The inhabitants of a town in New Zealand have been hit for several months by an atypical scourge: nightly loudspeaker competitions between motorists with a predilection for the songs of Canadian Celine Dion. “It’s annoying us” and people “can’t sleep anymore,” Anita Baker, the mayor of Porirua, a town of 60,000 inhabitants, told AFP on Thursday.

Sound battles have become a trend in New Zealand for several years. The goal of each participant is to saturate the sound of others with their own, spit out by hyper powerful audio systems. “They love Celine Dion,” says Ms. Baker. The people of Porirua can no longer stand listening to his hits like My Heart Will Go On and It’s All Coming Back To Me Now, especially since the battles sometimes last until two in the morning, according to the mayor.

Randomly, during the week or on weekends, competitors park with their engines running, blast their music at the top of their lungs and frequently change locations to avoid the police. “This is happening in our city center, which is located in a basin, and so the noise spreads like a drum to all the suburbs,” explains Ms. Baker.

According to the elected official, the “battles” began in November 2022, when local rugby fans celebrated the performance of the Samoa Islands in the Rugby League World Cup, where this Pacific nation reached the final. Ms Baker has already received numerous complaints from frustrated residents, and an online petition is now circulating to put an end to the cacophony. The mayor says she is determined to find a solution with the police: “we don’t want people to flee our city because of the noise.”