"I’m just a recording, just a moment in time, cursed to repeat myself, over and over and over again," Tane Cotton says when he answers the phone.
As above, it’s his recorded phone message, longer than most and drily amusing, deadpan — even delivering an unsettling twist in the tail for those who hang in there to the end.
A couple of minutes later when the fully embodied Cotton answers a second call himself, he apologises for the message.
"I think I made it in high school," he says. "But I really need to change that because every time I have some professional thing, it’s quite unprofessional."
And yet, maybe it tells a story. Its disregard for convention, the story-telling, the humour ... the extended exposition. These all appear to come as standard features of an interaction with the Dunedin musician, now working as one-man-band Sivle Talk — pronounced "Civil Talk", but try reading that first word backwards, it’s also Cotton’s middle name.
Certainly humour was there in spades — sharing the stage with righteous anger — in Sivle Talk’s first single last year, Bottom Feeder, subtitled in the song’s video as "A not so subtle commentary on the current political climate of Aotearoa".
First verse:
I’m just a Bottom Feeder / Scum of the earth / And I’m cursed / With the burden of empathy / My fellow humans matter to me.
The song continues: I wanna be an ignorant [expletive] / Learn to run Aotearoa like a business / Trickle down like the [explicit metaphor]
It’s punk rock, firing precision-guided invective at the establishment’s self-serving agendas in the finest traditions of the genre.
But also slightly cartoonish, by design, fighting fire with fire.
Our government seems to have recognised that the wheels are falling off late-stage capitalism, so is trying to see how much it can get away with before the lights go out, Cotton says.
"It’s absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, it’s cartoonish."
They’ve become puppet masters, perpetuating a culture war to distract people as their rights are stripped away, he says.
"You know, like trying to basically erase Te Tiriti o Waitangi is just completely ... batshit crazy. It’s like white supremacy right in front of our eyes — like how they’re trying to whitewash the curriculum at the moment, but everyone’s distracted by, ‘oh, no more NCEA, you know?’. It’s all just baffling."
None of the above is to pigeonhole Cotton as just another grumpy nihilist. And indeed, given he’s singing, playing guitar, bass and drums in Sivle Talk, both pigeon-holing and nihilism seem out of the question.
In the context of the song and its subject matter, though, punk rock recommended itself, he says.
"I want to make a wide range of stuff, but, yeah, the punk vehicle suited very well. I think the angry shouty sort of thing is very effective."
As an addendum, in which Cotton specialises, he cautions that talking about "angry shouty" can be reductive "because you can convey so much with your voice in so many different ways and so many different ways of angrily shouting".
This City plays fast slowly, pacing the delivery of its excoriation to make sure no-one misses the point, while a Death By Audio Space Bender guitar pedal helps turn the intensity up to 11 and Cotton displays genuine vocal range as the chorus line shreds the heartstrings.
Cotton was principally drummer in his previous band, Allophones, and took some university music papers that gave him access to drumming lessons, but the rest is self-taught — including, he says, writing ambitious guitar lines that he’s then forced to learn.
"With these singles, they’ve kind of been like dipping my toes in the water and learning how to be a songwriter and also a singer, I guess, and how to record my own music and how to play all the roles, every role in the band as one person, and also figuring out what direction I want to take," he explains.
It’s meant the focus has been very much on the arrangement, Cotton says, a left-field funky interlude dropped into This City being a case in point.
"One thing I’ve also been working on is deliberately trying to structure the songs to be as interesting as possible. Sometimes for a song, like, the A, B, A, B, C, D, or whatever structure, just like verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus — it works totally cool. But these three songs, they’re all slight variations on that."
Where Bottom Feeder took aim at national politics, This City adds the local, firing barbs at the priorities of the Civic Centre and in particular the authorities’ tragic inability to make the Bus Hub a safe place for Ōtepoti’s children.
"After so many incidents of violence, specifically at the Bus Hub, it should be very clear that something needed to be done," he says.
"It’s like they built the Bus Hub and then just left it. And it’s not like it’s improved public transport. It’s made getting on the first stop easier."
Cotton pauses to look up a
quote he’s seen that he thinks sums up the situation. It’s by the 19th century African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass: "It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men".
This City Has Let Our Children Down chants the lines "However you repave, you can’t remove the stains / Of the killings that took place in view of the cops" — which flips Douglass and repurposes his wisdom for infrastructure.
"The George St makeover is almost like a literal painting over," Cotton says.
"I think that every once in a while, something really bad happens that kind of wakes you up and snaps you out of the trance and makes you go, ‘hold on, things are not right’. And then you look up and everyone around you is still sleeping, you know?"
It’s a specific example that illustrates a wider malady, for Cotton. The violence that stalks Dunedin’s downtown drinking scene is another manifestation — a long-running issue that is for the most part conveniently ignored, he says.
"I feel like there’s a deliberate effort not to bring attention to it because it makes the facade of Dunedin’s happy city for cool people sort of fall away, you know? Like, every city has its shitty places and violent aspects, but Dunedin has a very uniquely horrific drinking culture that allows for this."
Cotton is also among those concerned authorities are twiddling thumbs while Dunedin institution The Crown’s viability as a live venue is threatened.
"Because that’s the cultural hub of our city, not bloody George St and the seesaw."
In his video for This City, the kids, who are most definitely not all right, can at least retreat to The Crown.
Sivle Talk’s second new single this month, This Body of Mine, is a significant change of pace, in terms of both content and style — made less surprising after Cotton lists his varied listenings of the past week or so: celebrated songsmith Elliott Smith (an obsession stretching back 18 months), experimentalists Geese (in particular their album 3D Country), an indie Irish band, Burglar, he found on Bandcamp and local band Sogg. Though Sogg are pretty much angry shouting — done in a different way.
For This Body Cotton shifts into a Thom Yorke register while an emergency 111 call plays in the background — the actual recording of a call he made when suffering heart attack symptoms.
"This Body of Mine has been finished for quite a while, but I’ve been holding it close to my chest because I didn’t know what to do with it. You know, it’s like, do I put it out in a single, or do I wait for the album," he says.
"I’m immensely proud of it."
There’s still the rage there, he says, but this time he’s raging against his own body.
Cotton has been battling long Covid now for years, alongside other debilitating symptoms that have regularly left him washed out and exhausted.
His studies at the University of Otago became a victim of the brain fog that accompanies his condition, he says.
"I think it’s incredibly difficult to express, especially to healthy people, what it’s like living with a chronic illness and how difficult it is. Because if everybody was able to understand, then nobody would say, you know, this sort of ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps sort of vibe’, you know, ‘just get over it’."
The reality is that over time you lose contact with your friends, your networks, he says.
"It’s a very alienating and isolating experience."
Knowing that, Cotton wanted to write a song for other people going through the same experience.
"I haven’t come across many songs that are about being chronically ill.
"So, I hope that this song provides that for somebody, that it’s something they can listen to and be like, ‘Oh, I feel seen’, you know?"
After all this single-handed sitting room creativity, Cotton finally takes Sivle Talk live to the stage tonight, for a gig at Pioneer Hall, followed by an appearance at Dankfest next weekend.
He won’t be trying to play all the instruments himself; rather he’s assembled something of a Dunedin supergroup, with Cotton on guitar and vocals.
"I’ve put together a great band to bring these songs to life and, honestly, could not be more excited. I haven’t played a gig in a year and a half," he says.
"And playing gigs is my life."
The gig
Sivle Talk plays Port Chalmers’ Pioneer Hall, with Eris and Sogg, tonight 7pm.
And next weekend at Dankfest, at The Crown.
The new singles are on Bandcamp.
