Gathering Shadows 2022 - Three Night Festival Of Darkness Announced

Darkness dwellers from throughout Aotearoa will be making their way to the hallowed halls of Te Whanganui-a-Tara's Valhalla and San Fran this summer for the second ever edition of Gathering Shadows. A long weekend of dark arts and music presented in collaboration with Shadowplay, the three night festival will showcase live bands, DJs, performance artists, art and markets from 21st to 23rd January (Wellington Anniversary Weekend) — traversing such morbid sonic realms as goth, industrial, post-punk, darkwave and more. Sink your fangs deep into the spine-chilling bill below...

Gathering Shadows 2022

Friday 21st January - Valhalla, Wellington
Stars And The Underground, Nefarious Deeds, Wallowitch, The Masked Empress

Saturday 22nd January - Valhalla, Wellington
Creassault, DJ Mel, DJ Bradula, DJ Hallucination

Sunday 23rd January - San Fran
Plum Green, First Move, Noise, Evelyn’s War

Tickets available HERE via UTR

Listen to Stars and the Underground's 2020 single 'Nosferatu Upon Tyne'...

Check out 'Compromise' from First Move's 2019 Provincial Blight EP...

Artist biographies:

Friday, January 21st 2022 at Valhalla

Stars and the Underground - an Auckland band whose music combines aspects of post-punk, darkwave and shoegaze with their own unique style. Stars, as the band is known to their fans, has toured Australasia and is now currently writing its debut album.

Nefarious Deeds - a cracked lens viewing the less-salubrious facets of the human condition, the Christchurch husband and wife duo expresses their frustrations about the cold disconnection creeping into our everyday lives to expansive industrial rock, with the primary mission of wringing what joy can be wrought from... all this.

Wallowitch - a Wellington-based banshee exhumed from the crypt who now exists in the realms of dark EBM, macabre gothic melodies, and frighteningly icy coldwave.

The Masked Empress - like Bowie had Ziggy, this is the stage creation for musical artist Diana McKay performing the finest selection of her original songs from a twenty year musical career in bands Idols of Eve, Mynor Star & FireKiss. Diana blends multi-layered, gothic, operatic vocals over edgy, distorted guitar effects set to solid ‘80s beats.

Saturday, January 22nd 2022 at Valhalla

Creassault - a fusion of dark electronic music ranging from ambient to industrial techno which formed in 1996 by Drew Lyon. Their most recent release is the EP Eden Without End.

DJ Mel - a heartbreaker and a soul shaker since 1973! Mel is a long-standing pillar of Aotearoa’s goth scene and founder of its largest online group.

DJ Bradula - two decades holding the aux cable at dark-end club nights and house parties, and a co-founder of Shadowplay events, DJ Bradula knows how to get a room to Release the Bats with a selection of goth, industrial, new wave and synth classics.

DJ Hallucination - as a mainstay of Shadowlounge and Shadowplay events of yesterday, he will give his first set in Aotearoa in over 5 years since leaving us for Australia, USA and Canada. Expect classic 80s goth rock and 90s alternative.

Sunday, January 23rd 2022 at San Fran

Plum Green - with a voice that aches with the ocean's desire to connect and divide she summons ghosts, lovers and other creatures of the night, evoking and invoking them at will for her audience. Her performances take on the quality of a ritual journey into darkness, delivering listeners safely back in the sunlight on the other side. Melbourne-based Plum Green has most recently finished the album Somnambulistic: a nine track album of dark dreams which forms one overarching dream as a narrative and which will be released by Nefarious Industries in 2021.

First Move - a noise-rock outfit from Pāmutana / Te Whanganui a Tara. Music and words that explore landscapes and perspectives through the honoured traditions of voice, guitar, bass & drums.

Noise - an experimental art-rock six-piece, founded in New York City and based in Wellington, works with a palette borrowed from contemporary art-rock, modernist poetry, the weirder edges of electronic music, indie pop and post-punk.

Evelyn’s War - initially created as a solo studio project by Wellington musician, Illya Pearl, following the end of his former band, Etienne de Silhouette, post-punk trio Evelyn's War has now emerged as a fully-fledged band and has shifted away from the keyboard-centric sound of the debut release to fashion a more guitar-based approach.