Edmund Cake

aka Ed McWilliams


Ed McWilliams, or Edmund Cake, is a composer, musician, singer, songwriter and producer who has carved out a part of New Zealand's cultural territory and made it his own: a place where mainstream pop intersects with abstract absurdity, flavoured with a singular method and his distinctive style.

The surreal/singalong-pop psychedelia of Bressa Creeting Cake (with Geoff Maddock and Joel Wilton) and Pie Warmer (with Tamasin Taylor of the Nudie Suits); production work with Anika Moa, Anna Coddington, Neil and Tim Finn, Tim Guy, The Brunettes and Rick Bryant; collaborations with Neil Finn and Don McGlashan; and his solo work as Edmund Cake mark out a strange and varied terrain dotted with sunny hillsides, boggy swamps, bushy barns, suburban super-malls, derelict downtowns and beatnik hangouts. Let’s go for a wander.

Ed Cake in his Queen St studio, 2004.
Photo credit: Gareth Shute
Bressa Creeting Cake - Papa People (197)
Bressa Creeting Cake, L to R: Geoff Creeting, Joel Bressa, Edmund Cake
Photo credit: Photo by Bridget Jones
Edmund Cake.
Ed Cake singing in The Brunettes Orchestrette.
Photo credit: Gareth Shute
Bressa Creeting Cake - Palm Singing (1997)
Pie Warmer's 2009 album The Fearsome Feeling. Pie Warmer was a collaboration between Edmund Cake and Tamasin Taylor.
Edmund Cake.
Trivia:

Ed met Anna Coddington when her first band, Hamilton's Handsome Geoffrey, won the Smokefreerockquest in 1998. Their “booby prize” (Ed’s term) was a trip to Auckland to record with him at the old TVNZ studios in Shortland St. Years later they wrote some songs together, and Ed produced and engineered her Duchess EP (Tea Set Records, 2005).

Downtown Puff was Ed’s name for his favourite pillowslip, a sweet little blue n’ white plaid plushy number.

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