Alphabethead, Displeasure & Birdparty Aotearoa Tour 2025

Please join Alphabethead, Displeasure and Birdparty this December as they traverse Aotearoa on a journey to present genre-expanding music that seeks to stimulate the brain, and move the body! These three acts differ widely from one another but are unified in friendship and the shared pursuit of life-affirming, body-moving combinations of rhythms, bass and formidable sound design.

Alphabethead is celebrating the release of “My Name Is David, his debut album of electronic music on Sunreturn. Displeasure release Billionaire Death Drive, their second album of anarcho-dance-punk and Birdparty, having already played some incredible festival shows and gigged in China, tour Aotearoa for the very first time.

ALPHABETHEAD finds himself adrift in the musical cosmos, somewhere between the constellations of Hip Hop, Electronica and Experimental Rock. As a teenager he won the New Zealand DMC DJ Championship and this title sent him performing across the globe. Over the next twenty years he'd go on to make six albums as Alphabethead, five albums as one third of cult genre-shredders All Seeing Hand and two records as half of the psychedelic Hip Hop duo Bad Taste alongside Young Gho$t. He also contributed production or turntable scratching to Home Brew, Tourettes, Death & The Maiden, The Etymologists (featuring Richard Nunns and David Long (The Mutton Birds) and The Village Of The Idiots (a modern jazz ensemble led by Anthony Donaldson (The Front Lawn, Primitive Art Group)). His musical prowess and singular approach to playing the turntable like a musical instrument has led to tours through Aotearoa, Australia, UK and China and performances at festivals like WOMAD, Splore, Laneway and Camp A Low Hum.

Now signed to Sunreturn, Alphabethead's new music is explorative and driving electronica stemming from sound design and synthesis with touches of turntablism and vinyl sampling.

https://alphabethead.bandcamp.com/

DISPLEASURE is the digital subsidiary of Unsanitary Napkin. Their music deals with the swirling mess of scaremongering bullshit rearing its increasingly ugly head in political discourse in Aotearoa. In the year 2025, things have reached the point where disgruntled science-denying farmers are teaming up with perverse public toilet-obsessed transphobes, raging anti-vaxxxers and evangelical megachurch despots in a horrific whirlpool of shit ideas manipulated by white supremacists and alt-right trolls - with all of their delusional social media outrage pumped by cynical algorithms to swell the profits of hypercapitalist billionaires and their colonial space-fantasies. Displeasure highlight the absurdity of this dystopian trajectory, and stresses the urgency of solidarity in dismantling the extractive capitalist core driving the whole enterprise.

https://unsanitarynapkin.bandcamp.com/

BIRDPARTY is the unlikely merger of extreme metal musician William Barrett (Heresiarch) and ambient/electronic dance producer Emma Bernard (Ludus). Constructed with sample-based textures, trippy vocals and drums, the duo build scintillating sci-fi soundtracks for the adventurous listener. Undefinable and unmissable, BIRDPARTY’s live show explores the realms between ambience and uproar — delivering a cathartically noisy spread of cinematic, semi-industrial goods & services.

Since emerging in 2023, BIRDPARTY have established themselves as one of the most exciting live acts in New Zealand, captivating crowds at festivals such as Twisted Frequency, Newtown Festival, Camp A Low Hum and Welcome to Nowhere, as well as the City Gallery of Wellington.

https://birdpartynz.bandcamp.com/

Alphabethead, Displeasure & Birdparty Aotearoa Tour 2025

Ōtepoti/Dunedin, FRI 5 DEC, Pearl Diver, 9PM
Ōtautahi/Christchurch, SAT 6 DEC, Lyttelton Coffee Co, 7PM
Tākaka, SUN 7 DEC, Roots Bar*, 8PM *No Birdparty
Kirikiriroa/Hamilton, FRI 12 DEC, Last Place, 8PM
Tāmaki-makaurau/Auckland, SAT 13 DEC, Audio Foundation, 7:30PM
Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, FRI 19 DEC, Meow, 8PM
Whanganui, SAT 20 DEC, Porridge Watson, 8PM