Wellington City Libraries

Te Matapihi Ki Te Ao Nui

Search options

Band Sensations

Decade(s) active:

Elsewhere online:

We say:

Band Sensations are an experimental art sound glitterbang band who perform live approximately once a year. Band members Amos Mann, Sian Torrington and Creek Waddington describe their music as “diverse mini-atmospheres with ecologies of sound, action and words.”

Improvisation plays an important role in Band Sensations’ music, with notation used only as a starting point during performances. Sian Torrington has contrasted this with her early musical experiences, including several years of compulsory piano.

Richard Haynes, Waka Atea, Band SensationsSound Explorers, September 11, 2014

Creek Waddington also samples Band Sensations as part of their solo work, currently available on SoundCloud. Band Sensations’ latest production, ‘Free Range Harriet’, was recorded live at Pyramid Club and released in March 2017.

They released their debut album in 2021, by far their most substantial project to date. It’s called ‘Flames in the trees, come be with me’ and is online at Bandcamp and Spotify as well as other normal streaming places, and available in CD format. According to the band the title is in reference to the ways we try to hold it together as we watch dystopian futures unfold (it’s a lyric from track 8, Orang-utan).

‘Flames in the trees, come be with me’ was conceived as a dystopian dance album but has strayed into pop lands, spoken ground, anthem country, and the animal wilderness. It contains songs about climate change, plums, dogs both dead and alive, plans of the elite to escape to outer space, and howling. Entirely independently produced from recording, mixing and mastering to the album sleeve design, it took them three and a-half years to make and was launched with well-attended scenic album tours as a Dunedin Fringe Festival event. (Two of them are from Dunedin originally.) Two separate and unrelated passengers on different tours described this album as “surprisingly uplifting” given its subject matter… And Amos’s uncle said it was a “nice bent recording”.

They are still practising together regularly and still making a public appearance on average once a year. In 2019 and 2020, these annual performances were in Wellington galleries: play_station and Toi Pōneke respectively. The play_station appearance was part of Unknown Gifts, in which the performers involved all received a mystery gift, and used that as the starting point for improvisation. The Toi Pōneke performance was in lieu of Sian Torrington’s artist talk, in response to her exhibition ‘I’m Glad You’re Here, Just the Way You Are’. This exhibition was among the first to open in Wellington after the national lockdown, and their sonic response was likewise presented to people still emerging from their sense of confinement. It was very warmly received.

In 2019, Band Sensations was also a contributor to issue 70 of the Wellington zine Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People. This issue came with a compilation CD of artists’ tribute versions of Miley Cyrus songs. Band Sensations contributed a rendition of ‘I Can’t Be Tamed’.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *