Bio

How To Kill first gathered in a Christchurch workshop in 2003 and played a handful shows with friends Into the Void.

A four year hiatus passed before the band found themselves reactivating and focusing their efforts toward an album at the behest of Failsafe's Rob Mayes, who had been moved by the emotional power and depth of their live performances.

Reformed and writing new material, with the aid of a Creative NZ arts grant the band recorded their debut full-length over an intensive and creative 4 months with Mayes at his Avalanche studios and at How To Kill's headquarters in Lyttleton, where, at the Wunderbar, they performed another pair of seismic gigs with comrades-in-arms Mountaineater, flooring many with their unique amalgam of oceanic feedback manipulations and angular counterpointed melodies, McLean’s and Matteers twinned guitars integrated into flexible interlocking structures by the tensile strength of Leigh-MacKenzie and Johnson.

How To Kill is an instrumental rock band, whose music draws on a diverse but resonant tradition of electric music – Earth, Can, The MC5, Bark Psychosis, Slint, The Skeptics, and Black Flag all echo in their open-ended yet propulsive ebb and flow, befitting a group whose members have individual backgrounds stretching from metal to free-jazz improvisation. Heaviness and light, light and darkness: with no motivation apart from four friends striving in communion to establish a still centre and happy place in the noise and rabid threshing of quotidian life. How To Kill play songs without words and let the music speak for itself, knowing that lyrical intervention forecloses the imagination of the listener, in whom the perfect voice resides and waits to be heard within.

How To Kill's Like Angels retraces the unforgettable savannah implicit in the glittering polis, a city bordering the sea, and razes concrete and steel to leave open ground – across which bodies move towards the only destination where all is reconciled. And if words lapse at the point of articulating the infinite ineffable, the perpetual vanishing point, then music provides for further movement to cross the threshold. Although every day is El Día de los Muertos, there is no celebration. Landing in a new world, entering its jurisdiction, witnessing the terminal Western, acknowledging with whom one has survived, and, despite it all, climbing onto the pyre, after knowing that you've always been nearly there, and keeping your peace while others speak until no one's listening and nothing remains save glowing ash – Like Angels sings the body electric and is a carnival in witness of its passing, despite the moment of its making being, too, but a memory of its end. And all that's missing are the voices in your head.

Band Members:
Campbell Johnson (bass)
Simon Leigh-Mackenzie (drums)
Stephen Mateer (guitar)
Robert McLean (guitar)