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Artist
The Garbage and the Flowers
12+ albums
noise rockLo-Fiindie rockNew ZealandExperimental Rock
about
Coming out of Sonic Youth-drenched Wellington, NZ in the early nineties, The Garbage & the Flowers were always going to be an anomaly. Denounced as the fifty-thousandth band to sound like the The Velvet Underground, and even as a Christian band in the local street press, the five-piece nevertheless built up a solid gang of devotees, who claimed their sound to be "unique, fractured, and psychedelic" and ideal to take acid with and get stoned to. Championed by songwriter Alastair Galbraith, they released a critically acclaimed first single, Catnip/Carousel, and double album, Eyes Rind As If Beggars, both on US labels. The latter, with its "sun-burning" and lyrical improvisations found them a secure place in the noise-pop canon. Former drummer Torben Tilly, now of Berlin based electronic duo Minit, described their sound thus: "In The Garbage & The Flowers (TGATF) there's this crystalline structure of a song with its architecture of chords and idiomatic vocal melody. It's something quite arcane and folkloric, owing a lot to Helen and Yuri Frusin's song-writing and Helen Johnstones' sapphirine voice. Being a part of this 5-pronged entity has been something I have really enjoyed and has definitely been influential on my approaches to making music. If all the musical parts work together in an almost mechanical kind of way to create a song it can be really satisfying. Sometimes however, through our own hazardous doing as a band, these songs would become unhinged and collapse in
