MNZ Interview: Carnivorous Plant Society

On his way to Akaroa, Finn Scholes pulls over and has a bit of a chat to Tim Gruar about his 13-year-long music project, creating animations, writing a children’s book and the dangers of leaving a conga drum precariously placed in the back of a tour van.

Somewhere between a fever dream, a jazz club, a sci-fi matinee and a roadside vegetable patch lives Carnivorous Plant Society. Led by Auckland multi-instrumentalist, composer, animator and cartoonist Finn Scholes, the band has spent the past decade cultivating one of Aotearoa’s strangest musical ecosystems: brass flares, slippery synths, mariachi shadows, tropical rhythms, hand-drawn monsters, and melodies that wander off into the mist just when you think you have them pinned down.

Since their self-titled 2014 debut, Carnivorous Plant Society have grown a mythology of their own across records including Phantom Finger, The New King, The People Below, The Plants, The Lizard and now I Am Always Listening, released in June 2026. I’m told the last two were part of a trilogy of music created during Covid – one funky, the second more quirky and cinematic. The third, yet to be released, is more vocal and song-based.

Scholes is the constant at the centre of the organism, but the band itself keeps evolving. On record, the core lineup features Finn on trumpet, keyboards and vocals, Tam Scholes on guitar, Cass Basil on bass and Alistair Deverick on drums. However, on the current ‘massive date’ Arts on Tour run, it’s a leaner road creature: Finn with cousin Erik Scholes on bass and veteran drummer Michael Barker. Apart from Finn, the touring band and the recording band feature different players – not mythology, just logistics, with 21 dates to survive and regular members balancing other work.

That shifting cast only feeds the legend. Cass Basil, you’ll know for her work with Tiny Ruins and Bic Runga, etc; Scholes has moved through Lawrence Arabia, Neil Finn, Gin Wigmore, Batucada Sound Machine, Hopetoun Brown, Avalanche City, the Rodger Fox Big Band, Auckland Chamber Orchestra, The Circling Sun and sessions with Anika Moa, Bic Runga and Tim Finn. In less curious hands, that résumé might sound like a CV. Here, it becomes fuel: a handmade contraption of musicianship and mischief, wobbly at the edges, highly skilled at the core, and glowing in the dark.

Even on a mostly small-hall tour, Scholes says, the band still hauls a serious amount of gear: instruments, amplifiers, merch, a projector, animations and enough portable weirdness to turn every country venue into a psychedelic picture theatre. “We’re playing 21 dates, thanks to Arts on Tour,” he says, with the route curling through Lincoln, Akaroa, Geraldine, Stewart Island and Te Anau.

For a largely instrumental band, he tells me, they are operating well outside the polite lanes of playlist pop. So, the current touring circuit is pure gold – making connections, building a small but enthusiastic fan base. The trio are not presenting I Am Always Listening like a museum exhibit; they are pulling old and new songs into different shapes, reading the room, and letting the set breathe. “It’s been so good for our band,” Scholes says. “We’ve done this maybe five times now… we’re getting little followings in some of these areas, which is so difficult to achieve.”

A Carnivorous Plant Society show is not merely a concert, I’m told. It is a low-budget cosmic cinema with a rhythm section. Behind the band, Scholes’ animations bloom, twitch and unravel: “sort of psychedelic kind of stories,” he says, with “a science-fiction, bit of apocalyptic” flavour. His own elevator pitch remains the best one: “jazzy world music with psychedelic animations.” Most songs now carry their own visual companion, which gives the audience “something for everybody” – especially those who might otherwise flinch at the words instrumental set.

We take a moment to reflect on the earlier days, creating animations for songs – or was it songs for animations? “The visuals began the hard way, drawings made frame by frame on paper, scanned one at a time, then stitched into motion.” These days Scholes uses animation software and a tablet, but the handmade pulse remains the point. In the age of instant artificial images, he argues, people still recognise labour when they see it. “You can tell that someone’s worked really hard for ages on something,” he says. “You can kind of feel it.”

The music follows the same homemade logic: if it sparks, it stays. Scholes traces the band’s DNA through South and Central American travel, Latin dance-band trumpet gigs, jazz rooms, theatre work and collaborations with New Zealand musicians. One key detonation was chicha: the psychedelic cumbia associated with Peru and the Amazon. After hearing a playlist from that world, the band felt the compass swing. “We were like, oh my, we’ve got to make an album like this,” Scholes says.

That hunger for strange coordinates runs through tracks such as Busy Garden, where Scholes hears Southeast Asian colours, and Down the Misty Hill, a longtime live closer finally caught on record. I Am Always Listening came out of a lockdown-era burst of writing big enough to feed several releases. The funkier cuts became The Lizard; the new album gathered the stranger, more sculptural pieces. “They’re not super groove-based,” he says. “They’re sort of a bit more like a composition… almost like a classical piece.”

For all the complexity, the music is not locked inside notation. Scholes often begins with something closer to a jazz lead sheet than a classical commandment: chords, melody, maybe a groove or bass line, and then enough air for the band to leave fingerprints. “There’s a lot of room for interpretation,” he says, “and the band always really enjoy being able to put their own mark on the piece, rather than having everything completely spelled out.”

That is where Carnivorous Plant Society becomes more than Finn Scholes’ private planetarium. Tam Scholes brings flamboyant guitar colour to the records; Alistair Deverick supplies drums, mixing and production muscle; on the road, Erik Scholes and Michael Barker rebuild the material as a compact, road-hardened rhythm section. Finn sounds genuinely lit up by the current trio. “These guys are great,” he says. “We are very much enjoying playing it.”

And because the Carnivorous Plant Society universe apparently needed one more portal, Scholes is also carrying a children’s book on tour. Three Friends follows a sheep, a dog, and a pink creature who leave the land of animals and encounter an alien. He had long suspected his cartoony visual style could work for children, even if some of his other work drifts darker. For this project, he says, he simply “took out the adult themes” and found something gentler underneath.

Then, inevitably, the road demanded a sacrifice. Early in the run, with the van packed to the roof – vibraphone, trumpet, flute, synths, the whole travelling ecosystem – the band were heading to the supermarket when a conga drum staged a jailbreak and went straight through the back window.

“Smashing the back window of the van was a bit intense,” Scholes says, with the deadpan understatement of someone who has accepted chaos as part of touring life. The fix was pure road lore: Glad Wrap over the wound, then a proper repair the next morning. It was, he admits, “one to remember” – the kind of disaster that becomes funny only after the gear is safe, the glass is swept up and the band has somewhere else to be.

Road life, at least, is not all petrol-station pies and lukewarm chips. Scholes says the band have been cooking plenty, with Erik apparently “really good at cooking meat”. Finn’s own culinary gospel is humbler but no less practical: the ‘touring wrap’ – cheap, adaptable, filling and possible without a sandwich press – scroll down to the bottom for the recipe.

After 13 or so years, Carnivorous Plant Society remains one of Aotearoa’s great outlier bands: part ensemble, part animation lab, part travelling circus with a working knowledge of van repairs. Their music is instrumental, niche, and gloriously hard to categorise, but Arts on Tour has pushed it into rooms where a band like this might otherwise never land. “Getting a band on the road is so difficult,” Scholes says. “It’s so expensive… so many bands are really envious of what we have, being able to come and play like this and it not be a complete disaster financially.”

So they keep going: more shows, more animations, more unreleased music waiting in the wings, another motel-kitchen meal before the next town. Scholes calls it “keeping on trucking along”, which is modest enough. Really, Carnivorous Plant Society are hauling an entire handmade universe around the country – and somehow, despite the conga’s best efforts, keeping it mostly inside the van.

Special Bonus Recipe – Finn Scholes’ Touring Wrap

Ingredients: plain beans, salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, whatever vegetables look decent – broccoli and cabbage get the nod – plenty of cheese, wraps, and hot sauce if the touring gods provide.

Method: Buy unflavoured beans and season them yourself with salt, pepper, cumin and paprika – low-cost spices that earn their keep on tour. Warm the beans with whatever vegetables are around; Scholes suggests broccoli and maybe cabbage. Add a heroic amount of cheese, wrap everything tightly, and trust heat, pressure and optimism to do the rest. As Scholes says, if the wrap is tight enough and there is “quite a bit of cheese in there”, you do not need a sandwich press.

Carnivorous Plant Society – I Am Always Listening EP tour