A collection of Pumice recordings from 1993-99, when teenagers Sugar Jon Arcus and Stefan Neville learned about music by doing it. The album covers the earliest days of the band recording on ghetto blasters with untuneable guitars at home in Whatawhata and Hamilton, New Zealand. There are a couple of recordings from their first public performance with drummer Ugly Dog Davies, at which their friends yelled at them relentlessly. There is material from their years spent living in Dunedin, NZ, with cassette four-track machines. Living cheaply in a cheap city with pet dogs and all the time in the world. Finally, the album includes music from the move back north to Hamilton and Auckland. Material that was released in microscopic editions as lathe-cut 7s and cassettes, documenting Arcuss final participation in Pumice activities. The LP features trio and duo recordings as well as solo recordings by both Arcus and Neville. The basic multi-directional creative impulse for which Pumice is known is there from the beginning. One-chord pop songs, crumbling folk music, and smeared-organ sound-sculptures. Small speakers shitting themselves with distortion and tape saturation. Acoustic guitars twanging and Neville and Arcus clearly learning to write songs of real quality. This music-making manages to be bold, reckless, and stupid, as well as delicate, sad, and instinctive. Pumice has always done whatever the fuck it wants to. Edition of 300 copies in silkscreened sleeve." - Planam.
After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.
This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).
Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.
Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.
Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
