I'm Al from Groeni and we're here at 13 Newtown Ave
I've lived here about four years it was initially a rehearsal space for Bands
and I slowly started moving more stuff and we started rehearsing here and then
me and my girlfriend at the time decided to move in and we still had the bands
rehearsing here which was interesting
I've been given until the end of the month and then they're gonna bowl it
down and build some apartments. Huge apartments, they bought the whole block
out pretty much which is a real shame cause there's been some real cool stuff
happen here and it's like a big chunk of Newtown festival now
Seven or eight weeks ago Al and I were at Moon bar, best bar in Wellington,
and we had a few too many and decided that it would be crack-up to to make a sandwich bar
and this place was on Trademe so we were like, let's just give it a crack.
everything's handcrafted, handmade just we made all the sounds on the
record from scratch, Al makes all the prep from scratch
the way that this album came together was so so good like before we started
writing we were really strict like we're gonna write these templates so I think all
the templates I wrote we're just on an acoustic piano and like a little melody
or something and I think it was reasonably similar for the other guys
so we'd have that compositional process and then that sort of raw production
which was kind of just brainstorming like how the thing could sound or
whatever and then refining that raw production into like actual sounds
that we'd want to use. Although it took two years I don't think we
over-thought it. We listen back to it now which you
know normally you listen back to a record that you make and you hate it
but we listen back and we're real happy with it, like it's been a really nice process
Having that structure just even though it took bloody forever that to get there
the process took care of the rest of it. We just arrived with some ideas prepared to
have those savaged and reshaped in a different way and kind of embraced
that process of them being taken apart and re-put-together in a different way
The overall kind of theme is a push and pull of that kind of
chatter within you of wanting to do the right thing and maybe something pulling
you the other way. Which over two years kind of worked it's way into being
dark versus light thing which is where the name Nihx came from. The names of
the songs themselves, the poems kind of fit within that broader theme.