The Garbage and the Flow­ers (for­mer­ly of Welling­ton and now based in Syd­ney; Myspace) are tour­ing NZ.

They’re play­ing tomor­row night (Fri­day Nov 2nd) at Hap­py with Birchville Cat Motel and Pan­el of Judges.

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 into frac­tured shards of noise and dis­union, lean­ing heav­i­ly like wine. This was espe­cial­ly the case when play­ing live, even if it was inten­tion­al or acci­den­tal. Part of its beau­ty was that almost at the same instant that it was falling apart it was begin­ning to fall back togeth­er again, cre­at­ing a coun­ter­point of melan­choly and joy. I quite like it when it is so chaot­ic and entan­gled. Some­how it feeds the imag­i­na­tion and the music takes on a life of its own, reveal­ing secret pat­terns and ghosts in the record­ings.

Based in Syd­ney since 1997, The Garbage and the Flow­ers, now a three-piece, are return­ing to their home­land with revered Mel­bourne band, Pan­el of Judges for a five date tour. They will be play­ing songs from recent albums Coro­na­tion and Stoned Rehearsal, and to cel­e­brate their forth­com­ing NZ tour a lim­it­ed edi­tion split Panel/Garbage & the Flow­ers 7″ will be pressed.