Pumice plus support from Little Skull

Event information

Since the early 1990's, Aotearoa / New Zealander, Stefan Neville has recorded and performed sincerely iconoclastic pieces of broken & repurposed song as Pumice. He excavates angular NZ folk, jangled Pakeha blues, scorched Pacific reels & noisy pop songs. Usually performed with a security blanket of static fizz & tape saturation through crumbling shitty speakers.

Stefan is an active participant in NZ underground music communities. He has collaborated with Kraus, Chris Knox / Tall Dwarfs, Coolies, The Renderers, C.J.A, Ducklingmonster, Greg Malcolm, Gfrenzy & Witcyst, as well as international contemporaries like Jandek, Anla Courtis, Richard Youngs & Les Harrys. Stefans music has been released on Soft Abuse Records, Feeding Tube Records, Fordamning Arkiv, Planam, Horn Of Plenty, Root Don Lonie For Cash, Ultra Eczema & his own Stabbies Etc label. He facilitates an experiential & spontaneous music making program for people with disabilities in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland called Māpura Music. His visual art practice is just as playful & grotty as his music.

“Everything Pumice owns is broken. Virgin audience members at his shows might think he is fucking up till half-way through when it becomes clear they are witnessing a perfect solo ballet of mini-cassettes, modified guitar, foot-pedal drum-kit & short-circuiting spring reverb croon. Deep into a genius career, Pumice still surprises with his subtle mastery of broke-down sounds, slowed-down Magic Band rhythms, crumbling chord organ hymns & tragic ballads that reach deep into the very soul of Aotearoa / New Zealand anti-pop pop music.”
– Glenn Donaldson

Little Skull

"Little Skull is the long-running solo project of Dean Brown, another New Zealander from Hamilton. A joke city to much of the rest of New Zealand but its feral mongrel out-of-it-ness is well known to those that have lived there. He coped with Hamilton through his bands Negative Eh & Nova Scotia and then buggered off to other cities and other countries.

Currently living in the U.K, Dean has had releases on labels such as Digital Regress, Anomalous, Horn of Plenty, Students of Decay, and Planam.



Dean is a player of all instruments and a master of none. It sounds like he is barely touching the instruments and yet his fingerprints are all over them. His instinctive spontaneous playing finds ways to make them glow & fizz & ripple." - Stefan Neville