Hello everyone. Thank you very much for signing up to my mailing list. There is so much I would like to tell you.

The first thing is that I have a gig coming up quite soon, in Wellington, where I will be singing intimate soul music with an amazing band: Lily Shaw (sax, flute, vox), Jack Mells (guitar), Emma Hattaway (bass), and Hikurangi Schaverien-Kaa (drums). What’s more, Lily will be treating us to a performance of some of her wonderful songs. You can buy tickets here:

6pm Saturday 13 June @ Hataitai Bowling Club

I have sung all my life, but seldom professionally as an adult. However, over the past few years I have been thinking about how I might open this up as a new part of my work. I booked this gig to force myself to practice singing, and to get a set of arrangements up to scratch. I was also motivated to develop some original tunes, which I plan to record as part of a larger work later in the year, and see as part a yet-larger staged work.

The concept for this music is to use love songs as allegories for the experience of feeling the weight of historical forces in one’s life. Marvin Gaye is the best at this, though I won’t yet be singing any of his songs as they are rooted in polyphony.

I have been having a lot of ideas lately, and have been enjoying many things.

One of my creative heroes is Maurice Sendak, and I have recently discovered his collection of interviews with Terry Gross for Fresh Air, which I highly recommend.

Jacques Brel has interested me for a long time, but I had found much of his earlier work too coarse and fanatical, though I am sure I will come to make sense of it in the future. However, his albums Ces gens-là (1966), Jacques Brel 67 (1967), and J’arrive (1968) have been totally revelatory. The arrangements and production are stripped to their most essential elements, even when ginormous. In this way, he works with silence as a canvas and an active character. Like the great artists of the 19th century, he sees the world how it is.

For the past few months, largely prompted by the press around his new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days (nice article about it), I have been diving further into the works of Wallace Shawn. I would recommend listening to this recording of his 1991 monologue The Fever (part 1, part 2). This was my first interaction with his non- character actor work and has stuck with me for years. For his film work and his long collaboration with theatre director André Gregory (great article about it), you should watch Vanya On 42nd Street (1994).

I have begun to have ideas for images, and have been greatly enjoying taking time to look at things with my phone’s camera, which you can see in my daily instagram stories.

I hope you are all well and I look forward to telling you more things in the future.

Hector