(originally published in Pavement magazine, 2001)

Cloudboy have returned from the deep South with their new album At The End Of The Garden, after four years in the wilderness. The Dunedin outfit have pulled together a beautiful collection of lushly orchestrated pop tunes, and the recently completed tour to support it's release extended on it's themes, using video, pantomime, masks, and costumes. Not your average album tour, then!

"Well, seeing as we've got such a cinematic sound already, we thought that we'd match it with something visual," says Jo Contag from Cloudboy. on the phone from Dunedin. "And since it took us four years to make the album, we thought it'd be good to do something a bit special. Over the years we've played in pubs, and our music has too much complexity, too much subtlety, and Demarnia sings quietly; it doesn't quite suit the pub atmosphere of drunk people loudly yelling in the background. We always find our audiences are very attentive, and they sit down in front of the stage, so we thought lets do a show in seated venues. Once you get into that scenario, you don't just want to play the music, you've got the opportunity to have a full sensory experience."

Jo was pleasantly surprised by the audiences response to the performance. "Crowds were generally quiet during the first few songs we'd play, people seemed surprised, they didn't know what to think of it, but then, generally we'd get very enthusiastic applause between songs. We've had rave responses from everywhere. We've been using movies from the Film Archive for the video backdrops to each song, using amateur drama footage from the 30's, 40's, and 50's. There's some really amazing footage there. we searched their databases for a few weeks, and found some great footage, then we had to get permission to use it from the depositors (of the fims with the Film Archive). We definitely want to work more with old New Zealand footage." Plans are afoot to do some return shows around the country shortly.

The album had a long gestation process. "We started the first recordings for it in 96, and did most of the recording and mixing last year." By way of contrast, their first ep took them about a week to record. "That was a good exercise in being concise," observes Jo, "but with this album, we decided we wanted to take as much time as we possibly need. It was pretty much self financed, with some Creative New Zealand funding, but without a record label. The aim was to make a very organic sounding, but very lush album. Some things took very long. For the next album, I think will probably be sparser, and more electronic."

The songwriting process starts with singer Demarnia Lloyd. "She writes the songs and builds them up in her home studio. Then she hands it onto me and Craig (Monk, violinist and guitarist), and Craig writes the string arrangement, and collectively we deliberate over weeks and months about what instruments to put on, and we get guest musicians along, and add to them ourselves. Dunedin was perfect for that, because its such a musical community where everybody has played with everybody, and a lot of people are friends, people have wacky instrument collections, like we have a jazz trumpeter from a school jazz band, and Demarnia's father played flutes and whistles on quite a few tracks. He's quite a well known folk musician from Christchurch. She's got that folk music background. T hat does actually shine through, like in the vocal harmonies." So, that's what is down at the end of the garden. Why don't you have a look?