“Rolling Moon” represents The Chills at the start of their journey proper. It's not a great recording by later standards but easily good enough to allow the song to shine. It's the start of a journey that Martin Phillipps is determined will become a career.
Prime Movers' drummer Chris Matthews didn’t feel right playing drums in a pop band. His thoughts were darker and he was seeing music a different way partly due to his new flatmates musical outlook.
"...After all, it was the anti-music business Do It Yourself (DIY) ethic that Chris was looking to embrace and not a willfully rough and ready Lo-fi one. DIY is about using the limited resources at your disposal and getting the best possible results by being imaginative and inventive."
"...Bored Games rewrote themselves back into the history of Dunedin music and helped put in place a small but significant building block in the long-lasting career of Shayne Carter."
"...All the songs brim with individual otherworldly invention and collectively transport us to an uncanny parallel universe. A universe that in some ways might be a grossly distorted and amplified view of late 1980s Dunedin as glimpsed at by sane and sober visitors..."
Louis Likes His Daily Dip is a remarkable record, a marker of Tall Dwarf musical ambition and the blueprint of the record making methodology that they would follow over the subsequent years when making their best recordings.
This Sporting Life were the necessary disrupting outsiders that helped mix and mess things up. They made Show Me to the Bellrope and helped to make Flying Nun a more interesting musical place.
The Able Tasmans debut release, The Tired Sun 12” was considered a bit of an oddity at the time with its keyboard led quirky full sound. And with the term “oddity” comes the unspoken implication that this is a one-off novelty.