The Garbage & the Flowers

Using the most abrasive elements of the Velvet Underground as a jumping-off point, the Garbage & the Flowers would spend more than 30 years developing their own insular and perpetually raw adaptation of psychedelic rock. The band's ability to be more caustic than punk in the same song where they displayed unabashed vulnerability or gentle sentiments made them stand apart even from their peers in New Zealand's underground circles, and their never fully formed lineup resulted in a slow, unsteady trickle of new output with years between releases. Their discography was already piecemeal at the time their 1997 collection Eyes Rind as if Beggars was released, but they continued a shaky course for decades to come, playing sporadically and offering up new releases that could be loose archival material like 2008's appropriately named Stoned Rehearsal or brand-new studio recordings on 2022 album Cinnamon Sea. The Garbage & the Flowers was started in the late '80s by Meeting in their teens in Wellington, New Zealand, teenagers Yuri Frusin and Helen Johnstone, who were enamored with the seemingly unattainable and lofty idea of being in a band. Taking their name from a Leonard Cohen lyric, Frusin played guitar and wrote most of the songs and Johnstone played viola and sang. The group's lineup and general status of existence would be nebulous for the rest of its duration, but originally Frusin and Johnstone were joined by drummer Torben Tilly, and as the years went on they'd go through phases of hiatus and resurgence, working with musicians including Paul Yates, Heath Cozens, Rachel Davies, Kristen Wineera, and Stuart Porter. The group's initial sound was closest to early Velvet Underground, with Johnstone's frenzied viola recalling John Cale's avant-garde freakouts. The Garbage & the Flowers played sporadically and released only a few compilation tracks and 7" singles in their earliest days. In 1997 they relocated to Sydney, Australia and continued to play out in a stop-start fashion. The double LP Eyes Rind as if Beggars, which collected their ramshackle home recordings and various live tracks into as cohesive a discography-like form as possible, arrived in 1997. The group continued into the 2000s and 2010s, gaining more supporters as more music fans dug into the history of both New Zealand's underground sounds and outsider music in general. 2008's cassette release Stoned Rehearsal/Live in NZ was released in a truncated form as the Stoned Rehearsal LP in 2011, followed in 2013 by an expanded re-release of Eyes Rind as if Beggars. The band continued to play sporadically and record in the years that followed. In 2016, Grapefruit released The Deep Niche, a reissue of material first self-released on cassette by the band in 1991. More scattered recordings surfaced over the next few years, sometimes presenting older unreleased tracks or live material. In 2022, the band released Cinnamon Sea, an album of completely new songs recorded in an abandoned courthouse in a nearly vacant village in Southeast Australia. Despite Cinnamon Sea arriving more than 30 years into the band's career, it sounded as mysterious and outside of time as their earlier efforts.
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