Cloudboy - Down At The End Of The Garden (Reissue)

Dunedin’s dream pop originators, Cloudboy, have announced a newly remastered vinyl reissue of their 2001 album, ‘Down at the End of the Garden’. This is the first time the album is available on vinyl LP, and is out via Flying Nun Records on Record Store Day — Saturday 22nd April, 2023.

Formed in 1995, Cloudboy — a creative tangent of select members culled from nineties’ electro-pop cult group Mink — write and perform lushly orchestrated dream pop of stunning beauty and originality. The core trio of Demarnia Lloyd, Craig Monk and Johannes Contag occasionally draw in guest specialists where required. Demarnia sings, writes, sequences and samples; Johannes records, mixes and plays guitar, flute and synth fx; Craig writes orchestral arrangements and plays guitar, violin and electric piano. The result of their carefully curated lineups was an intimate, fragile vocal blended with electro-acoustic instruments, synthetic soundscapes and amplified rhythms.

"The main aim of Cloudboy was to frame Demarnia's songs and intimate voice in compelling, unusual and evocative ways. Broadcast-quality home recording was still quite new then, and one of our main instruments was the sampler; digital technology had only just become affordable to poor student musicians. Recording the album was like being in a huge playground of sonic possibilities, putting together some really unique combinations to create the lushest soundscapes we could, and trying to avoid any established rock or dance styles." — Johannes Contag

The band’s first full length release, ‘Down at the End of the Garden’, originally released on CD in April 2001 through Arclife and Loop, is a concept album tour-de-force evoking a technicolor netherworld of epic proportions. A long time in “the works” it was recorded in Dunedin and Wellington during 1997-2001. This Creative New Zealand funded album is an organic work of art that thrived in the digital domain.

On ‘Down at the End of the Garden’, Demarnia’s songs are bound together by an instrumentation ranging from the exotic (tablas, whistle, prayer bells) to the familiar (drums, bass, guitar, organ) and the traditional (violin, double bass, flute, accordion, vibraphone), with the arrangements glued together by cutting-edge soundscapes and crackling yesteryear sample loops.

"It is to me a very full album, when I hear the songs the musicianship of the band really stands out to me, and the layers, complexities, the vocal depths (added by John and Jef Mitchell) it feels like a world is hidden inside it." — Demarnia Lloyd

‘Down at the End of the Garden’ is out via Flying Nun Records on Saturday 22nd April [Record Store Day] on limited edition transparent blue vinyl, and standard black vinyl.