A long time in the works vinyl edition of one of our favorite New Zealand albums. Rachel Shearers astonishing debut as Lovely Midget was originally released as a CD on Corpus Hermeticum in 2000. Mastered for vinyl by Giuseppe Ielasi and pressed in an edition of 500 copies, comes with insert.
This self-titled disc was the first full-length Lovely Midget offering, which I released on Corpus Hermeticum as a CD only in May of 2000. It followed a 10” on Ecstatic Peace a couple of years earlier. Rachel Shearer (who is the Lovely Midget) had, however, been busy since the late 80’s in the rock groups Angelhead (a cassette on Xpressway), and Queen Meanie Puss (singles on Siltbreeze and Flying Nun). She spent the latter part of the 1990s perfecting her engineering skills and developing the modus operandi that made Lovely Midget possible. The music of Lovely Midget is all about texture, there’s not just an LM ‘sound’, there’s an LM ‘feel’ as well. This is achieved by careful and extensive digital modification of recorded sounds. Their origin might be instrumental (as she claims for much of this album) but they sound ultimately anything but. This is a painstaking, almost lapidary approach, which produces highly polished fragments of sound, constructed like a mosaic into more-than-lifesize pictures in sound. Sounds are sanded away, then reconstructed from piles of dust-like granules; they are polished into unnatural brilliance, then dirtied up again into new shapes mimicking nature, but with subtle yet undeniable differences. At its most extreme this can produce an other-worldly ‘underwater’ sound, where every sonic event is heard through a curtain of intangible but unavoidable substance. Even the ‘songs’, where these exist as frameworks for the pieces, have been stripped back to their musical chassis and reassembled in the same order but to a different end. The effect is like listening to the ghosts of a yet unborn generation, paradoxical and uncanny. Lovely Midget was thus totally contemporary in the production sense at the fin de siecle, using state-of-the-art tools, but the music was and remains uncategorisable, achingly cool NZ soundwork for the 21st Century. While some might ‘chill out’ to this kind of thing, the truly discerning will quite simply find it too damn exciting. Pour yourself a glass of top-shelf vodka straight from the freezer and listen up as these beautiful dreamy drones and hovering inverted sound sculptures softly clash like floating icebergs of sound in a frozen fjord. Immaculate purity of aural vision realised. - Bruce Russell
