SPIRAL

"My gear consists of my good old Mic Mechanic 2 pedal, I like it for extreme reverb, echo & pitch, I use it with my reissue retro birdcage vocal mic which was a gift from my brother years ago. It gives a really warm, vintage sound and makes me feel like a gothy croooooner. Which I love. I usually sound check by singing Elvis or Roy Orbison, sometimes I’ll throw in Judy Garland, or waiata (Māori song)  while we’re doing soundcheck and see who notices. The sweet busy white boys doing sound are usually very lovely in humouring me.

I also have a second mic that we feed through Mitch’s laptop where we’ve made some really debauched, dark echo mic effects and delays which give our sound an added layer of deep twisted depravity. Using two mics is fun to use when they want to work together.

I also always keep my lyric book with me, I know my lyrics off by heart but it acts as ritual for me to write them out before a set, usually you’ll see me frantically scribbling away before we play. Plus, I carry a few karakia (Māori incantation) that I like to recite before our set. I’m still learning Te Reo (The Māori language) so I’ll often write down waiata and kupu/words that I am playing with in this book. The poetry of songwriting is important to me. I like to write about Greek Gods, evil Goddesses, Tātai arorangi (Māori astronomy), domineering senses of dark femininity, harrowing heartache and romance, y’know, the usual!

Another important piece I bring with me to every show are my knee-high patent boots; I should probably throw them out as they’ve been Frankenstein’d to the point of no return but I can’t play a show without them. They’re icons. My trusted old faithful’s."

"This is my Elektron Digitakt, it’s a small but versatile sampler and drum machine and it’s the only piece of gear I use for live performance. It’s a basic set up but it can do almost anything, it’s surprising how many features they fit into that little box. For the sound design I use VSTs like Serum, Absynth, Ableton’s wavetable and digital remakes of the Roland classics to create the samples, chop them up and load them onto the Digitakt, then we jam and add vocals. 

With all the digitakt’s parameters it opens up a lot of opportunity for live experimentation and improvisation, I like to think each one of our sets are different. One set we might have clean transitions and another we might have five minutes of noise in between our tracks… depends on our mood!

I dream of having a studio filled with analogue equipment, one day I’ll make that happen, but for now due to all the moving around and chronic itchy feet, this is my little set up and it works really well. The next step I want to take in my sampling journey is field recording, it’s been on my list for a while. How that is going to fit into Don’t’s sound I’m not really sure about yet. I might get arrested trying to sample some percussion sounds in an abandoned warehouse, we’ll see."