Throwin’ Bo’s presents:
School Fair
School Fair (Findlay Buchanan, Semisi Ma’ia’i, Hamish Morgan, De Stevens and Rose Pickernell) make music embedded in the human experience. It’s a product of the band’s native New Zealand, a place that remains intimate and remote, where emotion is magnified over both distance and familiarity. The five band members began the project renting out a factory-sized, sub-zero degree Celsius room normally operated by construction workers in the industrial area of Ōtepoti, Dunedin, New Zealand in 2021, recording music on the 4-track tape recorder that would become debut Gorse on a Hill. The album remained the only trace of the band online for a few years, an artifact for those who know where to look. School Fair’s music has this sense of self-discovery when you find it, a sound that feels both recognizable and like the vacant expanse of a country whirring by on a train. Still with little to no self-promotion, the appearance of sophomore effort Bird the Kid online in early 2025 was a new portal to their world of melodic and intricate indie music that retains a kind of atmospheric beauty.
Unexpected Violence (Mutual, 2026) is the first record made between geographical places, with the band now split in between London and New Zealand. You can hear this fragmented approach in the patchwork quality and inherent connective tissue of the album. Recorded initially in a studio in East London, it was the first time the band brought in an outside engineer (Syd Kemp?), as opposed to the band’s prior live recordings, where the tendency was to “feed back off each other in quite a messy abstract and complicated way that works for us but isn’t typically structured.” The band then took these recordings and evolved them back home in Dunedin, with the addition of vocals on some tracks by Pickernell adding to the cohesive energy and collective, dialed-in synergy of the quintet.
School Fair is built upon the many eclectic mediums from which the band members individually create: time spent repairing old machines, making short films, metalworking and jewelry-making, writing and engineering. All these counterparts bring a kind of industrial electricity to the music where each part feels necessary and agile, as well as perfectly in conjunction. It’s these points beneath the surface where the songs really bloom. The moody transference of guitar lick to guttural vocal and back again, where melody conjoins with surprising inflection and sharp-hued ambiance, littered with both poetic spoken-word and a self-referentiality of clues and repetition that rewards close listening yet remains accessible and immediate.
Transportive lyrics shine with the lore and mythology of a world that is both deeply specific and transcendent in its curiosity toward the surrounding environment. Unexpected Violence is filled with resounding descriptors: from “cat runs blind in the smoke / birds slap their wings away / trees thrash and crash / each lonely in their chosen way” (the meandering “Angelika”) or the consequently spellbinding phrasing of “come out to your dead animal river gushing hard / come out to your heart split open and lit up with stars” of “In Boredom You Shoot Your Gun”. It’s a starkly poetic snapshot into the band’s own universe and a showcase in the thoroughfare of language, where the specificity of one person’s memory counteracts with a landscape that blurs and unravels with the passage of time. Unexpected Violence a record that could only be made in a place like New Zealand, yet its vantage point expands far beyond to the vast unwieldiness of human sentiment. “There’s a sense of remoteness to the record, both emotionally but also in the sense of place, broken farms, cast iron beaches, blank midday fires, lost friends.” Or as the band recites in the austere glimmer of “Spirally Staircase Memory”: “memories are just stories that can’t be found.” But School Fair reaches some sort of access point, a way for them to live on.
The name Unexpected Violence was born out of Buchanan and Ma’ia’i coming across the genre title in a bookstore in Berlin, and is a fitting discernment of the heartbreak that often comes with the realities of existence. In album highlight “Gussied Up,” the band intones: “I never never never ever / wanna hear you / see you, feel you or touch you.” It’s a harsh statement that feels swept up in the parallel admission that these are relationships you may never fully escape; they have left their mark. We still pass the places they inhabit, and feel the uncanny emptiness even after moving on. It’s fitting that the record ends on a similar contradiction. Just discernable above spirals of drummed up, ambient noise: “I miss you now you’re gone.” For all things can be true at once.
goldenstar
Montreal’s goldenstar operate within a distinctly fraught strain of the North American musical canon, dancing in (and emerging from) the shadow of beloved forebears like Duster, Sonic Youth, and Sparklehorse. Their self-released 2025 debut EP alongside a sophomore release on OST have established the band as an essential voice on the contemporary slowcore-noise rock continuum.
Poor Image
Poor Image is a 7 piece emo/americana tinged slowcore band based in the Bay Area. The project came to fruition when members Reid Devereaux, Nick Ferguson, Keenan Lewis, Declan Lewis, Patrick Madden, Tammer Bagdasarian and Nick Ross, who spent their formative years between Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and San Jose participating in the broader bay area music scene, decided to join forces. Poor Image’s recent debut self titled album out on American Death Records is about coming of age strife and trying to “make it” in the age of supersaturation.
As written by Nina Protocol, Poor Image’s debut album “...refers back to a micro-glory age of low-stakes indie music in a way that could only come from a band a few generations removed from the source material. It finds a perfect balance between slowcore and Americana; it incorporates a variety of roots-leaning instrumental flourishes when it needs to; it rocks when it needs to”. Featured on Perfectly Imperfect as ones to watch, Poor Image has recently come off national tours opening for Horse Vision & Dutch Interior and are currently recording their second album.
DOORS at 7:00PM | MUSIC at 8:00 PM