North Dunedin musician, gamer and father Karl Bray loves the benefits of fibre. He’s just harnessed its power to share music files with a UK-based record producer and also collaborates on new songs online with band mates. Karl says fibre means his gaming is faster and as if all this isn’t enough, his kids are thanking him too. He explains it in his own words…

“I signed up to fibre as soon as it was available in our street, from memory that was late last year. We haven’t looked back.

 I’m the vocalist and songwriter for The Prophet Hens. We are a four piece who love the Dunedin Sound and have been together for about five years. We don’t have a lot of resources or money for recording and so we did the majority of recording for the new record ourselves. The four of us managed the recording and the music was mixed and mastered in Dunedin. Through a fan we developed a relationship with record producer, Occultation in the UK. When we were recording, during the night once the songs were mastered we would often go back and forward sharing the audio files of the songs between here and Nick in the UK – it was immediate. This sharing was directly responsible for the release of our record ‘The Wonderful Shapes of Back Door Keys’ in August.

I’m busy with my children and a fulltime job and the other band members have busy lives too. What’s more it can be difficult to find appropriate practice spaces. So even although The Prophet Hens are all in the same city sometimes the easiest way for us to collaborate is virtually. I’ll often have a session writing songs and then send the files to the team to see if they can riff to them and develop the music. This is really effective way for us to work together without having to physically be in the same place at the same time.

For some reason The Prophet Hens have a lot of fans in France and so we’re planning a show for them. It’s nice for people in France to buy our album but we’d really love them to be part of a show. We are touring in January and will stream a show then – that’s what the technology allows us to do now.

Inspired by the speed of my fibre connection I wired a PC to the router and then for the first time I bought a TV. I have access to everything I need through this. I stream Netflix, YouTube and Steam. My music and videos are all there as well.

Now, everything I need is here and I don’t need to leave home…although we have The Prophet Hens tour in the New Year…”