Listen To WAIWHAI.'s Debut Album 'Slowdown World'

Leading light of Aotearoa's sonically boundless underground, Rāhana Tito-Taylor (Te Parawhau, Te Uriroroi, Ngāti Māhuta) today unveils Slowdown World, the debut album from the multi-instrumentalist / producer's project WAIWHAI. — a new release from the always impeccable Noa Records. Slowdown World "is an affirmation of transmutation, resistance in noise" incorporating a variety of taonga pūoro as part of the long player's multi-dimensional, collectively composed palette, featuring a stellar cast including Julien Dyne, Riki Pirihi, Cory Champion, Abigail Aroha Jensen, Jeff Henderson, Navākatoa Tekela-Pule, and many more. Opening this weekend's Outlier Festival of electronic music / sound visionaries, where WAIWHAI. will play in collaboration with Wear Pounamu tonight at Hollywood Avondale, allow your ears to explore Slowdown World and learn about the kaupapa of the record below...

"Noa Records presents, the debut album of Rāhana Tito-Taylor (Te Parawhau, Te Uriroroi, Ngāti Māhuta) under the moniker WAIWHAI, here materialised as a psychedelic cumulation of collective compositions guided by the philosophies and aesthetic expressions of sci-fi screw-jazz, eco-noise, and puoro punk: SLOWDOWN WORLD.

Dreamed up in a time of collective trauma, abject paranoia and anxiety moving out of the tail end of 2021, SLOWDOWN WORLD, apparent to its name, asks us to SLOW DOWN, moving gently while the status quo is asking in fear and preservation for us to speed up, to be more productive. SLOWDOWN WORLD draws attention to joy and horror, in a world of ongoing colonial oppression and denial of harm, ecological abuse via self-servitude and capitalism, and perpetuation of ways of being that are destructive to ourselves and te taiao. Ēngari, it is also a world of beauty - our bodies know, the whenua knows. SLOWDOWN WORLD is an affirmation of transmutation, resistance in noise, and abiding in our fullest selves in spite of seeming insurmountable pressures in the world today; a message potently met and encapsulated during a week of triumph in aroha following the Toi Tū Te Tiriti hikoi ki te Paremata ō Aotearoa (19/11/24), a resounding reverberation from the unification of indigenous resistance across the world in recent times.

This album is born of a gentle karanga towards rest and re-unification, simply for knowing".

'Slowdown World' is out now on Bandcamp via Noa Records, releasing on streaming services next week.