Kita pull together after lockdown
Nikita Tu-Bryant is back in Wellington after a week ‘‘off the grid’’ surfing, writing and enjoying some phone-free time to allow the next batch of songs to ‘‘start tapping you on the shoulder again’’.
Tu-Bryant fronts Kita with keyboardist Ed Zuccollo (The Black Seeds, Trinity Roots, Troy Kingi, Hollie Smith) and drummer Rick Cranson (Little Bushmen).
Since emerging from lockdown the group have been busy workshopping songs, recording, mixing and mastering their new self-titled album and filming videos to accompany singles Private Lives and Envy.
The album is due for release on May 28 and in June an eightcentre tour will take the band all over the country.
Lockdown forced an unexpected creative process on the group’s latest recording. The band members were separated but able to access each other’s contributions online.
‘‘It morphed into this beautiful collaborative experience. Ed and I would Skype each other. We’d say ‘this is the key, this is the tempo, we’ve got 20 minutes’. We’d send each other the rough recordings and listen to them at the same time. Eighty per cent of the songs on the album were written like that,’’ she said.
The trio’s music blends synth pop keyboard layers and soulful beats underpinned by Tu-Bryant’s rock-influenced guitar playing and melodic vocals.
Born in Taiwan and raised in Auckland, Tu-Bryant moved to Wellington when she was 18 to study jazz. The jazz scene connected her with Zuccollo but Tu-Bryant struggled to identify with the purists on the course.
‘‘It took me about halfway through to realise I didn’t really like jazz. I wasn’t so caught up in it. I just wanted to have the tools to be able to paint the things I was saying with sound,’’ she said.
Finding herself as an outsider is a recurrent theme for TuBryant. Growing up she said she wrestled with the internal dissonance between her Taiwanese heritage and her Western upbringing.
‘‘I’m a feminist and Taiwanese culture is really patriarchal. So being onstage as an Asian woman. You shouldn’t be outspoken. You shouldn’t be drawing attention. You shouldn’t be desirable. This is something I’m working through all the time,’’ she said.
Performing live, Tu-Bryant stands centre stage, a splash of movement and colour between Cranson and Zuccollo’s more visually static drum kit and keyboards.
From speaking Mandarin as her first language to her Pa¯ keha¯ father’s rock record collection and Zuccollo and Cranson’s virtuosity, Kita is an unlikely combination that yields a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
‘‘We often say that the Mini Moog [synth] that Ed plays bass lines on is our fourth member,’’ Tu-Bryant said.
Kita recently opened the female-focused Peachy Keen festival in Wellington. Tu-Bryant is as proud of being involved in the event as she is of her male band members backing her desire for more female leadership in the music industry.
‘‘The music industry is so male-dominated. To be a part of a music festival that is wa¯ hine led was really important to me. Ed and Rick are massive allies in supporting these ideas – I work with awesome men,’’ Tu-Bryant said.
Kita’s music embraces a collision of gender, cultures and genres as a means of promoting an open, inclusive mindset, but Tu-Bryant said the bottom line was simply to affect their audience.
‘‘Music is a space where all the influences and elements come together. It becomes a common ground where we can find something as opposed to being told to do something.
‘‘We just want to make people feel, that’s the reason why we do it,’’ she said.
‘‘Music is a space where all the influences and elements come together. It becomes a common ground where we can find something as opposed to being told to do something.’’ Nikita Tu-Bryant