This feature is part of a new Scene Report on Dunedin. Check out the series here.
The internet is trash, and it’s filling up with more trash by the day. The Dead Internet Theory long ago stopped being a theory and simply became our online reality. In music, so much feels ephemeral: the utopian vision for increased connectivity was an artist’s songs and records reaching more ears than ever before, but when artists are increasingly competing with bot musicians and algorithmic playlists (Case in point: Spotify recently announced the addition of AI-powered playlists to its platform), this is becoming more of a rarity.
All of this is to say that what Sivle Talk is doing down in Ōtepoti is vital work.
The ‘one-man’ post-punk band recorded a full concert film, Barely Standing — Live at Pioneer Hall, earlier this year, wanting to preserve his blistering set for posterity.
“[I’m] obsessed with documenting and cataloguing everything… I think archiving stuff is really important,” Tane Cotton, the musician behind Sivle Talk (it’s pronounced “Civil Talk”), explains.
He enlisted his brother, Akira, and videographer Tom Walsh to film and edit the footage.
“[I]t ended up being sort of a hodgepodge of GoPro camera, which Tom set up, then camera audio, then the actual audio, and then I spent a couple months sort of editing it and putting it all together. Yeah, I’m really happy with how it came out and [I’ve] been making DVDs of it as well on Bandcamp, which people seem to like.
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“I don’t think it’s reached a super big audience or anything… But everyone who has seen it really likes it, which is good enough for me, and I’m glad that people are enjoying it… A lot of bands don’t really have many live recordings of themselves.”
Particularly in a place like Dunedin, which doesn’t have access to the facilities or money of, say, Auckland, documenting the incredible music coming out of the city matters.
“When you’re a North Island band, it’s easier to get funding and easier to put out an album. A lot of Ōtepoti bands will put out an album or a couple of EPs or something and that’s it,” Cotton says.
“And so it’s generally up to the [South Island] bands themselves to actually get someone to film it, so a lot of bands just get their mate to record a song and they’ll just pop it up on YouTube, which is great. But I wish there was more of that because it can be really hard to find good stuff.
“It sucks because there’s lots of amazing bands that are making really interesting and weird and cool music that aren’t getting pushed out but really deserve a lot more financial support and commercial support and marketing, and those bands just don’t really get that so we’ve just got to do it ourselves.”
After spending time primarily playing drums in the scene, Cotton, 22, decided to go out on his own around a year and a half ago.
“I never kind of had the creative control that I wanted, [I never] felt like I was an equal voice in the band. So it was very freeing to do the Sivle Talk stuff because I have complete creative control, which means I can do whatever weird shit I want and I’m not limited to any genres or expectations or anything.
“[I]t is very overwhelming because collaboration is a really important thing… not being able to bounce your ideas off of other people in the same way as being in a band leads to lot more frustration and a slower work cycle. But it’s ultimately worth it in the end… [I’m] very lucky to have good neighbours and live in a relatively sparse place that allows me to drum and stuff!”
At live shows like the Pioneer Hall set, Sivle Talk becomes a full band, Cotton backed up by a coterie of recognisable Dunedin musicians: Caleb from The Pink Opaque, Jack from U-NO JUNO, and Josh, the drummer for Pearly* and Dale Kerrigan. They form a solid unit during Sivle Talk’s Barely Standing set, with Cotton appearing confident having people onstage with him.
Wearing a shredded black shirt, he looks like Joe Strummer but sounds like Paul Banks, especially on opening track “This City Has Let Our Children Down”.
I’m surprised to find out, however, that Banks’ band Interpol aren’t really an influence on Cotton. He tells me he listened to “way too much Muse” as a teenager. He loves Jeff Buckley, IDLES, and Fugazi. “I fucking adore Elliott Smith,” he adds, also citing iconic Dunedin bands Straitjacket Fits and Die! Die! Die! as major inspiration.
His style of post-punk also closely mirrors Irish band Fontaines D.C., but Cotton doesn’t mind a listener being able to decipher his influences.
“I think as I’m sort of finding my feet with my music, I’m definitely drawing from a lot of influences and wearing them on my sleeve. Because I think to be able to innovate, [you] have to get a good grip on the basics first,” he admits.
The tracks on Barely Standing are political, angry, and very personal.
Cotton, who has battled health issues in years with Long COVID, wrote “This Body of Mine” as a means of “trying to shout into the void, ‘PLEASE LISTEN TO ME AND JUST TRY TO UNDERSTAND!'”
As the crowd rapturously receives the latter track inside Pioneer Hall, Cotton jokes, “A bunch of bottom feeders here, eh?!”
Looking ahead, Cotton says he’s just gotten out of a spell of writer’s block. “I’ve got five songs together for an EP and writing more for an album.” He’s also working on video projects and trying to do interesting lo-fi kind of stuff… [I’m] just trying to keep the creative juices flowing and kind of branch out a little bit from just music.”
Sivle Talk’s Barely Standing — Live at Pioneer Hall is out now.
