10 May 2023 - 0 Comments

Following close on the tail of their much-praised new album, Ceremony (out now via Ursa Minor in Aotearoa), Tiny Ruins - the project of New Zealand musician Hollie Fullbrook - today share a new live version of current single Out Of Phase. You can watch the band in session from here, with Ceremony also streaming in full from here.

Tiny Ruins celebrate the release of Ceremony (#2 on the NZ Album Charts) with an eight-date headline tour across the country kicking off this weekend at Loons, Lyttelton on Thursday, May 11, Port Chalmers Town Hall, Dunedin on Friday, May 12, and Sherwood, Queenstown on Saturday. May, 13. Tickets are on sale now from Banishedmusic.com.

The follow-up to 2019’s celebrated Olympic Girls, Ceremony goes deep into all the old and murky mysteries of what it means to be human – and sometimes it nearly goes under. Yet these songs also show how you can find the strength to swim from the shipwreck, push through the silt, and surface into another new morning. Another new chance.

Ceremony washes in and takes you out like a strong tide, its songs “chapters” of a saga set on the shores of Tāmaki Makaurau's Manukau Harbour. Known to locals as “Old Murky,” its western fringe of the Waitākere Ranges are home to Fullbrook. And while the harbour itself is a treacherous and oft-polluted body of water, move to one of its many peaceful inlets and it’s all tidal flats, shellfish and birdlife. “It’s beautiful but also muddy, dirty and neglected. It’s a real meeting of nature and humanity,” says Fullbrook. Although the things Fullbrook was struck by are annotated across Ceremony as luminously as a naturalist’s scrapbook, Ceremony is not a watercolour ramble through the natural world. These songs are not afraid of getting earth under the nails, of digging deep into some of the hardest matters of human existence. How do you move from loss and grief to acceptance and some kind of peace? How do you live knowing that you are surrounded by forces far beyond your control?

Ceremony’s productions are maximal, deep, complex. No moment is squandered without a clever polyrhythm, a curious harmonic tension introduced, an unexpected timbre. The intuitive weave of instrumentation - from Alex Freer’s deft and inventive drumming and Cass Basil’s conversational bass lines to Tom Healy’s lightening-strikes of electric guitar - land Fullbrook’s hard songs in an blissfully warm bedrock of sound - steadied in a kind of musical trust fall.

Listen to Tiny Ruins’ Out Of Phase

Watch the Ceremony Sessions Version of Dogs Dreaming

Watch the Dorothy Bay Video

Listen to The Crab / Waterbaby

Photo Credit: Frances Carter

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