Vinyl edition of this excellent album with 180g pressing and two-colour silkscreen sleeves by VG Kids. Another great side of post-Chris Knox/Alastair Galbraith-styled basement rock, loner folk breakdowns and classic, up-lifting Velvets motorik from Stefan Neville aka Pumice, 11 tracks that combine guitar, synth, drones, punked power chords and beautiful songwriting. As necessary as alla his releases. Recommended.

Dunno how Nyali Recordings do it but as anyone who picked up their phenomenal Masami Kawaguchi New Rock Syndicate CD-R will tell you, they consistently succeed in scoring the best material from whoever it is they’re working with. This time round it’s Stefan Neville aka Pumice, with a collection of unreleased radio sessions from around the world that is so perfectly balanced between classic NZ/Flying Nun singer-songwriter-isms and blasted Dead C/Fushitsusha style black hole rock that it’ll have you lining up your King Loser wax before you’re even halfway done. Neville is one of only a handful of performers on the planet – Wooden Wand, Jeremy Earl, Alastair Galbraith – that is capable of combing classic songwriting moves and a feel for higher-minded melody with the aesthetics of scorch, invigorating the singer/songwriter blueprint with a ton of outside junk, with warped fidelity, Dictaphone hymns and mangled feedback instants co-habiting with great, great songs just like they used to ‘back in the day’. Worldwide Gullet draws on tracks from Neville’s last bunch of recordings – Pebbles and Quo - and also includes a buncha covers, two Gfrenzy tracks and one by CJA, both unreleased in Pumice form. Also included are a string of tracks labeled “etc” which Neville describes as “traditional extended live Pumice variations for endless cassette and intercom. Super fans might notice loops from albums being reused and buried in amongst those.” Some of the songs are so blasted that the only real comparison is early This Kind Of Punishment or even Galbraith’s Morse LP. Cross that with instrument destruction that’s as nod-out beautiful as any Dead C fade-out and you’ve got the go-to Pumice album of choice. Hand-numbered edition of 107 copies. Highly recommended.  

Three-track follow-up to Stefan’s killer Nyali album that focuses on the noisier/post-Dead C end of his work. One long track with mournful Dictaphone vocals lapping waves of fuzz matched with a staggering proto-Japanese psych rock song and a final downer ballad seductively deformed by hermetic home recording process. All Pumice releases are mandatory purchases. Edition of 500 copies in black silkscreened paper sleeves with two postcards. Recommended. 

Love Cry Want play the works of Albert Ayler as transcribed by Tori Kudo or the Daily Dance LP rescored for idiot avant keyboards and drums, Bold Mould marks the debut of the Olympus duo, aka Stefan Neville of Pumice and Kraus (Futurians/Aesthetics). The sound is scarred with that hazy/out-of-focus NZ edge and runs from melancholy piano/fuzz instrumentals through an inspired reading of Pumice’s “Heavy Punter” from Quo and the aforementioned scrunchy keys/drums breakdowns that have a quality of fall-apart confusion that is extremely joyful. Indeed the album walks the line between exuberant punk-offs, NZ pop and dramatic, moody instrumentals that are even more sci-fi than Joe Meek in inspirational style. Edition of 500 copies with free download. 

Massive, ancient sounding underwater drone broadcast straight from the bowls of infinity with rusty strings and clouds of overloaded organ generating the kind of dark ritual atmosphere of Coil’s Solstice series relocated to the bottom of the world. Sunken is the world-beating duo of New Zealand’s Stefan Neville (Pumice) and Antony Milton (Nether Dawn/Clay Man In The Well/Stumps et al) and they play a particularly affecting form of ceremonial drone that combines the violent majesty of Hermann Nitsch’s mass actions with the haunted electricity of classic NZ amp destruction – Sandoz, Doramaar, Flies Inside The Sun, Surface Of The Earth – and a deep, murky recording style that is pure Siltbreeze. The bulk of these jams wouldn’t have been out of place in a tape box in Tony Conrad and Angus MacLise’s front room in 1968, just great epic navigations of the nowhere zone with a heavy occult atmosphere that is truly transformative. A phenomenal side, one that sits perfectly alongside your Dreamweapon LPs and easily the best even vaguely ‘drone’ orientated release of the year so far. Can’t stop spinning this. On Metal Rouge’s own imprint in an edition of 300 copies complete with a digital download: “Sunken's previous two albums on Pseudo Arcana were long form chord-organ driven flights into the heart of the ecstatic blaring sun. Despite Antony Milton (The Nether Dawn, Glory Fckn Sun etc.) and Stefan Neville's (Pumice) lovecraftian attempts to posit Sunken as sea-shanties sung by sailors lost to Cthulhu at the bottom of the deepest darkest ocean, somehow their surging reed driven organs and vocal streams broadcast via cracked electronics seemed to suggest sailors breaking free of the weeds and swimming towards the light, and even, occasionally, breaking the surface. Their first vinyl release New Zealand Eels however, is a tentacle shot from the abyss to drag the sailors back down into the service of the lurker in the deep. Bleak, black and completely drowned, New Zealand Eels beams five submarine tracks from the lost to the lost through the milky darkness. With the vocal melodies pushed to the foreground and the instrumental origins of the music obscured as never before by damaged baby monitors, power starved dictaphones, tape saturation and spring reverb, Sunken are now finally, truly lost to the abyss. Two drowned sailors invite you to breathe in the water, forget about life on the surface and lay down with the kraken amidst the curling weeds. "What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men." – H P Lovecraft” – EC. Highly recommended!

33rpm four track EP from New Zealand one-man band Kraus, co-member of Olympus alongside Stefan Neville of Pumice and founder of The Futurians/member of The Aesthetics. This great EP combines slowly-expiring instrumental damage aka the most brokedown side of the Xpressway label with a woozy fairground organ aspect that could be Sun Ra plays Silver Apples and some classic Corwood-plays-Beefheart guitar non-dynamism. Choice!