RESTOCK ARRIVING START OF DECEMBER
Double CD
HEAVY duty double CD overview of Pumice activity recorded between 1996-2021. Stefan Neville has made so much music during that time you could have probably upgraded this twice over and still be searching for adequate room. The workrate is one thing, the enduring inspiration quite another. Miserable Poison is, in its own way, a discrete map of a particular kind of DIY music that feels specific to a part of the world as remote as New Zealand. There are exceptions of course, but sounds of this nature don't tend to come from the centre. They're the rock not turned over, from the corner where light isn't often shone, a person (or persons) working independently on a whim, pressing forth into some unknown space just to see what might catch. And so, these 34 tracks, culled from mostly obscured lathes, cassettes, CD-rs++,. wander all over the map, and in doing so build a unique lexicon of anti-formalist song from variously debased iterations of folk, noise, drone, lo-fi and, I guess, indie rock as it might have first been understood through the lens of Flying Nun. Highlights to abundant to single out and besides the point anyway - the enture mass of the thing is the heart of the thing, all of it at once, frayed and thrashing, hanging by a thread. And what an enduring thread it is, the same one that seems to hold together the last 40 odd years of New Zealand's outsider spirit.
