s point of view) is that, if you visit more than one page on the site (which more than two-thirds of all of you are doing), you’re more likely to browse through 50 pages than two or three pages. Wow! That’s great!

I emailed the hundreds of people on the old Gathering mailing last last night (welcome, guys!) to let them know about the site – and I have already started receiving photos and offers of scans of this and that, which is awesome, and exactly what I hoped would happen once the site went live.

I’ll be doing regular updates on this blog of what’s new on the website, which I hope will give you a reason to come back regularly and see what else we’ve added, and what other cool stuff has been sent to us by Gatherers and crew.

The other thing I did today was to register with Wikipedia and add a bit more detail to the New Zealand music festivals page, which was looking rather thin (and inaccurate) on Gathering-related stuff. There’s still more info to add, but I’ll need to put my writing hat on – and get hold of some of the tech crew to get the tech info. Or someone else could update it instead!

I think I’m going to compose a full page on The Gathering for Wikipedia actually – all the other big festivals have their own page, so it’s only right that we should have one too! The one on Nambasa is particularly good, I think.

If anyone else feels like doing it instead – go for your life!

In the meantime, hope you’re enjoying the site (it looks like you are!) and please feel free to leave comments here (good or bad!) to let me know what you think of The Gathering archives website, and how you think we could improve it.

Tags: The Gathering archives website

It’s been a year in the making, but The Gathering archives website (v1.0) is live at last!

What can I say? I’ve been so immersed in everything-that-is-TheG – that it feels like only yesterday we were dancing in a field on top of a mountain, creating magic and mayhem in equal measure. Crazy to think that it’s almost 11 years now since the first Gathering, and nearly 6 years since the last…

I hope you all realise by now that I’m going to need quite a bit of help completing this website – in fact I’m thinking it never will be complete – if “completed” means getting to a point where there’s nothing left to add…

Somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000 people experienced The Gathering over the course of the six parties, and “completed” would mean including on the website every story, every photograph and every piece of video from every one of those people… plus every story, every photograph and every piece of video from every one of the goodnessknowshowmany crew who worked on The Gathering… and a whole lot more stuff besides.

I’ve got lots more stuff to add – video footage from the NZ news media for example, plus another couple of Gathering documentaries that are floating around; a bunch more photos I need to get my hands on (I’ll be emailing you very soon, Simon S!); more media coverage I’ve found but haven’t transcribed yet (so I’ll be spending more time at the National Library in the near future); plus improvements and additions to what’s online already – but I figured I should stop for a bit and just get what I’ve done already online. Otherwise it’ll never actually see the light of day…

When I first thought about building an archival website of TheG, I was planning to limit it to the four Canaan Downs years – mainly because I was personally involved as a crew member and organiser in three out of the four Canaan Downs Gatherings – and had left The Gathering before the event moved down to the Cobb Valley. I felt at least somewhat qualified to build an archive of the parties I was involved in – less so for the ones I wasn’t – plus I have very little archival material from the Cobb Valley parties.

However, I’ve had some feedback from a couple of original crew members (thanks Matt and Tim!) who felt very strongly that a Gathering archive site must include all 6 parties so – here you go – over to you to fill in the yawning gaps in the G1 and G2 sections… and the gaps in other years, too!

You’ll see as you begin to explore the site that I’ve deliberately left gaps where there are gaps to fill. I’ve not done it in a “this section of the site under construction” kind of a way – I’d lose my web designer’s license for sure! But more in a “we don’t have the info we need to complete this bit – can you help?” kind of a way. And I hope you will be able to help.

The Gathering is a festival of freedom, dance, music and participation. Your presence creates The Gathering….

I need your presence on The Gathering archives website in order to make it into the valuable record of an amazing piece of New Zealand history, that I know it can be.

Will you help? This is web 2.0 in action… There are quite detailed instructions on how to send me all kinds of stuff – including how to make corrections/additions to stuff already online.

If I could ask for just one (actually, two) things to start me off it would be copies of the official artwork for G1 and G2. You know – the booklet, poster, stickers, ticket etc from each of those parties. This is because the design of each section is based on the artwork for that year. Because I have no artwork from G1 or G2, these sections are currently designed in various shades of grey – which is OK but very plain in comparison to the Canaan Downs parties. I’d like to jazz them up and make them as pretty as the other sections! Can you help?

And please feel free to use this post to let me know if there are any pages on the site that aren’t working for ya. The URL of the page would be tremendously useful in that regard.

I hope you like it. Let me know what you think. I’m quite nervous now! How funny! Putting together an archive of the greatest party on earth is quite an awesome responsibility – even though nobody actually asked me to do it, and the responsibility is entirely self-imposed

OK it’s very late – it took a while to upload all the pages, so testing the whole site properly online will have to wait until tomorrow. Enjoy!

Tags: The Gathering archives website

With the website so close to lift-off (maybe even tomorrow!), I’ve been re-checking what I’ve written so far, to ensure that the ‘voice’ of the website is both consistent and sufficiently “not me”. It’s been one of the hardest things actually – deciding on ‘the voice’.

Who would have thought I could angst so long and hard over whether to use I and me or we and us? In the end I’ve decided on the royal “we” (haha) because, even though (at the moment) it’s only me working on the site, The Gathering was always about community, and diversity, and most of all, participation.

The whole point of The Gathering archives website is that its true value lies in what YOU can bring to it – with your stories, your photos, your video, and your own experiences of each party. That’s what will make this site come alive, and why (I think) it’s such an interesting project.

And that is about as far from I and me as you can get…

Tags: The Gathering archives website

I got a lovely email today from Reuben Williams, who’s just launched a brand new website called Outdoor Styles. He described his reasons for creating the website as follows:

I want to try to create an awareness that NZ is different from the rest of the world when it comes to outdoor festivals. I want to keep corporate names out of festival events for one. I also just want to raise awareness and encourage more people to check them out because we don’t like to hear these stories about festivals going bust, especially really nice ones!

And on the site itself he says:

outdoorstyles.co.nz is here to spread the word about outdoor music festivals in Aotearoa, as well as to demonstrate to the world why New Zealand is the place to be for the best outdoor music festivals.

We’ve been to many festivals, so we know the ropes.

Outdoor festivals bring out the best in people. The simple action of bringing together like minded people to listen to some beats is something that we crave.

The combination of New Zealand’s breathtaking diverse landscape, incredibly talented musicians and our people’s strong connection to the land is what we believe makes the Aotearoa Outdoor Style so unique and special.

We want to keep it this way and also would hate to see the commercial side take over like it has in places that aren’t New Zealand, The “V Festival” or the “Wireless Festival” just doesn’t make sense nor sound right, we don’t need that shit aye, keep it roots, keep it real.

New Zealand Outdoor Festivals focus on quality, not quantity which is why our outdoor festivals, often labeled ‘intimate’ compared to other well known festivals such as Glastonbury and SXSW are such a treasure.

It’s funny isn’t it, how the timing of things sometimes coincides? Reuben also noted that there’s an archival website currently under construction for the Nambassa Festival. Maybe we’re all just feeling a little nostalgic these days!

Outdoor Styles summarises the details of all the upcoming Outdoor festivals in New Zealand – making it a nice little one-stop shop for info and links. He’s also in the process of writing Brief history Aotearoa Outdoor Styles for the website – which will be a historical review of all the great New Zealand outdoor music festivals – including The Gathering. Check it out!

Tags: music festivals