Selected Writing
    Coal Scores: Being-With the More-than-Human through Speculative Performance Scores

  • Thought Experiment
    Drain Magazine
    USA
    2026

    An exegesis on the artwork Coal Scores (2026).

    ‘Coal is caught up in multiple narratives of apocalypse. It is complicit in histories of lung disease and cancer in mine workers, of toxic pollution in waters and landscapes, of annihilation of ecosystems through the removal whenua for mines, and of course, through its burning, in the catastrophe of climate collapse. But none of this is Coal’s fault. As Métis scholar Zoe Todd puts it: “It is not this material drawn from deep in the earth that is violent. It is the machinations of human political-ideological entanglements … that make this … progeny a weapon.”’

    https://drainmag.com/coal-scores-being-with-the-more-than-human-through-speculative-performance-scores/
      Moth Quartet: Spectres of Whenua

    • Artist response text
      Moth Quartet
      Te Whanganui-a-Tara
    2025

    • Photo: Rodney Vaughan

    An artist response to the album Tundra, commissioned by Moth Quartet.

    ‘The challenge Moth Quartet set themselves with Tundra is to attempt to converse with voices of whenua that have never been encountered. By speaking with an unknown landscape their music becomes necessarily speculative. Moth Quartet are trying to close the physical distance between Te Whanganui-a-Tara where the music was recorded and far distant latitiudes. They call up the spectre of a landscape, and in doing so they recognise the animacy of whenua, what Amanda Monehu Yates (Ngāti Rangiwewehi, Ngāti Whakaue, Te Aitanga a Māhaki, Rongowhakaata) desribes as: the geological, atmospheric, hydrological and biological whanaunga [...] that compose the livingness of this world (Yates, 2021). Tundra draws from this livingness, creating spooky action at a distance that enlivens their improvisations, highlighting our entanglement with whenua, even when that entanglement is invisible and tenuous.‘

    https://mothquartet.nz/music/tundra-essay/
      Archive Fever:  New Zealand Underground Sound in Fanzine Interviews 1991­­–1999

    • with Lasse Marhaug

    • Book length publication
      Marhaug Forlag
      Oslo
    2023

    • Photos: Soundohm

    A book collecting interviews, artwork, and texts of New Zealand underground sound artists from fanzines in the years 1991-1999.
    Collected and edited by Noel Meek. Texts by Noel Meek, Bruce Russell, Seymour Glass (Bananafish) and Nick Cain (Opprobrium). Cover illustration by Stefan Neville (Pumice).

    308 pages, format: 18 x 24 cm
      Homage to Annea Lockwood

    • with Mattin

    Book and CD publication
    • Recital 
    • Los Angeles
    • 2023

    • Photos: Soundohm

    Recital presents a book and CD homage to the New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939). The unique concept for this album was conceived by artists Noel Meek (Aotearoa) and Mattin (Basque Country), who each share a deep admiration for Lockwood. A longform Skype conversation between the three artists was arranged at the end of 2020. They discussed politics, aesthetics, and Annea’s compositional practice, among other things. Noel Meek & Mattin had from the beginning decided that the conversation itself would be used as a score for this album, Homage to Annea Lockwood.

    “My work is my way of exploring the world,” says Lockwood. Each piece on the album reflects her prismatic compositional practice: sound maps, scores that unfold temporally or environmentally, synchronous with nature, and pianos transplanted to exotic locations (often engulfed in flames). Meek & Mattin maintain a playfulness and curiosity of Annea’s sound world; from electronic verbal fizz, a recording of lighting a laptop on fire, hydrophonic diaries from underneath an old willow tree in New Zealand, to a polyphonic choral piece which concludes the album.

    Homage to Annea Lockwood is housed in a hand-numbered paperback book, which carries a full transcription of the conversation, in this case… the score, along with lush photographic documentation, and ending with a lovely afterword written by Annea Lockwood. 


      The Wire Magazine

    Various articles
    • London
    • 2015-2022

    Writing on experimental music, sound art, and contemporary performance, with a focus on Aotearoa and Indigenous practices.

    https://www.thewire.co.uk/about/contributors/noel-meek


      Personal Best Magazine

    Various interviews
    • Marhaug Forlag, Oslo
    • 2017-2020

    Interviews with artists practising experimental music, sound art, and contemporary performance, with a focus on Aotearoa and Indigenous practices.




      Witcyst: Real Folk - Lathe Cut Singles 1993-1997

    with Lasse Marhaug

    Liner notes
    End of the Alphabet Records and Pica Disk
      Oslo
    • 2017

    Research, interviewing, curation, writing and publishing.

    Photos: Olivia Webb

    Design: Lasse Marhaug

    https://picadisk.bandcamp.com/album/real-folk-lathe-cut-singles-1993-1997