Interview: Eyegum Music Collective - Scenic Tour ft. Koizilla and Sleeping Village

With their third nationwide Scenic Tour kicking off this Friday, Pōneke's Eyegum Music Collective continue to show their fierce commitment to supporting local emerging talent, maintained through their free Eyegum Wednesdays series at San Fran, Welcome To Nowhere and Great Sounds Great festivals, and ongoing Scenic Tours. Eyegum Music Collective co-curator Joel Cosgrove (of DAFM) sat down to discuss all things Eyegum via the internet with Charlotte Lovrin, including the forthcoming scenic tour with Koizilla and Sleeping Village — joined at Whammy Bar this week by Ripship — the capital’s live music community, and value of supporting Aotearoa's up and coming artists. 

Eyegum Scenic Tours #3: Koizilla and Sleeping Village

*Tickets available HERE via UTR

Charlotte Lovrin: With The Eyegum Collective active since 2013, the Scenic Tours still seem a fairly recent venture, with the first tour taking place in 2021. What were the initial motivations behind getting this idea off the ground? What inspired the idea?

Joel Cosgrove: There's something really fun about touring with another band. All too often you go from centre to centre playing with awesome local bands and you go "damn, I'd love to see that band again", there's a real bond you see with two bands once they've played together a number of times. It doesn't happen enough in Aotearoa, although is more common overseas where longer tours in more densely populated areas allows this. Whenever we do something we often ask "what can we add to this that the bands can't just do themselves", so that's where the idea comes from, doing all the behind the scenes organising, so that two bands can just go on tour and focus on playing shows. There's a really cool friendly competition that comes with doing a tour like this, the bands feed off each other, watching an awesome set challenges you to lift your game. Knowing you're going to play another show soon with the same band and knowing that that band is going to be awesome really focuses a band in a way touring by oneself doesn't. It's great to see the sets at the end of the tour compared to the set at the start of the tour. To be honest, We hardly ever plan anything out in the long term. Someone will bounce an idea around and then if it sounds like a good idea, we'll give it a go. Nothing we've done has ever been part of a master plan.

 
What kind of decision making is involved in settling on both the bands / musicians selected for the tours? Is there anything you look for specially in a group before inviting them along?

We throw band names around, it's really just thinking what a cool lineup would be if it came into town, would we get excited if we saw it? So the first one was Dale Kerrigan and Wiri Donna, the second was Mirror Ritual and Porpoise, and this one is Koizilla and Sleeping Village. Logan from Sleeping Village (also in Macho Macho) came up to us after seeing Koizilla set fire to the main stage at Cubadupa 2023 and just went for the slot. He knew that the next tour was going to have Koizilla, so just straight up said that the two bands would be an awesome lineup together, which it is, and now they're touring together. Often the two bands won't know each other until they go on tour. If we do our job right, it just clicks and makes for a really memorable series of gigs.

What kind of changes, positive or otherwise, within Pōneke’s live music scene has the Eyegum Collective been witness to over the decade since its formation, and how has the collective managed to work through or with these changes?

Music is always changing. We've run Free Wednesdays at San Fran since 2016, so we've seen the change on a week by week basis as well as over the years. Looking at the lineups over the years is amazing for the variety and originality of music coming out of Pōneke. I think that there is a real good collegiality in Pōneke, as long as an act is fun the gig works, as opposed to being too focused on genre. There's a strong streak of independence that comes through in DIY house parties and releases, it keeps things exciting.

The collective shows a strong commitment to the independent art sector of Aotearoa, specifically highlighted through the support of musicians, poets and independent makers of all kinds, through the Welcome To Nowhere festival and your free Eyegum Wednesdays at San Fran. What do you find to be the most rewarding aspect of supporting local, independent talent?

We're always surprised and excited at finding new music, the way that people take established ways of doing things and warp them into something new and unique, or just through sheer force of personality just bring some form of emotion forward that makes the music exciting and refreshing. It's amazing to see new artists come forward that just blow us away, or artists we've worked with since we first started i.e. Hans Pucket, Vera Ellen or Ludus, just come up with music at such a high level of execution that just blows us away. So much of this music we engage with is the music that defines our lives, it's what we sing and dance along with, it's the music we load up on our playlists.

How is Eyegum organised as a collective? Who is currently involved?

We're structured around events, Nowhere, Wednesdays, our Cubadupa stage, Scenic Tours, Great Sounds Great (our festival where we book out all the venues in Cuba St for an epic night of music). We have crew who've been there since the start, people who pop in and out, go overseas and return, to people who are fresh and new to it all. People often get involved through volunteering, taking up roles, or inventing roles we didn't know needed doing, but did, after a while they'll start coming to meetings, or we'll invite them. It does mean a lot of meetings though. We talk budgets, lineups and general planning, blah blah blah. There's a delicate and beautiful balance between crew who've been involved for years and crew who are new. It can be really easy to get stuck in one's ways, so having fresh new ideas or even just someone asking why things are done a particular way, is a good method of continuing to grow, reflect and develop as a collective.

What additional support in general, do you believe independent music and art in Aotearoa would benefit from receiving?

We try to plan on the basis of no funding, but event funding through Creative NZ and tour funding through NZ Music Commission is real important to us. Doing the work we do, it's on the margins, it's very easy to lose money and very hard to make money. Creative work is at the core of what makes Aotearoa a beautiful place to live in and yet there's so much evidence of how hard it is to make creative work here. There's not enough funding and so a lot of amazing work on the margins can disappear through no fault of the artist. Sport is an awesome thing and obviously there's never enough funding in that realm, but if we centred creative work within society as a whole like we do with sport (and sport funding), we'd be all the (culturally) richer for it. Travelling overseas makes you appreciate what we do have here, but also shows you how things can be run better here as well. It often comes down to the creation and support of creative infrastructure, like live venues, touring support, project subsidies etc. Every town we tour through is on a knife-edge, so many venues are barely covering costs. We need to help make building new creative infrastructure easier, as well as protecting and nurturing our existing infrastructure. You don't plant a lemon tree and forget about it, you come back each year or every six months, check in with it, and see what needs to be done to support it to grow as big and strong as it can.