MOKOTRON is carving his own path with Indigenous Māori Bass

In Māori culture, mana is a spiritual power found in a person, place or object. When witnessing a MOKOTRON live set, the manifestation of mana is always present. Seeing MOKOTRON play live is nothing short of a spiritual experience - one inducing goosebumps akin to the presence of ancestors pervading the room. A quintessential set from the Tāmaki Makaurau-based, Ngāti Hine producer opens with the chilling sound of traditional hand carved, wooden Māori flute instrument puoro, before his robotic, chanted poetry and karakia (prayer) cut through the moody atmosphere. Dark, brooding tension builds, and the sound system erupts with the raw energy of pulsating bass and breakbeats.

MOKOTRON’s mission is to decolonise the dancefloor by way of his music, looking to his ancestors to reformat Māorifuturism and reimagine an alternate reality for Aotearoa without colonisation. Born and bred in central Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, the artist born Tiopira McDowell grew up in the formative days of many of electronic music's most iconic global genres, from electro-funk, to techno, Miami bass, hardcore, jungle, and speed garage, just to name a few. Living in Tāmaki’s central city, in his teens McDowell could be found club hopping at venues like the iconic Herzog, but his first ever gig as a DJ was at a rave in Hamilton - just over an hour’s drive from Tāmaki Makaurau. He remembers being 14 years old, playing trip-hop in the backroom of a local RSA alongside local techno and drum and bass DJs. While in his teens he was drawn to the global electronic sounds born in the United States and Europe, he was always moved by the indigenous sounds of historic, pioneering artists like First Nations Aboriginal group Yothu Yindi and Aotearoa’s Moana and the Moahunters. During the 1990s, the latter wāhine trio encouraged Māori youth to preserve their culture and traditions, and for all New Zealanders to learn the Māori language, through their fusion of traditional Māori haka, chants, and taonga puoro with contemporary soul, reggae and hip-hop.

“It just always nagged at me,” McDowell recalls. “It's like, okay, here are people using their culture. And here we are, the rest of us, just wholesale ripping off British and American music. And I never got over it. So I think I always knew that one day I would have to follow that path. Because, I mean, British, American, Detroit music has been the backbone in my life, and it's like, am I just gonna live that my whole life? It took me this long to even be able to do this, because I didn't grow up speaking Te Reo or knowing how to carve pūoro.”

It’s a far cry from where McDowell stands proudly in his culture today, as a Māori studies lecturer at Auckland University by day, and purveyor of self-professed “trauma-driven Māori Bass" by night. He first started experimenting with Māori bass music around 2011, but as the greats always are, the music was too ahead of its time and didn’t get picked up outside of “some random people travelling in buses in Spain”, so MOKOTRON put his radical ideas on the backburner. It wasn’t until the 2020 passing of trailblazing Māori/Pākehā producer/musician Totems, aka the late Reuben Winter, that McDowell felt it intrinsically necessary to pick the project back up again.

“When Totems came out, I was like, that's the chosen one. That's the one who will do it. So I waited for them to do it, and stopped writing music. I sold all my gear. So, literally the day he passed away, I went to the Rockshop, bought an 808, and started writing those tunes. I wrote ‘Colonised Existence’ that day. I never thought it had to be me that was doing it, I just hoped that someone would do it.”

McDowell has lived many musical lives. Before MOKOTRON, he ran a Dancehall project that spawned a number one hit single in Jamaica, but was quickly disillusioned from the industry after being ripped off and making nothing from the song. On the release day of his latest December 2024 album, WAEREA, he reflected on another project that was supposed to be his original debut album, intended to be released in the late 90’s. “My debut album ‘The Lonely Robots Club’ was ready to press in 1998. It’s never been released. I was told as a young person ‘Only one in a million make it, you’re not that one, get a real career’, so music has always been a side hobby for me,” he revealed via an Instagram post. “Don’t follow my lead, don’t wait till half your life has finished to follow your dreams, live your dreams, don’t live other people’s fears. Waerea waerea, mahea mahea.”

“That's a consequence of living in a settler society,” he reflects. “People had to kill the natives and cut down the trees, and so we have a society that focuses on business, and rugby, and all that sort of stuff. And it's like, there's very little place for creativity. That was kind of heartbreaking, you know? I wish someone had supported me then.”

Although he didn’t feel supported in the music industry those two and a half decades ago, he did have the solidarity of fellow Māori electronic producer Denver McCarthy, aka Micronism. The creator of arguably Aotearoa’s most impactful and trailblazing electronic album, 1998’s “inside a quiet mind”, Micronism’s first and only album quickly became a cult classic, and went on to be awarded the 2023 Taite Music Prize’s Classic Record award honour over 25 years on from its release. Still today it stands as an iconic masterpiece of Aotearoa techno.

“During that time, I was working with Denver McCarthy. He had a studio in Kingsland, and he hadn't released “inside a quiet mind” yet, so he just walked me into the studio and we wrote tunes together. Denver brought me in, and he recorded my first few tunes when I was still in high school, which was, like, dark drum and bass.

It's nuts, you know, people have just started doing this thing where you have a setup where it's two DJs facing each other. That was literally Denver's idea back in 1997. He wanted us to do a live set where it's just him and I facing each other, and we don't pay attention to the crowd.”

Numerous monikers and musical projects later, McDowell’s journey has led to the distinct path he’s carved out as MOKOTRON today. While he spent years experimenting with genres to find his niche, he remembers all the puzzle pieces of the MOKOTRON sound came together in just one night.

“On Friday night, I'd have a thing called bass o’clock, which means at four o'clock on a Friday I come home early, everyone gets the fuck out of the lounge, and that's bass o’clock. That's how I wrote all of those earlier electro EP’s. And I think one night, I was just like, “I've got to start doing something Māori”. So I had just written ‘Dawn Of Bass’, which was what got my whole back catalog signed, and got me blowing up all through the European summer. And I was like, “yo, if you're gonna rip off Detroit that hard, it’s time to write a Māori song.”

So I sat there in the lounge, and I just ignored my kids and my family, and I was building this really scary sound. The lights started going down, the windows were open, and I just was trying to get it scarier and scarier. It was me chanting over puoro, and then the kids both ran into the room. It must have been nine o'clock. They were crying, and they were like, ‘dad, stop it. It sounds like there's ghosts in the house’.

And once I had that, I was like, that is how it has to be - I write until I feel scared. It's those chills of feeling the ancestors. So it was like, how can we put the ghosts in everyone's house? It's more of a feeling rather than a sound. As soon as I get that kind of goosebumps feeling, I'm like, that's it. So actually, [finding the sound] just took a night, and it took scaring the hell out of my kids,” he laughs.

Released on December 6th via Aotearoa independent label Sunreturn Records, MOKOTRON’s latest album, WAEREA (which loosely translates to “clearing negative energy”), embodies that deeply spiritual, spine-chilling essence he first evoked in his living room. WAEREA’s seven tracks are rooted in the kaupapa of championing Māori culture, reclamation from colonisers, and sovereignty that was never ceded to the crown by tangata whenua, in the face of centuries of mistreatment of Māori and last years government introduction of the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill threatening indigenous rights. While his waiata conveys the deep pain and distress of tangata whenua in Aotearoa, they equally embody the hope, unity, and resilience there is in resistance.

Intro track ‘KŌKIRI’ was written on the night of Aotearoa’s most recent election, where right-wing political party National were led to victory in 2023.

“it was really clear that there'd been a landslide victory and a mandate towards the right, and we just spent months as the left attacking each other - Greens, Labor, Māori Party - which is pointless. Meanwhile, the right were attacking us. They particularly focus on women in the Greens party. That's what they do. And it was just like, well, we can't do that anymore. We've been arguing with Labor since 2004. The right has unified, and now they have the numbers to hold government. As the left, we need to start talking to each other again. So I wrote that track that night.

Sound wise, I had just heard from a wonderful person called Lady Shaka, about playing Boiler Room. And I was like, I need to write some big tunes. A lot of my tunes are just inspired by Shaka. Whenever she emails me, I'll just go write a tune. I mean, the vocal for ‘TAWHITO’ was written in 2011, but she had just emailed me about a gig, and I was like, I gotta write a drop that's good enough for Shaka,” he says of the acclaimed Aotearoa-raised, now London-based Afro Pasifika DJ, producer, and promoter. “I'm an inspiration junkie, and she's my dealer.”

Second track, ‘KŌPEKE’, is MOKOTRON’s own version of a “diss” track that you would typically hear in the hip-hop and grime genres.

“With the lyrics, it was like, how do you express beef? Because, you know, there's diss records in hip hop, lyrical war in dancehall, and grime was just all beef. And I was like, I can't rip that off. I was like, what's the Māori version of beef? I'm Ngāpuhi, like, everyone hates us, even the fact that we exist pisses people off. So I was like, I'm just gonna do a straight Ngāpuhi tune, where all the language, all the proverbs, everything I'm saying, is just hardcore northern dialect and language, and that’s just a way of saying fuck you. I mean, it wasn't personal beef, but it was more just like - what would a diss record sound like in Aotearoa?”

WAEREA’s third track, ‘KO WAI KOE?’, which translates to ‘WHO ARE YOU?’, pivots from dark, heavy bass to weave reggae dub soundscapes with breakbeats. It was written over a decade ago, when McDowell was involved in discussions with an iwi to settle their grievances in regards to breaches of Te Tiriti.

“I was working in the Office of Treaty Settlements in 2012 and going into treaty negotiations with iwi, and seeing the way the Department of Conservation treated iwi. It was just seeing how hardline they were. I mean, they have that land because the British government said you can't confiscate land anymore. You can't just steal land off Māori, so instead of just confiscating it, they started saying, “well, we need this as a reserve, and we need this as a national park. It’s part of a colonial confiscation. It's about taking the last ‘unproductive’ lands that can't be turned into farms - let's steal them as well.” So, yeah, there's a history to it.

The next track, ‘REO TŌTAHI’, was written when ACT and the National Party were trying to get rid of the Māori language. Their thing was, let's rebuild by destroying Māori language. And that tune is me just saying, you know, if you want to live in a country that only speaks English, go back to England. But if you go to England, just remember, you're going to one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world.”

WAEREA’s title track is a deeply personal waiata written after the passing of McDowell’s father, speaking to the namesake's traditional Māori chant intended to clear away negative energy.

“For a tangihanga, or a funeral, the last thing you have to do is take the tapu off the vehicle that may have held the body, and you take it off the house. We were doing that, and it’s a chant that clears away negative energy. And it was like, “why are we doing this for a car? Why does the car need the waerea?” I need the waerea. My kids do. If I hold on to the trauma I've been through and abuse I've been through, I'm just gonna pass it on to my kids. So don't worry about the van. I need to worry about myself. For me, I know that our male ancestors needed to express how they were feeling. They did it through song and through compositions, and that was their way of publicly expressing their emotions. For me, we have to go back to those ways of actually talking about how we feel, using composition and poetry and song, but then that becomes a starting point to talk about other issues. We have terrible suicide rates in our community and in our country. That's because we don't know how to express ourselves. I think that's what that song is about.”

‘ŌTAUTAHI’ is a sombre ode to the South Island’s city of Christchurch, and its resilience following tragedies like earthquakes and terrorist attacks. McDowell recalls playing his debut gig as MOKOTRON in Ōtautahi at Arcadia, presented by HAVEN, the club night and record label founded in Tāmaki Makaurau by renowned British-New Zealand producer Keepsakes.

“Christchurch was always legendary in terms of soundsystem culture and dance culture. I was happy to do my first gig there, and I just spent a lot of time there. I heard a lot of stories from James, aka Keepsakes and his partner, and others in Ōtautahi. Just being Māori, I had heard a lot of negative stereotypes about Christchurch. And I think to actually go there and hear people's stories, and see the way they've rebuilt in terms of restoring buildings and finding club spaces - they have to put their club nights in a video game parlour. But that speaks to what they’ve built. People were really working hard to rebuild the culture of the city. It was really inspiring. So I think I wrote that while I was there just as a way of sending love to them.”

WAEREA’s lead single, ‘ŌHĀKĪ’, was written in response to the death of Queen Elizabeth, with lyrics speaking to challenge the crown to honour and uphold Te Tiriti. Originally, the song was born out of the Māori studies course McDowell teaches at Auckland university, where he assigned his students a creative project where they were asked to express - in any creative form - how they were feeling about what it meant that Queen Elizabeth had passed away.

“So that tune was just my response,” he says. “It was very much a response to the students. I can't tell you what they did for their assignments, I don’t know if it’s 100% legal, but they did some powerful things. And so I was moved by them. I was like, how am I gonna respond to that? So that's how I wrote ‘ŌHĀKĪ’. So it was really inspired by our young ones, and at the same time trying to push them and say, creative practice has to be part of your life. Because I didn't live in that environment where we reward creativity instead of punishing it. So I want to encourage young people to express themselves and to get rewarded for it.”

McDowell’s worlds collided when, during his debut Boiler Room set in Tāmaki Makaurau last November, for the global platforms first all-indigenous Māori line-up presented by Lady Shaka’s Pulotu Underworld, one of his students watched at their astonishment to see his lecturer playing live in front of him between a sea of Tino Rangatiratanga flags and sweaty bodies at Karangahape Road club The Studio.

“It’s funny, one of my students, he’s Latin-American, he always sits up in the front of my room of 600 people, and I really connected with him all semester. And then at Boiler Room, at the end of my set, I looked up and he was standing there. He was like, ‘what are you doing?!’ and I was like, “I don’t know!’” he laughs, before adding, “he was still at the front of my class.”

In the midst of the Toitū Te Tiriti movement and national hīkoi last year in protest of the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, the Tāmaki Makaurau Boiler Room was nothing short of full circle - having all fallen during the same week. Playing alongside his peers like MOKOMOKAI, Caru, Poppa Jax, Atarangi, Te KuraHuia, Katayanagi Twins, and Seymore, MOKOTRON billed the historic event as “the unofficial hīkoi after party”.

“That's why I straight away said, no, it's not Boiler Room - it's boil up (a traditional Māori dish) room. And that's also why I said it's not Boiler Room - it's the hīkoi after party. That was me sending that message up, because you control the narrative, and you control the world.

It felt weird that here we were in the midst of this really tense political situation - the biggest hīkoi we'd ever seen - and then a group of us were going to do something for a British company. It was like, if we're going to do this, we can't pretend like everything's cool. We have to make it political. We have to ground it in our politics. So we can dress like we did on the hīkoi. We can take the signs. For me, it was really important the way we did it. It was amazing to have that opportunity with Boiler Room, but we can't just fit in. We have to stand out. We had to seize that moment. And we did.”

-

Laura McInnes is a freelance writer living in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. Find her on Instagram.