Dunedin Sound
| Dunedin Sound | |
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| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Early 1980s, New Zealand |
| Typical instruments |
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| Other topics | |
The Dunedin sound was a style of indie pop music created in the southern New Zealand university city of Dunedin in the early 1980s.
Similar in many ways to the traditional indie pop sound, the Dunedin Sound uses "jingly jangly" guitar-playing, minimal bass lines and loose drumming. Keyboards are also often prevalent. Primitive recording techniques also gave this genre a lo-fi sound that endeared its earnest music, but occasionally hard-to-understand vocal accompaniment, to university students worldwide.
The Dunedin Sound can be traced back to the emergence of punk rock as a musical influence in New Zealand in the late 1970s. Isolated from the country's main punk scene in Auckland (which had been influenced by bands such as England's Buzzcocks), Dunedin's punk groups - such as The Enemy (which became Toy Love) and The Same (which later developed into The Chills) developed a sound more heavily influenced by artists like The Velvet Underground and The Stooges. This was complemented by jangly, psychedelic-influenced guitar work reminiscent of 1960s bands such as The Beatles and The Byrds, and the combination of the two developed into the style which became known as the Dunedin Sound.
New Zealand-based Flying Nun Records championed the Dunedin Sound, starting with their earliest releases (including The Clean's single "Tally Ho!" and the four-band compilation Dunedin Double EP, from which the term "Dunedin Sound" was first coined). Many artists gained a dedicated "college music" following, both at home and overseas. In July 2009, Uncut magazine suggested that "before the mp3 replaced the flexidisc, the three axes of the international indie-pop underground were Olympia WA, Glasgow, and Dunedin, New Zealand." The growth of the Dunedin Sound coincided with the founding of the student radio station Radio One) at Otago University, helping to increase the popularity and availability of the music around the city. Student radio RDU in Christchurch, popular in student flats at the time, was already playing plenty of Dunedin music as early as 1981, while commercial radio stations in NZ barely featured any "homegrown" music until a voluntary code was introduced in 2002 after a quota system was proposed and discussed during the mid-to-late 1990s.
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