Fishrider is a small scale independent label - more DIY ‘arts & crafts’ than ‘music industry’ - based in Dunedin, New Zealand. We've been releasing music we like for people who like the music we like since 2006. Along the way the Fishrider catalogue has expanded from jangly guitar pop and post-punk, to experimental/ electronic pop, folk and art rock noise and beyond. Since 2012 we've linked up with another small scale independent label in the UK – Occultation Recordings – to make releases available in the UK and Europe.
Death And The Maiden present their third album “Uneven Ground”. Uneven Ground by Death And The Maiden Death And The Maiden’s “Uneven Ground” draws back the velvet curtain on the trio’s shadowy dreamworld with nine songs of their distinctive slow-motion fusion of underground electronic dance music and post-punk guitars washed through with psychic
Stef Animal (The Golden Awesome) presents her debut solo release “Top Gear” again – now on limited edition LP for the first time since the album’s 2018 release. Top Gear by Stef Animal “Top Gear” is a paean to obsolete, entry-level, mostly 1980s synth, computer and electronic music technology. It’s a concept album
Together, Emily Fairlight and The Shifting Sands’ Mike McLeod have created a special new album capturing a special moment, sounding like they’re “playing in your lounge.” Sun Casts a Shadow by Emily Fairlight / The Shifting Sands Fairlight has been composing and performing for over a decade, playing throughout New Zealand and Australia
Negative Nancies exist in their own universe. The songs evolve organically through rehearsal room experimentation. Amid the No Wave art-punk chaos an irrepressible undercurrent of pop melodicism and moments of eerie psychedelic calm shine through the noise. Negative Nancies don’t play by anyone’s rules. Songs unfold in unusual ways through an organic wild-yeast
Pōneke/ Wellington jangle / surf / fuzz-pop sextet Tidal Rave return with an eight song album. “Albumette” was primarily written during the seemingly never-ending 2020 lockdown era, and explores such pertinent topics as “police incompetence, problematic capitalism, disconnection and in-between spaces.” The recording sounds darker and heavier on “Albumette”, and the bands song-writing
Wellington based six-piece band Tidal Rave continues a New Zealand (and Australasian) tradition of dark, compelling guitar and keyboard lead garage rock. There’s something slightly claustrophobic and unsettling at times about the churning dense weave of the three guitars and bass backed by ghostly organ and insistent drum pulse. Add the character provided by the
Emily Fairlight has a proper folk singer’s background having been, among other things, a teenage runaway adventurer in Australia and India, a circus school student, a barista and a runner turned jack-of-all-trades at a digital visual effects company. “Mother of Gloom” an elusive creature, but the prevalence of acoustic guitar and intimate sharing of lived experience point
If guitar rock is dead, no-one told Bad Sav. The latest blast of Analogue Dunedin comes from the band that refused to be left behind. Although featuring Death And The Maiden guitarist/vocalist Hope Robertson and bassist/vocalist Lucinda King, plus Shifting Sands guitarist Mike McLeod (on drums here), Bad Sav are the primary strain
The second album from Port Chalmers, Dunedin band Death and the Maiden creates a shadowy world within a world; populated by melancholy melodic synth waves, dreamy reverb washed guitars and vocals that celebrate the excruciating beauty and crushing weight of everyday life. The band – Lucinda King (vocals, Bass), Hope Robertson (guitar, drums,
The expression Élan Vital describes the impulse of life. The music on the debut album “Shadow Self” by Dunedin cold-wave trio Élan Vital represents that life impulse in an ambiguous zone between machine and human worlds. A dense claustrophobic swirl of dark dance-tempo synth-pop blooms from gloomy cold industrial dance music with vocoder
Artists
Bad Sav | Death and the Maiden | Élan Vital | Emily Fairlight | Males | Negative Nancies | Opposite Sex | The Prophet Hens | The Puddle | The Shifting Sands | Stef Animal | Tidal Rave | Trick Mammoth | The Dark Beaks