Biography

Daniel has been active in the creative music scene in Wellington over the past six years and has had the good fortune and pleasure of performing with many of the city’s wonderful musicians. As a guitarist he has recorded and released albums with The Rubbernecks (with Anthony Donaldson and Chris O’Connor), The Slab (with Simon O’Rorke and Anton Wuts), and Sync/Shed (with Jeff Henderson, Anthony Donaldson, Leila Adu, Jan Bas Bolen and Alison Isadora), all released on the SpaceCDs label. He has also played guitar in a wide variety of punk/noise groups including The Deconstruction Unit, Gook Nation, Po Face, The Goatslappers and The Testes, and has collaborated with musicians from Java, Sumatra, China, Laos and with Maori music specialist Richard Nunns.

Daniels’ electroacoustic music is included on New Zealand Sonic Arts Vol II and his compositional collaborations are featured on two releases, Agus and Friends and Rafiloza and Friends. With Phil Brownlee, Jonny Marks and Treefrog (aka David Sanders) he is co-founder/director of the sonic arts collective Amalgam who have produced seven Fringe Festival shows and events in Wellington since 1997 including MeatWorks which won the Best Music Award, Fringe 2001. He is a committee member of The Space, a venue for experimental music and performing arts (www.thespace.co.nz), has produced a number of albums for SpaceCDs and founded Bomb The Space, Wellington’s annual international festival of experimental music, now in its third year.

As a field recordist and ethnomusicologist he has worked extensively in New Zealand with race callers, auctioneers and other ‘street’ vocalists. He has written a Masters thesis on this area of New Zealand chant titled ‘Going for a Song’. With Allan Thomas at Victoria University he has co-produced a CD series called Karanga Voices: New Zealand Heritage in Sound which presents recent and archive recordings of a huge number of New Zealand vocal and animal sounds. He has also recorded folk musicians in Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan in Southwest China, Laos and Mongolia. These recordings have been made into the radio features The Nam Ou (a portrait of a Laos river journey), Voices of Guizhou and Yunnan (a collage of the use of the voice in southwest China), and Dali Market (a field recording for Out of the Blue radio).

Daniel has, until recently, lived in London and worked with some of the many fantastic musicians who inhabit the city including Takehiro Nishihide and Geeten in Secretaries on Standby. He co-produces a weekly radio art show on Resonance FM (www.resonancefm.com) called Unknown Country, and helps out as an engineer for the Audit/Live Music Meeting on Sunday night. Most of all he enjoys digging fence posts, the smell of silage and loading the Landrover with surfboards and heading out to the beach.

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