Snow White had it easy. She only had to deal with seven little men who whistled while they worked. New Zealand's Tall Dwarfs not only whistle, they jingle, jangle, gurgle, grumble, grunt, sputter, bang on tables and guitars, play crumhorn, clarinet, clavinet, spoons and shake an angry bee-colony's worth of tambourine. Worse yet, as many as three times the population of White's house turn up for recording sessions: "Nothing's Going to Happen" (from Three Songs, later collected on Hello Cruel World, a sampler of the band's first four releases) features 20 different players on everything from bagpipes to cabasa (a Cuban percussion instrument).

The core of the group is Alec Bathgate and Chris Knox, formerly of seminal Auckland band Toy Love. The inspiration for Tall Dwarfs comes from somewhere between the alienated dementia of the Beatles' "Blue Jay Way" and comic horror movies on late-night TV. The Dwarfs could almost be accused of having a Simon & Garfunkel fixation for all the melodic acoustic guitars used in their early work, but then out spills a mangled masterpiece (such as "Paul's Place" from Louis Likes His Daily Dip) where tremolo overkill and Knox's simple, clear singing suggest a lovesick Irishman trapped in a bagpipe. No matter how pretty, the Dwarfs' music is always strange.

Tall Dwarfs don't have a drummer, so they use creative repetition of all sorts to provide a percussive element, from Canned Music's pitterpat pawbeats and growling monster groans (which appear in "Turning Brown, and Torn in Two") through the harsh guitar saws and scat singing loops of "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" (on Slugbucket Hairybreath Monster, also later appearing on Hello Cruel World).

Most of the group's material was recorded on Knox's home Teac with neither EQ nor expensive microphones. This is strictly primitive DIY psychedelicacies with great green gobs of greasy grimy talent and monstrously surreal cover art (drawn by Knox) to match.

That same spirit of home taperism shows up most prominently when Knox is on his own. All he's got is a shy and fragile voice and two hands that can start a multi-track tape machine, tap impatiently on the table or strum an acoustic guitar. His earliest solo songs are short (few exceed three minutes, most run around or under two), sensitive and bittersweet. On Songs for Cleaning Guppies, "Sand Fly" has two voices whispering and humming against each other like a medieval madrigal harmony, while "Jesus Loves You" is an arty Chipmunk answer to "They're Coming to Take Me Away" and bears no resemblance to any hymn by the same title. "The thing that you call hope is just a legal form of dope that makes you happy," Knox recites as a pulse of music is played backward over two layers of recitational vocals, one at double speed, the other flatly half-whispered. Only 300 copies of Songs for Cleaning Guppies were pressed, but material from it resurfaced on Guppiplus, a companion disc to the Seizure album.

The multi-faceted Seizure (issued twice: the original cover shows Knox in zombie make-up, the second has only utilitarian yellow and black stripes) is sonically indistinguishable from a Tall Dwarfs album. It's got the Dwarfs' highly imaginative percussion and the same delightfully fuzzed-under sense of noise. It palpitates on "Wanna!!," a track that could be named "Rock & Roll Part 3" for its textural similarities to a Gary Glitter song. Seizure also continues Knox's fascination with gentle acoustic balladeering, as on the percussionless "And I Will Cry," where his voice is multi-tracked into a warm boy-next-door lead against a sweetly soured chorus of higher harmonies. Some of Seizure is a cappella ("Voyeur"); at other times the sea of grunge is deep enough to drown in.

At the time of Seizure's release, Knox remixed its "Not Given Lightly" for a 12-inch single (Not Given Lightly/Guppiplus), the B-side of which contains ten rarities: Guppies tracks, "Indigestion" (a recitation done for a compilation) and "Wanna Die with You" (a love song of sorts) from Monk III, a 24-song cassette assembled from '83 and '84 works.

The 10-inch Song for 1990 couples the gentle sparseness of Knox's early ballad-oriented work with more confident singing and better production to give his very simple voice'n'guitar songs greater richness and substance. While "Haze" is texturally akin to the Beatles' "Blackbird," the title cut, a sarcastic bit of patriotic cheerleading for New Zealand's 1990 sesquicentennial, highlights the nation's problems with typical humble humor. Fans of such homey balladeers as Daniel Johnston or Mark Edwards (My Dad is Dead) are likely to enjoy Knox's surprisingly feminist views on love, life and the unreality of everything.

Toy Love's lone album is a deceptively cheerful-sounding collection that falls somewhere between power pop and new wave. Despite efforts to minimize it, the nonconformist spark that would later make the Tall Dwarfs so appealing surfaces in songs like "Frogs," a twisted little horror story of fuzz-guitar racings and keyboard blurts interlaid with a whistle-while-you-work chorus, a cappella "Exodus" theme and sound effects (squeeze toys, coughs, objects falling to the floor, a grumbled voice) in dizzying array. The country-bouncing "Bride of Frankenstein" is a wiggling guitar ditty full of yee-haws (delivered incongruously in New Zealand accents); "Who's at the Bottom of Your Swimming Pool?" lists dead rock stars and popular music magazines of the time to make an anti-rock-culture statement. An interesting artifact, but strictly developmental.