Celebrating NZ music throughout May: 2 – Bic, Boh and Pearl Runga

Today, my picks are a bit more recent than yesterday’s, with a trio of talented sisters.

Bic Runga would be the best known, as a singer-songwriter, and is the one I’m mostly featuring. Her first album, Drive, was released in 1997. Here’s the title track, which is a delicate, acoustic song.

Also from the first album, but a little more rocky is Sway

Another gorgeous song is Beautiful Collision from her 2002 album of the same name

She released another album more recently, in 2016 – Close Your Eyes. To me, it has a bit of a different flavour to her older works. I can’t quite put my finger on how I would describe it. More uptempo maybe? Until today I hadn’t heard anything from it, so don’t know what my favourites are yet, so let’s go with the title track again.

Her sisters

Boh is another great singer, with more of a rock flavour. As well as a solo career, she’s the singer for Stellar, and here’s my favourite of their songs, Violent.

There is another sister Pearl, who isn’t very well known. But here’s her covering Bette Davis Eyes

She is also part of synth three piece band thE.brOKen. Here’s their song Left To Our Devices

They are originally from Christchurch, with a Malaysian Chinese mum and Maori dad.
If you want to see a bit more of their background, here’s Pearl paying a visit to their old neighbourhood

Featured on the NZ Music Month website today

Jon Lemmon with It’s Gonna Be Alright, which is a very happy boppy song, that I might even choreo for my arthritis oldies. It was released last November, and apparently it’s played everywhere in NZ. Maybe I better start listening to the radio!

The video was shot in Wellington, and although I don’t know who everybody is, I spied Ruth Gottlieb who was one of City Councillors for our part of the city, till she retired. And I spotted Island Bay beach.

NZ website MuzicNet says:

Sometimes the message arrives at the perfect time, wrapped in just the right way, delivered with a beaming smile. Welcome to the world of Jon Lemmon. In a time of growing uncertainty where strange forces work to build walls between us, he makes music to bring us back together. The journey starts here and the word we hear is that it’s gonna be alright.

This music comes bounding out with warm, euphoric tones, bright synths and a futuristic aesthetic. Its core is a creative optimism, an infectious mantra that hope is stronger than fear, and that as humans we have far more in common with each other than we often believe. And this music is all about believing. It’s modern dance unshackled by contemporary anxiety. It's the visionary optimism of a sixties movement. It’s made by a guy whose name really is Jon Lemmon.

Born in California, Jon ended in up Wellington at the age of 19 and quickly found his place in the vibrant underground New Zealand music scene, known for its community-mindedness and D.I.T. (Do It Together) attitude. He found his sound playing underground festivals in the middle of the dense New Zealand forests, a style of music that was intrinsic to the land and the scene he found himself in. Jon Lemmon’s our kind of pied piper and It’s Gonna Be Alright promises to be the start of an extraordinary musical and communal journey…. Leave your cynicism at the door. Let go….

Though the Wellington library website says he has produced earlier music:

Jon Lemmon is an electro-pop singer/songwriter whose work explores community and inclusiveness. His 2016 single ‘When it Came Along’ was funded through crowdsourcing, while his 2011 album Demos/Sketches was released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 licence.

Thanks for listening . If you got through everything, you're a real stayer and I take my hat off to you!

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