Seminal Dunedin acts The Clean, The Chills, Look Blue Go Purple, The Verlaines and 3Ds Christchurch's The Subliminals and Loves Ugly Children and North Islanders The Able Tasmans. The list of acts with which Houston has worked is long. I recorded many great Flying Nun bands at Fish St in the late '80s and '90s.'' When Stephen Kilroy asked me to be his partner at Fish St Studios, we bought a 16-track recorder that used half-inch tape and a 24-channel mixing desk. "After a few years I started recording local bands. Having bought his first PA system as a teenager, doing the sound for bands enabled him, firstly, to pay off the loan and, secondly, to learn on the job. Tex Houston describes himself as a bit of an electronic nerd.Our ad in Critic read, 'Broken Ear Recording Studio - bad equipment, inept engineers, cheap rates'.'' The studio was called Broken Ear after the Tintin book. I think they paid us $50 and a crate of beer. ![]() "The first thing we did was, yes, a cassette EP. I asked them on the spot to come over and record,'' Cotton recalls. "It was at the Empire where I saw HDU's first-ever gig supporting a band I was playing drums in, Age Of Dog. ![]() I started collecting albums because of who made them, rather than who wrote them.''įast-forward a few decades and Cotton's expert ears have been sought by a diverse range of artists, from Shayne Carter's now defunct Dimmer, to Wellington heavy rock juggernaut Beastwars, to Dunedin folkish act Delgirl and sonic adventurers HDU. "I guess I didn't really know it at first, but I was liking records not just because of the songs, but also because of the way they sounded. When he wasn't eating cereal or playing games on his ZX Spectrum computer, he would pore over the liner notes of albums, taking in the small print: "engineered by. "It's also about twiddling shiny knobs that make lights flash and build things up and break them down again.''Ĭotton recalls his early teenage years in Christchurch were often spent shut away in his bedroom. ![]() Occasionally acknowledged (usually in the liner notes of albums), typically obliging, the sound engineers and producers at the mixing consoles of recording facilities and venues around Dunedin could be likened to a good bass-line: felt rather than overtly acknowledged, they are nonetheless often intrinsic to the success of a song.ĭale Cotton, a recording and live engineer, a mixing and mastering guru whose adventures in sound are intertwined with the output of a range of groups, perhaps sums up the collective spirit as well as anyone: "I'm driven by a combination of needing and/or wanting a sense of place, specifically, in the river that is New Zealand culture. Yet in all this celebration of creative spark, there has been little mention of the expertise that adds muscle to the bones of much of this music. Those who operate within Dunedin's varied musical paradigms agree there are no small number of good acts out there, be they fingerpicking folkies, angsty alt-rockers, or ethereal electro-pop kids, the list goes on. Such publicity offers a focus wider than the group itself, shining a light on a Dunedin music scene in rosy health, according to various industry types, including those who document its pulse from afar (e.g., United States label Ba Da Bing Records, which recently picked up Kane Strang's debut album Blue Cheese or Uncut, Billboard and The Observer's praise for Port Chalmers singer-songwriter Nadia Reid's recent album, Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs). ![]() There it is in black and white (with a few red highlights), a list of the media coverage accorded The Chills in the wake of the Dunedin band's recent album, Silver Bullets.īy the start of this month, the Martin Phillipps-led outfit had attracted no fewer than 400 positive articles, spread across 26 countries. They are the city's sound engineers and producers, whose ears and expertise augment all those chord combinations, writes Shane Gilchrist. Amid talk of a new golden age of Dunedin music, there are some who have gone under the radar.
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