Rachel Ashby from In the Pits meets the organisers behind Lyttelton’s Port Noise, one of the most thrilling new events in the music festival calendar.
It’s already a hive of activity when we arrive at the Lyttelton Coffee Company, the temporary headquarters for the Port Noise music festival, to meet the organisers. Rose Smyth is on the phone to a scaffolding crew, coordinating the construction of two towering structures for Rowan Pierce’s installation BEACONS. Ben Woods is busy checking flight times on his laptop, shortly bound for the airport to collect Melbourne-based musicians Sarah Mary Chadwick and Simon J Karis. Outside, the Lyttelton Coffee Company owner Stephen Mateer is plumbing a huge sink especially for the festival’s use. Volunteers and contractors buzz in and out of the room getting ready to transform a large carpark into two outdoor stages.
In less than 24 hours, Ōhinehou-Lyttelton will again become enveloped by Port Noise, a “made by musicians, for musicians” festival organised and programmed by locals Smyth and Woods. Now in its third year, Port Noise has built up a reputation among the musically-inclined as the hot new thing happening on the local live music calendar. It’s nestled right in the bosom of the town, where the base of craggy hills meets the industrial hum of the working port. Specifically, it happens just off London Street: in venues The Lyttelton Coffee Company, Wünderbar and Loons, plus two outdoor stages in their adjoining carpark. (There’s also a plethora of off-site secret show locations, but more on that later).
Last year, seething with jealousy and FOMO in Auckland watching Instagram videos of Mykki Blanco (a genre-bending American rapper who has worked with Madonna and Kanye) performing on the back stairs of the Lyttelton FreshChoice, I promised myself I wouldn’t miss out on Port Noise again. It didn’t take much to convince my friends Callum Devlin and Finn Johannson to join me making the trip down from Auckland. The day before the festival, I picked them up from the Devlin family home, and we all piled into my grandma’s Suzuki Ignis (thanks Jandi) to head through the hill to Ōhinehou. As former Christchurch kids, Callum and I treated Wellingtonian Finn to the highlights tour of school bus stops and buildings that no longer exist.
By the time we neared the Lyttelton Tunnel, we were both reflecting on the aspirational coolness that Lyttelton held for us as music-obsessed city-side teens. Forever associated with songwriting and art, the town really cemented its reputation as a crucible for interesting sounds after the earthquakes, with artists like The Eastern, Delaney Davidson, Marlon Williams, Nadia Reid and Aldous Harding coming to the fore.
It’s this deep relationship with music that makes Lyttelton a prime spot for a festival concerned with the underground and avant-garde. This year’s Port Noise line-up spanned the breadth of alternative music scenes around Aotearoa – to name just a tiny handful, there’s Tāmaki bass-powerhouse Mokotron, jangly guitar wizard Jim Nothing, bona-fide Dunedin legends David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights, Ōtautahi techno thumper Mr Meaty Boy, and southern shredders Pearly from Ōtepōti. On top of this, rave demon Vanessa Worm jumped the ditch from Australia, while Nebraskan songwriter Simon Joyner & The Eucalypts and Puerto Rican dub master Pachyman joined the bill from further afield. It’s a truly genreless and expansive lineup.
Since its inception in 2023, the festival has already grown and morphed beyond what Woods or Smyth could have ever imagined. “Every time the festival rolls around, new inspiration strikes and we think, ‘we can just add this little extra thing’ and that turns into significant changes,” laughed Woods from the bustling HQ. The programming is a joint endeavour for Woods and Smyth, and reflects their shared musical interests. Woods, a working musician himself, has spent many years forging networks of music makers across Aotearoa and overseas. Smyth brings a wealth of programming, hospitality and event management experience to Port Noise – she’s run cafes, organised and programmed festivals. Together they bring invaluable pragmatism and warmth to pulling off something as creatively daring as Port Noise.
Because this isn’t just a one-day outing, either. In the lead-up to the main event, there was a week of gigs around the town – a sound bath and tāonga pūoro gig at the church, noise music happening in the cafe upstairs, and a family show before the main festival kicked off. Not only that, alongside the main lineup came a whole raft of off-site secret shows, which ticket holders randomly receive a pass to when they enter the festival. This pass contains just a time and location – if you choose to take it up, you might find yourself watching Kāi Tahu witch-hop artist KOMMI in a tiny room at the top of the Lyttelton Club, or Melbourne’s Georgia Knight performing with auto-harp in the blackness of the Lyttelton Arts Factory.
It certainly seems that the wider Lyttelton township has embraced this sprawling and ambitious festival. On festival day, the queue for wristbands snaking down London Street revealed many local faces, as well as a fair few music nerds shipped in from elsewhere. As the evening progressed, and we traversed around stages that ranged from packed bars, to scenically appointed open-air grandstands, a friendly camaraderie permeated the crowd. Banter between bar staff and security was genuine and relaxed, and punters looked out for each other on the naturally steep rake of the hills. There was a collective excitement about navigating the rabbit warren of the Port Noise layout, and a shared understanding that we weren’t just a passive audience, but co-conspirators in making this festival work.
Moving from the glow of Pachyman’s outdoor twilight set into the thumping fug of DJ Caru in the Wünderbar was a particularly fun vibe shift, the disco ball glinting with reflected light from a wall of CRT televisions. Every space had a different atmosphere, and the artists seemed to embrace this too. Uncle Quentin, crooning into a vocoder through a neon balaclava, came with his own matching green inflatable tube man which flailed surreally alongside him throughout the set. Meanwhile, inside The Loons (formerly the old Working Men’s Club) Sarah Mary Chadwick played piano alone to a totally transfixed crowd. Walking back down to the main stage from a secret set at the church, we were hit by a wave of bass rising from the beginnings of Mokotron’s set. Melodica, breaks and tāonga pūoro soon reverberated around the natural amphitheater of the Whangaraupō Harbour, drawing focus towards the water.
By the time the festival had shifted to kick-ons (at beloved bar Civil and Naval, naturally) Port Noise was starting to feel like being at a very strange and exciting house party hosted by the whole town. And much like a good house party, it required a solid team of friends mucking in on the dishes and decorating to make it all work. Whether it’s taking a shift on the bar, hauling PAs up and down stairs, or hosting out-of-town artists on spare mattresses, you could feel the village wrap around Port Noise. “We have to work out how we keep it like this, using the community,” Smyth said the day before. Woods agreed. “We want it to be sustainable. At this point I start to really miss making music”.
Despite their creative aspirations, the organisers said they are not interested in infinite growth for Port Noise. “I think a huge part of it for me is not trying to go into things with that ever-expanding mindset. I don’t want things to explode and it loses itself,” said Woods. What does appear to be important is finding ways to grow the festival’s potential as a site for collaboration and connection. “We don’t have the industry here like Auckland does, and we don’t always have the events for artists to get together,” said Smyth. “We’re interested in bringing people here, to meet artists here and see what happens from that. Introducing artists to each other is really important. For us it really is about that manaakitanga”.
All weekend I was struck by the ways in which the pair facilitated that kind of connection throughout the festival. The day after Port Noise wrapped, I blearily dragged myself out to a barbeque hosted at a friend’s house. When I arrived, sausages were already cooking, and artists and organisers alike were debriefing the previous day’s events. Despite having a bloody good time, the FOMO crept back in as I heard about all the excellent sets I didn’t manage to catch. Maybe the joy of a good music festival is in its choose-your-own-adventureness. You can’t see every cool, weird and exciting performance, especially if the festival is as stacked as Port Noise has proven to be. I guess I’ll just have to come back next year.
Click here to watch the Port Noise episode of In the Pits, an independent video-podcast series created by Tāmaki Makaurau based music die-hards Rachel Ashby, Zoë Larsen Cumming and Sports Team, aka Callum Devlin and Annabel Kean.
