Eddie Chambers

Peter McLennan

9 Jul 2013

A major figure in the Auckland inner-city scene in the 1990s, Eddie Chambers started out working at Radio BFM as a volunteer in the late 1980s, and was soon the recording engineer in their in-house ad production crew.

He was quickly using the BFM facility to record musicians and Chamber's name pops up often on recordings of some early Auckland rap crews including Semi MCs, who won the BFM Rap Competition in 1988 – the prize included the opening slot for Run DMC. He also engineered recordings for the likes of MC OJ and Rhythm Slave, Hallelujah Picassos, and Nathan Haines, whilst at BFM.

In particular he has several credits on the pioneering 1989 BFM hip-hop compilation AK89 - In Love With These Rhymes.

From there Chambers began working with Joost Langeveld, and the two formed Nemesis Dub Systems in 1989. They both then joined the ranks of Flying Nun act NRA, led by Rex Visible. NRA were a Christchurch band who’d relocated to Auckland, and were previously known as Not Really Anything, keeping NDS active at the same time. The two bands often played and toured together.

Chambers and Langeveld recorded their debut self-titled EP at BFM’s studio, and at Incubator studio with Mark Tierney and Rex Visible sharing engineering duties, and released it on Murray Cammick's Wildside Records in 1991. It featured their BFM Top 10 hit song ‘A Young Boy's Tale’, a delightfully grim ditty.

Their album A Multitrack Situation came out in 1992 on Deepgrooves, again recorded up at BFM. The liner notes observed that “A Multitrack Situation was recorded between 1989 and 1992 on shit equipment with no fucking budget!”

They frequently collaborated as NDS with Stinky Jim – who also designed the cover montage for their debut album and later formed Unitone Hifi with Langeveld and Angus McNaughton.

Chambers and Langeveld relocated to New York not long after the album came out, with Langeveld continuing to work with Unitone Hifi, though only a few new tracks on compilations emerged from the NDS duo thereafter.

Chambers found work in a recording studio there, but ended up hating it – he wasn’t his own boss, and he got stuck recording country and western, which seemed wrong to him in New York.

Eddie Chambers moved to another job outside the recording industry and saved to set up his own home studio, where and he and Langeveld continued making music, although he has said the work was unfocused. Chambers said he ended up getting “lots of little black boxes” and making lots of music, much unreleased. In the last part of the 90s he did some soundtrack work for video games and sound design for CD-Roms. He also contributed to the 1995 debut album by Unitone Hifi Wickedness Increased, and their 1996 remix album, Rewound and Rerubbed.

These days Eddie Chambers, having left New York in the early 2000s, runs the family property rental business in Rarotonga, and has a regular radio show called Beyond The Reef on a local station, 88FM.