From Tiny To The Opera House

New Zealand musician Hollie Fullbrook resembles something of a musical soap opera at the moment. Not only are her Auckland-based indie-folk outfit Tiny Ruins about to make their Sydney Opera House debut during the 2016 Vivid LIVE program, but she was also recently approached by celebrated auteur David Lynch to record one of her songs Dream Wave together — he'd been passed the demo by Lorde — and when tracked down by The Music she's currently on tour in Europe with drummer Hamish Kilgour of Kiwi legends The Clean. Add to the equation the fact that Tiny Ruins are working on material for their impending third album and it's clear that Fullbrook's dance card is pretty full at the moment.

"I think it's a nice idea to go from the smallest venue that you started out in to the Sydney Opera House the next night!"

"For this tour we're obviously playing songs from the EP [Hurtling Through] that we made together, but also I'm playing a few songs that are planned for the next album," she explains from Berlin. "Right before I left I was practicing pretty solidly with my regular band back in Auckland, kinda workshopping new material for the Opera House show. That show is going to be really cool — we're going to definitely play some older stuff, but we've got some new songs that we'll be trying out there as well."

Fullbrook explains that this fruitful collaboration with Kilgour started as a happy accident.

"It was sort of arranged," she laughs. "I was going to New York for the first time and I was a bit worried because I couldn't take my band, and I just thought that the audiences might be quite talkative at CMJ so I got hold of Hamish because I knew that he'd lived in New York for about 25 years. It was kinda like 'Kiwi to Kiwi' and it was quite funny because he just turned up five minutes before the show with his bag of percussion and music, and we hopped onstage together and kinda felt our way through the set. It's really great playing with Hamish, because every single show is really different — he's a got a really experimental approach to playing drums, a really free way of playing. After playing a few shows together in New York we tried to record a few songs, which is how the EP got made over the course of a year."

Tiny Ruins recently expanded from a trio to a quartet and are adding an extra multi-instrumentalist for the Vivid LIVE show, resulting in a sound Fullbrook describes as "beautiful and lush".

"We're so looking forward to playing the Opera House!" she gushes. "Before I came on this tour it was all that I was thinking about. Over the next couple of weeks we'll get fully prepared and then we have about four days before the show where we're going to workshop it all and do a secret little 'warm-up' gig in the venue that we started out playing in Auckland called the Wine Cellar, which is a 100-capacity venue. I think it's a nice idea to go from the smallest venue that you started out in to the Sydney Opera House the next night!"