Infinity Sessions, Monty Soutar and Storylines: The Spinoff event guide
Welcome to The Spinoff event guide formerly known as the event noticeboard. If you're new to the guide then welcome to your weekly, curated selection of gigs, events and exhibitions from across Aotearoa. If you want to pitch your event for future guides then please use this handy form.
Online/Nationwide
Music: Neil Finn's Infinity Sessions
Live stream
Wed–Sun, August 13–17 & 20–24
The Spinoff will be livestreaming performances from some of Aotearoa's best-loved musicians including Vera Ellen, The Beths, Tom Scott, Tami Neilson and Dave Dobbyn. Visit the site from 7.30pm each evening to watch along.
Whangārei
Literature/Storytelling:
Whangārei Central Library
5pm Tuesday, August 19
Free
A stunning line up of writers and illustrators including Apirana Taylor, Jane Arthur, Isobel Joy Te Aho-White and Rachael Craw share their tips and tricks.
Leigh
Music: Salmonella Dub Soundsystem
Sawmill Cafe, 142 Pakiri Rd, Leigh, Auckland
7.30pm Saturday, August 16
$52.97
Featuring the Mighty Asterix and Whirimako Black on vocals with the epic Sal Dub horn section live.
Tāmaki Makaurau
Listen to the iconic album and alongside intergalactic visuals.
Visual art: Young Gallery Night
Designed for ages 16–25, this is a free evening of live figure drawing, DJs, dance performance, a photobooth and more. Food and drink for sale, too.
Kirikiriroa
Literature: How to write historical fiction with Monty Soutar
Trust Waikato, 4 Little London Lane
9.30am–12.30pm Saturday, August 16
$30 (incl. morning tea)
'Monty Soutar offers tips from his own experience writing the Kāwai series to encourage both beginning and practising fiction writers to get their manuscript started or finished.' See more from Hamilton Book Month here.
Music: Orangefarm and Warm Regards
Vogelmorn Upstairs, 93 Mornington Rd
7pm (doors open) Saturday, August 16
$15
An evening of cinematic, indie-pop featuring former members of Cassette, Fur Patrol and The Datsuns.
Whakatū
Music: Don McGlashan
Nelson Centre of Musical Arts
7.30pm Thursday, August 14
$58.50
A one-off solo show from a New Zealand legend.
Ōtautahi
Theatre: End of Summertime by Sir Roger Hall
The Court Theatre
6.30pm August 14; 7.30pm August 15–16
$29–$49
Final days of Sir Roger Hall's Covid era comedy-drama.
Ōtepoti
Multiple venues
Friday 15 – Sunday 31 August
$16–21
The film festival hits Dunedin this week.
Wānaka
Poetry: Wānaka Poetry Slam
Wānaka Library
5.30pm Thursday, August 21
Free
All welcome (non-competitive environment!)
Rakiura
Music: Winter Jam Session
South Sea Hotel, Oban
7pm Thursday, August 21
$49.90–$59.90
Local musicians jamming – all welcome to bring instruments and join in.
This article was produced with the support of Creative New Zealand.
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Infinity Sessions, Monty Soutar and Storylines: The Spinoff event guide
The Spinoff's top picks of events from around the motu. Here's the week 14 – 21 August. Welcome to The Spinoff event guide formerly known as the event noticeboard. If you're new to the guide then welcome to your weekly, curated selection of gigs, events and exhibitions from across Aotearoa. If you want to pitch your event for future guides then please use this handy form. Online/Nationwide Music: Neil Finn's Infinity Sessions Live stream Wed–Sun, August 13–17 & 20–24 The Spinoff will be livestreaming performances from some of Aotearoa's best-loved musicians including Vera Ellen, The Beths, Tom Scott, Tami Neilson and Dave Dobbyn. Visit the site from 7.30pm each evening to watch along. Whangārei Literature/Storytelling: Whangārei Central Library 5pm Tuesday, August 19 Free A stunning line up of writers and illustrators including Apirana Taylor, Jane Arthur, Isobel Joy Te Aho-White and Rachael Craw share their tips and tricks. Leigh Music: Salmonella Dub Soundsystem Sawmill Cafe, 142 Pakiri Rd, Leigh, Auckland 7.30pm Saturday, August 16 $52.97 Featuring the Mighty Asterix and Whirimako Black on vocals with the epic Sal Dub horn section live. Tāmaki Makaurau Listen to the iconic album and alongside intergalactic visuals. Visual art: Young Gallery Night Designed for ages 16–25, this is a free evening of live figure drawing, DJs, dance performance, a photobooth and more. Food and drink for sale, too. Kirikiriroa Literature: How to write historical fiction with Monty Soutar Trust Waikato, 4 Little London Lane 9.30am–12.30pm Saturday, August 16 $30 (incl. morning tea) 'Monty Soutar offers tips from his own experience writing the Kāwai series to encourage both beginning and practising fiction writers to get their manuscript started or finished.' See more from Hamilton Book Month here. Music: Orangefarm and Warm Regards Vogelmorn Upstairs, 93 Mornington Rd 7pm (doors open) Saturday, August 16 $15 An evening of cinematic, indie-pop featuring former members of Cassette, Fur Patrol and The Datsuns. Whakatū Music: Don McGlashan Nelson Centre of Musical Arts 7.30pm Thursday, August 14 $58.50 A one-off solo show from a New Zealand legend. Ōtautahi Theatre: End of Summertime by Sir Roger Hall The Court Theatre 6.30pm August 14; 7.30pm August 15–16 $29–$49 Final days of Sir Roger Hall's Covid era comedy-drama. Ōtepoti Multiple venues Friday 15 – Sunday 31 August $16–21 The film festival hits Dunedin this week. Wānaka Poetry: Wānaka Poetry Slam Wānaka Library 5.30pm Thursday, August 21 Free All welcome (non-competitive environment!) Rakiura Music: Winter Jam Session South Sea Hotel, Oban 7pm Thursday, August 21 $49.90–$59.90 Local musicians jamming – all welcome to bring instruments and join in. This article was produced with the support of Creative New Zealand.
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Ahead of an incredible new Infinity Sessions livestream series, debuting tonight, Duncan Greive spoke with Neil Finn about his long history of trying to make the beautiful things happen online. It's hard to remember now, when it feels so dominated by a handful of mega platforms, but those who went online in the 90s and early 00s truly believed that the internet would be a utopian place for culture. Advocates like Lawrence Lessig, institutions like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and theorists such as the free culture movement argued for an internet with radically different legal foundations to that which governed the offline world. The thinking was that society was overly constrained by gatekeepers, and that the internet represented a unique opportunity to remake our media environment. One person who found inspiration in those promises was Neil Finn. The Crowded House frontman had already established himself as an uncommonly collaborative figure by the turn of the millennium, opening his home studio to other artists and founding the 7 Worlds Collide project, bringing the likes of Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and The Smiths' Johnny Marr to a run of live shows (and subsequent releases) in support of Oxfam. That sense of community and industriousness found a natural home in the early internet. Finn put on a livestream when we were accessing the web through dial-up, to an audience of a few dozen, and has never stopped trying to make interesting things happen online. In the 2010s he livestreamed the recording of his album Out of Silence, and there is a through-line of obstinate creativity in streaming projects like Fang Radio and his recently-launched subscription fan community Private Universe. The most unruly and impressive element is the Infinity Sessions, and tonight sees the debut of MUFGAL, which might be the most elaborate thing he's conjured for the internet. The acronym stands, rather plaintively, for 'Make Us Feel Good About Life'. It's a two week long concert series, happening at Roundhead and proudly supported by The Spinoff, which sees an incredible rotating lineup of New Zealand musicians, including The Beths, Dave Dobbyn, Troy Kingi, Bic Runga and Neil himself playing five nights a week, streaming live every evening. It's a massive undertaking, all driven by his own restless energy. It also says that even as the world feels dark – hence the title – he is still fighting the good fight. And doing so in digital spaces about which he is now deeply ambivalent, while still holding out hope that something magic can happen there. The following is an edited and condensed version of a podcast interview for The Fold. Stream the Infinity Sessions live on YouTube. Duncan Greive: Make Us Feel Good About Life. The title feels fairly self-explanatory. Still – could you unpack its origins? Neil Finn: It started as kind of a joke. My dad was really into acronyms. One of his was IOAG, it's only a game. Because he'd watch cricket, and if it wasn't going well: it's only a game. Or it's more than a game, IMTAG, if he was really enjoying it. So MUFGAL came out of that thought. It was actually originally MUFGALINZ, meaning make us feel good about life in New Zealand. Because I sensed there was a mood of languishing. I think in the middle of winter, there's always things to look at, whether they're on the news or with the health system – just all the things that are very troubling and uneasy. It started to sound like a really good motto. What is it that you're driving towards with giving yourself all this work, making these beautiful, fragile, very specific things come together? I just have an internal compulsion to think of an idea and then double it. Just trying to get the best possible outcome. Often it actually has worked out to be really brilliant, but there's a moment in the execution of these ideas where I go 'there's no way we can pull this off'. With the last big Infinity Session we did, I had a moment an hour and a half before we went to air where there were seven orchestra pieces to rehearse and we just didn't have time to do them all. So we were facing the possibility of playing these arrangements nobody had heard or played before on livestream, and I just had a real panic. [Composer and vocalist] Victoria Kelly came down with me. I think she was having a panic as well. But it went amazingly, and that always seems to be the case. We did the show, and with that little bit of adrenaline it just always goes without any grief whatsoever. The thing that surprised me about the last Infinity Session was you were almost trying to make it more difficult. Not just the number of different performers involved but also Rob Brydon beaming in for some reason, and two dueling MCs competing for control. It was teetering on the edge of transcendence and chaos at all times. Well you've hit the nail on the head there really. I always saw the potential of the internet. In like 2001, when it was just getting going and I did my first live stream from a basement in Parnell. There were only maybe 20 people watching. It's amazing to think they even got that many, given the quality of the internet back then, trying to livestream over dialup. I just got absolutely taken with the idea of being able to not have a gatekeeper. No production crew, no established TV brand behind it, and that the artist was able to play directly for an audience, no matter where they were. That lack of any structure, or being constrained by a format that's already established. I remember when the internet arrived and there was a vision for a whole utopian cultural world that was going to come out of that. Sitting here in 2025 I don't feel like that promise was realised. Do you think that we have lost something along the way? It's hard to keep track. I've abandoned all of my social media in recent years. I was doing Twitter – it was fun for a while and I enjoyed it when I felt like you were able to be subversive and have fun and actually send things up. Then two things happened. I got to the point where I felt like 'oh I haven't tweeted today, I better tweet'. And also whenever anybody died or anything you felt like you had to comment on it and be part of it. Then also the dreadful massacre that happened live on the internet, it just put a shudder through my whole system. I just went 'I don't want to be on there'. I was even asked about why I went off all my social media. The Guardian wanted me to write something about it. And I said no, because then I'm just doing what I'm trying to avoid, which is commenting. And yet here you are, doing something big and new. I have this little bit of faith that if you keep doing good work, eventually it finds its way. It's sort of contradictory, in some ways, thinking that you can take on the internet in a pure sense and have it actually find an audience. I don't know if you can. I want to talk about some of the places that are integral to music now, because the contrast between them and what you build yourself is quite interesting. What's your view of Spotify? I'm not on Spotify. It's not really an act of resistance particularly. I just don't use Spotify, so I don't know. I know it's extremely useful for checking out stuff. But I really object to any ever having an algorithm decide what I might want to like. It hasn't been very beneficial to musicians. I think that record companies are doing rather nicely out of it now, which is the established order, really. The way that the whole world is organised is that the established order usually wins every transaction. The established order has won that transaction. And musicians are just struggling. They're fighting with AI now and it's going to happen more and more. That's the really worrisome thing. I like the perversity, where you're using a platform like YouTube for distribution but not necessarily in the way that it wants to be used, by only making it live very briefly. What's the motive there? I'd prefer not to be using YouTube. If I had a good alternative, I'd use it, but YouTube offers kind of universal access to this idea. It's also a hotbed of awful things. So I don't really have an opinion about YouTube. It's just there – but we're not aligned. We've got no sponsors. You know, we have partners, including yourselves, who are interested in the idea and want to be part of it, but there's no sponsors. We've had the opportunity to have companies come in and brand the thing. And I've resisted that, to the point where it's ended up being quite expensive and we've spent a bit of money trying to do it. So there is a perversity there. It'd be easier with a sponsor to pay for it, but I'm really suspicious of having anything aligned. I look at Liam, who wrote and recorded his Hyperverse album live on Twitch. It feels like within the family, generationally now, there's this curiosity about technology and what it should enable, that is also on some level suspicious of what it wants you to be. I have done plenty of the traditional media outlets and podcasts and I understand that it's part of getting the word out about a new record. They're important and some of them are really memorable, because there actually is a good conversation in the midst of it. But there's a lot of stuff that feels somehow not very satisfying. Doing things on your own is fun, as long as the tech side of it goes OK. It used to be that you'd go to a radio station and do an interview and then you'd wait till the end of the week and you'd find out if you had any radio play. It was a simple setup. It was deeply corrupt. But it was good old-fashioned corruption. Yeah. There were all sorts of dodgy people, and it was no by no means perfect. And the thing about nowadays is that there are just so many layers of communication, so many gatekeepers and some good things happen with that. There's people who just operate on some level you're not even aware of and all of a sudden they're filling Spark Arena. On some occasions they're really good, and it's mysterious because you haven't heard them or seen them in any format that you've been watching. The internet has created compartmentalised and heavily curated spaces where people are getting exactly what they want, but they're not really aware of the rest of the world. When I imagine being an artist starting out now, in a world so fragmented, it seems like an exhausting task just to take that first step. Some of the things you do seem to wrap your arms around younger artists, who face a tricky operating environment today. It's a beautiful thing to find an artist in full flight early in their career and they're just moving with absolute agility. You see the ideas flowing and you see the energy. A lot of that is being directed now into creating social media for themselves. And some people are really good at it, and it's part of the reason they become successful. It's a composite talent. Being just a musician or just a songwriter in itself is enormously tough. It probably always was, but I think more so now than ever. But if you've got the composite skills of being able to be a communicator or being able to make content, it works for you. What it appears to do is to direct people's creative energies into areas which are potentially problematic. And slightly corrupting, if I could say so, in terms of what their efforts are. They're judged by likes and judged by streams and judged by status. A little bit of that comes naturally with the world of celebrity, which we've all known. But it seems now that the work maybe is not as good in some, and people don't flourish beyond their first or second album. It feels like what MUFGAL and Roundhead and the Infinity Sessions are seeking to imagine is a different world for musicians. Well, I hope so. I don't think we can do it all by any means. It's stumbling along, as I usually do, but I don't know. I'm not the marketer. That's really always been quite confusing for me. Like you said, it does feel like we were languishing, as a species. Maybe this is where it'll turn around. Well, God, that would be a lovely thought. It's a small effort, but I do have big expectations for it. I want it to be amazing. The beginning of Crowded House was us playing parties as a three-piece busking trio. I really fell in love with that feeling of having the room just buzzing. So with this intimate atmosphere, hopefully we'll create some of that.
