A genre-diverse festival called Flipper Fest has been scheduled for August 9-10th, all in the name of the Yellow Eyed Penguin Trust. Platforming local musos of the current Dunedin Sound, the festival promises to merge surf rock with punk and indie-adjacent sounds to make for a rip-roaring spectacular. All for the love of penguins!
The festival is the creation of Caribou frontman and closeted penguin-lover Mario Giradet, who announced his brainchild to the world a couple weeks ago. “Yellow Eyed Penguin are cool,” Mario told Critic Te Ārohi. His biggest inspiration for organising Flipper Fest was a first-year visit to the Yellow Eyed Penguin Trust. “They really stood out to me as something important, and with hoiho meaning ‘noise shouter’, it only seemed appropriate to do a bit of a music festival for them,” he said.
The Yellow Eyed Penguin Trust is a group dedicated to preserving hoiho through the building of reserves, coastal preservation, and maintaining the native plants that populate the homes of the hoiho. Due to their threatened conservation status, driven by a 75% decrease in population since the mid ‘90s, the already uncommon species is trending toward extinction in the next 20 to 40 years, although much of this decline can be attributed to an infectious disease outbreak in the mid-2000s.
The festival itself is being hosted over two nights, seeing performances at the Crown and U-Bar. Acts such as Ani Saafa, Leo Lilley, Caribou, Uno Juno, and the Hypocriticals (yeehaw) are just a few of the bands who are stepping up in memory of their old Club Penguin accounts. Mario said that he wished to “unify all the music scenes of Dunedin, make it something that everyone can get involved in for a good cause.” The diversity of the showing is amplified by several Christchurch-based bands coming down South specifically to get their jam on for Flipper Fest.
Doors open at 8pm for each performance, wrapping up at 1am. All proceeds go to the Yellow Eyed Penguin Trust and tickets can be purchased online at Under the Radar. It’s about to be the Club Penguin night club up in here.