Auckland - Feb 21st at the Cross St Studios. Tenniscoats and Xe

Tokyo's Tenniscoats centre around the duo of Saya and Taskashi Ueno, a married couple who have been making music since 2000, and together run the highly regarded Japanese label Majikick Records.Tenniscoats manage to reign in the sounds of the avant-garde and knit them into accessible and wonderfully listenable vignettes in which you find yourself going back to again and again. Their starting point is pop songs, but with a staggeringly free approach: psychedelic folk tunes, complex instrumentals and short pop jewels side by side, everything is possible
thanks to Jen French for photos

Xe

The first performance of the new group Xe, comprised of Rachel Shearer, Sean O'Reilly, Guy Treadgold and Dean Roberts.
Voice and data, negative realm. Ice crystals in the morning sand, pacific endless and awake on the other side of awake. Black holes are friendly, space between stars is not. Historically, about songs about cats coming in from the hailstorm, about hailstorms themselves, and one endless smoke. About hands full of noise to give to silence, stacking pebbles in a bell. About the hammer, the pick, the glass and the stairs. About single tone, dry reed, thin cipher oppressive sky. About post dangerous lifestyles, pre extinguishing blips along the event horizon