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.