Tiopira McDowell: next stop, Glastonbury

Most of the thousands of students who have attended Dr Tiopira McDowell’s Māori Studies lectures over the years have no idea he is also the electronic music producer known as Mokotron.

Described as ‘dark, Māori bass’, his music finds its audience in underground clubs, and Tiopira has never courted a profile beyond the music’s authentic followers.

“I want a real support base; I want a real community,” says Tiopira (Ngāti Hine).

But since winning one of New Zealand's most prestigous music awards, the Taite Music Prize, in April, and the Electronic Artist of the Year title at the Aotearoa Music Awards last week, his cover has been well and truly blown.

Named after legendary music journalist Dylan Taite, the Taite Music Prize recognises an album, released in the past year, for its artistic merit, creativity, innovation and excellence.

Winning the prize for his album Waerea, Tiopira says, was “a dream”.

“I wanted to make an album that could cut it on the dance floor, that could play in the clubs, underground on K Road, but that was also critically reviewed and treated as a piece of art,” says Tiopira, who is co-head of school at Te Wānanga o Waipapa.

“With this project, the point was to do something that hadn’t been done; to do something completely original, that could only come from Aotearoa. For that kind of project, this is the prize.”

Written in te reo Māori, Mokotron’s music features traditional Māori instruments such as taonga puoro and draws on oral traditions. In te ao Māori, a waerea is a protective incantation used to clear negative energy; as the name of the award-winning album and its title track, it references the passing of his father two years ago and the accompanying personal tensions and their release.

Tiopira says his music has always been personal and has become increasingly political. The album was written between 2022 and 2024 and reflects an increasingly tense political period for Māori, he says.

So how does a successful and busy academic, who teaches Māori history and culture, end up as an award-winning underground electronic music producer?

Music has always been there, he says. He learnt piano as a child and later moved on to guitar. He was also bitten early by the electronic music bug, discovering a love of drums and bass guitar while at intermediate school. But he was discouraged at home from following music as a full-time career, he says, and while he DJ’d for years, focusing primarily on his academic career won out.

Despite the success of Mokotron, it’s very much a side project, juggled with work and family (he has two daughters, aged nine and 17), which he works on in the evenings and weekends. But there’s a strong interplay between his academic and music careers.

“Music’s always been the escape from academic work. And academic work has always been the escape from music. I did try once to be a full-time musician, and I just couldn’t do it. It turns out that I’m using music as a release for stress. So, as soon as I took the stress of work away, I couldn’t write music, and I write my best tunes when I’m most stressed out.”

Each also provides creative fuel for the other. Lectures in the Māori 230 course he teaches, focused on Māori history from the colonial period through to today, share their themes and names with Mokotron songs.

The course also has a creative component, where students use media – anything from Minecraft models to weaving to jewellery – to express ideas explored in the course, and these feed his own creative expression. When many students chose to reflect on the death of Queen Elizabeth II in their projects, for example, he created his own response, which resulted in the track 'Ōhākī' on Waerea.

Mokotron’s music is produced out of the garage of his west Auckland home, and the $12,500 cash that comes with the Taite prize will help bring his dream of creating a portable music studio closer to reality.

He’s now focused on writing the next Mokotron album and later this month he’ll perform at Glastonbury, as part of a Pacific collective brought together by internationally renowned Māori DJ Lady Shaka.

Mokotron’s music may still be underground, but the time for Māori electronic music, he says, has come.

“The fact that I’m going to Glastonbury probably tells you something that I’ve been saying for the past four or five years, which is that this kind of music is going to blow up. And you’ve got to listen, because you don’t want to miss that moment.”

Caitlin Sykes