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A DIY Noise-Rock Duo From Dunedin Is Touring China. Here’s How It Happened
How does a DIY noise-rock duo from Ōtepoti end up touring 13 cities across China? Rolling Stone AU/NZ deputy editor Conor Lochrie chatted with two people involved in the life-changing trip to find out how it came to be.
This Night Lunch feature is part of a new Scene Report on Dunedin. Check out the series here.
China doesn’t know what’s about to happen.
A few hours from now, Night Lunch will take to the stage in Shanghai for the first of 13 tour dates across the country. They are two people named Liam — Liam Hoffman and Liam Clune — who create a seismic sound as if there are actually four or maybe five Liams inside the recording studio. They play fast and loud, very loud, using just a homemade bass and a beleaguered drum kit. RNZ once said their music “is heavy but doesn’t take itself too seriously” (true), and David Farrier thinks their songs are “genuinely catchy” (considerably true). Their live shows are so intense that one of them says he almost passed out during one gig, just about getting by on the sheer force of adrenaline. They make extreme noise with minimal tools, and after assaulting the ears of fans mostly in their home base of Ōtepoti Dunedin for several years, it’s now the turn of Chinese crowds to bear witness to one of Aotearoa’s most idiosyncratic bands.
“[W]e make pretty loud, crazy music, but I’m pretty, I don’t know, chill… I like taking it easy. But when an opportunity comes [along] like this, you have to take it.”
I’ve got one of the Liams — Hoffman — on the phone from Dunedin. Even though he was up in the wee hours of the morning, “just doing heaps of this China tour shit,” he sounds alert, caffeinated. It bodes well for what’s going to be a life-changing but also highly stressful trip.
“Heaps of prep, bro,” he says. My god.”
Luckily for the boys, they’re not alone in this endeavour: the tour is the work of Kristen Ng, a multi-disciplinary artist with a mighty work ethic.
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Originally from Pōneke Wellington but now based in Chengdu, China, Kristen started the well-received multimedia blog Kiwese just over a decade ago, using it to promote independent music and culture across both China and Aotearoa. Two years later, in 2015, Kiwese expanded into a touring label for Kiwi acts.
Since that year, Kristen has organised Chinese tours for Orchestra of Spheres, Lady Lazer Light, All Seeing Hand, E/N/T, Alphabethead, mr sterile Assembly, Strange Stains, Womb, BIRDPARTY, Vera Ellen, Dale Kerrigan, Flesh Bug, and Kristen’s own electronic project Kaishandao.
When Kristen took Dale Kerrigan to China last year, it was the first time she’d worked with a band outside Wellington. Now it’s the turn of Night Lunch, and Kristen says she’s “excited to keep exploring the Dunedin scene.”
“[S]he’s organising everything,” Hoffman says, with a hint of relief in his voice.
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Kristen first met the boys at beloved Aotearoa festival Camp A Low Hum. She remembers the moment well.
“Their set was such a fun and chaotic expression of DIY, noise and good humour, which appealed to me greatly. I was floating in the lagoon on an inflatable turtle when they started. By the end, I had scrambled up the bank and was rocking out front left.”
A couple of years later, Kristen pitched the idea of a China trek to them — after she sent through a detailed PDF with all the “preliminary stuff,” Hoffman realised the trip was “actually pretty doable.”
“[Y]ou could not do a tour like this just as a Kiwi or anyone who doesn’t speak Chinese or have [sic] a community in China,” he says. “Like you just could not do it… she’s really well connected with the Chinese scene and the underground scene… she does heaps of cool stuff.
“She’s really [all] about exporting New Zealand talent and showing her Chinese community what is going on over here — she’s got a whole circuit worked out where she knows the venue organisers, knows [the] promoters, knows bands in China… She’s been doing this for 10 years, so she’s got it pretty well oiled, even though it is DIY as hell. It’s unbelievably DIY.”
I correspond with Kristen via email (the Night Lunch tour is fast approaching), and she offers detailed insight into Kiwese’s past cross-country tours: “Touring is a gruelling and enriching experience, pushing the body and mind to the limits. In this altered state of being, in this heightened sense of living, full momentum at full tilt, doing what you love, united with your crew and band, it is the ultimate high.
“There have been so many incredible shows, hilarious memories, unforgettable characters and friendships forged from these experiences over the years.”
She lists several highlights from past trips: Orchestra of Spheres playing as ‘Globular Synthesis’ in a Beijing barbecue joint; E/N/T performing on the altar of a temple in Xiamen; a whopping seven hours of karaoke with Womb; a drunk uncle replacing Ben Lemi on drums at Jah Bar. “Missing passports, missing phones, random roadies, unexpected cameos — there is simply too much lore,” she adds.
She caught up with Kiwese alumni Dale Kerrigan, Flesh Bug, and Strange Stains (now known as Desire Path) in Dunedin over the summer, and they “spent hours” reminiscing on their tour memories from China. “We’ve seen each other at our best and worst, and as such, those shared, intimate experiences have bound us together for a lifetime.”
I first listened to Night Lunch’s music — their 2024 EP Measure Twice, Cut Once, to be exact — whilst looking over the still, blue waters surrounding Port Chalmers, just northeast of Dunedin.
The juxtaposition of this serene scene and the abrasive sounds blasting through my earphones was initially jarring (like Michael Haneke’s brutal inclusion of a screeching metal song in the opening-credits scene of Funny Games, as the upper-middle-class family drifts pleasingly through Austrian countryside on their way to their lake house), but then the seemingly disparate things coalesced. The soothing landscape sharpened the deliriously disruptive nature of their songs, particularly “Case of the Mondays on Sunday” which, with typical Night Lunch humour, looks at an email exchange gone awry: the unnamed character in the unhinged song is tired of someone named Monica not properly replying to his correspondence.
“Every Sunday, every Monday, I email and still you don’t reply!” he cries out. “The first one, yeah I get, because they’re just some silly jokes, but the last one that I sent, at least deserved a lol,” he insists with (I think) mock anger. The sender, however, is undeterred. Every time the elusive Monica doesn’t reply, he says “it fuels me… for tomorrow’s email.”
“Case of the Mondays on Sunday” is, in ways that few songs are, genuinely funny, with the right amount of irreverence. Recall what Kristen said about her fateful first encounter with Night Lunch: “a fun and chaotic expression of DIY, noise, and good humour.” It’s the latter flavour that really defines a Night Lunch song, and it’s for this reason that their China tour, with its meeting of new cultures, will be so fascinating.
Levity is present in conversation with Hoffman, too. “I’m from Invercargill, so I’m kind of scared of the world!” he says at one point, referencing the enormity of this China tour for him and the other Liam (who originally hails from Auckland).
“Nah, just kidding. But it was just crazy. She [Kristen] was like, ‘26 days, 13 shows. Just back to back trains, touring…’ I was like, ‘All right.’”
How would he describe Night Lunch’s sound to a new listener?
It’s noise-rock that’s “pretty nasty,” he says. “It’s two strings, two bass strings, super downtuned and distorted… there’s basically no melody, it’s just bass fuzz basically, and then really messy drums.”
If a quiet corner of Otago Harbour on a calm morning is at first an uneasy backdrop to Night Lunch’s music, then Chinese cities and shows will offer a different contrast altogether. The tour starts in the global metropolis of Shanghai, also visiting other major cities such as Guangzhou and the TikTok-approved Chongqing, but it’s also taking the boys to perhaps lesser-known places like Fuzhou and Changsha.
“Kiwi crowds are generally louder, rowdier and fuelled by alcohol. Chinese crowds are generally more reserved and attentive to what they are watching,” Kristen tells me.
Night Lunch had to get a lot of their lyrics “checked over” before the trip, including one song called “Cigarettes”, which has a “line about stealing some ciggies.”
“They were like, ‘Nah man, you can’t have that,’” Hoffman recalls. They didn’t even bother submitting some other songs. “Kristen was like, ‘We’re not even gonna bother with these because they really don’t like swearing and any references to drug use.’ So that’s kind of half of the catalogue, bro!”
The conversation takes a turn towards the subject of day jobs.
We bond over both, at different times, being a “bin guy” — Hoffman currently works at a worm farm in Dunedin, “handling all their food waste,” and I used to push bins and sort waste at Auckland City Hospital.
Several Night Lunch songs are explicitly about the brutal realities of trying to make ends meet in today’s unrelenting capitalist society. The short, unsweet “Maximum Wage” is about “being pissed off about working shitty jobs all the time,” caustic lines like “faster, fix this, move that, thanks heaps” giving way to a battering drum solo.
Hoffman works hard in order to pursue his music, and this China tour is being funded by the boys’ savings. “We’re dropping a whole bomb on it… [I] could get a car or could go to China.”
Kristen’s vital work has tapped into a market that more Kiwi acts would be well-served to explore. Like Port Noise co-creators Ben Woods and Rose Smyth realising that more local musicians should be looking at Australian tours before making the significant jump to Europe or the States, touring the closer Asian continent could be, with the right help and support, a career-altering move.
Hoffman agrees. “It’s so close, it’s actually way less stressful. We actually were looking at a European tour at the start of this year, and it was literally like 2.5 times the price. It’s fucking crazy. It’s crazy, absolutely fucked.”
Abandoning their European tour plans made fiscal sense, but it came at a loss: they missed out on meeting a chain-smoking Italian man in his 60s who wanted to arrange a tour for them. “The Italian one was about $25K,” he reveals. “More even. It was actually more like $30K. It was fucked.”
This Chinese run, in comparison, will ‘only’ set the boys back by $10K. Still a lot of money, but a major saving compared to the prospective European tour.
In financial terms, it helps that, as Kristen puts it, Night Lunch are a “nifty, portable unit for carting around China.”
“[W]e’re sort of a product of our economics, you know? It’s super compact. We can just show up. We’ve been practicing together for eight years,” Hoffman says.
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Night Lunch have “done a lot of shows around New Zealand,” but this is their first international tour.
After moving to the city around 10 years ago to attend art school, Hoffman quickly fell in love with the place. He’s still there to this day, working and doing band stuff. Now approaching his 30s, Hoffman is loving seeing up close this new generation of Dunedin bands.
“I’m at an age where I see all the younger bands coming up, and it’s really cool to see,” he says, singling out U-NO JUNO as one he’s “really fond of.”
Night Lunch did a bit of Amplified stuff in their early years, around the age of 22-23. Radio One also gave them exposure, and then “a bunch of New Zealand bands found us through that. And we got to play with pretty much any band that would come to town.”
They previously played with Earth Tongue, Die! Die! Die! and, on a less positive note, Shihad, getting involved in the “corporate rock game” for a night.
r“[T]hat was actually fucking lame, to be honest. Shihad was one of the bigger gigs we played, but it was pretty lame,” Hoffman recalls.
“Was it the crowd?” I ask.
“Yeah, the crowd was all right — it was in the Glenroy Auditorium in the town hall — but the management was so stupid… we had [to] bring our own stuff, all our own amps, drums. We got paid fuck all. The manager was just super douchey, just a dick. He’s like, ‘No point are you allowed to approach the band, okay? Okay, guys, I’m serious.’
“It’s Shihad, not the fucking Beatles.”
“[I]t’s crazy, isn’t it? It was quite funny, Liam was walking down the hallway as he didn’t realise that Shihad were coming from the other end, and the manager guy stopped him. He’s like, ‘Bro, you have to back up bro, back up.’ And Liam’s like, ‘Okay.’ And then while Shihad were packing down, we packed down our gear and carried it through the crowd piece by piece and left because we’re like, ‘Fuck this.’”
“It’s good to bag on some shitty parts of the culture,” he adds.
What’s next for Kristen and Night Lunch?
The former has one big-name band in mind for a Kiwese tour: “[It’s] low key my dream to tour someone like Katchafire!” It doesn’t seem like the right time to ask Hoffman about the future; this China tour is more than enough to keep him occupied for now.
And there’s also another reason Night Lunch’s tour is special: it will reunite the Liams for the first time in a long time.
“[W]e’re going to literally meet in Shanghai, have one band practice, and then hit the tour the next day,” Hoffman explains. “It’s going to be fucking crazy. We’re pretty loosey-goosey, rough and ready. So it’s going to work.”
He says it’s “ages” since the duo worked in a studio setting together. “He’s [Clune] has been away for about a year. And before that we hadn’t recorded anything for ages. We’re quite dormant even, so this is sort of a strange little thing… we’re pretty low underground, you know? And then when we get a chance to do something cool like this, or a festival, that’s when we usually reconnect.”
Follow Night Lunch here. Find out more about Kiwese here and here.
