Musician Jono Aidney was born and raised in Auckland City, but like many of New Zealand's most talented, he is currently based in Melbourne, Australia. Oliver Page managed to catch Jono during his week-long visit home to chat to him about his latest project, and his battles with illness and its effect on his art.
Listen to Oliver Page speak to Jono Aidney in On The Dial.
Jono originally decided to set up camp in Melbourne to take advantage of the city's potential job market, but ongoing battle with Ulcerative Colitis forced him to rethink his direction in life. Following several major operations, Jono spent months at a time in hospital, forcing him to quit his job.
A silver lining was the time that he was afforded to work on his art, allowing him to shift the direction of his career to what inspired him the most. “For pretty much 10 years, I was in severe pain and on a lot of opiates, and on antibiotics. It kind of, it puts you in a strange place, mentally.”
Jono says being on that many painkillers makes it very difficult to control one’s thinking. “There were good moments and there were bad moments. When I was up in the States it was, my health was quite good. As far as it affected the art, there’s just kind of this frustration that I carry everywhere with me that my body is, just like, letting me down.”
“And not just me, its like, every romantic relationship I’ve been in; my body’s letting both of us down.”
Supplied/Christian Woodmansey
Jono is first and foremost a musician, releasing work under the moniker 'Quail State'. His new album is called The Volcanic Hazards of Auckland. Its cover art (his own design) depicts the six dormant volcanos that dot Auckland City's landscape. The design, he says, expresses a kind of elaborate metaphor, the volcanos representing the fallout from relationships. “An ever present threat of that we leave lying around the city as we go about making bad decisions, having bad break ups. We can never really escape them. They hang over us.”
Forgoing a traditional album launch, Jono decided to celebrate his new work with a showing at the Yes Collective Gallery. Rather than a simple live performance of his music, he opted to use his album as a kind of soundtrack for an exhibition of new works by young visual artists from around New Zealand, playing the album on the gallery's sound system while invited guests mulled around the space, chatting and enjoying the work on display.
In curating the show Jono approached artists whose work he had admired and gave them a brief, based on the themes of his music. “I said, it’s kind of about volcanoes, but it’s kind of not... it was very deliberate, I didn’t want the work to be of the same style, which is why I (sought out) some water colours, and some oils, there was some illustration work, plus my own prints. So it was quite deliberately a wide range of styles.”
His unorthodox approach to launching his album was inspired by the necessity of travelling light, “When I moved to Melbourne, the one thing that I did take with me was all of my artwork. I thought, it would be so great to take just the one thing that I really like about records, the beautiful cover art and big graphic prints. I really love that iconic cover design. And so I thought let’s take that, and make that the thing that people buy." With every work sold in the gallery, Jono included a Soundcloud link for a free download of his album.
You can learn more about Jono's work at Bandcamp.
