Messed!Up
Forget stadium rock. On 7 October, Auckland’s Whammy Bar becomes ground zero for a far more intriguing kind of guitar spectacle when two cult heroes of experimental music – Papa M and Mick Turner – share the stage for a rare and seriously unmissable night.
Papa M is the solo guise of David Pajo, the multi-instrumentalist whose fingerprints are all over the history of American alternative music. From Slint and its genre-defining post-rock to collaborations with Tortoise, Stereolab and The For Carnation, Pajo has spent decades pushing the guitar into stranger, quieter and more unpredictable territory. As Papa M, he turns fractured melodies, drones, folk influences and ambient textures into music that can feel simultaneously intimate and enormous.
Then there’s Mick Turner, the Melbourne guitar visionary best known as a founding member of Dirty Three. Turner has made a career out of finding beauty in space and silence, building atmospheric ambient pieces from delicate guitar lines, drones and beautifully understated noise. His solo work and collaborations with artists including Cat Power, Will Oldham and Ben Chasny have cemented his reputation as one of Australia’s most distinctive experimental musicians.
And this isn’t their first encounter. Pajo and Turner first toured Australia and New Zealand together 26 years ago. Now they’re reconnecting for a rare run of intimate shows, bringing decades of musical history, experimentation and restless creativity into small rooms.
Expect guitars without the rulebook: hypnotic passages, fractured melodies, ambient washes and moments that could veer somewhere completely unexpected. This is music built for close listening, and for getting lost in.
