Rachel Shearer, having earlier been associated with local labels like Xpressway and Flying Nun, also made more drone-based material as Lovely Midget, released by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and via cult NZ noise label Corpus Hermeticum.
As you might expect from the above, Shearer’s music as Lovely Midget involves a bunch of classic band instruments, but especially on her more recent album, North Head (2003), this is abstracted and submerged, with what sound like loops mixed with more improvised stuff.
Her self-titled debut, originally released on CD by local Corpus Hermeticum in 2000, was re-released on vinyl in 2024 by a Swedish label. This has a touch more noise and rock influence than North Head, to my ears. It’s a heavy sound.
For the reissue, Bruce Russell (Dead C, Corpus Hermeticum, etc.) wrote:
Lovely Midget was […] totally contemporary in the production sense at the fin de siecle, using state-of-the-art tools, but the music was and remains uncategorisable, achingly cool NZ soundwork for the 21st Century. While some might ‘chill out’ to this kind of thing, the truly discerning will quite simply find it too damn exciting.
There are definitely other Lovely Midget releases out there, with Shearer first releasing under this name in 1995, and in 2009 she released a DVD called Fakerie under her own name, which the label page suggests signalled the end of Lovely Midget. She looks active under her own name, e.g. performing at an Audio Foundation festival in 2021, and in Delhi in 2024, excerpted here: