Tall Dwarfs

New Zealand duo of singers/songwriters Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate (aka Tall Dwarfs) were forebears of both the lo-fi movement and indie rock writ large, bringing an experimental approach to laconic jangle pop melodies and recording everything themselves on four-track. Their somewhat warped songs always kept pop at the core, and their shabby psychedelic production paved the way for both the Elephant 6 collective and the early home recording phases of bands like Pavement, Smog, Eric's Trip, and many others. The band produced new material prolifically, issuing near-annual EPs throughout the ’80s and spending the ’90s and early 2000s on albums like 1990’s Weeville and 2002′s The Sky Above the Mud Below. Knox suffered a debilitating stroke in 2009, bringing the project to an abrupt halt. In 2022, Merge Records issued the 55-song anthology Unravelled 1981-2002, collecting some of the best moments from the band’s extensive catalog.
Knox and Bathgate formed Tall Dwarfs in 1979 following the demise of their previous band, the legendary Toy Love. Recording on Knox’s four-track machine, the duo debuted with the 1981 EP Three Songs, highlighted by the classic “Nothing’s Going to Happen.” The record was a hit, although it left many Toy Love fans baffled by the pair’s new musical direction: Tall Dwarfs’ releases were deliberately primitive, the D.I.Y. ethic at its purest — songs were all recorded at home (performed in bedrooms, hallways, and the like) and defiantly experimental in nature, presaging the rise of what was ultimately dubbed “lo-fi” as the sound began to grow in prominence and influence over the course of the decades to follow.
In 1982, Bathgate relocated from Dunedin to Christchurch; with the distance between him and Knox now totaling some 750 kilometers, Tall Dwarfs was relegated to a side project, with both men meeting once or twice annually to record and perform the occasional live date. The first product of their long-distance union was the EP Louis Likes His Daily Dip, issued in 1982 on the fledgling Flying Nun label; Canned Music followed a year later. With 1984′s SlugBucketHairyBreathMonster, Tall Dwarfs scored their most successful record to date; the track “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die” was a cult hit across New Zealand, and with its inclusion on the Flying Nun compilation Tuatara, it received significant international exposure as well. After recording 1985′s That's the Short and Long of It, Bathgate moved to the U.K.; many predicted the duo’s demise, but he returned after a year, and the Tall Dwarfs reunited for 1986′s Throw a Sickie (so named because both Bathgate and Knox were suffering from colds during production).
With 1988′s Dogma, the duo finally graduated to a proper studio; the EP featured “The Slide,” a tale of euthanasia which became one of their most controversial and best-known efforts. The long out of print first four Tall Dwarfs EPs were mined for the subsequent Hello Cruel World best-of collection; the first of their records to earn proper world-wide release, it won them considerable global media coverage. In 1990 they reconvened in the studio, emerging with so much material that the longstanding EP format was finally forsaken to release a full-length LP, dubbed Weeville; a year later another album, Fork Songs, appeared. A tour of America followed in 1992, and in 1994 Tall Dwarfs issued the 3 EPs LP, a collection of 18 new tracks sequenced to resemble a trio of mini-albums. Though Knox had long maintained a solo career, Bathgate waited until 1996 to make his solo debut with Gold Lame; still, Tall Dwarfs remained intact, issuing Stumpy a year later. Fifty Flavours of Glue arrived in 1998, and The Sky Above the Mud Below followed in 2002, by which point the band had been in motion for more than 20 years and had influenced multiple generations of new artists. The Athens, Georgia based Elephant 6 collective and their associated bands had been especially moved by the output of Tall Dwarfs, and in 2005, Elephant 6 band Olivia Tremor Control embarked on a short U.S. tour with Tall Dwarfs. In 2009, just as the band was gearing up to record a new album, Knox had a stroke. A host of acts indebted to the Tall Dwarfs for their lo-fi path finding quickly put together a benefit compilation titled Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox. Contributions came from Yo La Tengo, Lambchop, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, and many others. Knox’s stroke effectively ended the band, but their legacy lived on and several compilations appeared in the following years. In 2022, Merge released Unravelled 1981-2002, a collection of gems from every phase of the band’s long-running evolution. ~ Jason Ankeny