Kate Robertson talks to Auckland hip-hop/electronic/jazz band Yoko-Zuna ahead of Seamless, an all-ages show in Auckland this weekend. 

For Yoko-Zuna, 2018 looks set to be a tipping point. Consistently gaining momentum since their 2015 debut album This Place Here, the Auckland-based four-piece are finding themselves ready to break through the alternative sphere and well into the mainstream.

They’ve earned a reputation for their eclectic, hard-to-define brand of hip-hop, electronic and jazz influenced beats. No Yoko-Zuna set is the same, and every single they drop brings something fresh to the table.

Their latest single ‘Day Job’ (featuring SWIDT) is the kind of track that has you both fully immersed in it and wondering how on Earth they actually came up with such wizardry. With their forthcoming album – with features ranging from Jess B and Noah Slee to P Money and Ladi6 – due later this year, it’s time to set your hype alarm, because release day will be big.

I caught up with band members Frank Eliesa, Swap Gomez and JY Lee ahead of their set at this week’s all-ages event Seamless to chat big sets, big features, and their forthcoming sophomore album.

You’re playing SEAMLESS this Friday, an all-ages concert series. What do you make of the underage gig scene at the moment?

Frank Eliesa: I don’t think there are enough gigs. We’ve probably only played three underage gigs in our life cycle, but the crowds just go wild. Like, crazy crazy crazy. It’s really cool with younger crowds because they’re totally into it, but yeah, probably not enough.

JY Lee: We definitely need more underage gigs in Auckland. We need to be supporting that scene and encouraging younger kids to get into checking out gigs, listening to music or starting their own bands. That way we can get them involved in the community and they can help grow the scene. It’s pretty vital supporting that. And also alcohol-free gigs, that’s a big thing as well. It would be nice for no alcohol at gigs to be a norm. Alcohol and gigs are really seen as synonymous, it’s like if you’re going to a gig you’ve gotta drink, you’ve gotta get wasted. It’s cool having gigs where people can do that, but separating it would be nice so people can just check out the music.

When you’re getting ready to go on tour, do you spend a lot of time figuring out how to arrange your songs in a way that works for a live set?

FE: Usually about a week and a half.

Swap Gomez: We had Rhythm & Vines then Rhythm & Alps straight away so before that, we didn’t have any days off, except for Christmas. We rehearsed Boxing Day, the day after and the day after because we were creating a new set for those shows. That takes a bit of time. Luckily we had this cool gym that we practised in.

A gym!?

JL: Yeah, Swap’s flatmate and our artwork director, it was his boss’ uncle’s.

SG: It’s a free gym for the community, but no one was there. It’s a boxing gym so our rehearsal space is on the floor, then there’s a big giant ring that’s still got blood stains on it and stuff. It’s pretty gnarly.

Does performing your songs live lend itself to a bigger sound than what people hear when they listen to your music on Spotify or Soundcloud?

SG: Because we do a lot of collabs, it’s different when we don’t have the artists with us. What we end up having to do is take the song and remix it for live purposes. We do play the songs, but they sound different. They won’t sound like the recorded track. You’ll get a live version but it’s not only that, it’s a live remix of it. We’ve done that with heaps of our tracks because the artists can’t be there. Instead of just playing the track, we end up chopping and changing it. We have our own show, then we have a show with the artists, then we have a more mellow show, a dancier show, a hip-hop show.

JL: It’s basically just a catalogue of songs. We’ve got roughly 100 songs that we kind of just know.

The scope of your music in terms of the genres it pulls from is super far reaching. How does that affect how you approach songwriting and heading into the studio?

FE: We do literally anything we want.

JL: Sometimes we’ll just jam together and see what comes out, or we’ll have an idea and then build on it. Sometimes with certain artists, we’ll have something in mind and we’ll create something for them.

SG: We’re musically all very different to each other so I think that plays a part in it. We’re all influenced by different stuff, so I’ll like stuff that these guys don’t. We all come from different backgrounds. I think that’s what happened. It also depends on our moods.

Your album coming out later this year is stacked with features, including the likes of P Money. What’s it like working with local artists who I’m guessing you probably spent a long time looking up to?

SG: It’s really cool. We didn’t expect any of it to happen because we started out on ground level. We’d have a couple of friends on our songs and that’s it. I think what really helped is that the couple of friends we got on the first album ended up doing so well that we all kind of grew together. Once that growth came about we started getting opportunities that we’d never thought about, ever. Everyone got wind of it and we started making relationships with different artists. New Zealand is so small that you end up meeting all these people anyway. We met half of the artists before we approached them to do something. Plus we’re all musicians outside of Yoko-Zuna, so we’ve played on someone else’s record or whatever. It’s a community vibe which is really cool. P-Money is probably one of the guys that is really conditioned into New Zealand culture, whereas we feel like we’re just starting out, so to be working with him and Ladi6, it’s crazy.

You’ve got a single coming out in June, ‘Chunky Monkey’, could you tell me a little more about that track?

SG: This track is something we play in its entirety live, we don’t remix it at all. We just love the track, it’s really dancey. It’s got um, should I say what it is?

JL: Yeah.

SG: We have a song with Raiza Biza and Bailey Wiley, and it’s the same track, the instrumental, but we sped it up and it sounds like a completely different track. No one will actually figure it out unless we tell them. I don’t know how much it was sped up by.

JL: Yeah I have no idea. It just sounded good.

SG: The vocal samples on it are from a song on our last EP called ‘One Question’ with Laughton Kora. We took his vocal sample and put it on this song. There’s a lot of going on. It’s like two songs in one. It’s the Laughton song and the Raiza Biza/Bailey Wiley song, but it sounds totally different and no one will be able to tell it’s from those two songs.

The Spinoff’s music content is brought to you by our friends at Spark. Seamless (also supported by Spark) is on at The Tuning Fork, Friday 18 May. You can buy tickets here.

With Budget day fast approaching, how will it be sold to the public? And how will the opposition go about pinning a derisive name on it? Let’s look back at some of the best and worst attempts.

Budgets are complicated, big hairy beasts of policy packages rolled out to the public in the space of an hour. Journalists get slightly more time to digest them if they go along to the morning lockup, but they’re sworn to secrecy and get their phones confiscated at the door so they can’t tweet it out.

As such, the way the budget gets sold, and countered, on the day itself, can have a huge impact on how it gets perceived and remembered. And the key to that is coming up with the right perfect, pithy epithet. A good name for a budget can be defining for months or even years. A bad one sometimes won’t even make the paper the next morning.

So with that in mind, here’s a reverse chronological list of what names have worked, and which have barely made a ripple. 

2017 – New Zealand

The ‘one dollar bill budget’

Then Labour leader Andrew Little tried to get this one moving as a response to National’s tax cuts, which were very handy for those on high incomes, but offered little for those who weren’t. Little’s example was a cleaner, who would get $11 more on the tax cuts, but would lose $10 in other support. Hence, one dollar.

Verdict: One dollar Bill? Because of Prime Minister Bill English? Any takers? As it turned out, no. We have one dollar coins here, thank you very much. 2/10

2014 – New Zealand

The ‘fudge-it Budget’

Remember David Cunliffe? Won the Labour leadership in a coup and then led them to a crushing defeat against the rampant Sir John Key led National Party. His big criticism of the election year budget was that the much vaunted surplus achieved by finance minister Bill English was a mirage based on craft accounting. English, Mr Cunfliffe proclaimed, was fudging it.

Verdict: This name gains points for coming up with a handy rhyme. It loses points because most people quite like fudge. 5/10

2008 – New Zealand

The ‘block of cheese budget’

You’re going to start seeing a theme develop here, where the opposition tries to attach a super relatable name (everyone knows about cheese) to a budget to describe the tax cuts contained in it. In 2008, the Labour government was on its last legs, desperately flailing around to try and stave off their upcoming defeat. One of the methods used by finance minister Michael Cullen was tax cuts – $16 a week for those on incomes on the average wage of $45,000. Then-opposition leader Key said it was a family sized block of cheese, but look, either inflation has been in reverse since then, or prices have gone down or something, because I just looked at Countdown’s website and you can get a kg of Signature Range Edam for $7.90. I mean, that’s a lot of cheese quite frankly. Should you really be eating two kgs of cheese a week?

See also the ‘chewing gum budget’ in 2005, where much the same epithet was being used to describe those tax cuts. Results have been combined due to similarity.

Verdict: Can we maybe get beyond tax cuts being the primary measure of whether a budget is good or not? 3/10

1991 – New Zealand

The ‘mother of all budgets’

Coming out of the wild economic reforms of the 4th Labour government, finance minister Ruth Richardson delivered a radically austere budget that ripped huge chunks of the welfare state apart, and unleashed another wave of privatisations. It was so radical in fact, that it contributed to former PM Sir Robert Muldoon’s decision to resign. The wider economic programme, with the equally catchy name ‘Ruthanasia,’ contributed to huge unemployment and put severe pressure on the health system.

Verdict: There’s a good double meaning here. It was like a mother in that it was so all-encompassing. But it was also like a mother, in the sense that The Datsuns might say was from hell. 8/10 

1958 – New Zealand

The ‘black budget’

Perhaps the most well–remembered budget epithet in New Zealand’s history. The so-called Black Budget was delivered by Labour’s Arnold Nordmeyer, who in response to a growing balance of payments crisis, hiked sin–taxes dramatically. Smokers and drinkers were whacked heavily, and because people quite enjoy doing both, the government’s popularity plummeted, and they were bundled out of office in 1960. It was an unfortunate single term of government for the Labour party, who endured near permanent opposition between 1949 and 1984.

The Black Budget had a weird second life as part of a hammy campaign for DB Export beer in 2010. Have a look at this horrifically misleading and ultimately pulled advertisement.

Verdict: The name has stood the test of time, and become something of a cultural touchstone for New Zealanders of a certain age. Not necessarily a good touchstone, but a touchstone nonetheless. 9/10

1909 – United Kingdom

The ‘People’s budget’

This was described by then Chancellor of the UK David Lloyd George as a “war budget,” but the enemy was poverty, rather than the Germans (who in a few years would also be the enemy). It introduced land taxes, and taxes for those on higher incomes, and dramatically increased spending on social welfare. The land tax proposal was later dropped, due to pressure from the House of Lords, but regardless, it was transformative in the lives of Britain’s poorest. Every once in a while there are calls in Britain for another one.

Verdict: Remarkable in that George himself got to name and frame the budget, rather than leaving that up to the opposition. 10/10

2018 – ??

And with New Zealand’s own budget about to be read on Thursday, here are some predictions for the names parties will try and attach to it.

Labour: Probably something soggy and unmemorable like the “caring budget.”

National: Will probably hone in hard on free tertiary fees, and how spending there means money can’t be spent elsewhere. They’ll play on parental fears about their adult children and call it the ‘binge drinking budget.’

New Zealand First: It is literally impossible to predict what phrases Winston Peters will come up with. 

ACT: The stardancing budget. Because it’ll all be utopian, head in the clouds stuff (But really, what else has David Seymour got on at the moment?)

Greens: The Green budget, to remind everyone that they exist.

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