I haven’t bought a CD in a while but I was strolling down Wellington’s Cuba Street looking for a bit of inspiration the other day when Liam Finn’s music tapped me politely on the shoulder and dragged me into the music store. Liam is New Zealand music royalty, of Neil Finn descent, although — with his wild hair and beard — he’s looking a bit more like a young Jesus these days. The record is made with the help of an analogue loop machine, and you’ll find the kind of stunning instrumental crescendos that I haven’t heard since The Beatles Hey Jude. He engages emotionally and spontaneously, with both skill and showmanship.

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A personal favourite, Stolen Girlfriends Club continues to give a welcome fix of delinquency to the New Zealand fashion scene. Their initial following cherished their oversized t-shirts with cheeky slogans, but while they are in no danger of maturing (thankfully), their range of garments develop each season to cover denims, knits and such covertable items as silver hot pants. Their latest release, unashamedly entitled Elegantly Wasted, will allow you to look completely fabulous while behaving badly. Combining black and white with electric metallics and an alcoholic lime, it’s the kind of clothing you were meant to blow all your cash on before committing to your rent.

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New for the world of Retroism is Hackman, a New Zealand based design collective that brings a hearty serving of vintage simplicity to the cluttered table of the modern world. Operating since 2002, their debut product is the Guinea Pig – a speaker for your iPod or MP3 player, Discman, Walkman, portable record player – any product that you can plug headphones into. The Pig requires no power source of it’s own, aiding you on your journey to ‘carbon neutrality’. It also allows you amplification capabilities without the restrictions of a pesky wall plug or battery. As well as being functional and sustainable, The Guinea Pigs are made from some very handsome hardboard and then laser cut with there own pattern. Hand assembled, individually named and numbered where they will be found the Pig Orphanage section of their website. Among those up for adoption include Brenda, Baby, and Scarface.

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Paris House is a leatherwear brand emerging out of Wellington with a range of wallets, bags and temporary tattoos. With Sharon Paris at the helm, her latest collection, Belief creates a Victorian medical visual and is being stocked at World, Hailwood and The Good Room. My problem is the inclusion on the C word. Elevation to the status of ‘conceptual’ seems a bit fair fetched to me, because I could have sworn I was looking at a bunch of wallets. ‘Idiosyncratic’ statements merely hide behind a veil of ambiguity. If anyone can figure out the meaning of ‘It would appear that people believe in medicine, but they don’t believe in art without questioning either’, I will personally offer you a prize for doing so. So buy the pseudo-conceptual wallets if you dig the comments but if you are trying to decipher the higher meaning, I would be tempted to say you are looking into it too much. And admittedly, I have bought much sillier things because I was seduced by a strong aesthetic.

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Stu Barr has created a nest for himself by the name of Butterfly Net, tucked away in Ponsonby, Auckland. A self-confessed patriot of New Zealand design, when he came to finding a studio space, it occurred to him that if he combined it with retail capabilities it would allow him a forum not just for his own projects but for other Kiwi designers who couldn’t commit to the large orders of other stores. And a wide net he casts too, with furniture, fashion, knives, sunglasses, pottery and a different artist featured each month. It is not the first multi-disciplinary design venture for Barr. He is of award winning Tio fame, creating furniture with changeable upholstery in collaboration with New Zealand fashion houses such as World and Zambesi. One gets the distinct impression that half of the prize for Barr is getting to talk to customers about all things design and with all stock being limited and with no more ‘out the back’, heading out with his net to catch up on more beautiful examples of New Zealand art and design.

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Sometimes when you look at an image you just want to pick it up and eat it with a spoon. And just sometimes this happens over illustrations depicting a pregnant woman murdering her husband with a leg of ham and then feeding it to the investigating officers. A recent graduate working out of Wellington, New Zealand, Sarah Anderson’s illustrations of Roald Dahl’s Lambs To The Slaughter are a bit too beautiful. She also pays clever attention to all that festers under the surface: ‘while the grotesque humour makes it hard to take the story seriously, further examination reveals it to be an insightful examination of the conflict between the face one presents to society and one’s hidden inner nature’. [see also Peter Ferguson]

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