Local Wellington composer, producer and ethnomusicologist David Parsons: 1944-2025
The passing of local Wellington composer, producer and ethnomusicologist David Parsons was announced recently. He had a long & diverse career that involved many aspects of local & international music, and we have brought some of those elements together below.
From David's Wikipedia page:
"Trained as a Sitar player David Parson's started composing new age music in the early 1980s with the two albums Sound of the Mother Ship & Tibetan Plateau produced by small California based label Fortuna Records. He then continued producing several albums of new age albums influenced by eastern instruments gaining a solid reputation in the genre. In the 1990s he developed a second career as an ethnomusicologist, recording performances of traditional music from across Asia and the Middle East which were subsequently released on the Celestial Harmonies label."
He released over 20 albums of his own music, plus a lot of his recordings as an ethnomusicologist, and a fascinating, fuller, biography of David can be found on the Celestial Harmonies webpage.
In 2019 RNZ did a piece on the lost album The 40 Watt Banana by Peeled (of which David was a member), which was a compilation of previously unreleased recordings from the late 60's/early '70's, including their sole 7" single release from 1971, that had just been released for the first time on Vinyl by Spanish label Pharaway Sounds
In a 2023 Audioculture piece on Film Music Aotearoa, part 4: the late 80s, wellington composer Michelle Scullion remembers her first major film project, the score for Peter Jackson’s debut, low budget, sci-fi comedy-horror Bad Taste. Creating demos on her Roland Juno 106 synthesiser for Peter Jackson to listen to, she then set out to perform her final score on an array of synthesisers, drum machine, and turned to David Parsons to help capture the recording....
To record these parts, Scullion worked with Dave Parsons in his small Aro Valley studio in Wellington. Parsons had used synthesisers in his own new age/ambient music (eg, Sounds of the Mothership, 1980) and knew how to conjure up great sounds out of them. “He was a synthesiser programmer, and I described to him the sound I might want and I’d challenge him. Then he’d challenge me to call up my own drum machine patterns. So Dave was very included and inclusive in creating the score.” Parsons also helped create faux-orchestral parts on a sampler. “There was no money for recording classical musicians,” Scullion explains.
A personal remembrance:
One of our colleagues, WCL's Local & NZ History Specialist, was a friend of David's family in the mid 80's and kindly shared these memories.
"I recall seeing his home studio when he was living in Aro Valley when I was invited over. This would have been circa 1984 - 85 or so. I was really into electronic music (just basic stuff like Jean-Michele Jarre etc) but new synths were hard to get and really expensive. I walked into his studio….and my mind was absolutely blown. It was the first professional electronic music studio I had been into (apart from the one up at Vic) and it was stunning. It was all then-modern gear, which at the time would have probably been worth about the same as the house they were in.
He was a highly talented composer with an international reputation who, in the era of cassettes and CDs, sold music by the truckload (especially in Germany of all places) yet was barely known in NZ. Back in the day I recall hearing from Colin Morris how hippy back-packing tourists would arrive in Wellington wanting to pay homage to David Parsons… and no one knew who they were talking about. I remember buying a cassette of his from a record store in the United States when I was travelling across the country in 1988 and the record store guy wondered (on hearing that I was from NZ), whether I knew David Parsons. Amazingly, I was able to say I did!"
From our Catalogue:
Dancing with cats - David Parsons
Further Links:
David Parson's on Discogs