A big thanks to Ingrown Records for featuring Rained Down on the Outsider Radio Show #27. For reference Rained Down plays at 2:21:04 during the show.
I’d highly recommend checking out their excellently curated shows on their website or on Mixcloud. They also have a great range of records for sale and merch as well!
Wake into While is the last track from Dreams EP and has just been released in the final throes of 2025. This is a song about new beginnings and being present in the here and now.
The Dreams EP is a vibrant, grounded work that invites listeners to engage with their own creative journeys and aspirations. It consists of six tracks, each accompanied by visual media that enhances the thematic exploration of dreams. The music spans a diverse range of styles, with some tracks evoking dreamlike atmospheres and others narrating experiences that exist solely in the realm of imagination.
As 2025 draws to a close and the last track from Dreams EP has just been sent to the distributor, it’s time to run back over the last years work.
This is a song called Rained Down — a bass-driven track, originally written on guitar and Fender Rhodes, where complex-yet-subtle layers of textural sounds ebb and flow to create a distorted, other-worldly and dreamlike environment for a voice that speaks about reaching through uncertainty to catch your dreams.
From the second verse “ Ghost-like face uncertainty, one moment you’re trapped the next you’re free, a sea of dreams the people need, and the last thing you can’t see yourself.”
Shot on 35mm film, Mark Howden’s Sun is Through draws inspiration from the remoteness and grandeur of the New Zealand landscape and from the allure of aerial photography.
Originally filmed in 2000 for a thesis project that focused on the concept of multi-site audio-visual installation art. Titled sub.ssi — sub as in under, and ssi an acronym for “site specific installation”. The film footage was compiled with music as a “soundtracks album” and was exhibited simultaneously at three different locations. The main event was at an aircraft hangar at Ardmore Aerodrome, Auckland, NZ (where the Cessna aeroplane used for the project was housed), it was also telecast on Triangle Television in Grey Lynn, and installed as screen art at Auckland University of Technology’s exhibition space. For the event, Mark chartered a bus that picked the audience up from designated bus stops in downtown Auckland and carried them to and from the aircraft hangar venue.
Fast-forward to 2025, the film footage has been updated and recontextualised with this new soundtrack from Mark’s Karaka Sound Studio for the Dreams EP.
The film footage was shot from a Cessna aeroplane over several remote locations in the North Island of New Zealand — from Lake Waikaremoana to Lake Taupo, crossing the Waikato north to Manakau Heads and up the West Coast of the North Island to Ninety Mile Beach, where we landed and drove up the sand to the Northernmost point (Tiriparepa/Scott Point).
“I wanted to create a style of film that situated itself somewhere between documentary and ethnographic film, music videos, and multimedia installation art. The project was site-specific in the sense that it played on the idea that, depending on where you showed the work determined how a viewer interpreted it. So, at an aircraft hangar, it was a creative happening-type show with the footage being projected onto the bodies of aeroplanes and the music being played over loudspeakers, on Triangle Television it functioned as a series of music videos, and at AUT it was contemplated as an audio-visual screen art installation. Now with the additional factor of time, 25 years to be specific, the recontextualisation gives the work a subsequent meaning. While photographing the landscape, I had constant awareness that the subject I was involved with would inevitably change, much would disappear, and what I was filming was a moment in time for posterity. Working with this footage now evokes this concept for the Dreams EP, literally what I was working with is from another reality and is now a dream”.
It was so excellent to see Chords, track 2 from the Dreams EP featured here. Shoegazer Alive is a great blog/playlist/Facebook group with a really good selection of music. I’d highly recommend anyone interested in the genre to check it out.
I do have one tip though :)
Please, playlisters, bloggers, reviewers, music channels, platforms et al — if you do come across music and decide to use it for your own purposes by featuring it on your blog, playlist or website..or all the above, find the time to like it, subscribe to it and respect the artists by notifying them. Yes, we know you are busy listening to music, but not only will artists thank you for it and most likely pay it back, you help make the world a better place!
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Mark Howden 