There and back again

Maybe my height without heels is a little hobbitish, but I don’t have giant hairy feet. Nevertheless I recently embarked on a grand adventure like the ones famously traveled by Bilbo and more recently Frodo.

At the end of last year, as many of you know, I went to Malaysia.  Malaysia is very different from New Zealand. You can buy Milo in a can and it’s bloody good!  It’s very very hot all the time, there are mosquitos that can allegedly kill you.  It rains every afternoon at 4:30pm.  Anyway I had a series of fabulous adventures and am now back safe and sound in New Zealand, sitting about the fire telling tales of The Land where Winter Never Comes.

On my journey to there and back again, I met lovely people and made friends I will never forget.  I played a gig or two or three.  I read a lot of books, spent a lot of time on the train, ate a lot of new foods, wrote a lot of new songs.  I threw a magic ring into a volcano and defeated a dark lord.

THE VELVET ACES

I met Moe through Twitter when I’d been in Malaysia a little while.

He was looking for a guitarist and I was looking for a band, so after texts and tweets we organised an In Real Life meeting at Starbucks.  Soon there were jams and auditions and hanging-outs and shisha and The Velvet Aces began to take shape.

And like all bands, the band involved not just the people who happened to play the musical instruments in it but a group of friends and supporters and hangers on who all made up the musical family that had formed around Moe the nucleolus.

TRANSIT OF VENUS

And through playing in the Velvet Aces I became friends with Riz the other guitarist…

And he and I ended up jamming on some of the Transit of Venus music together with other friends Henry and Ash.

Unfortunately I had to leave before we got to play any gigs together, apart from that one time Riz and I hit an open mic night, which doesn’t really count does it? haha

But I just remembered ‘that one time’ I played some Transit of Venus songs with Ziam and crew at No Black Tie That was when I first got to Malaysia.

BINTANG

And then there was the time Moe and Sashi got me to play session guitar on their song Bintang, which was then nominated for an AVIMA award for the acoustic version. That was pretty cool I thought!

NEW ZEALAND

I arrived back home on Tuesday, started looking for jobs and flats and all those things one needs to survive.  I’m really glad to be back, though I’m going to miss a lot of things about Malaysia.  Even though I spent half my time in Malaysia missing so many things about New Zealand!  Mostly people are the things I miss, and I’m just so thankful that the internet exists and makes it easy to keep in touch with everyone!

(For those of you who want to know the gossip first-hand, long story short I moved to Malaysia for my boyfriends job and now I am back in New Zealand because our relationship hit some difficulties. But I’m ok, he’s ok, we’re still friends and all that so no need at all to look all worried and pat me on the head when you see me!)

Looking forward to getting back into the music thing here in New Zealand, got a couple of projects I’m working on, and a concept album I’m planning for release in conjunction with the june 2012 astronomical event – the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun.

Well, that’s about all I can be bothered writing right now. If I don’t update regularly enough feel free to nag me about it

Hope this finds you well,

<3 K xxx

p.s. check out The Velvet Aces http://www.myspace.com/thevelvetacesonline