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GRAEME JEFFERIES AND THE CAKEKITCHEN BIO


The Cakekitchen comes from the stable of “New Zealand” bands from the 1980s and has released a large amount of material into the international marketplace via labels such as Flying Nun, Homestead, Merge, Raffmond, and Haus Musik. The brain child of Taranaki born New Zealand songwriter Graeme Jefferies, “The Cakekitchen” is more a song writing and recording project than a live “meat and potatoes” band but has never the less put together live ensembles to occasionally represent the material in a live context.

Graeme has a small mobile studio of fairly vintage recording equipment that he manages to ship around the world on palettes to which ever country he wants to write songs in. He has lived in and written songs in England, France, Holland and Germany. Like Graeme’s earlier recording project “This Kind of Punishment”, The Cakekitchen’s music is primarily recorded in houses and hallways without any form of deadline, rather than in big studios over a few weeks.

It champions the no longer widely used ethic of making records in the “Teac four track” style of recording. Instruments and song texture can be widely varied from song to song and instruments can change on a dime inside of the context of the actual song structures themselves. Albums are slowly accumulated over a “period of years”, their contents drawn from a fairly constant stream of songwriting and improvising.

Sounds from the environment, such as “water and wind” often appear in the music and are of equal importance in achieving the desired effect as a “cello or viola” part. Graeme plays a wide variety of instruments and often plays everything himself. Other times he enlists the help of a hand picked group of friends and musicians. Performances also vary considerably and can just be a “solo show”, with Graeme playing a number of different instruments himself or a group outing involving “three or four other people”.

Musicians who have added their ingredients to the baking of these projects include respected Auckland drummer Robert Key, multi instrumentalist Markus Acher, French musician Jean-Yves Douet, Michael Heilrath, and novelist Rachael King. Alastair Galbraith, Hamish Kilgour, Belgian violinist Dieter Rooseuw and Brett Jones from the “Nocturnal Projections” have also hopped in and out of the stew.


 

 
 
 
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