Pursuance

Tell us a bit about yourself!
I’m Jes, and I’m a gig photographer that mainly shoots underground gigs—rock, indie, alternative, hardcore, and DIY shows. I also personally love music like this, and have a lot of friends in the scene.

How did your love for music start?
As a kid, my brother gave me an MP3 filled with 2000s music—stuff like All Time Low, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and so on. Then when I got older, my friends introduced me to local music.

I was a huge Forests glazer. They were the first local band I ever watched live. From there, I branched out and discovered more of what I like. Right now, I’m really into shoegaze, but also enjoy a lot of girl artists like Phoebe Bridgers, boygenius, and Faye Webster. It’s a nice break from all of the heavier stuff that I like, and I think the lyrics really speak for themselves.

So would you say you’re as much into the lyrics of a song as you are with the instrumentals?
I think it’s a give and take. The best songs, of course, would have good sound and lyrics, but sometimes, the very best songs are the ones that have the simplest lyrics. It doesn’t always have to be complex.

And now on to photography—how long have you been shooting for?
Two years. So right out of COVID, when gigs were starting to come back, I brought my camera out with me one day and just started shooting, and have never stopped since.

Wow, so this is something that you picked up on your own?
Yeah, and I actually really love photography! When I was younger, I really didn’t know what the heck I was doing, then one day, I picked up a camera and said “Okay, this is exactly what I want to do.”

I’ve since done editorial shoots for my friends’ bands, and have shot maybe hundreds of gigs. I really like street and contemporary photography. In fact, I’m going to university for photography in 2026 after I serve my National Service, so yes, it’s my life.

What have you been doing in your free time then?
On the weekends I hang out with friends and go for gigs. I also walk around town and shoot street stuff. I’ve also been learning how to draw and doing mixed media and stuff. I also run a podcast with my friends called among laymen, where we interview local bands. It’s a small collective that I created with likeminded friends, and is something we want to pursue in the future—documenting the music scene.

So what are your thoughts on the local music scene?
I think it’s going really well! When I was younger, maybe 16 or 17, it wasn’t as big, and now, it’s just getting bigger and bigger. It’s been quite cool meeting the bands that I used to listen to and attend gigs for and screamed my lungs out for, and it’s nice to see them doing well, touring the world.

I feel like there’s a resurgence happening now, and maybe in the next few years, there’ll be a new batch of great bands that will be following in the footsteps of our predecessors.

How about the underground scene? Do you think there’s a misconception that people might have about it?
I think the misconception that people have is that they think we’re rebels in a bad way, that we’re gangsters or drug addicts, or just a bad crowd in general. But I think a good majority of the scene is just, for lack of a better word, troubled.

Because of what society is, and because we’re different, growing up was hard for a lot of us, Not a lot of people related to us, so sometimes we mixed with the bad crowd, but eventually, when we found each other in the scene, we realised that everyone is just trying to be themselves. We’ve been fighting ourselves or other people in trying to project it, which makes us look like bad people, but we’re not—we just want to find ourselves and our voice.