Grounded by Jet Jaguar

This is my fifth solo album, shy of 18 years after my first. The name 'Grounded' has its positive and negative sides. On the former, there's the meanings like anchored, settled, feeling part of a place; on the latter, a thing that can't get airborne or a kid who's not allowed to hit the town. When I'm making music, some days I feel so calm and confident in what I'm doing, based on a couple of decades' experience. Other days I feel stuck making the same old moves and wondering where it's all going. Both sides get me writing, just in quite different ways. That mix of calm and restless is something I reckon I share with lots of others who feel the urge to make stuff.

The other reason 'Grounded' felt right as a name is that so many of the tracks on the album either contain really old musical fragments or field recordings I made while travelling. So they're either grounded in history or grounded in a place, for me. They're all new tracks, but some started from lifting bits and pieces from a folder of sketches from back in 2004. Sometimes I took multiple sounds and combined them, other times it was taking the ideas for processing or structuring a track and applying them to a new set of sounds. You can hear recordings from Évora in Portugal, Cadíz in Spain, and the Hawkes Bay and Lake Tarawera in New Zealand.

New Zealand music maker Michael Upton, releasing under this name since '96.

Also often collaborating, part of Tonkyn Pearson (formerly Montano), Takamu, and more.

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