Tom Linklater (Wave Zero)

grid city grooves on george that was hollow and suited by keepsakes and today i am joined by a wonderful local guest via the power of the internet i hand off all the introductions because i'm not very good at them so do you want to let the audience know a little bit about who you are and what you get up to

absolutely so my name is tom link later um i have an alias which you might see around of wave zero we can kind of get into that soon where that comes where it comes from and what it kind of means but i'm from wellington originally moved to christchurch when i was about 17 years old um so just out of high school um came down to study at mains shout out to anyone who went to mains and um did the audio engineering music production uh program there and um from there kind of Was kind of on my own two feet, living in flats, living in uni hall and yeah, kind of progressing into what I wanted to be was, where I wanted my career to go, I guess, was kind of in music industry, but I had no idea what that looked like.

At the time, I thought I wanted to be a DJ producer, as lots of people probably do.

And then I realized that it's actually a lot more dense, but I think interesting of an industry.

And I've kind of captured that over the last 12 years since I've been in Christchurch, 29 now.

So yeah, I guess I've seen a few years and seen a few different scenes in that time.

yeah so a little bit more of a backstory i guess i um i spent seven years in youth work so after i finished mains i went and worked for a youth organization papanui called papano youth development trust and they run a youth center called a loop so they basically run a whole lot of programs around the city mostly in the papano area but um broader as well and lots of in-school youth work lots of events and hangout spaces and for seven years i ran all of the music, technology, and kind of like internet and online infrastructure.

And yes, there's lots to dig into there as well.

And since then, I've done a few different things in the event space and now have an IT day job, which is kind of interesting and left field, but absolutely loving it.

And yeah, I guess impacting people's lives.

That's a basic surface level overview of where I've kind of come from.

yeah okay so there's there's a lot of kind of ground to cover there i guess i'd love to start we'll just take this in order i'd love to start back in the beginning um when did your relationship with electronic music first kind of start where did it come from and yeah what kind of pulled you in the direction of wanting to focus on it and go to mains

yeah cool that's a great question actually um probably started from being part of a local church, actually, and being, you know, playing on the worship team with my dad and being like, hey, this is actually something that people probably have an occupation doing is music.

And I'm like, okay, well, I guess I saw big concerts happening, but then for the things I was in front of and playing guitar at the youth group and that sort of thing, I guess it was like, you know, easy to volunteer in a million different places, but what could it look like to actually have a career in this area and um yeah so through youth group i met um okay i'll give him a shout out his name is james burschett and he's currently a dj in wellington still running his own events up there as well as he's been going for a long long time he might hear this as well um so hey james so he he basically one day he told me oh did you know you can actually get these things which are a little box you plug into the computer and it's a It's called an audio interface.

That means you can take a microphone and put it into the computer.

And I realized, oh, you know what? I don't actually have to run it into my headphone jack.

It's actually tools I can buy to be able to take analog audio and put it into the computer.

And so at that point, I'd been thinking about, oh, how can I improve my guitar tone? And I'm like, you know what? Computers probably have the answer to that.

So I kind of went down this rabbit hole.

And this is probably about the age of... like in year 10.

And thankfully, I had a really, really strong music department at Onzo College in Wellington, which had lots of synthesizers and mixes and speakers.

And so I got to experiment heaps.

And I guess at that point in my life, I probably wasn't the most outgoing individual.

So the idea of... bringing all the sound into the computer and not having to rely on organizing band practices with unreliable bandmates and trying to like balance other people's expectations like i could just get all the software on my computer and just sit there like a nerd and make beats that was really appealing to me um and yeah so that was kind of that was the first like big thing that i really got hyper focused on and there was a dude called Blair who was in the year above me and we you know made music together and were helping with setting up events and that sort of thing around school at the same time so he went off to mains and I'm like okay well let's look into it and then yeah I ended up that was when I was year 12 that he did that and then he said he left after year 13 then when I was year 13 he came back and told me all about it and then I was like you know what I'll go and do that as well So yeah, for my first year of mains, he was a year above as well.

And yeah, so that was a bit of a, I guess, wake up call of, you know, leaving home and, you know, only being 17 at the time, like lived in uni hall for half that time.