Rock Quest Regional final winner - check. Rock Quest Best Musician - check. South Island Secondary Schools Jazz Band competition winners - check. Queenstown Jazz Band competition Best Musician winner -check.
Is there anything the amazing Rory MacMurdo cannot achieve?
Since Rory MacMurdo exploded into the Dunedin music scene in the then two piece band TFF, the band has picked up two more members and has successfully recorded two albums with the band, one unreleased and one Irregardless receiving a five star review in Real Groove magazine.
Not bad for an 18 year old high school student.
Though in his last year of high school, Rory is already enrolled in a musical course at Otago University, honing his skills for more professional use.
"I do plan to make music my career. I'm going to Uni next year to study that amongst other things."
He is interested in possibly being a session musician and plans to continue playing music with his many side bands.
"It's like solving a really funny math problem," he says about playing drums. "On a scale of one to ten, it would be a ten... or off the scale."
Seeing Rory drum is quite an experience, as anyone who has seen it would admit, frenzied and wild, with Rory coming off literally soaked with sweat by the end.
His approach to drumming could be cited back to bands like Lightning Bolt or Hella, with Rory's earliest drumming influences coming from bands like Primus.
This style of drumming sits perfectly in the noise rock genre, which Dunedin is internationally regarded for, and is still fully alive today if you know where to look.
As a good way of ending this profile, here's a little bit of shameless self promotion by the man himself, "Buy the latest Lady Bag release please."
- by Reuben Henderson Year 13 Logan Park High School
