Techtones reissued

I saw RNZ Music pay tribute to Chris Knox on Instagram the other day in honour of his birthday. They highlighted some key moments, like the Enemy, Toy Love, and him getting a four track recorder and making records with the Clean and the Verlaines to name but a few of the FNun rabble.

It reminded me that the first album recorded with his four track wasn't a Dunedin band, but Auckland act the Techtones. Their one and only album 'TT23', from 1981, has just had a digital reissue.




Knox got his four track reel to reel (a Teac A3340s) in 1981, after getting a $2500 inheritance after his Nanna passed away. It was being sold off by Mandrill studio, where Toy Love had recorded, and he recalls it was a guy named Dave [Hurley] who played in bands in the 60s who owned it. Knox can't remember his surname tho.

He did a bunch of recording experiments to learn how to use it, which his flatmate Doug Hood iniststed he release as his first solo album, Songs for Cleaning Guppies (1983). He told that story to The Wire in 2008, here:





Audioculture's Gary Steel says "It’s hard to imagine in the 21st century, with every other musician working from their home studio, but in 1979 there was only one way to record an album [for Toy Love]: In the often oppressive environment of a "real" studio. It cost a bundle of cash, and an inexperienced group had to do everything the producer and engineer told them to do. It was an atrophied situation with the wrong hands holding all the power.

Knox – with the help of Doug Hood and a few others – changed all that, when he took a 4-track recorder down to the South Island [in 1981] to get their essence on the go. Roger Shepherd formed a record company around the results of those recordings, Flying Nun, and the rest is history."

A new profile of the Techtones has gone up on Audioculture: "Despite being offered a five-album recording deal by CBS who, earlier in 1981, released the single ‘State of Mind’, the group decided to go it alone. Most of TT23 was recorded by Doug Hood and the band on the legendary Teac 4-track tape recorder belonging to Toy Love’s Chris Knox. The “studios” included a dilapidated Auckland hall [on Bond St] where The Clean would later employ the same 4-track, and Hood, to record the revered Boodle Boodle Boodle EP."