Dubious Brothers: Dubious Word Traders

Indie pop/rockers King Biscuit were the last Waikato act to grace the cover of NZM, back in 1995, and even 12 months ago Hamilton was about the last place your average A&R man would be looking to catch the next wave of dance culture music. But that was then...

The Dubious Bros' debut album 'Trade Secrets', was recorded last year over weekend sessions at Wintec, the local polytechnic in Hamilton, where producer/beatmaker Chris Macro and 27 year-old mc Tyna Keelan met. True, even now, and belying the excellence to be found in places on this CD, there isn't much of a hip hop scene there, just a pocket of mcs and DJs who help each other out and "... all know each others' girlfriends..." according to Tyna.

"The thing about doing it all in Hamilton is there's no distractions," says 26 year-old Chris. "There's no scene you have to go schmoozing. It's basically, you're stuck here, there's nothing else to do, so you might as well do your shit."

Some things are the same, 'Trade Secrets' was due out last October in time to ride the beats wave that reached new heights and mainstream popularity after the hype of the Hip Hop Summit in Auckland, but both remixing and attempts to secure funding took longer than originally planned. Seven months later and that hip hop crest has kept on rising - now looks an even more optimum time to release.

The delayed release, Chris admits, gave him time to refine the album to perfection.

"I think it's been mixed about six times in total. I thought, 'Man, if I've got the time, I might as well make it the best album that I can possibly make', and we put heaps of time in it. In the last while heaps of stuff came out in New Zealand and the production values were kinda sloppy. Then it all started getting better, so I thought I might as well make ours sound like one of the better produced records."

By biding their time, the Dubious Bros have secured some very sweet deals. They started talking with Mai Music after last year's Hip Hop Summit, signing with the record label in November. Their album is now set for distribution in New Zealand and Australia through the pro-active Shock Records, who are better known for their support of the local punk scene.

Shock Marketing and Promotions manager, Lisa Paris, says the whole company loves the album and she anticipates widespread success.
"We all think it's amazing. One of those where you go 'wow...' when you hear it. It's going to appeal to a lot more than that centralised market."
Tyna agrees.
"Hopefully people from heaps of different backgrounds can catch it. I think we've hit it right there. It's not so centred in hip hop that only hip hop heads will catch it."

Even so, the Dubious Bros are getting noticed by the hip hop community as well, says Chris.
"Everyone thinks it's from offshore. Even heads - even up at bFM. I think P (Money) was playing The Future on his show and Logikal was like 'Who are these dudes? Sounds like some underground New York cats.' P's like 'They're from Hamilton'!"
"About as far away from New York as you can get," laughs Tyna.

Dubious Bros have never expected an instant rise to popularity, although the Mai Music release may mean the groundswell effect they are hoping for will be speedier.

Mai Music CEO, Victor Stent, is confident this first full length single-artist release on the label will do well. He acknowledges that the label's earlier signings, including Tauranga's Loniz, Psyko Akoustix and Auckland R&B singer Carmen Steel, still need time to develop an album's worth of recordings.
He says he was impressed by the maturity of the tracks they played him.
"It certainly didn't feel like a demo or a first record. You don't often find an act that has developed such a body of work in isolation."

Dubious Bros don't fit the typical Mai FM profile, but Stent insists the radio station is not gospel for the Mai Music label.

"What we play on Mai doesn't dictate what we sign and who we work with."
Mai FM were playing three tracks off the album before its release, and expect to rotate as many as half of the dozen tracks. The b-Net and Channel Z networks have also already picked up songs from the pre-released album.

Confidence and fresh styles apart, what impresses about 'Trade Secrets' is its musical proficiency - it's well played. Surprising then, to hear that Chris doesn't "... really play anything," and only completed a degree in music production at Wintec (the Waikato Institute of Technology) only last year.

"I had some production skills," he says. "I thought I had mad skills, but when I got into Wintec, I realised that I didn't have shit. You don't really get much hands-on experience until halfway through the second year (of the three year Media Arts degree) and that was pretty cool, because I was still deciding what I wanted to do.

"I had been living overseas and I wanted to come back and start a hip hop group, knew that I wanted to do some hip hop thing. Halfway through the second year I hooked up with Tyna because the Native Sons were recording at Wintec and they needed someone to do some beats. So I played them some beats and ended up sort of co-producing with Tyna. After that, we were like, shit... we might as well record our own album."

"Ohhh, it was funny," laughs Tyna. "We were knocking out beats in ten minutes."
"Anyway, the third year came around," Chris continues. "I had all this free studio time as part of the course and this whole portfolio to do, so I just recorded the album there, with the knowledge I had learnt from Zed Brookes, who was my tutor. He's a wicked engineer, he knows his stuff, he taught me heaps. So, as well as learning in class I spent pretty much every Friday and Saturday night there for an entire year. I just learnt heaps."

And produced a fine album too. Somewhat surprisingly, no other students on the course used this same opportunity.

"There was a huge apathy, which is kinda weird, and no-one really understood what a great opportunity they had at their fingertips. I was like, 'Dudes, I'm recording this album...'"

Indeed, as well as a Bachelor in Media Arts and the Excellence in Music Production award (which somewhat ironically won him some studio time), he walked away with 30 tracks, 12 of which made it onto the album. The remainder will be released on the Dubious Bros website. ("So we've got a mysterious back catalogue," Tyna jokes.)

"Every year in a class you get one or two people who take the ball and run with it," says course lecturer Zed Brookes. "By the end of it, Chris could teach me, he learnt so much."

"It's just like I took advantage of what was on offer," is how Chris describes it, admitting it was hard work. "I pretty much gave up weekends for a whole year, but it was so worth it. Now we've got an album and that's kept our production costs down, so we don't owe the label anything. There are no recoupable costs, cos it was all paid for by my fees!"

"We bounced everything down to two-inch tape before mixing. This also countered the difficulties in transferring tracks recorded on Logic Audio on a PC to a Mac. They've got a nice big old-school Studer tape machine and real good mics. We used a Neumann U67 for every track. All the vocals sound real nice because of that, basically."

At the end of the course, Chris had a three week internship at Kog Transmissions in Auckland, tightening his skills under the wing of Chris Chetland. He did the final mastering of 'Trade Secrets' at Kog headquarters and when he told Kog he was moving up to Auckland and they offered him work on a contract basis. "Like a plumber or a builder" he laughs.

Tyna is also regularly in Auckland, though currently residing in Hamilton. He has regular gigs with jazz and soul groups at Auckland's Supper Club and more recently Khuja Lounge. Tyna played all guitar, bass and "... whatever keyboard parts I could nut out" on the album.

They both agree that what makes 'Trade Secrets' unique in the NZ market is the use of a lot of live instrumentation - the album has few loops or samples.
"We're both schooled up in music theory as well," says Chris. "So, if we can't find it as a loop or sample, we can just play it."

Tyna started learning classical piano at the age of eight, but soon stopped those lessons and took up guitar. Along with Aaron Tokona ex-of Weta, he was considered a hot young talent in Wellington in the '90s.

He studied at the Whitireia Community Polytechnic in Porirua, completing the Diploma in Commercial and Jazz Music in 1994 and has been playing in bands ever since.

"But I was always an mc. Through the whole time I loved hip hop, but if you got up at a party and started rapping people were like, 'What are you doing man?'"
Vocals on the album are sometimes tongue in cheek, sometimes on the verge of battle rhyming and sometimes deadly serious.

"That's just us coming out in the music," says Tyna. "We're not from the streets, we're not ghetto, we're just true to ourselves."
Chris agrees: "We're not trying to emulate the gangsta rap stuff that's coming out of the States. Though, we're definitely influenced by what's going on in the US, we're sooo influenced by that, so we're not going to try and say that we just keep it totally purely NZ at all times."

Other collaborators on this album are mostly local Hamilton mcs, and include Mareko from Deceptikonz, mc JB (whom they affectionately call Junior Dubious), and members of H-town hip hop crews Four Corners and Native Sons. Female vocalist Hinemoa Pohatu is used on Johnny and Jenny a track that talks about family abuse while DJ Sir-Vere scratches on next single Rage.
Former Wintec graduate Andrew Brown shot a video for Rage at the True Colours gig in Auckland at the beginning of June, and also shot the video for the first single The Future.

The pair are already talking about the next Dubious Bros album, which they are planning for 2003. They will move away from guest vocalists, working instead with other musicians, naming TrinityRoots' Warren Maxwell and Toby Laing of the Black Seeds as some they will approach.

They'll stick with their home-based recording process, says Chris.
"I use Logic Audio. I just have everything sitting in there, and then I can work on it at home. But definitely for the mix down, I'd be looking at going back to Kog. I don't think we need a big fat studio and to have all our tracks on a mixing desk, just to make it sound good. I think you just need plenty of gear, plenty of time, musical knowledge and to know what's going to sound good."

Before that there are plans for a jazz album (without vocals), which they plan to release under a different moniker through Mai this summer. And they'd like to travel - Australia being the first destination, but Europe and Asia not unrealistic goals.

When asked what piece of the album and the whole process they are most proud of, both Bros are humble.
"I'm always proud of the fact that we did it, and we did it all totally ourselves," says Chris.

Original ambitions were to record an album, and maybe release it.
"We used to be down at the studio and we'd be sitting outside and we'd be like man, 'It'd be choice if we could do this or that.'" says Tyna "Reality has gone way beyond what we were dreaming of then."