The Love Which Moves the Sun and Other Stars
REMNANTS
that were left for me alone
making music with ghosts is awful
but NIISA was never meant to end on GRAVE
so here are the REMNANTS
here are the beautiful moments
from a time far before now
when the sun still shone
having no alternative
on nothing new
the trust

REMNANTS gathered from
the recording sessions for NIISA - NIISO in 2017 at Bruce Farm
Adison and I's bedroom at Stanmore
Reuben's garage on Lancing/Georing (the birthplace of NIISA)

LISTEN WITH AN OPEN HEART
WITH EARTH TOUCHING UR FEET

1. Take me back to the beginning of his project: What is Niisa, how was it formed, who was involved, what was its intention?

Niisa was a band with me, Adison Whitley and Reuben Winter which formed sometime in 2015. Adison and I were dating at the time, very in love, attached at the hip as they say and we were hanging out with Reuben almost everyday. He was making a lot of really serious music alone as Milk and Totems while playing for P.H.F. and Roidz, Adison was playing in Cheats, Heroes For Sale and recording for his solo project David Adison and i was drumming for Greenfog, Shacklock Meth Party, Couchmaster, The Pleasure Majenta and heaps of other bands, so we were all in need of something that was silly, fun, really really really heavy and that we all had equal creative control over. So, we just started jamming in Reuben’s garage, it felt like it was already written. We began making music with very little intention for it to be a whole *thing*, no intention to record or tour or play shows, those all just sorta fell in our lap and we were like, okay sure! 

We had a lot of really lovely rituals and traditions as NIISA, for example, we had band practice twice every week no matter what, but we did it kind of differently. If we didn't feel like being loud, we would just go see a movie together, or sit around finding new music, talk about music, engineering techniques, gear. I remember we spent an entire afternoon drawing a map for the song structure of ‘Earthmover’ by Have A Nice Life because we were so enraptured by it. We would go for drives and walks out in the waitakere ranges, talk about our feelings, philosophy, watch music documentaries, read comics silently together, play video games. Adison would often sit there drawing while me and Reuben were just yabbering about everything. Band practice was thought about as intentional time with each other, with no obligation to show up in any particular state of mind, or to achieve anything. This created a kind of safety that I had never had in any band before. We were all struggling really really really badly with our mental health so it was important that we made it not just about ROCKMUSIC, but love and acceptance. No matter how bad and fucked up we were feeling, being consistant supporters for each other was the priority, which made the times we did make music together, effortless and very intimate. I think it created a different level of connection that seems to be perceivable in our music and is the foundation to it.

2. When/how was the music that makes up Remnants recorded?

All the elements from REMNANTS were captured between 2015-2017 when we were most active as a band. The majority of the recordings were from our session at Bruce Farm where we recorded NIISO. At this mistical location in the middle of fucking nowhere, is a huge empty faded red barn on a deer farm (well, empty apart from the thick layer of pigeon shit that coated the entire floor which we spent a whole day sweeping out with tshirts wrapped around our faces) that offered an incredible metal edged natural reverb. Before and between tracking the ‘songs’ we had ‘written’ for NIISO, we spent a lot of time playing around making soundscapes, improvising. We set up in a way where all we had to do was press record so we could capture as many of these moments as possible, at all hours of the day and night. We obviously ended up having too many songs for a respectably lengthed album, so a lot of them sat unused, forgotten or very shortened. Also present on the album is a haunted cassette recording from one of our first practices in Reuben’s garage, practices I recorded with a single mic in me and Adison’s small room which we would occasionally squeeze a drum kit into, phone recordings of us hanging out and talking shit, and the vocal overdub sessions we did into a storm drain pipe in Cox’s Bay, and in the bunkers on the North Shore.

3. Talk to me about your thoughts on the project after Adison and Reuben passed? - What was your feeling towards Niisa, how did your relationship with the music change?

Niisa was already my most cherished band I had ever had the privilege to be part of, i looked up to Reuben and Adison in a big way before we became friends, I was completely obsessed with David Adison and Caroles. I regarded being in a band with them as a “holy shit iv made it’ moment, that they wanted to make music with me, and that it felt so good and easy, and that people liked our music was huge and so much fun.

When Adison died, Rueben helped me an indefinable amount with that hugeness of grief, and wasn't afraid to talk about the darkness that was forming in us. We talked about trying to re-release NIISO during this time, with grand ideas to send it to massive labels like southern lord and press vinyls, to honour Adison and the music we made together. However these plans were drowned in the wetness of grief. 

After Reuben died a few years later, I had this extremely SHARP and HEAVY realisation that I was the last one left and it was now my duty alone to do something with NIISA, to finish it somehow. 

NIISA, especially NIISO now feels like a grave stone, or a photograph, a small moment in a life of three people bound together by shared trauma and suffering, who found each other in the dark. A private voice recording of a conversation between three deeply damaged, traumatised, hurt and afraid people. NIISO sometimes scares me now, we really expressed some very dark and evil shit and put it into that album. REMNANTS hopefully shows more that it was three people, who loved each other so deeply and wanted to keep trying in spite of all the pain.

4. How did you rediscover the project? (How did you find the songs, was there an 'oh shit what is this' moment?)

I believe i was looking through an old hard drive a year or so after Reuben died and found a folder within a folder, named something suspicious, opened the abelton file, saw the words “ru and adiswan in my room”, pressed play and just lay on the ground in shock as i heard a recording of us I don't think i had ever listened to. It was an extremely long recording of us jamming and talking, and had the conversation that was the birth of GRAVE I+II in it. It felt like I was in the room again. It was one of the most intense experiences to time travel like that. 

I kept digging and found more but put them aside for when I felt more emotionally fortified to deal with their existence. I forgot about it a couple times and re-found them, my brain couldn't keep it in there. 

After i had worked on the album for a little while on and off for maybe a year or more, I found one more recording deep in a hard drive, which is now Closing. It was the final piece I needed and the most apt musical capturing of us that I think exists. It was really intense to listen to, and hurt very much, but it also made me smile while I was weeping. That song made me realise how beautiful it is to feel loss so strongly because you loved so strongly.

5. How did you go about forming the rough takes into an album? What was the practical process, what was the physical/emotional impact of the labour, and how did you push through it to create this?

Making this into an album was a very spiritually guided process, I followed the signs. I had always felt extremely connected to Reuben and Adison after their deaths, they graciously haunted me and still do. My home in Anawhata, where most of the work was done, seemed to be a place they both ghosted about within, which was confirmed to me by the sharing of many friend’s dreams of visiting them at that house. Whenever the conditions were right, full moon, an enduring storm, home alone on a cold night with ample firewood to have it burning for hours, when I felt the silent push or maybe pull to do it, when i felt deathly alone, I would work on it gently, and I felt that they were with me during those moments.

It had to be done over several years, there is no way I would have been able to make it all in one go without completely losing grip on reality. It certainly took a toll on my mental health, I had little bouts of paranoid psychosis within that house, which thanks to a few friends and my really cool therapist, I made it out of. Although I'm hesitant to blame this album for that, perhaps working on it (and another ghosts album..) gave me something to do when I was already there (elsewhere). 

The practical process of piecing it together and mixing it is really difficult to talk about because it was so intuitive, guided, and a lot of it is lost to my memory so unfortunately that shall remain a mystery to everyone.

6. How has your relationship to the Niisa project changed over the process of creating this album? 

I think there have been 3 distinct phases which i flicked through in a most random fashion when working on REMNANTS:

• DO IT - you have to do it, it hurts, it hurts really good though, a nice pain, with your brothers again, do it, this is my job alone, it is my duty, a gift and a burden i must carry with grace

• *it doesn’t exist*

• OH NO why am i doing this, nobody wants this, dont take up space, dont trigger everyone, dont talk about it, hold it close, but dont touch it, shhhh
  
  

I've definitely been able to zoom out and see the greater impact this has had on my entire life since releasing it though. We had made agreements with each other, through our years of being each others main support people, and through the ritual of that band, that we would not do it (it, it). We talked about it freely with each other, removing the stigma and fear of talking about our mutual want to die but did everything we could for each other to make it easier to not. It took a few years of being hurt by their leaving, but eventually this pain turned into a furious and unrelenting NEED to be SO FUCKING ALIVE, and live really really hard, for them, inspite of their leaving.

7. How has your relationship with Adi and Reuben grown/changed throughout this process? By spending such deep time and attention to the creative energy of them through this album, and by collaborating with them across time and space, have you learned or discovered anything that you want to share?

I'm not really sure I know how to express what it's like to spend so much time with ghosts, at some points more time with ghosts than with the living. There are endless things I have learnt from them and about them and about death and about myself, about music, and making art, being alive, loving, being alone and what it is to capture a slice of a soul in a song.

I think the best way I can say it is in abstraction:

There is a certain kind of yellow air

That descends upon a bleeding person

a fog that blurs the outside place

the real place 

And you slip down into elsewhere

HOUSE OF DEATH

Many things can meet you there

Fire (warm)

Sharp stones

A few tales (three)

So many sticks, some sharpened some blunt

Levels of hell like dante told it

a horrible, horrible forest

one very large tree and all its children

Several shapes

Birds and badgers and a skillgate gardner

The smell of lemons

It quite beautiful really

AWAY

Be careful to not bleed too much though

Breathe the yellow for too long

They are seeking a way back

Sometimes

Sometimes they want to take you with them

COME AWAY

If you keep some blood for yourself

They will understand

Maybe itl bring some joy back for them

Playing tricks on you again

Stealing your guitar picks

Giving you back a lost cassette (please)

Tickling your head when you need to see the moon

Sometimes they will play the gig for you

if you really need the help

Or make you cry when you see someone smile

very occasionally it will rain just for you

Or a moth will come to die at the end of your bed

And then 4 years later when you buy a guitar on the other side of the world

Give you back your guitar picks

To say “please keep making music”
COME AWAY FROM DEATH

A funny joke

Don't try to understand them

They are multiplicities just like you

You see, Several selves exist at once

All the time

In every place

It seems the only option is

To keep your eyes very open

Keep your glasses clean

and live so hard

That the fog can't keep up with you

No, Actually 

i suppose you learn to blow it away

The fog

And if you move with aroha first

with the earth touching your feet

The fog will hold all ten toes firmly to the ground

And then they will let go of your hand

Release you back to the world

So much more alive than when you left it, bleeding

With their guitar picks in your hand (for now)

And you have now felt and seen

The Love Which Moves the Sun and Other Stars

oxoxox
Charlie