Nick D & Dick Johnson are Weird Together

First of all i must apologize for my lack of postings of late, but i do have a valid excuse. Honest. So you might remember when this site launched last year we kicked it off with a series called 'Beats In Our Backyard'. The series profiles different ethnicities that live in New Zealand and more importantly their music culture. If anyones seen the TV series that i'm involved with 'Making Tracks' it's no secret that I have a massive passion for musics from all over the world, and more often than not the more far-flung you look the more vibrant and exciting the music culture you find. Needless to say the experience of doing the BIOB series was nothing short of  awesome, and i got to uncover a wealth of incredible music that's quite literally under our noses and made some pretty cool new friends. It got me thinking.....

Now some of you might know Dick Johnson, originally from the UK now calls New Zealand home, one of the top DJ's in the country and certainly one of the best producers when it comes to electronic music. He's been a very good friend for a very long time and we for years joked about how we'd start making some music together - but we were always a bit too useless to follow up on our late night promises. It's funny because as long as i've been Djing in clubs people have always asked me when I'd start making music, and for some reason I had this kinda ridiculous thing of not wanting to start making music until i'd learnt as much as I could about the world of music. Anyways, after meeting all these amazing musicians living in New Zealand, I gave Dick a call and said let's work with them and thus - Weird Together was born.

So for the last 2 months myself and Dick have been in the Red Bull studios recording Burundian Drum Ensembles, Caribbean Steel Pan Orchestra's, Sudanese vocalists and also getting a helping hand from some of our kiwi friends like Jeremy Toy and Ryan McPhun. It's been a lot of fun and the last two weeks we've been finishing off the recordings and getting ready for our live show debut which is at Splore this weekend, where Dick and I will be joined onstage by all the various musicians that we've been recording with. I think all up we will have around 20 people onstage and we've already become somewhat of a logistical nightmare for the production team on our stage. If you're coming to Splore we're on Friday night so come have a boogie, hope you like it. But one thing I will say is that it's cool that something that started as a series of profiles on this here site has now become a project that I get the feeling is going to have quite a multi-coloured life this year. I'll have some free music for you guys on this site soon. I've seen the future, and it's looking Weird.

Oh and by the way - here's a couple of the clips from the Beats In Our Backyard series in case you missed it.

Yaw Boetang from Ghana - 

Camille Nakhid from Trinidad & Tobago -