King Records Worldwide

A New Zealand Underground Archive

This is a New Zealand Underground Music Archive documenting a scene that has interested me greatly since the 1980’s. I can’t say what precisely drew me to New Zealand music, but if I had to guess I would say that it has something with the lack of pandering I found amongst much of the scene, a purity and enthusiasm for music and art that I had seen as diminishing in my country (USA) and the UK. Add to that a lack of pretense (I guess that goes hand in hand with the lack of pandering) and you have a sound that connects to what I’ve always loved in music, whether it be the jangly pop of early 80’s Dunedin, the darker, sometimes sadder moods of the early 80’s Christchurch scene and later Xpressway recordings or the isolated experimentation and avant garde sounds of bands like Sandoz Lab Technicians, Birchville Cat Motel, Armpit and too many others to mention.

I've been asked by a number of people to make some information available that has not been readily available on the web and this is my attempt to do this. This is kind of a clearing house for my obsessive data gathering. Bear in mind, I did not spend a lot of time building these into a nice HTML format, they are fairly spartan in terms of color and information at this point.


My email address is... vallor@comcast.net

My mailing address is...
Dan Vallor
PO Box 6364
Concord, CA 94524
USA

click here to see my Wants List



NZ Label Discographies


An Apoplexy Label Discography: Peter Wright's fine Christchurch label.

An Arclife Label Discography: Dunedin's premier cooperative label.

A Blunt Instrumentals Discography: Sandoz Lab Technician's private label.

A Celebrate Psi Phenomenon Discography: Campbell Kneale of The Birchville Cat Motel's label

A Corpus Hermeticum Discography: Bruce Russell of The Dead C's label

A Crawlspace Label Discography: Including the Auckland record shop's house label and their Crawlspace Artist Series releases.

An EST Tapes Discography: Robert Scott of The Bats, The Clean and The Magick Heads cassette label

An Extemporanious/LifeSpace Discography: Witcyst's labels.

A Flying Nun Records Discography: A Complete Record of New Zealand's premier (formerly) independent label.

An IMD Discography: Short lived but essential Dunedin post Xpressway imprint.

An Industrial Tapes Discography: Paul Luker's (This Is Heaven/Phantom Forth) mid-80's imprint.

A Language Label Discography: The Dead C's private label.

A Metonymic/Medication Label Discography: Kim Peiters and Peter Stapleton's art and reissue labels

Onset/Offset Discography: Legendary outsider label from the 80's-90's

A Precious Metal Discography: Michael Morley of The Dead C's label

A Propeller Records Discography: One of New Zealand's premier pop and punk label

A Psuedoarcana Discography: Antony Milton's Pseudoarcana label as well as related labels Seedy-R! and Wire Bridge

An Ripper Records Discography: Another, slightly more consistent New Zealand premier pop and punk label

Root Don Lonie For Cash and Plop Recordings Discographies and the Oat Publications imprint: Clayton Noone's (CJA) label.

A Sleek Bott Discography: The imprint of the always brilliant Axemen and their off shoot and solo ventures.

Stabbies And The Rockets Recordings Discography: Pumice's Stefan Neville's label

An Trinder Discography: The brief output of the label that introduced Omit and Crude as well as Nigel Bunn.

A World Resources Discography: Paul Toohey's label, home to K-Group, Surface Of The Earth and others.

An Xpressway Discography: The mother of all NZ underground labels.



PDF files of two of my articles from Leslie Gaffney and Frank Van Den Elzen's Popwatch, thanks the Kiwitapes Blogspot for the lovely PDF scans, they are far better than the prior jpegs that were posted here.

Xpressway Records From Popwatch 9


New Zealand Vanguard From Popwatch 9



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