The Garbage & the Flowers

Drawing from the Velvet Underground's most abrasive qualities as a foundation, the Garbage & the Flowers spent over three decades shaping an insular and consistently unpolished take on psychedelic rock. What set the group apart even within New Zealand's underground circles was their knack for shifting between punk-level abrasion and unguarded vulnerability or tender moments inside a single track, while an ever-shifting and incomplete roster produced only a halting stream of material separated by long gaps. Their catalog already felt fragmentary when the 1997 compilation Eyes Rind as if Beggars appeared, yet the band persisted on an erratic path across subsequent decades, performing only occasionally and issuing new material that ranged from archival documents such as the 2008 release Stoned Rehearsal to fresh studio work on the 2022 album Cinnamon Sea.

Formed in Wellington, New Zealand in the late '80s by teenagers Yuri Frusin and Helen Johnstone, who shared a teenage fascination with the remote notion of belonging to a band, the Garbage & the Flowers took their name from a Leonard Cohen lyric. Frusin handled guitar and wrote the bulk of the songs while Johnstone contributed viola and vocals; although the lineup remained fluid throughout the group's existence, early membership included drummer Torben Tilly, with later phases of dormancy and revival bringing in Paul Yates, Heath Cozens, Rachel Davies, Kristen Wineera, and Stuart Porter. Their earliest sound echoed the first Velvet Underground recordings, Johnstone's agitated viola work suggesting John Cale's experimental outbursts. Sporadic performances yielded only scattered compilation appearances and 7" singles at the outset. After moving to Sydney, Australia in 1997 they maintained an on-again, off-again performance schedule. That same year the double LP Eyes Rind as if Beggars gathered their rough home recordings and assorted live tracks into the closest approximation of a discography then available. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s the band attracted growing attention as listeners explored New Zealand's underground history and outsider music more broadly. The 2008 cassette Stoned Rehearsal/Live in NZ appeared in abbreviated form as the Stoned Rehearsal LP in 2011, followed in 2013 by an expanded reissue of Eyes Rind as if Beggars. Occasional performances and recordings continued, with Grapefruit issuing the 2016 reissue The Deep Niche drawn from a cassette the band had self-released in 1991. Additional stray tracks, often older unreleased or live material, surfaced in following years. In 2022 the band delivered Cinnamon Sea, consisting entirely of new songs tracked inside an abandoned courthouse in a sparsely populated village in southeast Australia. Even after more than thirty years, Cinnamon Sea retained the same elusive, timeless character that marked the group's earlier work.