Meet the Photographer Devoted to Documenting Dunedin Music

This characteristic is a part of a brand new Scene Report on Dunedin. Check out the sequence right here. 

If you’ve been to an Ōtepoti gig anytime within the final decade, you’ve in all probability seen Fraser Thompson.

When the beloved experimental competition Lines of Flight just lately celebrated its twenty fifth birthday, the photographer was there, discovering time to play music too; when native legend Shayne P. Carter performed a present inside Port Chalmers’ gorgeous Iona Church, he was in every single place, snapping photographs from the aisle, the second flooring, and the altar’s edge; he was proper within the thick of it when Dankfest got here to the Crown Hotel, nonetheless managing to {photograph} the night time amidst the mayhem. Even when Office Dog placed on a shock present simply two days after Christmas, he was there.

“I’m on 70, or almost 70,” he says over the telephone from his hometown, tallying up the variety of native gigs he’s been to this yr alone. Even to a Rolling Stone author, that’s a frankly astounding quantity.

The Fraser Thompsons of the world play a pivotal, oft-unsung function in any robust DIY music group. He’s the particular person behind dunedinsound.com, a formidable media archive of Dunedin’s stay music scene.

An internet developer by commerce, he constructed an endearingly old-school web site to host all of his pictures and movies, that are searchable by gig, artist, and venue. It’s a labour of affection which has confirmed fruitful for Thompson simply as a lot because it has for town’s music scene.

“I had an interest in bootlegging and that sort of tradition of recording live shows, and I built a little thing where I have microphones and earplugs so I could record shows just by being there,” he says of the rudimentary early days of the undertaking.

After he acquired a correct digital camera, he began taking pictures and movies of every gig, posting them on each the archive’s web site and devoted social media accounts.

Befitting a metropolis like Dunedin, Thompson rapidly realised that the “tiny local shows are much better than the hundred-dollar stadium stuff.” (I had the identical realisation very early into working at Rolling Stone.)

“[B]y their nature, [they] have much less curiosity and fewer individuals experiencing them, so I used to be like, ‘This stuff is possibly important and maybe I could catalogue it,’” he says. “And then it sort of grew into the idea of the website, and I started adding photos as well.”

Are people grateful for Thompson’s work?

“Yeah, I think so,” he solutions. “I hope so! I always expect someone to be like, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ and it’s only happened once or twice. Most of the time everyone’s appreciative.”

His fellow musos do admire the hell out of Thompson and dunedinsound.com.

“[H]e’s awesome and I fucking love what he does,” Tane Cotton of post-punk band Sivle Talk, who’s additionally keenly conscious of the significance of completely documenting stay music, informed me. “He’s been recording all these gigs for like 10 years or something, and I consider live concerts that aren’t recorded like basically lost media, you know?”

“You are an inspiration! And so many Artists and fans love the work you do more than you realise!!!” commented Pearly* and Dale Kerrigan member Joel Field on Instagram.

Dunedinsound.com is solely a ardour undertaking for Thompson — he’s attending 70-odd reveals per yr on prime of going to his day job.

“[O]bviously I need to make a living… this doesn’t make money,” he says. “At the same time, it would be nice if there was a way to do it [make money].”

As he outlined in an Instagram post, “it’s not a business… it isn’t concerned with generating revue… it won’t go away once it stops making money (it has never made money)… it doesn’t want you to sign up for anything or track you.”

For the person who’s been to over 400 reveals in 11 years, certainly it’s not possible to select a favorite?

“I usually write a yearly summary thing… I mean, Koizilla’s final show was pretty amazing. It felt like everyone was really united, which is what a community and a city [is] all about,” he says after a second’s hesitation.

His favorite venue, in the meantime, is probably going unsurprising: the Crown Hotel, the ramshackle outdated pub beloved by each Dunedinite — Kane Strang informed me it was in all probability his “favourite place on earth.”

The Crown, nonetheless, is battling an “existential threat,” Thompson says: apartments are being constructed proper subsequent to the stay music establishment.

“I’m worried about the Crown because the Crown is literally the cornerstone of all local music,” Thompson sighs.

A sobering sidebar on dunedinsound.com contains a map of town’s stay music venues, previous and current; haunting wee crosses mark the defunct spots, which nearly equal the variety of venues nonetheless standing.

Thompson, nonetheless, is aware of there are behind-the-scenes figures similar to him placing in hours of labor to enhance the state of affairs.

Save Dunedin Music, for instance, is “doing really great stuff. They’re like lobbying — well, I don’t know if you call it lobbying, but [they’re] working with the council. There’s an action plan now [so it’s] just whether the council actually does the stuff they need to do.” Within the council, too, there are actually individuals he says “are very supportive of local music.”

It’s laborious, although, to get too downcast about the way forward for town’s stay music scene, not when volunteers like Thompson stay. When a lot of our on-line world is now ephemeral and downright nugatory, dunedinsound.com must be treasured. Here’s to 70 extra reveals for Thompson in 2026, and numerous extra past that.

Check out Thompson’s undertaking here and here. Support the undertaking here.