The Brag #462

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rock music news welcome to the frontline: what’s goin’ on around town... with Nathan Jolly

he said she said WITH

KATE MARTIN my dad play keys and my mum pour her heart and soul into beautiful jazz ballads. Because of them, my future seemed so clear from a very young age.

I do love my Feist and Sally Seltmann. The first time I heard Sally was on my birthday in 2010. I was listening to Heart That’s Pounding, and I’ve made it a bit of a tradition to play that album every birthday, because it’s just so joyful! Apart from female artists, I just really enjoy great on- and off-stage musicianship – artists like Bela Fleck and Beach House.

I don’t ever want to be restricted by genre!

My musical friends from home and the ones I’ve met over the last few years have really shaped me as an artist, too. I also find lots of little ideas in the way people phrase their sentences, observing others’ circumstances, and being still in the midst of a storm.

I

got kicked out of the concert band in high school after being warned by the band conductor time and time again to stop improvising and start reading the sheet music. With both parents being

musicians, I was born into a very musical household which I am very thankful for – having parents who support a music career is something to never take for granted. I grew up sitting on stools with lemonades, watching

My most recent album, Hand Me My Bow And Arrow, was recorded with my friend and producer Michael Carpenter of Love Hz studios in Sydney. We met three years ago back when we recorded my first album, Synthetic Shoes, Leather Boots. What connects us is our uncanny ability to bounce ideas off each other and sometimes even preempt one another’s musical thoughts. It’s

great to work with someone who takes on your music with such enthusiasm.

When I first started writing I began exploring acoustic guitar finger-picking, so my first album reflected an indie/ folk feel. I’ve always majored on lush vocal arrangements and layered instrumentation, and this has continued to feature on my second album, with more of an emphasis on a bigger sound. I didn’t want to be restricted by keeping to one genre, which is evident in this album. I’m currently on the road with my band for a tour, so now I’m in a five-piece!

I think the bar is always being set higher and higher in the ever-evolving music world, which provides a healthy challenge for emerging and established artists. The battle lies in maintaining your sense of self and being able to balance influences without becoming overly impressionable.

What: Hand Me My Bow And Arrow is out now through Shock With: Ben Wells & The Middle Names Where: GoodGod Small Club When: Thursday May 17

Ball Park Music

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Jack Colwell

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SELECT’S 7TH BIRTHDAY FOR BEYONDBLUE

Sadness is something that can usually be eased by Bright Eyes and Joni Mitchell and so many warm baths and goals-lists and new-clothes-new-life affirmations, but depression is another beast altogether which, for anyone who’s experienced it (or anyone who knows anyone who has), can often seem unbeatable. Select Music’s 7th birthday party is coming up to take over some of Sydney’s best venues, and to raise money for beyondblue – an excellent organisation which shines a light on depression. By going you will be making a real difference, and you’ll also be watching some incredible Aussie bands like Bluejuice, Andy Bull, Bob Evans, Ball Park Music, Hungry Kids of Hungary, Lior, Something With Numbers, Pluto Jonze and many others. It goes down on Thursday June 21 at The Standard, Upstairs Beresford, Oxford Art Factory, OAF Gallery and Phoenix Bar – and tickets go on sale Tuesday May 15.

THIS WEEK AT FBI SOCIAL

FBi Social have some good stuff happening this week, because it’s FBi Social and they have good stuff happening every week. Wednesday: Holy Balm at 1pm, for free. Thursday: Canadia’s Bahamas are playing (Google their Barcodes album cover, it’s exactly what meaningless sex is like). Friday: Damn Terran and Chicks Who Love Guns and Corpus and Sweet Teeth and only $10? Whaaaa? Saturday: Chance Waters will be doing the hip hop that

Richard In Your Mind

the kids like these days. He used to be named Phatchance, but Phat with a Ph is so 2010…

DALLAS FRASCA

The money to fund the album was stolen at an airport, and then the only copy of the finished record was stolen along with the laptop it resided on. Now I don’t know what your bullshit thresholds are like, but this run of events would have had us burning down villages of orphans just to prove that people are a hollow, vacuous, evil things

The most interesting thing about owls is that their eyeballs are fixed in their sockets, so they have to turn their heads to see rather than darting those big eyes from side to side. (This is also why owls rarely look dodgy.) The most interesting thing about Jack Colwell & The Owls is that he’s a classically trained composer and a brilliant performer, and launches his album Picture Window on June 6 at GoodGod with Packwood and Moon Holiday.

Also, he’s been asked to join Karen O’s Stop The Virgens at Vivid LIVE. That’s kinda interesting, too…

without redemption or aim… Dallas Frasca, on the other hand, chose to pull her fans together to help her re-fund the album, which she re-recorded and is now releasing – Sound Painter – and assuming karma is a thing and we understand the way it works, her and her band will have the show of their lives when they perform at the MusicOz awards at the Opera House this Tuesday May 15, alongside Kid Mac, I AM SAM, Screaming Bikini and more. You can get tickets through the Opera House website. Now go do that!

RICHARD IN YOUR HAND GAMES

‘Maybe When The Sun Goes Down’ was our pick from the latest Richard In Your Mind record Sun, which even if they haven’t realised it themselves is pretty much their third concept album about the sun. They’ll be playing this and other gems from their sun-drenched back catalogue at GoodGod Small Club this Friday May 18, joining by the dreamy Otchkies and the slightly unhinged Upskirts. That new music agency Hand Games are organising the entire night, and will be DJing between sets, because silence makes us think of all the mistakes we’ve made in life and stuff.

Tickets are $12 from Moshtix.

Xxxx

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HOW NOW, JACK COLWELL?

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rock music news

free stuff

welcome to the frontline: what’s goin’ on around town... with Nathan Jolly

FREESTUFF@THEBRAG.COM

five things WITH

SABRINA FROM SABRINA AND THE RED VANS Your Crew Guitarist Greg Whitehead, bass and 3. backing vocalist Suzanne Kinsella and the newcomer on the drums, Leon Tussie, come together as The Red Vans! They breathe life into the songs, enabling me to expand my creative vision. I don’t know where I’d be without them – awesome bunch of people!

The Music You Make We just released our debut album, Cheap 4.

Romance, that we packed with sassy rock and soul, showcasing dirty guitar solos with driving drum and bass. We recorded the album at both Newmarket Studios and Sing Sing with the brilliant Callum John Barter from Solid Sounds (British India, Mike Noga & The Gentlemen Of Fortune, The Pictures). The album also features guest musician Joe Cope from Eagle & The Worm and The Hello Morning, who works his magic on the Hammond organ and piano. We went and got all dolled up and filmed our very first film clip for our single ‘Alice Dwyte’. Check it out on YouTube – the band’s alter egos are the ones to watch!

Growing Up I grew up in a musical family – and with 1.

23 first cousins all living in the same area, every family function ended with a concert in the backyard… We performed everything from Bob Marley to Elvis Presley tributes to MC Hammer dance-offs. My brother Rudy Sandapa is off making a name for himself in the dance scene in Europe at the moment; we’ve come a long way since our

backyard concert gigs, and yes they still happen every time the family gets together at Christmas!

Inspirations Life inspires me: relationships, heartache 2. and triumph… My little brother Jermain battled cancer a few years back, and his journey has shown me that every step on this earth is a blessing. Dream BIG.

5.

Music, Right Here, Right Now Gotta love Australia and its diverse music scene! We love getting on the road and playing at festivals – around Australia, you always stumble across something new or something borrowed that packs a punch, and you always come back richer in friends.

What: Cheap Romance is out now Where: The Roxbury Hotel, Glebe When: Saturday May 19

Tiger Choir

BEN & JERRY’S! ICECREAM! YEAH!

If you see a black and white and strangely upright bovine figure wandering around the streets of Sydney, don’t call the police: Woody The Cow is performing Random Acts Of Kindness for Ben & Jerry’s. If you’ve got a friend who’s done a good deed, nominate them at randomactsofkindness.com.au and you could both (both!) win a year’s supply of extremely delicious ice cream. To celebrate, we’ve got two pints of ice cream to go to five BRAG readers who tell us a good deed they’ve done – just make sure you live or work within 10kms of Surry Hills. No one likes a melted prize. Or a sticky courier.

LIZ MARTIN

Considering she wrote it flat on her back recovering from hip surgery, Liz Martin’s third album Dance A Little, Live A Little sure is fun. Have you heard her latest single, ‘So Long’? It’s basically the sun on your back on a grass lawn on Saturday. A Sydney favourite for a while now, Martin’s toured with Sigur Ros, Silverchair and The Black Keys, and is back on the road launching that record. She’ll be making you tap your toes at Notes Live this Saturday May 19. You want a double pass? Let us know the name of her second record.

TIGER CHOIR

If you’re a Tasmanian trio and you choose to name yourself Tiger Choir, then be aware that this combination of words makes us think about primary school and Warner Brothers cartoons and Abel Tasman and the dodo and other extinct animals, and will result in a weirdly disconnected trip down memory lane. It’s a good thing your bouncy, layered, spacey pop is the perfect soundtrack for that kind of thing – and that’s exactly why we’ll be getting along to the launch of your debut album Unicycles on Thursday May 24 at FBi Social, with Paper Scissors, Telafonica and Megastick Fanfare DJs in support.

local band have just unleashed their killer debut record Sovereignty and have Hallower in support – so there’ll be a bunch of party involved.

DELTA RIGGS

Look at those guys up there. They look exactly like the kind of scruffy, country-tinged, rubber-soulful, retro-sounding, blues-rocking punks that would cut an EP live in a single session, don’t they? Well that’s exactly how the brilliant Talupo Mountain Music Volume II came to be – it’s the one that housed ‘Counter Revolution’, which won them an Unearthed spot at Pyramid Rock last year – and they’re launching this mixture of everything good at FBi Social on Friday June 8.

MEGASICK FANYEAH!

Megastick Fanfare make squelchy, synthy summer songs and they will be flinging a bunch of them at you this Friday May 18 at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf Sessions – and entry is so very free. It sells itself, really.

SPLIT SECONDS

Geoffrey O’Connor is one of the best pop songwriters to come out of Melbourne in the past few evers. The Crayon Fields’ (his band) debut album Animal Bells is proof positive, Sly Hats’ (his other band) Liqourice Night was brilliant, and his recent solo venture, last year’s Vanity Is Forever, furthers the argument. O’Connor is playing at the Studio at Sydney Opera House on Saturday June 2, for GoodGod’s Vivid LIVE party – alongside Egyptian Lover, Nicky Da B, Prince Zimboo, Straight Arrows, No Zu and Donny Benet.

Get along. It will be special.

RESIST THE THOUGHT

If the idea of watching hardcore guys Resist The Thought play an all-ages show Saturday May 26 at Venom fills you with an exhilaration so furious it can only be headthrashed out, then yup, that’s pretty much the reaction that everyone in the room will be having. The

21 CHALLENGE

Sure you went to those rallies at university, and you try to buy free range, and you watched and maybe even fell for that peculiar Kony bollocks. But if you want to actually make a difference, take the 21 Challenge, which basically involves you doing (or giving up) something, anything, over 21 June days while raising money for homeless youth. It’s both easy and worthwhile – the best kind of charity. Register online at 21challenge.com.au, and hit up your friends, lovers and enemies to donate. Especially the enemies. They’ll feel awkwardly conflicted about saying no.

THE MORNING NIGHT

Here’s how you make an album, as done first

by Perth pop group The Morning Night on their debut record Otis: Enlist Ricky Maymi, one of the few non-nutcases from The Brian Jonestown Massacre to produce, play guitar, keys and percussion, and to co-write a few tracks too. Then get members of The Triffids and The Stems to play pedal steel and rock organ, just to get that jangly, speckled Perth sound that is so easy to recognise and so hard to define. Then unleash the bad boy at The Vanguard on May 20, watch everyone go apeshit over how great it sounds live, and then swagger off stage as if you never expected any other reaction. Easy, right?

ALBARE

If you do your magic-eye face (that squinty-eye thing) and look at the credentials of jazz fusion maestro Albare’s backing band, you’ll find the word that pops out is ‘Grammy’ – these guys have won a swag of those between them. He is bringing this band to the Seymour Centre at the University of Sydney on June 9, to perform songs from his latest album Long Way, out now through prestigious German label Enja. Tickets are $45 from Ticketek – and this won’t be one of those Uni parties with the red cups, either.

“Stars in the milky way transform the night in a darkened frame .distant suns and constellations shooting stars and the sky is blazing” - JOELISTICS 10 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

Xxxx

Split Seconds are one of those Perth bands who write pop gems that somehow manage to have that Jebediah sugar-pop buzz and that Triffids spaciousness all at the same time. It’s a sound that’s uniquely Western Australian, which is why we are drugging them, kidnapping them, and driving them to Sydney in that van with no windows and a mattress in the back. By the time they come to, they’ll realise it’s Thursday May 24 and they’re out the front of GoodGod Small Club.

They’ll mill around confused for a bit, before they decide to play a set after Sydney pysch-pop wunderkinds Underlights. Then maybe a bus back to Perth? Who knows.

GEOFFREY O’CONNOR

Albare

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The Music Network Music Industry News with Christie Eliezer

THINGS WE HEAR * Against Me! frontman Tom Gabel revealed he is transgender and will live as a woman, taking on the name Laura Jane Grace. He’ll remain married to his wife Heather, who he says is “super-amazing and understanding.” He begins taking hormones and electrolysis treatment shortly. * Obese Records’ hip hop showcase Block Party is taking the year off; the label is too busy with the Obesecity 2 compilation and other releases. * Darlinghurst gay club The Taxi Club closed after 50 years. Owners admit that business was down already, but the nail in the coffin was the building’s owner deciding to turn it into apartments. The club may return elsewhere in the future. * After four years of having a tutor on the road with him, Justin Bieber has, at 18 years old, finally graduated from high school. * Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos has begged new bands not to do Oasis covers, saying “Oasis were fucking boring.” * It seems that the two dolphins in a Switzerland zoo, first suspected of dying from the high bass levels of a rave next door last November, were fed heroinsubstitute Buprenorphine by some idiot ravers – to a painful end. * Attendance at this year's MardiGrass festival in Nimbin were down from the

FEDERAL BUDGET #1: BIZ RESPONDS The Federal Budget allocated $64.1 million over the next four years to the arts – and of that, contemporary music only gets $3 million. $1.7 million goes to music export body Sounds Australia, an initiative of APRA/AMCOS and the Australia Council. APRA CEO Brett Cottle said this would help increase the number and frequency of venues booking live music, and encourage international tours to use locals as support acts. Save Live Australian Music (SLAM) posted, “Considering this was an austere budget where many areas were cut, it’s impressive that the contemporary music sector were effective in lobbying to finally receive a boost to funding.” The Contemporary Music Touring Program has an extra $400,000 a year.

The West Australian Music Industry Association gets $1.3 million to educate and promote new apprenticeships and residencies to sharpen songwriting and performing skills.

FEDERAL BUDGET #2: BUT BAD NEWS FOR AMRAP...

In a blow for community radio and independent musicians, funding for the Australian Music Radio Airplay Project (AMRAP) was not renewed. Current funding runs out end of

past 10,000 because of fears of drug busts – but the relationship between organisers and local cops remain, umm, high. They competed against each other in the Tug Of Peace again and the cops won, after organisers last year cheated by using a tractor. But when it came to accepting the winning Cannabis Cup, no policeman was willing... * Plans by Selinas nightclub owner C-Inc to build $150 million five-storey apartments and shops above the club are iffy, after Randwick City Council put forward a proposal to cap all buildings at three storeys. * When producers of ABC-TV’s Q&A asked Kate Miller-Heidke to come on, she agreed because (a) she digs the show, and (b) figured she could talk about her pet topics – human trafficking and slavery. Alas, the debate didn’t cover that, and she was stuck with giving ho-hum comments about the carbon tax and budget. Anthony Callea tweeted, “a total waste of space ... embarrassing rep for Gen Y!” She lashed back, “Pot Kettle Fuckwit”. * After visiting Jamaica and meeting Bob Marley’s widow Rita, Prince Harry has become such a reggae-phile he wants to become a reggae DJ. * When Stone Roses come to Australia, will it be with drummer Reni? Radio reports say he is ill, and that the band is rehearsing for their world tour with another.

June. AMRAP delivers new Australian music to 2000 broadcasters from 300 community radio stations. “It’s incredibly disappointing to see such a valuable project that gets Australian music to radio stations all over the country cast aside at this point, and we are determined to work with Government to find a way to keep the project going”, said Catherine Haridy, chair of AMRAP with the Community Broadcasting Foundation. “Community radio plays such a critical role in the development of Australian musicians.”

NEWCASTLE’S SOUND SUMMIT CALL FOR APPLICATIONS Applications are open for musicians and speakers to take part in this year’s Sound Summit in Newcastle (Sept 27-30). Now in its 13th year, Sound Summit is a platform to further the works of those in the independent scene through showcases, performances, panels, workshops, Q&As and debates. If you’re a musician, producer, artist, filmmaker, author, journalist, publication or fan, and have an exciting initiative or sound for the festival, they want to hear from you. “We’re interested in receiving proposals that explore any dimension of contemporary music – be it technological, political, theoretical, media, industry, fan or performance based.” They also want musicians

themusicnetwork.com who want to play at the event. Deadline is May 25; see www.soundsummit.com.au

RIHANNA PULLS A BOOB ON ADELE For Adele’s 24th birthday, Rihanna sent her a cake in the shape of boobs. The cheeky message accompanying said cake read, “Happy Birthday to my lover, Adele” and “to the baddest bitch around” – followed by a topless picture of herself covering the iced gems with her hands. Adele had two things to celebrate: her 21 album has out-sold Michael Jackson’s Thriller – and it’s become the fifth biggestselling album in UK history, after shifting 4.3 million copies.

MADDEN AND CARMODY JOIN SONG SUMMIT The Voice mentor Joel Madden and Kev Carmody have been added to APRA’s Song Summit (May 26-28; not to be confused with Newcastle’s Sound Summit). They will be interviewed separately as part of the event’s In Conversation series. Other additions are ABC Radio’s James Valentine to moderate Life Is Better With Live, triple j’s Lindsay ‘The Doctor’ McDougall to interview Missy Higgins, Riplez.org founder Ben Richards for Crowd Funding, Matthew Kennedy, who joins Meet The Managers with Susan Robertson and Geoff Trio, Troy Barrett of Hub Artist Services for the 100 Songs Project, and Vanessa Picken, co-founder of digital marketing agency Run DNA.

HART AND MENARD SET UP RADIO PLUGGING SERVICE Publicists Nicole Hart from Revolutions Per Minute and Leanne Menard from Menard PR are, in addition to running their own PR firms, teaming up for a new radio plugging service.

They’ll provide face-to-face and ongoing radio servicing, with Hart in Sydney and Menard in Melbourne. Their first client is Canadian rock outfit The Trews. Contact point is Leanne Menard: leanne@menardpr.com.au.

SHINTO KATANA SIGN WITH SKULL AND BONES Sydney’s Shinto Katana signed with Skull And Bones Records (distributed through Shock).

Their third album Redemption will shine light on the label, with a release date to be confirmed.

Emerging from the west Sydney metalcore scene, Shinto Katana released Cold Streets in 2008 and We Can’t Be Saved two years ago.

New track ‘Solitary’ features Frank Palmeri of Emmure.

‘I MANAGE MY MUSIC’ HITS SYDNEY Jen Cloher’s music biz workshop ‘I Manage My Music’ makes its Sydney debut on Saturday June 30. Speakers include Lanie Lane, selfmanaged indie Brendan Maclean, Van Picken from digital marketers Run DNA, and PPCA GM Lynne Small. Info and booking at www.imanagemymusic.com

WUNDERKIND HEADS TO MUSHROOM GROUP A&R exec Michael Parisi’s record label Wunderkind has left Warner Music for a joint venture with Michael Gudinski’s Mushroom Group. It joins labels Liberation Music, Illusive Sounds, Ivy League, I Oh You and Liberator Music. First releases are by Stonefield and Melbourne’s Owl Eyes.

ARTS SUBMISSIONS FOR HARVEST FESTIVAL

Bluejuice

SELECT MUSIC'S STAIRWAY TO SEVEN Select Music is celebrating its 7th birthday with charity fundraising bashes on Thursday June 21 at the Standard, Upstairs Beresford, Oxford Art Factory, OAF Gallery and Phoenix Bar. A bunch of its roster is playing, including Bluejuice, Ball Park Music, Lior, Bob Evans, Hungry Kids Of Hungary, Something With Numbers, The John Steel Singers and Midnight Juggernauts DJs. All proceeds go to beyondblue, a charity which raises awareness and helps prevent depression.

Harvest Festival, which returns to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane from November 10 to 18, has opened the application process for arts submissions. It is looking for stage performance, live art happenings, site installations, roaming performance, spoken word, comedy, circus, digital and ecological arts projects – and everything in between. Last year 400 artists participated in the arts program on four dedicated stages, with 50 installations and two virtual experiences. Deadline is July 1; see harvestfestival.com.au

‘EVERGREEN’ UK’S BIGGEST SINGLE OF THE 21ST CENTURY Pop Idol winner Will Young’s ‘Evergreen’ / 'Anything Is Possible’ is the UK’s biggest selling single of the 21st century so far. Released in February 2002 in the aftermath of his win, it sold 1.8 million copies. It beat Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ (1.35 million there since Jan 2011). #3 is Gareth Gates’ ‘Unchained Melody’,

#4 is Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I Gotta Feeling’, #5 is Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’ and #6 is Maroon 5’s ‘Moves Like Jagger’. Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know’ is already at #30. Full list: officialcharts.com

SYDNEY RADIO ADS FALL BY 3.14% Radio ad revenue for Sydney’s metropolitan stations fell 3.14% to $170.967 million in the ten months ending April 2012. But Sydney and Perth (down 0.67%) were the only two to register a drop. Adelaide grew 3.88% to $53.45 million; Brisbane 0.49% to $91million; and Melbourne 0.14% to $169 million. In total, the five metropolitan markets dropped 0.6%, to a total of $559.675 million.

FLO RIDA: “I’M THE VICTIM!” Flo Rida has responded for the first time after being told by an Australian court to pay $80,000 to Newcastle’s Fat As Butter promoter Mothership Music. Last October, he blew out his headline set just hours before, despite getting a $55,000 advance. The rapper insists he’s the “victim” in all this, and claims Mothership Music didn’t provide transport from his Sydney hotel. Last October, Mothership Music said transport was waiting at his hotel when he pulled the plug. “Promoters try to jerk you [around]… A lot of times anyone can come up and say anything and get everyone’s attention,” Flo Rida tells AllHipHop.com. “They feel like they should pay you a certain amount of money, and they feel like they shouldn’t give you a ride to the venue. Maybe they thought that I should have brought my Bugatti [luxury sports car] to Australia, and that I could have brought my own car.” Mothership gained a watershed legal precedent after being able to serve a damages claim via Facebook, after lawyers couldn’t serve papers personally.

GOTYE’S ‘SOMEBODY’ MAKES U.S. HISTORY Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ last week made U.S. chart history, becoming the first song ever to top four charts: the Top Hot 100 (for its fourth week), Alternative airplay chart for a tenth week (the longest reign by a soloist, passing Everlast’s ‘What It’s Like’ in 1998/99), and the Dance Club Songs chart and Dance/Mix Show Airplay, for remixes by Thin Red Men and Tiësto. The track also sees Kimbra become the first woman born in the 1990s to top the Hot 100. It spent a third week at #1 on the Hot Digital Songs chart last week, after 348,000 downloads. Last week, the video hit 200m YouTube views.

Lifelines Marrying: Bobby Brown and fiancée Alicia Etheridge in midJune in Hawaii, around the time that New Edition play there.

Dating: MTV presenter Alexa Chung and The Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr, after she broke her engagement to Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner last year.

Injured: Opeth frontman Mikael Akerfeldt with a serious head injury – not from a car crash as rumoured, but from hitting his head on the tour bus while getting some underwear out of his suitcase.

Sued: The Beastie Boys by Tuf America, which claims they illegally sampled Trouble Funk’s ‘Say What’ and ‘Drop the Bomb’ on two albums.

Sued: EMI Music by the estate of famed composer Henry Mancini, which claims it hasn’t been paid $1.35 million in profits from his Pink Panther music.

Died: US photographer Jim McCrary, 72, responsible for album covers including Carole King’s Tapestry and Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

Died: Former Into Eternity guitarist Rob Doherty, cause unknown.

“The languid heat makes sleepless nights lazy speak, mosquito bites, old timers drive the road trains rolling cigarettes single handed” - JOELISTICS 12 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

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BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 13

BRAG FEATURE: MAY 25 – JUNE 3

Vivid LIVE 2012

T

his year’s Vivid LIVE – the music component of Vivid Sydney – continued the tradition of jaw-dropping lineups, but discarded the curatorial model; from now on, rather than being programmed by seminal figures like Brian Eno and Lou Reed, Vivid LIVE will be put together by the Sydney Opera House team, led by Head of Contemporary Music Fergus Linehan.

The result is a program rich with world premieres, and Sydney exclusives by some of the most creative minds in the industry: The National’s Bryce Dessner, composer Nico Muhly and Sufjan Stevens will guide us through the universe with their critically acclaimed Planetarium; Sydney Symphony will be helping Efterklang show off their new album for the first time (most of which was written with this particular night in mind); and Amon Tobin will present his ground-breaking and dimension-busting audiovisual extravaganza ISAM Live: Beyond 3D. Beyond this, the lineup is noticeably lady-centric. Karen O brings us her hugely ambitious Stop The Virgens “psycho opera” (seven years in the making and featuring over 50 artists, including Yeah Yeah Yeahs bandmates Nick Zinner and Brian Chase, and Beastie Boy Money Mark); Florence & The Machine will perform with an orchestra of over 40; Imogen Heap will share cuts from her in-progress crowd-sourced and innovative forthcoming album; and Janelle Monáe will finally bring her ArchAndroid Orchestra Down Under (having left fans panting after she cancelled last year’s tour). “At one point this year, our program was so driven by incredible women that we actually toyed with the idea of doing an all-female event,” Linehan has admitted. What made him change his mind?

“Amon Tobin, The Temper Trap, Sufjan Stevens.”

We got the chance to talk to some of our Vivid LIVE festival picks; for the full program and tickets, see vividlive. sydneyoperahouse.com 14 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

Janelle Monáe Show Us The Monáe

By Caitlin Welsh

B

y the time you read this, we will know whether or not the rumours are true. A few weeks ago, Afro-futurist pop-funk-soul auteur Janelle Monáe tweeted a link to a SoundCloud post about a “Prince rehearsal… watch out Australia!” The Australian music media went nuts – the assumption made sense, given that Monáe (who owes no small musical debt to her fellow pint-size pop pioneer) and her ArchAndroid Orchestra had previously opened for the Purple One overseas, and will be in the country at the same time as him, performing in Sydney for Vivid LIVE. (The first show on Prince’s Welcome 2 Australia tour is Sydney on May 11; only one date, May 26 in Brisbane, clashes with Monáe’s Vivid schedule.) But when asked directly about opening for Prince, Monáe is coy almost to the point of defensiveness, repeating the same line to several journalists: she can only confirm May 26 and 27 at the Sydney Opera House.

In fact, Monáe won’t be drawn on a number of seemingly innocuous details – such as what we can expect from the show she’s doing this interview in order to promote (“I guess you’ll have to come and see. I think that’s the purpose of me coming over there – to give you something that I have to plan, but not discuss it with you prior to me going over there”), or even where she’s speaking from (“Um, I’d prefer not to say. But I’m recording music, I’m focused on music”). Perhaps she was in character as Cindi Mayweather, the android-on-the-lam protagonist of her two releases, 2008’s Metropolis: The Chase Suite EP and dazzling 2010 LP The ArchAndroid. (Monáe has been known to answer journalists’ questions with fanciful references to the ArchAndroid concept, claiming in a 2010 Rolling Stone profile that she

"Once we start messing with androids, how will we all get along? Will we teach our kids to fear androids? Will we oppress them? Or will we work together to do something great?"

attended an “Android community church in Metropolis”, and only dates androids: “Nothing like an android – they don’t cheat on you.”) But she also won’t confirm or deny an old quote wherein she declared her intent to release two albums in 2012. “As an artist, I do things according to my soul clock, and right now we’ve recorded music, and we’re recording music, and whatever the timing calls for, that’s what I will release,” she says. “I don’t try to plan anything.”

A frustrated interviewer could accuse the singer of trying to build up extra mystique around her clearly established image, but Monáe softens slightly as she explains that the soul clock can’t be reset forward or back for anyone. “I don’t like being mysterious,” she says, a little apologetically. “I just prefer not to speak when the timing isn’t right. Everything is all about timing. It’s very important for me not to speak out of turn.”

Part of her reluctance is that she relies on inspiration, divine or otherwise – and it seems that she hasn’t been given the ending to the story of the ArchAndroid yet. “Pretty much all of my concepts come to me in my dreams – a lot of the music, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and record it on my iPhone,” she explains.

“That [ArchAndroid] story was just truly an amazing story because it had so many parallels to the android, and what the android represents to The Other. And so it’s never-ending. Things that are going on in 2719 [when the story is set] are happening right now in the present day, just in different forms… And I couldn’t have planned that story – that was truly something that came to me as a gift from God, in my dreams.

But it just had so many parallels, and it was such an empowering story – a story of courage.”

The ArchAndroid’s breakout single, ‘Tightrope’, a gleefully frenetic fuck-the-haters anthem, was also said to have been inspired in part by President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But true to her justification for making a record inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis – which, she informed the Rolling Stone interviewer, was at its essence a tale of the haves and have-nots – she insists that it’s a universal message, applicable as much to the 99% as to the narrative of disillusionment being spun around the Obama presidency. “[Obama’s] was just one of the stories,” Monáe explains. “I try to stay as connected as I possibly can to the community, and my family, and what real people are going through every day when they are working, or going to school, or just trying to make ends meet. And I think balance is what we all yearn for; we all need to stay sane in this world – ‘Don’t get too high, don’t get too low.’ So just like President Obama, or the person working at the post office – that song was written for them too.”

While she’s performed for Obama twice already this year, to rapturous praise from the President, Monáe is committed to keeping her image accessible. Her

trademark quiff never budges, and her gamine tuxedos are also sported by the members of the ArchAndroid Orchestra, who will join her for her Australian shows – the uniform is a nod to Monáe’s family members and friends in uniformed or public service jobs. “We wear black and white, we wear tuxedos, and music is our weapon,” goes their motto.

“They are really talented musicians, and we’re just looking forward to bringing the album and the live performance together and creating an experience – not just a live concert, or a showcase, but an experience that you believe in, and one you’ll never forget,” she says, offering no more information on the personnel or stage show.

But it’s at the mention of the recent performance by Tupac Shakur at Coachella – beamed in from the afterlife via hologram – that Monáe really opens up. A hologram – a technological manifestation of a human being that is not human – brushes up against her pet concept, the Android. She’s a fan of Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and author who helped popularise the idea of the technological singularity: the “intellectual event horizon” where artificial intelligence will outstrip that of humans. And while a hologram is obviously not AI, the varied reactions to the visual resurrection of the dead remind Monáe of one thing: a human fear of the technological Other that fascinates her so much that the entirety of her recorded output revolves around it.

“I always pose the question: once we start messing with androids, and computers that can develop human characteristics, how will we all get along?” she offers, almost with the air of a university lecturer. “Will we teach our kids to fear androids? Will we oppress them? Or will we work together to do something great, to innovate and help the world more? What example will we be showing to the next generation? So I think the hologram poses that question. Are we scared of that? How do we feel about that? And how will we feel if holograms can be employed, or have IDs? Will we look at them as though it isn’t a real person, or as though it’s not an idea we can believe in? If it’s bringing joy to somebody, then why do we think it’s evil, or why do we hate it? It’s good to talk about these things, because technology is going to progress with or without you.”

One last stab at a personal question: would she approve of getting the hologram treatment herself?

“Well I’m here – but if I pass on to a different frequency, you mean?” …She pauses a moment.

“I would be very interested in seeing my hologram, absolutely. But I’d want to be alive to see that.”

What: Janelle Monáe and The ArchAndroid Orchestra Where: Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House When: Saturday May 26 and Sunday May 27

Vivid Sydney Lighting the Sails photo by Daniel Boud

Linehan’s programming pedigree is well established – besides curating Sydney Festival from 2006-2009, he’s also the man we have to thank for the Opera House’s recent spate of covetable gigs. He says the decision to change Vivid LIVE’s curatorial format was simple: “We found that what major artists really wanted was a platform to do special projects at the House.

The new structure gave us a chance to have many voices, rather than just one.”

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BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 15

Zola Jesus

BRAG FEATURE:

Vivid LIVE 2012 MAY 25 – JUNE 3

Opening Up By Alasdair Duncan

T

he music that Nika Danilova makes as Zola Jesus is compelling to say the least.

A classically-trained vocalist, she took a detour into the world of synths and now makes sweeping, strange electronic records. Her most recent release, Conatus, was one of the finest of last year, combining an affinity for avantgarde music with an ongoing love of pop – and it’s certainly the most gripping mash-up of Stockhausen and Britney Spears that you could ever hope to hear.

Sydney will get to experience the strange and beautiful world of Zola Jesus for the first time this month when she arrives in town to perform at Vivid LIVE. Danilova admits she was a little intimidated when she heard about the venue for her show. “Well, they invited me, and I was so excited because it seemed like an amazing festival – and the Sydney Opera House is such an amazing institution, there was just no way I could refuse,” she says with a laugh.

Danilova reveals that the iconic setting will definitely influence what happens in the show – although at the time of our interview, she’s still not quite sure as to how. “I really don’t know how

it’s all going to go yet,” she says. “I always put a lot of pressure on myself when it comes to the show. I want to do something extra special, but at the same time it’s incredibly expensive and difficult to travel to Australia. I had to really tear down my set quite a bit, so I’m going to try and push through that – but it’s going to be difficult.” A big characteristic of Danilova’s style is her individualism – she’s a bit of an loner, and with her music, she produces and plays all the instruments herself, as well as manning the vocals. This is fine in the studio, but when it comes to a live show it becomes necessary to open the songs up to other musicians. But she found this process easier than she expected. “I actually really enjoy playing with a band,” she says.

“I’m such a control freak that when I’m making the songs, I feel complete autonomy over that work.

When it comes to playing live though, I feel like I need other people to interpret it.”

"When I'm making the songs, I feel complete autonomy over that work. When it comes to playing live though, I feel like I need other people to interpret it. On stage the songs sound so much better if I put them in the hands of other musicians."

This means giving up control, but Danilova finds that to be a weird sort of rush as well. “I know that on stage the songs are going to sound so much better if I put them in the hands of other musicians,” she says. “It’s always fun, because they bring their own style and their own personality – it’s just a whole new incarnation for the music.” Playing the songs with a band has also allowed Danilova to find all sorts of new dimensions and nuances in them. “I’ve had the new songs in the show for a couple of months now,” she says, “and they’ve matured so much since they were recorded that every time I actually hear the recordings, they sound so much different from what they are now.”

I ask Danilova if this new-found openness with her music might have any future implications – if, say, she might be more inclined to work with other musicians in the studio as well. “I think that I’d like to bring in other players in future,” she answers. “I have such a vision for having so many different instruments that I can’t play, that I’m going to need to bring other players in... As for the writing process though, I’m still very protective of that – and think I will be for a very long time.”

Our discussion turns back to Vivid LIVE, which, as well as Zola Jesus, has an incredibly amazing array of artists on the bill for this year. British pop belters Florence & The Machine will be there, as will Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, performing what she's described as a ‘psycho opera’; bizarre RnB singer Janelle Monae will also be in town, as will the ethereal pop machine Imogen Heap.

“It seems like it’s definitely a women’s club, and I’m really excited to be a part of it,” Danilova says.

“There are going to be a lot of really cool, strong women playing the festival.”

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I ask Danilova if there are any new artists inspiring her at the moment, but she says that she’s been listening mostly to older music lately – as in, a full century old. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Finnish classical music,” she tells me. “I realised there were a lot of great Finnish composers that I’d never really listened to before, so I decided that I wanted to try and get to know them.” I admit that I know absolutely nothing about Finnish classical music, and Danilova laughs: “Me either – that’s why it’s so interesting!

“It’s not really different from a lot of what I’ve heard before,” she continues. “It’s more that I just haven’t been exposed to it… It’s not really different, but it’s new – it’s a whole new world. I really like art from that early 20th century period as well,” she says. “I find it really interesting because it’s the beginning of industrialisation and the new world as we know it. It’s the birth of what we’ve become.”

With: Light Asylum, Forces What: FBI Radio / Penny Drop party @ The Studio, Sydney Opera House When: Thursday May 31

Imogen Heap

BRAG FEATURE:

Vivid LIVE 2012 MAY 25 – JUNE 3

I, Robot By Jonno Seidler

I

f Imogen Heap sounds like she’s buzzing with ideas on record, wait until you hear her speak.

The dynamic, award-winning and boundarypushing artist seems almost incapable of sitting still – which makes for an excellent interview. Heap is returning to Sydney for a performance at Vivid LIVE and for Vivid's Song Summit conference, where she'll deliver a keynote speech about the processes behind her dazzlingly diverse range of compositions. She'll be bringing six months worth of custom-made songs with her, which were created with the help of her extensive online fanbase using a diverse range of mediums including sound, text and vision to inform her songwriting process. This collection, currently entitled ‘Heapsongs’, is a continual work-inprogress that will result in an album that almost every listener will have been involved with in some capacity. It all seems utterly exhausting – but for Heap, it’s endlessly fascinating.

“I don’t find technology overwhelming,” she says. “I find the possibilities overwhelming. Seven or eight years ago I would never have tried to do a video clip myself; I would have let them do it, picked a director and gone with it. But now, when I have an idea, I can make it happen. I can go online and find collaborators through Twitter or YouTube.

I love to get fans involved; rather than flicking through professional photography books, they will submit stuff via Flickr and then I can use a young, aspiring photographer who’s excited and whom I can help get a leg-up into the industry.” Each of the six ‘Heapsongs’ that Imogen has released so far has increased in ambition, and they’ve arrived alongside keenly-managed blogs, custom made video clips, social media-integrated conversations, and live streams. It’s sprawling and completely mad; if the robot race ever inherited the Earth, they’d definitely appoint Heap as their leader.

really human element. When you hear the bassline moving up and down, you see my hands doing that, too. You literally hear the sound change as you see my hands move. It’s not just the parts but also the texture of the sound.” Anyone who has seen Heap live knows that she possesses an otherworldly array of sounds within her voicebox, which she’s been known to manipulate with loop pedals and other gizmos. But in the future, she may not be checking anything in at the terminal when she embarks on another world tour.

Though she didn’t achieve entirely what she wanted to with the backyard live stream, there’s no stymieing Imogen Heap’s endless creativity: “Even though I hadn’t slept for 48 hours, everyone had been paid, and people had flown in from around the world to be a part of it,” she grins. “So in the end, I just look at it as a very, very expensive demo!”

Where: Concert Hall Northern Foyer, Sydney Opera House When: Tuesday May 29 Song Summit: In conversation with Richard Glover, 10am on Saturday May 26 @ Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre

GEORGE GARZONE ANTONIO SANCHEZ

"I don't find technology overwhelming; I find the possibilities overwhelming. You give me a sound piece – whether it's a door opening or your dog barking – and I will make a piece of music."

HENDRIK MEURKENS

Of course, messing around with technology to push the limits of songwriting isn’t new for Heap – she’s been playing with synths, vocoders, loop pedals, and anything else she could get her hands on since the success of her first record way back in 1998. Her ability to take inherently cold pieces of computerised instruments and infuse them with something undeniably human was crystallised on her self-released sophomore album Speak For Yourself, which spawned, among other things, the game-changer that was ‘Hide And Seek.’ But that’s not a shade on what she’s doing these days.

“You give me a sound piece – whether it’s a door opening or your dog barking – and I will make a piece of music out of that,” she says, as we discuss the composition of her first Heapsong, ‘Lifeline’.

“After that, I wanted to find out whether there was some general consciousness going on between all fans across the world. So I set up a word cloud, where some ideas would grow bigger than others. It happened to coincide with the Japanese earthquake, so the words that were coming up were ‘seismic’ and ‘gravity’ and ‘hope’ and ‘love’.”

Heap mixed this with the heartbeat of her brother's new baby, and the song was, quite literally, born. “I was really quite proud of that,” she says. “It was the first time I managed to marry all the different influences of my life together into one piece of music.”

Every scientist reaches their limits, and for Heap that moment came when she recently attempted to live stream (and film for a clip) her latest composition, in a gigantic enclosure in her backyard. The catch was that Heap had tasked herself with composing and performing the song live, using only the super-cool, futuristic musical gloves that she’s been developing with a NASA researcher for years. “I got a bit too ambitious with the last one,” she laments, “but we were developing new tech and new software, and I was basically developing a new way of writing. I literally had so little time on my own that I was still writing the song at 1am on the morning of the gig, which was terrible.” The song came off, but not as well as Heap would have liked. “I use so many different instruments in my shows, [and] these gloves kind of allow me to strip them all away and bring on a

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BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 17

MAY 25 – JUNE 3

Vivid LIVE 2012

My Brightest Diamond Still Shining

By Benjamin Cooper

F

or most artists, being heavily pregnant is a suitable justification for not touring at all, never mind making an arduous journey halfway around the world. But such

distractions don’t seem to apply to Shara Worden. In early 2010, the frontwoman and chief songwriter of My Brightest Diamond was asked by curator Brian Eno to perform at the second annual Vivid LIVE. She arrived sevenand-a-bit months pregnant with her first child, to rip up Sydney Opera House with her epic meshing of chamber music and soaring pop.

“I’m very drawn to the whole idea of opposites.”

Even apart from the thrill of being personally invited to the festival by the Roxy Music and experimental maestro, Worden is emphatic that her last trip to Australia occurred at precisely the right time. “I’m very drawn to the whole idea of opposites,” she confesses. “When I came to Sydney last time there was probably an assumption that I would be held back in my performances. I think I reacted strongly to that in my shows.” Worden continued to dismantle expectations following the birth of her son.

“When I had a baby I experienced that rush of joy that comes from being a parent, which is followed by this feeling that life is very hard yet also very beautiful,” Worden says, before a pause. “I was experiencing a lot of new things at the time, and then less than six weeks after my son was born I had the opportunity to appear in a Matthew Barney film. I consider him one of the greatest artists of our time, and I felt so lucky to get to work with him – so I jumped right back into that crazy world.”

The “crazy world” that Worden refers to includes a loose group of New York creatives, such as fellow Vivid LIVE performer Bryce Dessner and Australian Padma Newsome – both of whom she performs alongside in instrumental group Clogs. But more immediately, Worden’s world is largely concerned with her recently rediscovered home of Detroit – particularly the changes in the Michigan city since her adolescence. “The tension between the old and the new in Detroit is palpable,” she says. “There’s a really old tradition of gardening and farming in Detroit that actually pre-dates industrialisation. And

Amon Tobin The Light Fantastic

By Digby Woods

F

Nevertheless, there’s an untamed element to be found in ISAM – an interstellar abandonment that reflects the title of Tobin’s accompanying audiovisual show, ‘Beyond 3D’. Selling out tours across North America and Europe over the last 12 months, ISAM Live: Beyond 3D fuses the music of the album with a morphing visual display projected onto a massive cubist screeninstallation.

“If you’re doing something that doesn’t have any musicians, you do have to think about how you’re going to present it to people, and that’s what the challenge was with this show,” Tobin says. “[ISAM was] a record that a lot of people had issues with getting their heads around; [I wanted to] present it in a way that made sense, without compromising the music.”

Besides incorporating the album’s naturecollage design work by Birmingham artist Tessa Farmer (think dead insects, decomposing foliage, animals and bones), ISAM Live is the product of some of the most ingenious minds in the field of visual design, including Vello Virkhaus – VJ, producer, and director of V Squared Labs. For Virkhaus, one of the most exciting things about the ISAM Live show is that it’s four-dimensional.

“4D in mathematics is a very abstract concept in which this additional dimension is indistinguishable, yet acknowledged,” Virkhaus explains. “What is fascinating is that [with this live show] we give viewers an idea of what it might be like to see beyond 3D space, to see all points simultaneously for both the exterior and the virtual interior of the set.”

E

Vocalist Caspar Clausen says that the band are getting nervous as they put the finishing touches on their Vivid LIVE show. The trio should be old hands by now, having given their 2006 album Parades the symphony treatment with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra in 2009, but this time they’ve taken the unusual approach of writing and arranging the performance of a new album they haven’t even recorded yet.

ISAM Live: Beyond 3D premiered at Montreal’s MUTEK festival last June, to great reception: “The combination of this mapped effect and Amon’s music produced some very intense emotional reactions from people after [that] performance,” Virkhaus says.

The video of that performance opens with a visual of shattered glass projected onto a massive cube sculpture, at the centre of which is Tobin, the conductor within his own creation.

This gives way to plumes of blue smoke, punched into the air while ‘Journeyman’, the first track from ISAM, blasts over the speakers.

Shots of the crowd give witness to the overwhelming audiovisual sensation, with one crowd member saying, “It’s like feeling small, and the music overpowering you.”

Despite all the accolades and assertions that he has “revolutionised the live music experience,” Tobin insists that ISAM “is just an album, first and foremost. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel… I’m just always finding new things, exploring them as much as possible, and feeling completely out of my depth doing so. That’s what I love about making music – and maybe that’s what keeps me awake.”

What: Amon Tobin’s ISAM Live: Beyond 3D Where: Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House When: Saturday June 2 at 9pm & 10.45pm

"I'm always finding new things, exploring them as much as possible, and feeling completely out of my depth doing so..."

18 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

Efterklang veryone from Metallica to Michael Bolton has given their old material the highbrow makeover with a few dozen tuxes, tubas and timpanis; it’s a great way to add gravitas to material that may lack it, and usually to sell more tickets or records without having to make anything new. But for Danish three-piece Efterklang, the symphony is anything but an afterthought – this time around, anyway.

“When you’re synthesising sound, you only need a grain of something,” he explains, “so I was just at home, banging plates on fireplaces, and creaking my chair. There were no extravagant trips to record wolves or tigers.”

Her observations of Detroit’s tensions are writ large throughout her third studio album, 2011’s All Things Will Unwind – a restrained tour de force that she will be bringing to the Opera House. “Detroit [now] is entirely different from when I grew up here,” she says, “and that was the central idea for the record: putting myself in a situation where I’m seeing the poorest people I’ve encountered and documenting that experience. It’s very much foreign territory for me, but that makes for a fascinating and entirely new social world...

"Since I’ve been back, I’ve felt a great onus to tread lightly around here," the singer admits.

"Obviously when you have a lot of young entrepreneurial people moving into a poorer neighbourhood, there are concerns about cultural schisms, and I’m aware that I am part of that demographic and my presence presents problems. But I’m also aware that the role of the artist is to go to such places and document the gentrification that follows social shifts. The city is changing every day, and I’m lucky enough to be able to be part of this community and a kind of outside observer.”

What: All Things Will Unwind is out now Where: Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House When: Sunday May 27

“It’s probably the biggest single project we’ve ever done.”

Now In Surround Sound

By Caitlin Welsh

rom the traditional vinyl samplings of his debut album, Adventures In Foam, to the manipulated field recordings of Foley Room, Brazilian-born producer Amon Tobin has consistently been fascinated by the re-appropriation of sound. Like Foley Room, his seventh and most recent album, ISAM, sees Tobin crafting a cornucopia of sampled 'found sounds’ into a sonic maelstrom – except this time, he went looking for curious sounds closer to home.

then there’s a history of people who escaped slavery in the South, who see farming as an extension of poverty. So there’s this conflict because what represents freedom to one group is reminiscent of oppression to another.”

“It’s probably the biggest single project we’ve ever done,” Clausen admits, on the phone from his home in Berlin. “With Parades we made an album that was quite ambitious, but we were focussing only on the album and had one and a half years to finish it. And once we were done with that album, we all looked at each other and thought it would be amazing if we could perform this piece as one thing – take that one and a half years and condense it to 45 minutes, just play it like music is supposed to be played.”

The band were already in the early stages of writing the new album – which is to be titled Piramida – when they were invited to work and perform with the Sydney Symphony. Clausen says that doing it “backwards”, collaborating with conductor Matthew Coorey and arrangers who have previously worked with Kronos Quartet and Sigur Ros, certainly changed the way the album will eventually sound. “All the time we were thinking while we were making the album, ‘This

is also going to be performed with a symphony orchestra.’ And that was pretty crucial for us. We don’t really feel like performing music with the orchestra is over the top. For us, it’s very important that it’s all one thing. Like an integrated part of it.

So we were kind of giving it space while we were composing.”

But the symphony is a natural fit for the band, whose sound blends post-rock’s appreciation for slow burn, long-game songwriting with an emotional and accessible orchestral aesthetic.

“The way we make music anyway, we use a lot of sound sources and a lot of orchestral elements, but we don’t really use them as just salt and pepper on top of something – we use them as ingredients.”

That said, he welcomes the blurring of boundaries between indie rock and classical composition evident in recent years (exemplified by poster boys for the blended sound – and fellow Vivid LIVE performers – Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly). “There are definitely more and more people working with the orchestra. And it’s funny that you say Metallica, because throughout Parades we were using Metallica as an example of what we didn’t want to do,” Clausen laughs, of Metallica’s 1999 release S&M, recorded with a symphony orchestra. “So that was a big part of it. I like Metallica, but, at least to us, it was unnecessary.”

One of the most telling details about the show, though, might be that Clausen can’t really tell us too many details – they’ll probably still be finishing the album as you read this, working in the Opera House right up until opening night.

“It’s quite incredible, we think, that we’ve got the opportunity to do stuff like this without actually having anyone approve it beforehand,” he says mischievously. “We could be doing anything, you know?"

What: Efterklang & Sydney Symphony – commissioned by Vivid LIVE Where: Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House When: Saturday May 26

Amon Tobin by Nathan Seabrook

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BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 19

Ned Collette + Wirewalker Balancing Acts By Luke Telford

N

ed Collette + Wirewalker’s 2 is a dry, pragmatic, immediate record, which shares little with the heady avant-rock of 2010’s Over The Stones, Under The Stars.

One reason it sounds so soberingly intimate is that it was born, largely, out of Collette’s relative isolation after he relocated to Berlin. Shorn of the presence of his bandmates, he switched from his beloved SG electric to a nylon string, flamencostyle guitar. The dulcet percussiveness of that instrument forms the backbone of the record; its crunchy murmur is framed with furrowed synths and artful ad hoc percussion, breathing dark atmosphere into songs that seem resigned to accepting the mixed fate of their author.

“As soon as I moved here, I bought a nylon string guitar. I started using it for all my solo shows. I haven’t played electric guitar live for two years now,” he says. “The reason it happened that way – without such a guitar-band focus – is simply that I was living here alone, and it kind of gave me the freedom to create things in the studio that weren’t necessarily ever going to be focused towards playing in a guitar/bass/ drums trio.”

The economy demanded of playing rock on a classical instrument extends to the record’s arrangements. Though heavily layered, each element is carefully balanced and nothing seems to outstay its welcome. But despite its lightness of touch, 2 feels crowded, beset with an inexplicable and unresolved tension, both musically and thematically. One of the tracks is dedicated to Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, and this allusion feels right; the surreal, fractal narratives of Bolaño’s final, unfinished novel, 2666, pose a neat parallel to the sound of Collette’s new work. Throughout the book, the most basic and eccentric of stories – an academic love triangle, an obsessive manhunt, a mad father’s hallucinatory epiphany – are laden with a deeply unsettling and faceless darkness.

This presence looms over the characters, tracing their steps, but never fully reveals itself; it’s always there, just out of sight.

Although the novel acted as a foil to the start of Collette’s new life in Berlin, he’s uncertain whether its darkness translated directly into what he was writing. “I don’t think it’s really darkness – I always think of it more as romance,” he says. “Sonically, this album has quite dark moments, but it actually feels a lot lighter than, say, the first Wirewalker record, which is quite heavy, thematically and instrumentally. For me, all good art peers into the darkness. I prefer it when it has a cheeky curiosity about it – almost like you have to laugh at the depths, otherwise you might be consumed by them.”

“For me, all good art peers into the darkness.

I prefer it when it has a cheeky curiosity about it – almost like you have to laugh at the depths, otherwise you might be consumed by them.”

Part of what makes Collette’s songs so compelling is the way they outline deeply personal things without making them seem either overbearing or pithy. While much of what he writes is catalysed by what he reads, the process of writing the pieces that do arise from personal events is far from cathartic. “There’s stuff on this record that’s really personal, and there’s stuff that isn’t, and I think that things are quite well disguised,” he says. “Often if you’re writing personally, you’re writing about something that isn’t so fantastic in your life. Maybe it’s easier to walk away from those situations, but I tend to, for some reason, try and document them.

It all gets wrapped up – if you’re writing about a painful situation, it magnifies that. I don’t really get a catharsis from it. I don’t feel, ‘Right, well that’s documented now, so I don’t have to think about it anymore’.”

The work of English musician Robert Wyatt is one reference point that goes some way to describing how 2 sounds. Like much of Wyatt’s work, the record seems to function stubbornly, on its own terms. When his name is mentioned, Collette seizes on it with an eager relief – it turns out Wyatt has been a guiding voice for him for some time, but no one appeared to notice. “It’s funny how long these influences take to bubble up through your work. He’s been huge for me,” he admits. “He’s a guy that’s completely influenced by jazz, but doesn’t really sound like any sort of tired old black jazz musician that I know of. He’s a pop songwriter, as well. It’s almost like you want to say he’s got such a clear direction, but I think what I love about him is he seems to have no direction, and really just follows his whims in a very thorough way.”

The logic behind giving this record the Wirewalker tag comes down to the hand that drummer Joe Talia had to play in its creation. Talia is an experimental musician with a notable pedigree in his own right, having worked in jazz improv and electro-acoustic composition alongside musicians like Oren Ambarchi, Francis Plagne and James Rushford – and he’ll be playing synth in the upcoming tour for 2. Collette explains that Talia’s input to the record was crucial to its uniqueness.

If a song began to sound too much like someone else, it would be axed. “We were joking the other day about releasing an album of all the songs we’ve recorded over the years that we’ve never released, and calling it Songs That Sound Like Other People’s Songs,” he laughs. “For me, the biggest thing is not sounding like anything else.

Because I don’t really see the point, otherwise.

There’s plenty of records in the world already.”

What: 2 is out now on Dot Dash, through Remote Control With: Mary Ocher, Swimwear When: Friday June 15

20 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

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Daniel Merriweather Record Correction By Nils Hay

D

aniel Merriweather has been relatively quiet since his 2009 debut LP Love & War and subsequent ARIA for Best Male Artist. That’s not to say he hasn’t been busy – quite the opposite in fact. Having just recorded a new EP in Brooklyn, which was mixed in LA, he’s back in his hometown of Melbourne about to embark on a national tour, including a few support slots with Kimbra.

“To come back and do shows and test the waters with the new stuff is really exciting,” he says.

“It’s one thing to be in a studio and to write and record the songs; it’s a whole different thing to be in front of an audience with them. It’s kind of cool because you get feedback from the audience, and you get to see what works and what doesn’t.”

Having taken a bit of a hiatus from the stage while he’s been writing, Merriweather feels like Australia is the ideal place to road test his new material. “The awesome thing about Australian audiences is that they’re really super honest,” he says. “If they don’t like something they definitely won’t clap as loudly; if they do like something, they’ll let you know about it.”

It will be interesting to see how fans react; by his own admission, the new material is a bit of a sideways step from Love & War. Merriweather likens it to the music he was making when he started out ten years ago. “It’s not like I’m going backwards,” he explains, “but I’m going back to territory that I never really got to expose to the world.” It’s also a step away from his previous release, in the sense that the EP has been created totally independently – a fair way from his Mark Ronson-produced, major labelreleased LP. It’s a new challenge which he finds particularly liberating. “If I could turn back time I

may have done it like that the first time around,” he admits, “because there’s just so much more that you can do. If you trust yourself and trust what you want to convey, then it’s a really beautiful way to put music out.”

As excited as he is about the EP, it’s really just the entrée – Merriweather has some 30 to 40 tracks put aside which will form the basis for the sophomore album that he hopes to have out by early 2013. As happy as he is to have an EP which serves as a snapshot of where he is at the moment, he holds the album format in high regard, and treats the idea of a follow-up very seriously. “With an album, I feel like there’s a sanctity there that needs to be preserved.

“It’s very rare now to have kids listening to albums from start to finish,” he continues. “Our forefathers really put effort into making the album a piece of artwork, and I think that a lot of the time people forget that.” Merriweather is also quick to deride “the butchery of record labels, waving their magic A&R wand around saying, ‘You should fix this and put that there.’”

He cites The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’ (the experimental track from The White Album) as a prime example. “Someone in this day and age would’ve told them to take that off the album, but in those days it was a piece of artwork that they were making,” he stresses, “not just a means for record companies to sell more pieces of plastic to the youth.”

With: Toucan Where: The Standard When: Sunday May 20 More: Also supporting Kimbra at The Enmore Theatre on Thursday May 17.

Bonjah Kiwi Chaos By Simone Ziada

T

hey packed their bags and moved over the seas from New Zealand to Melbourne just to get their name out there – and it worked. Since their 2006 relocation, Bonjah have been nominated for multiple awards, were named Rolling Stone Australia’s 2011 ‘Artist To Watch’, and have made a name for themselves around the country with their powerhouse performances. Leaving behind their hometown couldn’t have been easy, but with all of these accolades under their belt, lead vocalist Glenn Mossop says it’s definitely been worth it.

“We left because in New Zealand ... there’s not a big enough market there. It’s such a small country,” he explains. “I mean, there are amazing musicians and bands that come out of there, but yeah – we just thought that we’d come overseas and try our luck here. We’d heard such great things about Melbourne and the music industry over here. That was something that was really appealing to us.

“The population of Australia is a lot bigger than New Zealand, so you’re reaching a lot more people,” he continues. “In saying that though, we love heading back to New Zealand and playing shows over there as well. But Australia is our base and our music root.”

Bonjah kicked off 2012 with all sorts of bangs – starting the year at Pyramid Rock Festival alongside the likes of Scissor Sisters and Grandmaster Flash, they joined the East Coast leg of the Big Day Out travelling circus, and sold out their national summer tour. And then of course there was that accidental headline set at the Metro in March, after the Cranberries cancelled their show last minute...

Not bad for a few lads from Tauranga.

Best described as soulful rock, the Bonjah boys are definitely doing something right.

With street buzz hitting fever pitch, the band have received numerous nods from the music industry, are sitting on over half a thousand live shows, have clocked up a casual 22,000 independent CD sales, and have appeared at most of Australia’s premier music festivals.

And now they’re heading around the country again, playing down the east coast before heading off for some shows in Europe in support of the Make A Wish Australia Foundation.

So what can the European crowds expect?

What anyone can expect from a Bonjah show, really: thrashing guitar, smooth vocals and “a lot of energy”, Mossop says. “It means a lot [to be supporting Make A Wish]. It means that we’re giving back to these kids... Giving them an opportunity to do something that they might not have had in the past. It’s just an amazing thing to be a part of, and to be helping people and giving back. We’ve had some amazing opportunities given to us and we feel grateful for those,” he says. “We don’t just want to sit on our arses and take – we want to be able to give back as well.

“Regan, our guitarist, has some close ties with some of the people involved in Make A Wish.

We approached them and asked if we could be part of what they do, and they were happy for us to get on board and let us be part of the amazing things that they do for sick kids,” Mossop explains. “It’s a great honour for us – we’re very happy to be a part of it.”

With: Bowan & Lucky Dutchman, The Quixotics Where: The Lair @ The Metro Theatre When: Saturday May 19

The ReChords When The Beat Drops By Rick Warner

“It’s really strange the way this band has headed,” muses vocalist and double bassist Tyron Shaw. “Originally we had the concept of being a traditional western swing-style band with drums, but it’s somehow just taken its own direction. In the biggest part of this band’s career so far it’s just been double bass,

acoustic and a lead guitar, but all three of us sharing vocals and harmonies. That kind of filled out that sound.”

It’s clearly working for them. In the thriving Melbourne inner-north roots scene, they’ve become a firm fixture, clocking up around 300 shows both locally and abroad by last count. But is the band beginning to outgrow the niche they’ve carved out for themselves?

As the crowds keep growing at their shows, Tyron is surprised at the diversity of punter that the band is attracting. “Our Melbourne shows had been getting such a wide audience on board that we don’t do many rockabilly gigs with other rockabilly bands [anymore]. We’ve found that the general inner-Melbourne folky-rootsy kind of following was getting all sorts of people who were really getting into the band and discovering this music for the first time.”

One such recent convert is producer Lindsay Gravina (The Living End, Faker, Kate MillerHeidke), with whom The ReChords are now exploring their sound with in the studio.

“Lindsay is interested to experiment with us and see where we can take the music to without trying to destroy the essence of the band and the three-piece,” says Shaw. “We’re going to introduce the element of drums into these recordings to kind of push it into a more radio-friendly market.”

Drums? As a band that has managed to survive this long without them, I ask Tyron if there is any apprehension in being taken somewhere musically that they may not like.

“Yeah, we’re totally thinking that that scenario could happen,” says Shaw. “But we’ve decided as a band that we’re going to try this and leave it in [the producer’s] hands to see how he would treat our music. Basically, in the end it comes down to us. If we’re not happy with it, we’re not going to release it.”

In the interim, The ReChords are returning (sans drummer) to Sydney this month to play the upcoming Black Cherry event. Having played there last year, Tyron laughs that “‘loud’ would be the first word that comes to mind.

But Black Cherry is perfect because it does cater for a fairly wide variety of audience. We really get into our performance. It’s quite a visual thing. It’s oldies music – well, not oldies music,” he hastens, “but it has that kind of edge about it.”

With: Bands – The Drey Rollan Band, Barbarion; Burlesque/Circus – Mali de Goey, Chelle Hafner, Frankie Faux, Lauren LaRouge; DJs Limpin’ Jimmy & The Swingin’ Kitten, DJ Jack Shit (FBi) Where: Black Cherry @ The Factory Theatre When: Saturday May 19, 8pm More: blackcherrypresents.com.au

“Friendly blokes, racist jokes. Everywhere you look there are ghosts.” - JOELISTICS 22 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

The Butterfly Effect – photo by Tony Mott

O

ne of my favourite Massachusetts bands, Piebald, once said, “All you need is drums to start a dance party.” The ReChords would probably find that amusing; they’ve been coping rather well without a drummer since getting together in 2009. The western swing/RnB/roots three-piece have amassed themselves a rather large following in their home town of Melbourne, settling in for residencies at The Gem in Collingwood for month-long stints, scoring support slots for touring acts like Justin Townes Earle and King Cannons, and turning heads with their performance at the Meredith Music Festival. And all this without a single snap of a snare.

Dallas Frasca No Holds Barred By Benjamin Cooper

D

allas Frasca tells me that she’s got itchy feet – but before any potential fungal concerns arise, the Melbourne blueswoman quickly clarifies that she simply wants to tour again... Now. “We just love being on the road so bloody much,” she says. “It was actually really hard for us to stay still long enough to take the required time to make the record. Getting back in the van and catching up with the people who love our music is really exciting for us.”

The record in question is Frasca’s sophomore release Sound Painter. The twelve tracks, devised by Frasca alongside guitarist Jeff Curran and drummer Pete McDonald, represent a continuation of the snarling melodies from her 2009 debut album, Not For Love Or Money. If it seems like Frasca’s particular brand of howl wears her heart on its sleeve, it’s because it damn well does. “I’m definitely a passionate person and I really like putting myself out there in the songs,” she says. “I think all of us in the band are like that, and I reckon that honesty is something that our audience relates to.”

Frasca is unflinchingly honest in her lyrics, but that’s not to say she treats her music like a diary – there’s a massive amount of consideration that goes into the band’s songwriting. When talking about the album’s lead single ‘All My Love’, Frasca is typically frank: “That song was a bitch to get right. In many ways it felt like the benchmark of the album – it’s got that big, rocking riff running through it, and I think you can really hear the sense of momentum that the three of us are able to create,” she says. “There was a solid four months of writing that occurred here in Melbourne before we went to New York.

We tracked the album over there for a week, and it was perfect timing because it felt as though we were musically peaking, as we’d spent so much time beforehand bashing the tracks out.

To finally feel the culmination of all that time spent agonising over tiny bits and pieces was an absolutely huge rush.”

The evening brought with it a few surprises for the band as well. “Bloody Andy decided to fly out from New York to surprise us!” Frasca exclaims. “So once we’d recovered from all having coronaries at that shock, he then proceeded to be even more of a darling by whipping out the little monkey mascot from his studio, Wal, who apparently had some issues clearing customs due to being a monkey...”

But the most rewarding part of the evening was realising the importance of the music to Dallas Frasca’s fans. “When people were nominating their favourite tracks on the album, the choices were not the ones I thought of as immediately appealing or necessarily being single-worthy. But then I realised that it doesn’t matter what we think of the music any more: new connections have formed, and now the songs belong in the hearts and ears of everyone else.”

What: Sound Painter is out now on Spank Betty Records, through MGM Where: Sandringham Hotel, Newtown / Music Oz Awards @ Sydney Opera House When: Saturday May 5 / Tuesday May 15 – tix through the Opera House website

“I’m definitely a passionate person, and I really like putting myself out there in the songs. I think all of us in the band are like that.”

The band recorded at Brooklyn’s Rola Pola studios, which belong to fellow Australian Andy Baldwin, and held particular attraction for the band thanks to the vintage 1960s Fender audio gear lying around. “We don’t use any bass – it’s just Jeff and I thrashing away on our guitars – so it was absolutely necessary that we get the feel of the live energy our music creates. Thankfully Andy’s studio is pretty much perfect when it comes to nailing down those beautiful blues tones, but the gear also gives you enough of that low-down element amongst the dirty riffs,” Frasca explains.

The decision to work with Baldwin was an obvious one. Though the man himself is apparently quite an understated character, the band knew from their first meeting that their paths were inevitably intertwined. “Andy is one of those divine souls who never feels the need to dominate a room, and is always completely honest,” Frasca says. “We first met at a festival in December 2010 when he heard our band playing from a distance and hung around to have a beer after our set. Next thing we’re hanging out the entire weekend, and it wasn’t ‘till we got back to the city that someone told me that’s he’s this incredible expat producer who works with people like Björk all the time!” …Not to mention fellow Aussies including Midnight Juggernauts, The Drones, The Living End and The Cat Empire.

Frasca lucked out with the chance meeting – especially considering the otherwise tumultuous genesis of Sound Painter. After returning from a national tour in 2011, the band were waiting for their luggage at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport when disaster struck. “I was carrying the bag with all the cash takings from our tour, and I turned around for five seconds to look for another piece of luggage. When I turned back around some asshole had nicked the cash bag from right in front of me!” Frasca laments. “It was a shitty thing to happen, there’s no denying it, but we also were not going to let it ruin our desire to finish the album. We took the theft as an opportunity to kick on with our fans – so we put out a pledge through pozible. com, requesting financial assistance to help with the remaining album costs.” It was a massive success, raising close to $5000 to help with mixing and promotion – and in payback, fans were invited to an exclusive listening party for the album in a Melbourne warehouse.

BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 23

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five minutes NASHEN MOODLEY

When did the love affair with cinema start?

I went to the movies with my mum a lot as a kid – we’d watch double features, it was great.

And she was into westerns, so I’d watch lots of those. But my initial independent taste was Bruce Lee films – I would watch Enter The Dragon every day after school… My mum’s favourite film was Rio Bravo, so I’ve also seen that film many, many, many times.

What was the cinema culture like in Durbin, growing up? There was no cinematheque at all, so I’d watch a lot of quite commercial stuff – Ghostbusters, that kind of thing. In my neighbourhood there was actually a cinema, which was pretty rare (they were usually just in city centres). They would play double features – sometimes the combinations were really weird. I remember on the last day of school I went to see Home Alone or something like that – and then [after that] they played this bunch of 11-year-old kids Easy Rider [laughs]. But it was really through the Durban Film Festival that I was exposed to international cinema.

W

ith Sydney Film Festival dropping its full 2012 lineup last week, and the festival starting in just a few weeks, it’s time you got to know incoming Festival Director Nashen Moodley, who took over from Clare Stewart at the end of last year.

The South African-born cinephile comes to Sydney after eleven years as the director of Durban Film Festival – and he’s not even 35.

HARVEST ARTS APPS

Music and arts will make tender love this November when the second annual Harvest Festival hits Sydney. To be part of the sexiness, artists and performers can submit applications to present works – from cabaret to installations, new media, and ‘live art happenings’, yada yada – at what will no doubt (given the swag of awards and positive word-of-mouth they received last year) be one of this year’s stand-out festival events. Submissions close July 1, and all the deets and the online application form are at harvestfestival.com.au

So you didn’t study cinema at university?

No – I started studying law, with the aim of becoming a human rights lawyer; and then six months into it, I was really not [enjoying it] – so I took a year off to edit the campus newspaper.

The newspaper did very well in that year, and I won a few awards, so I was asked to write for a mainstream newspaper – and started writing about music. When I went back to university, I dropped law and did philosophy instead. I kept writing for the newspaper – mostly about popular music, but also popular culture, including cinema.

I was very into the Durban Film Festival at the time – I would watch loads and loads of films.

THREE STRIKES

Sydney College of the Arts alumni Luke Burcher and James Cooney are launching /// (Three Strikes) Projects next week, with a little help from the Rocks Pop-Up community. /// Projects will focus on emerging artists and musicians from Sydney’s inner-west, via projects that present their work in innovative ways and unusual places. First up is an exhibition featuring Western Sydney artists Nathan Howard, Ben Lang and Hannah Fenton (May 23 – June 4), with the launch party featuring chunes by Big Dumb Kid and Charles Buddy Daaboul (No Art). Head along to 47 George

How did you end up in the role of festival programmer? The programmer of the festival quit just a short time before the festival, and so the festival was pretty desperate to get someone in. They called me, and said, ‘Well we have this list of things that needs doing – writing program notes, programming films…’ a bunch of stuff – and given the desperate situation, they thought they could kind of bundle up different different tasks to different people. I was 21 or 22 at the time, and I said ‘I can do it all!’ [laughs] It was still a pretty small job at that time – I think we screened 30 films, in one venue, with one guest. By the time I left, we screened more than 200 films across about 20 venues, we had about 400 guests; so it underwent a huge transformation in my 11 years there.

He’s lampooned British gangster culture, celebrity entertainment, America – and Ryan Seacrest’s shoes; Sacha Baron Cohen’s next stop is Middle Eastern politics, via the character of Admiral General Aladeen – the ruler of the Republic Of Wadiya – who finds himself unexpectedly slumming it in New York, and experiencing Western ‘democracy’ first-hand… Whether people love it or loathe it, they’re definitely going to be talking about The Dictator. To get one of 10 in-season double passes to check it out for yourself, email us with the name of one other cast-member.

THEDICTATORMOVIE.com.au

What are your 'desert island' top-five films?

Rashomon – I could see it over and over and over again and still find something new. I love Magnolia, I think it’s an incredible film. Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-bi – it made me a devoted Kitano fan. And I’d take Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Those are all fairly serious, I should maybe take something funny…Life Of Brian?

– or a Woody Allen film. Maybe Crimes and Misdemeanours!? But that’s not really funny.

What: Sydney Film Festival When: June 6 - 17 Where: State Theatre, Dendy Opera Quays, Event Cinemas (George St) and more More: program and tickets at sff.org.au / our recommendations and reviews of the lineup at thebrag.com/sff-2012

Street on Wednesday May 23 at 6pm for a look. threestrikeprojects.tumblr.com

ONLY AT THE MOVIES MAY 16

THE RUMBLE

And speaking of Western Sydney doing it better: The Rumble will climax this Saturday May 19 with its Grand Slam finale at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatre, featuring the best of Western Sydney’s young word-wranglers and slam poets, going toe-to-toe for cashmoney and glory. The Rumble was created by new arts literacy org Word Travels (helmed by awardwinning slam poet Miles Merrill) as a platform for youth expression – from poems and stories to lyrics and monologues. The winning entrant/ team will perform at Sydney Writers Festival’s Rumble All Stars on May 20, alongside MC Trey and Luka Lesson, among others.

MCA ARTBAR

What is art, really? Feel that slight furrow between your eyebrows? You should wear that to the MCA next Friday, for the launch of ARTBAR, their new monthly musicperformance-art-design-booze mash-up. Held on the last Friday of every month, the series will launch on Friday May 25 with an instalment curated by Sydney-based photographer and video artist Justene Williams, whose Crutch Dance TV installation is currently on display at the MCA. It’s also the opening night of Vivid Sydney (lights on!) so the view should be pretty glorious. mca.com.au/series/artbar

ART @ OPERA BAR

Alternatively, if your gang’s ‘east side’ (of the harbour), it’s probably safer to go to Opera Bar – on Thursday March 24 – where they’ll be serving up a cocktail of music, alcohol, art and harbour-views, for ART:LIVE – an evening of live art featuring the Sketch The Rhyme crew and local low-brow heroes Jumbo, Sprinkles and Teem, all commandeering the internal columns of the Opera Bar for their own art displays. Badass. Head along from 8pm to check it out, for free.

OUTSIDER CINEMA The Regal Twelve - Marie Antoinette

HOMAGE

Internationally acclaimed artist Alexia Sinclair is presenting a selection of stunning images from her popular series The Regal Twelve and The Royal Dozen at Customs House this month. Sinclair’s portraits blend historical detail with fantasy, via immaculately staged tableaux in which she poses models in her own hand-made costumes, against elaborate props and sets, with the resulting photographs meticulously polished in postproduction. Get lost in the details and discover the hidden symbols (with a little help from her virtual tour guide, on one of the courtesy iPads). Homage runs until June 29 in the Ground Floor Exhibition Space @ Customs House, Circular Quay.

24 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

The Art Gallery Of NSW is celebrating Australian outsider cinema this month, with a program of rare shorts and features showing across its regular free screenings slots (Wednesdays 2pm & 7.15pm, Sundays 2pm).

Featuring works by iconic filmmakers such as Rolf de Heer, Gillian Armstrong and Tracey Moffatt, the lineup dovetails nicely with the gallery’s freshly-shucked display of works from their Australian art collection, showcasing the best cuts from colonial to contemporary. Head along to the Domain Theatre this Wednesday May 16 for de Heer’s Dingo (Colin Friels and Miles Davis), and head to artgallery.nsw.gov. au/films for the rest of lineup…

100 BEDROOMS

If you like your art with a splash of voyeurism, check out this upcoming exhibition of bedroom portraits by Sydney photographer Ellen Disaster (aka Margaret Ellen Burns), in which she peers behind closed doors into the (from what we can see, relievingly untidy) personal space of friends, acquaintances and even strangers.

Burns is a NAS graduate who describes herself as a compulsive snapper, in-between her commercial gigs; her current camera crush is Ashahi Pentax Spotmatic film camera. 100 Bedrooms opens Thursday May 17 at kind of (118 Oxford St) and runs ‘til May 27.

GAME ON @ 107 PROJECTS

107 Projects are having a games day, with a little help from their favourite artsy/creative types, who have been invited to 'build' their favourite games. Expect giant chess, a customdesigned put-put golf course and something called the ‘very fun interactive scrabble club’.

For $5 you can run around like a cordial-fuelled fiver-year-old from 12-9pm. Saturday May 19 @ 107 Redfern St, Redfern. 107projects.org

© 2012 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

WITH

Keeping It In The Family By Alicia Malone

Dark Shadows images © 2012 Village Roadshow Films BVI Ltd

Dark Shadows

L-R: Helena Bonham Carter, Chloe Grace Moretz, Eva Green, Gulliver McGrath, Bella Heathcote, Johnny Depp, Ray Shirley, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller and Michelle Pfeiffer e’re all going to get greased up after this,” announces Johnny Depp, a cheeky smirk obscured by his famously disheveled hair. “We’re going to take some psychedelics, grease up and get in the pool. You’re all welcome to come.”

“W

in my head, how great it would be to turn it into a film. But the way it happened was sort of off-the-cuff: Tim and I had a conversation about how we should do a vampire movie sometime – and the next thing you know, we’re sitting in a room with [screenwriter] Seth Grahame-Smith, sculpting the thing.”

Press conferences can be strange at the best of times, but add in Johnny Depp and his long-time collaborator Tim Burton, and things get downright bizarre.

Their eighth movie together is the creepy comedy Dark Shadows, based on a ‘60s television series they both loved as children. Depp plays Barnabas Collins, an 18th century aristocrat-turned-vampire who wakes up, after two centuries of cursed slumber, in the very confusing ‘70s. He finds his former home, Collinswood Manor, rundown and inhabited by his eccentric descendants – including Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, played by Michelle Pfeiffer (also an avid fan of the TV series).

The three wanted to capture the spirit of the series in their own way. “It’s like if you took a painting and were inspired by it,” Burton explains, “that’s what it was like for me. It wasn’t about remaking Dark Shadows, that wouldn’t be much of a money-making proposition; it was about presenting it in a different way, even though it’s based on a known TV show.”

“Everyone knows by now that I called up begging for the job,” laughs Pfeiffer, “I’m not proud. I was obsessed with the television series when I was a kid, and I read in the trades that Tim was developing this with Johnny, so I shamelessly called Tim, after twenty years of never talking! Luckily, there was something in it for me.”

And then, just when it seems like the press conference is heading into a deep and thoughtful moment, Burton throws a curve ball: “I mean, you really know you’ve made it when they make a porno version of your film. There was Edward Penishands – One and Two. Both very successful by the way…”

What: Dark Shadows When: In cinemas now

Photographs by Chris Peken, taken from Exposed

Johnny Depp as Barnabus Collins

ON WORKING WITH TIM BURTON “Ever since Edward Scissorhands, even though there is a kind of comfort zone with Tim, I still feel that drive to come up with something that will please him, that he’ll like. So working with him is always new, it’s always fresh. I have watched Tim grow as a filmmaker – not that he didn’t have those skills right off the bat. His love of the process and his ability to take risks and change things up has been really impressive. I feel very lucky to have been around this long to see it.”

ON BARNABAS’ LOOK “[Tim and I] have been such fans of horror films in general since a very young age – he on the west coast and me on the east coast were even reading the same magazines at the same time, like Famous Monsters Of Filmland, Fangoria and all that kind of stuff. Our approach to Barnabas was not about the current trend

of vampire movies; it was about creating a classic monster, an image – something that we would see, in other circumstances, painted by [Famous Monsters Of Filmland illustrator] Basil Gogos.”

MICHELLE PFEIFFER ON JOHNNY DEPP “I’ve always had a crush on Johnny… I am happily married by the way, if you can include that in my statement!

I’ve always been a huge fan of his. He’s really funny, as you’ve witnessed here. He’s very fun-loving on the set, but when the cameras roll he’s very serious and always incredibly prepared. I think it’s easy to get really intimidated by someone of his stature, but some of the greatest actors that I’ve worked with, the most gifted ones, have always had the ability to put you at ease right away – and he definitely has that in spades.”

TIM BURTON ON CASTING AUSSIE ACTRESS BELLA HEATHCOATE “I remember when I met Bella, it was just like… wow.

I didn’t know her work, but as soon as I met her, it was like, ‘Well, she could have been reincarnated five times already; she could be a ghost.’ She’s just got that quality of an old movie star. Sometimes you can just look at somebody and time travel. She had that dynamic, and especially with film; that’s not something you can ask somebody to do.”

SLAM TV!

G IV EA W AY S

Depp had been thinking about making Dark Shadows into a film for years, and mentioned it to Burton while they were making Sweeney Todd. “It was always sort of there

On his aspirations for the film, Depp says he hopes that both fans and nonfans “will relate on some level, whether to the dysfunctional family or the weird humour. There’s a horror aspect to the film, but at the same time there’s the absurdity of this cursed man [who finds himself] in 1972 – an explosion of insanity compared to what he was used to. In the end, I just hope people will like the film.”

JOHNNY DEPP

ON THE VAMPIRE ‘TREND’ “I’ve been watching vampire movies since I was five years old, so for me, it’s never been a trend. We didn’t look at it that way, we looked at why we loved the show, what Johnny is interested in, and what we liked about Barnabas being a reluctant vampire – all the things we felt were unique and personal. This is the first time for me, working with Johnny, where I felt like he was reaching way back for a character that really inspired him. So it more was about all of those elements, and not thinking about trends. It’s always been trendy for us.”

LAUNCH PARTY! WORDZ!

Alan Pham

WIN!

L

iterary-minded not-for-profit Word Travels love a bit of spoken word (just love it) – so they’re using their new Rocks Pop-Up residency/digs to host the launch of brand-new spoken word site SlamTV.org – a home for locally and internationally-harvested spoken-word content. The party will feature beat-less performances by local hip hop heroes Joelistics (TZU), Ozi Batla (The Herd), The Tongue and Morganics, alongside straight-up poetics from Australian Poetry Slam Champion Luka Lesson, and performers featured in Chris Peken’s portrait exhibition Exposed (currently showing at Word Travels’ space in The Rocks) – including bravochild, Alan Pham and Alana Hicks.

Alana Hicks

SLAM TV’s Launch Party happens Wednesday May 16 from 6pm at Level 1, 47 George Street, The Rocks – and it costs REAL MONEY. But we have five cheeky doubles to get in the door – so if you want one, email freestuff@thebrag.com with your favourite word.

BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 25

[THEATRE] High School Hell By Roslyn Helper

M

elita Rowston began writing plays at art school. “I actually started out as a painter,” she tells me. “I went to the Victorian College of the Arts, and started hanging out with actors and seeing a lot of plays; I wanted to tell stories in my paintings, but I realised I could tell better, more detailed stories if I put them on stage.” Over a decade later, Rowston has carved out a reputation for writing theatre with a distinctly Australian voice – and Crushed, playing at New Theatre this month, is no exception.

Crushed is set in a fictional NSW bayside town, up past the Northern Beaches. It’s 1998, and Susie, the most popular girl in school, is having her 16th birthday. To celebrate, a group of high-school friends have gathered in the scrublands on the side of town – “You know, where you go and listen to rock music and drink warm beer,” says Rowston. That night, Susie is abducted from her bed and never found.

Fast-forward 22 years, and workmen excavating the same scrubland uncover the Poison T-shirt Susie was last seen wearing – slashed and covered in blood. The ensuing criminal investigation brings three friends – her best friend, her boyfriend and the town rebel – back together, to confront their memories of a night they’d hoped to leave buried in their adolescence forever.

“It’s what I call a high-school reunion from hell,” Rowston quips.

It’s a story inspired by Rowston’s own experiences growing up in a small town on the Victorian coast. “Where I grew up, a little girl was abducted from her bed in the middle of the night and never found. I was a toddler at the time, and it was literally two blocks away – my mum still talks about it,” she says. As she researched the story, however, Rowston quickly realised that

the ‘missing child’ theme runs a rich vein through Australian history and culture. “In the 1980s, we had the highest rate of child abduction in the world,” she tells me.

Bring Back The Showgirl [BURLESQUE] A Nude Awakening By Roslyn Helper tassel twirl and do burlesque, and I went to the gym every day. I had a personal trainer three times a week, I was on a special diet, and it took me a year to make my costumes; it was like a year and a half worth of preparations!” She laughs, “And yeah, it paid off. It all paid off.”

She then went on to take third place in the Miss Burlesque World Championships, in Iowa.

Kristin Kreuk in Ecstasy Jane has been performing as a stripper for over a decade, but her interest in burlesque is a relatively recent development.

“Time isn’t my friend, and it’s a lot more acceptable to be an older woman doing burlesque, whereas there’s a date on my youth for being a stripper,” she explains. She started stripping at the age of 21, at which time she owned a shop on Chapel Street (in Melbourne) called Fantasium. “We used to hand-make bondage, fetish and gothic clothing, and we got a lot of strippers coming in and getting their costumes made by our store.

I was like, ‘Ah gosh, if they can do this then I can!” she laughs. “So I started, and I haven’t stopped!”

Rowston says the biggest challenge with Crushed was constructing a believable narrative arc. “I think the struggle was the suspense plot – the murder mystery – because it’s so detailed with the clues and the evidence. It was that struggle of making it believable and telling the characters’ relationship stories as well,” she explains.

In the end, she drew heavily from her own past to create her characters. “They’re all really angry, but I love them; and the lead is a mixture of a couple of girls I went to high-school with, who I’m still friends with on Facebook”.

Ahead of the production at New Theatre, Rowston handed over her story to director Lucinda Gleeson, with whom she bonded over the play’s social milieu. “Lucinda calls herself a Canberra bogan, and grew up in a more Canberra-like town,” Rowston explains, “and she’s really connected with [Crushed], because just before we got into rehearsals, she started reconnecting with her highschool friends as well. She’s just like, ‘This is too close to home, I know these people; I know this world’. So that’s been really great.”

On her hopes for the upcoming production, Rowston says, “I like it when people have extreme reactions to my work. I’ve gotten to the point where I know that could also include extreme hate, but yeah… feeling something really resonant is what matters.”

What: Crushed by Melita Rowston Where: New Theatre / 542 King St, Newtown When: May 16 – June 9 More: newtheatre.org.au

Sean Barker, Jeremy Waters and Lucy Miller in Crushed

A lot has changed in the showgirl scene since then, and Jane laments the demise of the artform.

“Basically, when I started 15 years ago, all the showgirls wore big Cassandra Jane (centre) beautiful costumes and they all had big props and they all had pride in woman with an exuberant Australian themselves. They looked like movie accent has picked up the phone. “Oh my stars, not porn stars, and it was more about god!” She laughs, “Sorry, can you just wait being sexy rather than being sexual. There used – can you just give me like two seconds while to be about 40 venues that we all performed I put some clothes on?” She giggles. “Sorry I’m in, but now there’s only one left in Melbourne,” on Adelaide time, I thought I had another hour! she says, citing pokies as a key factor in this Just one sec – I’ve got to find a top…” downturn.

A

Stripper, burlesque artist and showgirl Cassandra Jane is in the throws of preparing for the Adelaide opening of her show Bring Back The Showgirl, which started as a fundraiser to help her reach the finals of Miss Nude Australia last year – a goal she achieved, against considerable odds. Having competed previously and come second two years in a row, Jane then took time off to have a baby, and relinquished her ambitions of winning the prestigious competition: “I kind of put my dreams aside, and I forgot about them and didn’t really think it was even possible to get back to the status that I had already been at.”

But two years later, Jane made up her mind to win the title, and hauled herself back into training via a grueling preparation schedule. “I had a personal coach that taught me how to

Forging ahead, Bring Back The Showgirl is both a homage to the rich history of the Australian showgirl tradition, and an amalgamation of Jane's influences, taking the best bits from Parisian and Las Vagas showgirl styles, burlesque and striptease, and mixing them together to create her own brand of neoburlesque (with a finale that, she hints, involves a giant chandelier, hundreds of feathers and a sprinkler system). “We’ve gone completely overboard,” she exclaims.

What: Bring Back The Showgirl Where: The Factory Theatre / 105 Victoria Rd, Marrickville When: Sunday May 20 More: bringbacktheshowgirl.com/tickets

Theatresports [COMEDY] Anything Can Happen By Alasdair Duncan

or many of us, doing theatresports for drama class was sort of a high-school rite of passage; but the Theatresports National Championships takes that classroom experience to a whole, manic new level – a boisterous night when the best improv comedians from around the country come together to battle it out in teams. “We have group of incredibly experienced players,” MC (and former contestant-slash-champion) Rebecca De Unamuno tells me. “They make it seem effortless when it’s actually really pretty tricky to do well. It’s great to watch them play – the level of characterisation and the level of storytelling is incredible.”

F

anything can go wrong. “Oh, yeah, there are always disasters!” De Unamuno tells me.

“People often ask if we’re really improvising, and I ask, 'Okay, do you really think that scene would have had no ending, or that character’s name would have changed halfway through if we had rehearsed it?' There are so many possibilities for disasters and things not to work, but the good thing is that you can always just forget it and move on to the next scene. The good thing about the nationals, though, is that the skill level is so high, if something is going off the rails, there’s always the potential for someone to jump in and save the scene.”

Producer Cale Bain has been involved with the event for six years, and says the highlight for him has been getting to know the various comedians who come through each year.

“They’re all really talented improvisers and many have become really good friends,” he says. “I guess within the show, one of the highlights was seeing a comic commit to doing a scene naked with only a sombrero covering his most delicate bits. He started the scene in his underwear, but the other players just yanked it off. And given the size of The Enmore, everything on stage looks smaller...”

The Theatresports National Championships have been billed as the State Of Origin of improv comedy, given that contestants from all around the country will be representing their respective states for the title – including NSW champions The Dyslexia Men (featuring Dave ‘Lowervine’ Callan, Bridie ‘Rouge’ Connell and Jon ‘Magento’ Williams). But unlike the world of sports, nobody (Bain assures me) is really out for blood. “It doesn’t really get too competitive,” he says, “it’s more fauxcompetitive. We’re all really good friends, and we sort of play up the competitive angle, but what we really care about is the show. You’ll see people jumping into other people’s scenes wherever there’s a good spot for a joke, or

Given the nature of improv, anything can happen on the night – which means that 26 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

The Dyslexia Men: Dave ‘Lowervine’ Callan, Bridie ‘Rouge’ Connell and Jon ‘Magento’ Williams to bring a reference in. We’ll jump into eachother’s scenes and help out wherever we can.

It’s a really ensemble-based show.”

Bain caught the comedy bug at the age of 13, and he takes great pleasure in watching teen improvisers develop and eventually end up in the championships. “The theatresports schools championships are happening right now, and it’s really fun every year to go to the nationals and see what becomes of those people who’ve been trained in school,” he says. “It’s really great to see which people

become professional performers and how far they can take it. It’s great to watch kids develop into comics – but kids are [naturally] amazing at improv; they’re natural liars…”

What: The Theatresports National Championships When: Saturday May 19 at 8pm Where: The Enmore Theatre Tickets: improaustralia.com.au

Crushed photo by Ian Barry

Crushed

FULL PROGRAM NOW ON SALE SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL HUB @ LOWER TOWN HALL Grab a drink at the bar and see exhibitions, live music, films, talks and DJs – FREE every night during the Festival.

Sydney Film Festival brings the city to life with over 230 screenings of over 150 films from 51 countries, plus talks, forums, guests and red carpet galas.

Check out the full program and buy online at sff.org.au or purchase by phone on 1300 733 733.

SING ME THE SONGS THAT SAY I LOVE YOU THE ZEN OF BENNETT – A CONCERT FOR KATE MCGARRIGLE

KILLER JOE

POLISSE

SAT 16 JUN 8.30PM EV9 SUN 17 JUN 6.30PM EV9

THU 7 JUN 9.00PM EV8 THU 14 JUN 9.10PM EV8

TUE 12 JUN 8.45PM STATE WED 13 JUN 6.15PM EV9

Behind the scenes with icon Tony Bennett as he records an Grammy-winning album of duets with diverse guests including Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson and the late Amy Winehouse.

A Texas drug dealer hires a cop and parttime hitman (Matthew McConaughey) to murder his mother for insurance money in this sleazy noir from director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist).

French star turned writer/director Maïwenn’s third feature is a tough-as-nails drama about the hardened cops who work in the CPU (Child Protection Unit) on the mean streets of Paris.

THE COMEDY

LIBERAL ARTS

JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME

THU 14 JUN 9.00PM DOQ2 SAT 16 JUN 2.00PM DOQ2

MON 11 JUN 6.45PM EV8 FRI 15 JUN 6.45PM DOQ2

FRI 8 JUN 8.30PM EV4 SAT 16 JUN 9.35PM EV4

Musician/filmmaker Rick Alverson’s ironically titled feature is an excoriating look at a group of privileged and reckless Williamsburg hipsters; features performances from James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) and Gregg Turkington (“Neil Hamburger”).

Josh Radnor wrote, directed and stars in this charming romantic comedy in which a disillusioned 35-year-old man, on a visit to his former college, falls for a beautiful and intelligent student (Elizabeth Olsen).

Gentle, warm-hearted, offbeat comedy about an aimless 30-something man (Jason Segel) who is unemployed, lives in his mother’s basement and believes he is destined for something special. Co-stars Susan Sarandon, Ed Helms and Judy Greer.

FRI 15 JUN 9.30PM EV4 SUN 17 JUN 12.00PM EV4 This rousing tribute to the late Canadian singer-songwriter, recorded at New York’s Town Hall, features her famously musical children, Martha and Rufus Wainwright, and friends including Emmylou Harris and Norah Jones.

INFINITE STORIES ONE FILM FESTIVAL 6 – 1 7 J U N E S F F. O R G . A U

BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 27

Arts Snap

Film & Theatre Reviews

At the heart of the arts Where you went last week...

Hits and misses on the silver screen and the bareboards around town.

■ Film

IRON SKY Released May 10

head on photo festival launch 04:05:12 :: Customs House :: 31 Alfred St Circular Quay

PICS :: TL

World War II ended, and instead of having trials at Nuremburg and fleeing to Argentinean villas, the Nazis actually went to live on the dark side of the moon, where they spent the next 60 years evilly plotting revenge. It sounds great, but it’s actually quite hard to tell whether Iron Sky is any good or not. The performances are stereotyped, the plot-swerves are swift and confusing, and the action scenes are wimpy.

Sometimes it’s bad enough to make you laugh – which is the confusing part: how good or bad is it supposed to be?

Iron Sky seems to aim for the same funnybad-movie territory as Snakes On A Plane or Black Dynamite – and it does okay at that.

To succeed in the ironic-bad movie world you need a good awareness of different kinds of bad. Unfortunately, Director Timo Vuorensola and his team over-do it in some departments. The film is so jam-packed with clichés and references that some moments feel like badly re-shot versions of better movies. For people not up to date with the decade’s Nazi memes and sci-fi pop culture, it might even feel a little awkward. The more original sequences suffer as well, and most of the early scenes where stranded astronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby) falls into the hands of the 'moon Nazis' are full of overplayed and out of place jokes.

It’s not all too bad. There’s a sense of self-awareness in Iron Sky, and an understanding that Nazis are totally anachronistic and silly. This comes through in some of the movie’s best scenes, which unfold in a pseudo UN conference where a Palin-esque US president badgers other world leaders about Nazis, flags and helium.

Unfortunately the Austrian-Finnish-Australian production team left the obvious but welldone political humour for a short pocket at the end of the film.

Props should also go to the film’s producers, who implemented a rare kind of participatory cinema – from crowd-sourcing their budget to incorporating ideas from online fans and contributors.

a point of interest, with the suggestion that boyhood loyalty and male solidarity is shortlived once their actions start having actual consequences.

James Beach’s direction is clever at times, within the restraints of a simple, scene-based story – which while bland at times, has moments that break through the sitcom format. For its limitations, Reasons to be Pretty asks real questions of what ‘settling’ looks like, in both a career and a relationship, and a how-to of strategies not to follow in resolving conflict.

Justin Wolfers ■ Film

DARK SHADOWS Released May 10 In his latest Tim Burton collaboration, Johnny Depp skewers his dreamboat rep (and apparent intransience – the guy turns 49 in a month!), playing Barnabas Collins, an affluent, Georgian-era cad turned vampire. Damned by the lovesick witch Angelique (Eva Green) to eternal life as a cadaverous blood-sucker when he affiances the virginal Josette (Bella Heathcote), he is entombed for two centuries, then, quite by accident, exhumed into the chintzy-glam world of small-town America, 1972, where he finds his lineage dwindled, the grand family estate languishing in near-ruin, and – gasp! – Angelique, nattily pants-suited and working overtime to ensure the Collins’ decline.

Dark Shadows is perhaps Big Hollywood’s most unlikely adaptation of the year – even against Battleship (“From Hasbro, the company that gave you Transformers”…).

Based on a weeknightly TV soap littleseen outside of America, where its mix of filial bickering and supernatural intrigue sustained more than 1200 episodes from 1966-71, Dark Shadows’ potpourri of horror, high comedy, sex japes, melodrama and Alice Cooper (!) is entrancingly off-kilter for vast tracts of its run-time, never less so than when Depp is relishing with clipped diction Barnabas’ every archaic utterance (“Oh dear, hath my scent offended thee?”).

Yet while Burton navigated an equally unwieldy multi-character narrative with assurance in the sublime Mars Attacks!, here he visibly struggles with the surplus of characters and dead-end subplots. Additional to Depp’s arch Barnabas and Green’s vampish witch, Seth Graeme Smith’s Nicholas Jordan screenplay flits with mounting ungainliness between the rest of the Collins household, including Heathcote again as the new nanny ■ Theatre and Barnabas’ modern-day love interest REASONS TO BE PRETTY (her exact relationship, if any, to Josette is the most inchoate element of the movie); Until June 3 / Darlinghurst Theatre Michelle Pfeiffer’s unflappable matriarch; a pair of troubled kids (Chloë Grace Moretz We are midway through a fight. We’re not and Gully McGrath); Jackie Earle Haley’s sure when it started and it seems unlikely to entranced groundskeeper (the Renfield reach a resolution. This is how Neil LaBute’s to Depp’s Dracula); a louche Jonny Lee Reasons to be Pretty starts out, and what Miller as Pfeiffer’s philandering brother; and appears initially to be a relationship comedy Helena Bonham Carter’s whisky-swilling at its most basic, turns out to have some xxxx live-in shrink. guts and realism to it.

cybele malinowski: vacancy

PICS :: TL

At the very least, Iron Sky will give you an occasional chortle; more importantly, it reminds us that there’s a time, place and context to laugh at most things – even Nazis.

03:05:12 :: Gaffa Gallery :: 281 Clarence St Sydney

Arts Exposed What's in our diary...

SYDNEY WRITERS’ FESTIVAL May 14 – 20 / Walsh Bay, Sydney Town Hall, Sydney Opera House and more Facts: over the next week, Ben Law fans can hear him talk about being bullied (Sun May 20, 1pm), writing a memoir (Sat May 19, 2pm) and/ or marriage equality (May 19, 6pm – alongside Jeanette Winterson!); people who are impressed

by Pulitzers and hefty works of fiction can hear the (hopefully drunk) musings of Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot) at The Chaser’s Empty Vessel soirée (Fri May 18, 9pm). Q&A/ Insiders devotees need to get along to Can’t Be That Hard, featuring Barrie Cassidy (yay!), Annabel Crabb, Malcom Turnbull et al (Fri May 18, 6pm). But if you value sex and laffs over intellectual cred, dedicate Fri May 18 to Erotic Fan Fiction’s 7pm readings session, and Teen Diaries at 11pm. All the rest of you? All The Best’s Great Unveiling (Thurs May 17, 7pm) – it’s free, has a great lineup of storytellers, music by Rainbow Chan, AND there’s an audience story slam... swf.org.au Marieke Hardy: Teen Diaries

28 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:07:12

Andrew Henry is compelling as the central character Greg, a buffoon who kick's off the action by absent-mindedly insulting his partner Steph's (Julia Grace) appearance.

Disaster ensues. The apologising and backstabbing does get tedious at times, moreso because the use of the set is limited, and both the conversation and action tend to progress somewhat like a sitcom. In the second act, however, their arguments do gain a certain depth, and along with a wellchoreographed fight scene, the characters’ true natures seem to be revealed. Poignant questions are asked about why people stay in relationships longer than they should, or why a good thing is worth not giving up on.

The comedic aspects of this production are hit-and-miss, and too many of the jokes are repetitive; but the performances are generally strong, particularly Stephen James King’s turn as Kent, whose physicality and lack of remorse really bring his ‘jock philanderer’ character into perspective. Carli (Lucy Maunder) enjoys a happy marriage with him thanks to her looks, but will that be enough in the longterm? Kent’s friendship with Greg is also

Impelled by a killer soundtrack of great rock ‘n’ roll – The Moody Blues’ ‘Knights in White Satin’ sets the tone, twining beneath Burton’s most functional opening credits to date – Dark Shadows is best when permitted to simmer as an odd, gently comic Gothic chamber-piece of admittedly niche appeal, rather than straining to satisfy a notional multiplex audience. Indeed, the convoluted, FX-heavy finale almost undoes the good that’s preceded it – despite the striking sight of Green as a cracked-porcelain homage to Linda Blair.

Gerard Elson ■ Theatre

KEEP SMILING! A HOUSEWIFE’S GUIDE Until May 19 / Bondi Pavilion Keep Smiling! A Housewife’s Guide is set in 1960s Australia during the Vietnam War, and explores the female role in the household and society at large, through a group of

See www.thebrag.com for more arts reviews

Film & Theatre Reviews Hits and misses on the silver screen and the bareboards around town.

women who each represent a different feminine archetype. Mrs So-And-So (Josipa Draisma) is insecure and babbles a lot; Mrs Making-Ends-Meet (Christina Falsone) runs a grocery store while her husband is mysteriously absent; Mrs Worldly-OfGreat-Estates (Carla Nirella) possesses a snobby disposition, not to mention drinking and smoking habits that allude to a deeper unhappiness; Mrs Practical-AndTrue (Alyssan Russell) is devoutly raising four kids while her husband fights in the war; Mrs Newcomer (Naomi White) is the upstart new-kid-o-the-block, who rejects a marriage proposal for bigger dreams of going to London; and Mrs Eye-On-ThePrize (Stephanie Son) is a politician’s wife, struggling to conceive a child as she clings on to the rungs of the social ladder.

These six women get together for weekly luncheons, tea dates and choir practice, amidst an ominous roll-out of military conscription, and a tornado of problems tumbling and peeking out from behind each character’s artificial facade. Falling in step, stage designer Daniel Alleck, lighting designer Liam O-Keefe and costume designer Virginia Mawer have created an immaculate, garish 1960s aesthetic, with a

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model home providing the backdrop, as the women don beehive wigs, charming frocks and kitten heels.

Each actress gets her moment to shine, with a Shakespeare soliloquy from the character her archetype is based on – which provides a nice point of contrast to the plasticy feeling of the rest of the play. But it’s hard to figure out where the heart of the story lies.

Is it simply a period satire – a face-value exploration of ‘60s housewife archetypes?

Or does it tug at something deeper: the fact that 50 years later, we are more obsessed than ever with trying to maintain the veneer of perfection, the heteronormative gender divide and the belief that material consumption can fix our problems.

Sure, the premise is simple and relatively unoriginal, there are a few clunky moments and a fair dash of historical incongruence, but if nothing else, the melodramatic humour that propels Keep Smiling! through to its hilarious food-fight finale certainly keeps its audience smiling.

Roslyn Helper

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Street Level

GRIFFIN THEATRE COMPANY PRESENTS A RETURN SEASON OF

With Mali de Goey (BRIS) trash cabaret; and my career as a performer started on the streets of Brisbane, juggling, stilt-walking and fire-breathing.

What’s the craziest place your work has taken you? I just returned from Bogota, Columbia, performing with the Tom Tom Crew to a sold out 4000-seat stadium – a full rockstar experience!

ANGELA ’ S KITCHEN 15 MAY-9 JUNE

BY PAUL CAPSIS AND JULIAN MEYRICK

And the craziest skill you’ve acquired? The craziest thing I am learning is how to balance a 6m stainless steel pole on my shoulder while my girlfriend Chelle pole-dances on it.

Y

es – it’s true you can’t swing a (retro polka-dot) bra in Sydney without hitting one burlesque babe or another, but no, we can pretty much guarantee that you’ve never seen burlesque – or even boylesque – done like former BRIEFS star Mali de Goey does it. He and his pole-dancing partner-incrime Chelle Hafner (aka Miss Pole Dance, Queensland) are bringing their bogan-tastic moves to the upcoming Black Cherry party, complete with mullet, uggies and a Gunners soundtrack.

What is the relationship between bogan and burlesque? It’s generally sexual; you know, drunken and messy (a bit like a night at Black Cherry).

Offstage, are you more of a bogan or a burlesque kinda guy? I drive a dented, lowered black Commodore with a crack in the windscreen, so probably leaning towards bogan.

Where did your career start out? My career as a bogan started when Chelle and I flew to Mackay to pick up the dented, lowered black Commodore with a crack in the windscreen.

My career in burlesque started with Brisbane troupe BRIEFS – all-male, all-vaudeville, all-

What are you doing for the upcoming Black Cherry? I dress as a dumb-arse bogan called 'Bo,' stripping down to ugg boots, mullet and little else whilst balancing on my head and hands at a height, backed by the sweet sounds of Guns N’ Roses. I created the character Bo in ‘96, in the lead up to a regional tour with Circus Monoxide – I’d wanted to create an act that was appealing to regional Australia, and was fortunate to be working with the little dynamo Nicci Wilks (Circus Oz) under the musical direction of the incendiary Michael Lira (Darth Vegas) at the time. Bo continues to go from strength to strength, and always goes down a treat in the city too.

What will you and Chelle be doing together? Chelle is blessed with the muchsought-after ability of folding herself in half backwards, touching her head to her bum; I like lifting sizeable things with one hand over my head. Together we will attempt to perform as many combinations of these essential life skills as possible, for your viewing pleasure!

With: Frankie Faux and MC Lauren LaRouge, The ReChords (Melb), The Drey Rollan Band, Barbarion, DJs Limpin’ Jimmy & The Swingin’ Kitten, DJ Jack Shit (FBi), Jungle Rump Rock’n’Roll Karaoke Where: Black Cherry @ The Factory Theatre When: Saturday May 19, 8pm More: blackcherrypresents.com.au

TO MAKE A BOOKING CALL 02 9361 3817 OR VISIT GRIFFINTHEATRE.COM.AU BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 29

Album Reviews What's been crossing our ears this week...

ALBUM OF THE WEEK dirge. We’re dancing at the wake, not crying in the dark.

CATCALL

The Warmest Place Ivy League Catherine Kelleher ceremoniously welcomes us to her long-awaited The Warmest Place with a hymnal, echoey a capella title track giving way to the crunchy, mechanical beats of ‘August’, which she wrote on the anniversary of her father’s death. “Are you in the warmest of all the places?” she asks in a flat, drawling vocal that belies a throat-catching emotional frailty: “Are you watching me from somewhere safer?”

The songs on The Warmest Place showcase a breadth of genres and personalities, but ultimately mesh together as a confident, fun, earnest debut.

Murky, twisting synth lines are brightened with a twinkly top layer – just one of the ways that this song balances the uncertainty and pain inherent in its subject with an optimisim that has a certain warmth, even if the outlook isn’t entirely sunny. It’s funereal, yes – but in a more rainbow-hued, celebration-of-life way than a depressive

HERE WE GO MAGIC

SMALL GIRAFFES

A Different Ship Secretly Canadian “So hey, you’ll never believe what happened the other day. We were so hungover, playing a midday slot on some shitty stage at Glastonbury, and for the whole show there were these two crazy guys dancing up the front. Guess who they were? Nigel Godrich and Thom fucking Yorke!” This is the story that I imagine Luke Temple and the rest of Here We Go Magic told at the pub in 2010 after their fated meeting with the Radiohead pair. Yorke expressed his love of the band, and Godrich expressed his desire to produce the band’s latest album, A Different Ship.

It's the first time that a Here We Go Magic album has been produced by anyone but the band themselves (and by ‘band’ I mean frontman/ songwriter Temple), producer Godrich has managed to simplify proceedings.

Whereas previous albums Here We Go Magic and Pigeons have been meticulously composed and rich with dreamy electronic mists, Godrich steered A Different Ship towards simplicity. There are still the musical layers that Temple and co. love to employ, but superfluousness has been shucked.

The album drifts from alt-country (‘Hard To Be Close’, ‘Miracle Of Mary’), to dreamy psychedelic pop (‘Alone But Moving’, ‘A Different Ship’), to Afro-beat electronica (‘We Believe In Action’) and Belle & Sebastianesque twee-pop (‘How Do I Know’).

Most songs rely on a single melody to get from start to finish, and the flourishes of synth that creep in and out simply push the tracks towards their intended destinations.

With A Different Ship, Here We Go Magic’s characteristic (and occasionally annoying) eclecticism has been trimmed by Godrich into a lean, mean indie-pop machine.

Rick Warner

It’s not that Gogoll isn’t, ahem, wellversed in lyric-writing. Under the moniker Daylight Tremor he has issued almost a dozen releases over the last six years, the majority of which contain songs with words – even if these words are sometimes few and far between.

It’s just that, to quote Gogoll, “Small Giraffes is where I’m at musically and creatively at the moment”.

So Bob Dylan, Andrew Bird and every other astute lyricist in between eat your heart out because, in something of a brave move, Small Giraffes’ selftitled, debut album is a words-free zone. In fact, Small Giraffes is a zone free of everything other than acoustic guitar ...but phwoar, what acoustic guitar.

Reinvoking childhood skills gained from playing Transformers, Gogoll magically morphs strands of nylon and steel stretched over wood into a MEGAINSTRUMENT. More than a one-man band, Gogoll is a one-man orchestra, manhandling his instrument in a way reminiscent of a crocodile interacting with its prey. He strums, plucks, hits, flicks, rolls, taps and bashes his way through eleven tracks that, their power notwithstanding, remain easy and beautiful to listen to.

Like a gentler, simpler John Butler, Gogoll reminds his listener that an acoustic guitar can be as percussive as it is melodic.

Jenny Noyes

OBERHOFER

Despite the misleading ‘II’, this is a debut record, and it sure sounds like it – from the heavy-handed production by an industry vet to the moments of raw brilliance. 2010 breakout single ‘Away Frm U’ arrives fully-formed and packed with appealing contrasts: the stringy pop thrash interspersed with toy piano, the steady drive of the kick drum with the all-or-nothing guitars, and the simple, plaintive/dismissive refrain of the exasperated boyfriend: “You’re pushing me away from you / And there’s nothing I can do / I can’t fight all of your battles for you.” It’s nothing new, but it’s a damn fine pop-rock song – all the more impressive for having been written before frontman Brad Oberhofer was out of his teens.

The facile surf-rock of ‘Cruising FDR’ suffers somewhat in comparison to the aspirational complexity of the other material, but it also offers a refreshing counterpoint to its often self-serious, Arcade Fire-lite grandiosity, which feels a little unearned. The Avey Tare-like scratchy, sub-verbal tweaks and quirks that Oberhofer’s voice displays on ‘I Could Go’, not to mention the dry-bones xylophone tumble, reveal an admiration for the way Animal Collective paint pop with sounds that feel innate and spontaneous, not just accessible.

But accessible is exactly what Time Capsules II is – all welcoming and spacious as Grammy-winning producer Steve Lillywhite’s work tends to be; it’s most evident on tracks like ‘Landline’, all wind-in-your-hair New Wave earnestness, thundering prettily through a refrain of magnificent banality (“If I don’t pick up the phone / Call the landline / Oh, the landline / Oh, the la la la la la”).

An energetic debut release that is alluring in the warmth and deceptive in the simplicity of its sound.

There’s so much promise here, but Oberhofer needs to pull a Cloud Nothings and embrace his weird, dark corners a bit more. U2’s favourite producer is not the man to help you do that.

Andrew Yorke

Caitlin Welsh

Two Seas Independent

If there’s one genre of music I tend to approach with such a degree of prejudice that I could almost accuse myself of misogyny, it’s female-fronted twee-folk. And sure, there are plenty of music fans out there who’d love to hear anything that could be described as a cross between Joanna Newsom and Lisa Mitchell – but I know I’m not alone in regarding such artists with some suspicion, at least on first listen.

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Sui Zhen runs all the risks of earning the twee label: hers is a sweet, tissuepapery vocal paired with plucked guitar and a mostly-absent percussion section that, when it appears, consists largely of handclaps – but she gets away with it in this debut LP because, ultimately, it’s honest. Also because the whimsical elements of her songs are met and balanced with substance and freshness – both in terms of lyrical content and composition.

‘My New Friend’ is a melancholy but warm tale about friendship and romance.

Zhen hangs her heartfelt, insightful lyrics and pretty harmonies on a fairly conventional acoustic guitar-driven folk pop structure, with instant appeal. ‘Little

The collaboration between Moonface (aka Spencer Krug, who used to front Wolf Parade) and Siinai (a slick, Finnish post/kraut rock band) only appears to work as far as its actual music goes. The arrangements are tight, expansive and detailed enough to hold your attention. They also manage to veer away from excessive cliché, despite wresting tried-andtested chord progressions and textures from the usual influences.

The release makes more sense when you understand that Krug approached the band, who were previously devoted to instrumentals, with the hope of making a Moonface collab album for him to lace his measured histrionics over. There’s nothing ostensibly wrong with what he’s singing – some of his lines are fantastic – but his delivery is so full of its own importance it may make the music snob in you retch. He sounds like an overly precious facsimile of Interpol’s Paul Banks.

The good news is that Siinai are diligent instrumentalists. They fill tracks with sumptuous texture sleight-of-hand details that have been lovingly recorded with plenty of space. ‘Headed For The Door’ is almost beautiful enough to forgive the MOR bollocks of ‘Yesterday’s Fine’ – and occasionally, there’s some synergy: opener ‘Heartbreaking Bravery’ is stately and immersive, with startling lyrical imagery to match. You find yourself wanting to dislike this record for its opportunism, but really, the collaboration is more likely to have arisen out of convenience. Siinai have music – luscious, often-beautiful music – and Krug wants to sate what he probably sees as his prodigious hunger for inspired self-expression.

After the success of Sub Pop’s abstract hip hoppers Shabazz Palaces last year, you could quite easily dismiss the signing of TheeSatisfaction as the label capitalising on a hot commodity.

The two women provided vocals on a few tracks on Shabazz’s Black Up LP, and the groups do share a distinct commonality in style and substance – but where Shabazz Palaces pushed the limits of speakers with leaden bass and crunchy drum loops, TheeSatisfaction smooth it out, hypnotically luring the listener with a mix of soul, jazz and spiritualism, owing as much to NYC’s Native Tongues bohemia as they do Palaceer Lazaro and Shabazz.

After meeting in college, Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White, the pair that make up TheeSatisfaction, began exchanging mixtapes full of Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald, and that influence can be heard on their debut album. From the instrumental opener ‘awE’, the listener is treated to a flow of creativity, albeit rarely in traditional song format. Most tracks clock in under three minutes and are driven by dreamy jazz loops and stream-ofconsciousness wordplay. Opportunities to show their penchant for rap (the group has released six mixtapes previously) are limited, but songs like ‘Bitch’ and ‘Enchantruss’ still show that they can string a few rhymes together.

But it’s the non-hip hop cuts that prove where the duo's strength lies.

‘Existinct’ and ‘Sweat’ demonstrate an almost Erykah Badu-esque flair for the soulful, while the almost house-y ‘QueenS’ is instant dancefloor fodder, with an irresistible repeated chorus worthy of any Chicago house record.

This is Siinai with Moonface, not vice versa. Beautiful in parts. Will leave a sour taste. Avoid if allergic to Interpol.

A scattering of ideas tossed carelessly into the atmosphere by two psychedelic neo-soulstresses – with impressive beat-making to keep the whole thing grounded.

Luke Telford

Rick Warner

Frog’ plays more with composition, revealing a deft use of silent spaces and elemental layers that continues throughout the record. In the end though – like all of the songs on Two Seas – it’s about telling a story; this time, a tender ode to her studious sister. ‘Imagined Ships’ explores darker existential waters with off-kilter harmonies and lyrics that both paint a picture and leave room for your imagination to take its own course.

Sui Zhen invites us on a voyage more akin to gently rowing across bottomless lakes than weathering stormy seas – and after a few listens, I’m with her all the way.

Jenny Noyes

awE naturalE Sub Pop

Heartbreaking Bravery Jagjaguwar

INDIE ALBUM OF THE WEEK SUI ZHEN

THEESATISFACTION

MOONFACE WITH SIINAI

Time Capsules II Glassnote

Small Giraffes Independent The only thing better than animals are miniature animals – a fact on which 24-year-old Tasmanian guitarist, busker, religious enthusiast and design student Alan Gogoll has capitalised in the naming of his instrumental acoustic project.

Yes, that’s correct: his instrumental acoustic project.

These connected opening tracks are the highlight of the album for me (I’m a sucker for happy-sad songs, and such a winning combination of infectiousness and emotional complexity is a rare good thing) – but that’s not to say the album peaks too early. On the contrary, Kelleher barely skips a beat (especially for the first half hour), cranking out track after track of molten pop gold, channelling electropop, RnB and disco-funk from the ‘70s (Chic, Fleetwood Mac), ‘80s (Bananarama), ‘90s (Janet Jackson) and today (Cut Copy, Ladyhawke) – not to mention her many collaborators on the album, including members of Ro Sham Bo and Van She.

OFFICE MIXTAPE And here are the albums that have helped BRAG HQ get through the week...

OF MONSTERS AND MEN - My Head Is An Animal EFTERKLANG - Magic Chairs SHADY LANE - Built Guilt

WYE OAK - Civilian TALK TALK - Laughing Stock

BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 31

live reviews What we've been to see...

MOUNT KIMBIE, OSCAR + MARTIN, ALBATROSS The Hi-Fi Friday May 4

The Hi-Fi feels bigger than The Forum did.

The undulating green curtains along its walls suit Albatross’ aqueous electronics well. Their music is a sociable blend of club sounds and pop melody, but its arrangements are impressively immersive.

One track foregrounds sharp hi-hats against the sounds of coins colliding and the icy, high-frequency patter of a busy street. The combined effect creates an alluring depth of field that draws the listener deep into a delicate web of softserve synth and head-nodding wonkiness.

THE MORNING NIGHT (ALBUM LAUNCH) JILL BIRT & ALSY MACDONALD (THE TRIFFIDS) BIG SMOKY (SINGLE LAUNCH)

SUNDAY MAY 20TH É THE VANGUARD 42 KING STREET, NEWTOWN NSW É DOORS OPEN 7PM Tickets available through The Vanguard website www.thevanguard.com.au

PICTURE WINDOW JACK COLWELL & THE OWLS Album Launch GOODGOD Wednesday June 6 at 7:30PM with Moon Holiday Packwood DJs: Glamour Attack $10

Some claim Oscar + Martin’s fragile pop threatens to be toppled by the sheer air in a space this large, but I disagree. Their set starts shakily with a couple of new tracks, one featuring an erroneously shrill MC. But by the time the bittersweet high-life lope of ‘All I Think About’ kicks in, it’s clear they’ve recovered the confidence needed to make these endearingly precarious songs work. The rest of the set swells with warmth, uncanny colour and careful, risky improvisation. ‘Chaine Maile’ is stripped of a set rhythm, turning it into a lumbering, RnB swagger – and when MC Erroneous returns for a second verse, the music feels brave enough to make his jabbering more piquant than precious.

Mount Kimbie’s wistful records belie the magnitude of their live show. Tonight’s set starts with epic, textured sweeps before settling into the intimate, familiar shapes found on 2010’s Crooks & Lovers. The London duo play a host of new songs tonight, a number of which focus on unprocessed live vocals. They’re unfinished but impressive, curiously barren of clutter, and more immediate for it.

What’s most wonderful about seeing this group live is the way their music grows to fit the space it’s performed in. This room feels big, but the effects used on the songs’ familiar focal points make it feel bigger.

Dense rhythm tracks are exaggerated by immense reverb. Stuttering vocal samples are run through infinite-repeat delay, giving the impression that they’re reaching out across the crowd to natter in your ear.

When these affectations recede, snapping the pieces back into their intimate, yearning, muted worlds, it feels epiphanic – startling and bittersweet and beautiful.

Luke Telford

HUSKY, THE TROUBLE WITH TEMPLETON, BEC SANDRIDGE Oxford Art Factory Saturday May 5

It’s always a bit nerve-racking seeing a band perform live when you’ve fallen in love with every song on their album.

Opening the night was singer-songwriter Bec Sandridge, demonstrating that she’s well on her way to being much more than a support act. Her flowing, narrative-driven songs about love, backpacking through Europe and ghosts quivered and tumbled out of her, eclipsing the nervousness she returned to between songs. The Trouble With Templeton (aka Brisbane’s Thomas Calder) followed, exhibiting powerful (and sometimes overpowering) vocal prowess in a set of striking and heartfelt folk songs.

Then Husky came on to play with trademark sincerity, and the quiet sort of perfection usually reserved for private, rose-tinted memories. Opening with the lush, rolling rhythms of ‘History’s Door’, lead singer/ guitarist Husky Gawenda induced the sensation of being hugged by someone wearing a woolen jumper, threaded with smooth backup harmonies by keyboardist Gideon Preiss and bassist Evan Tweedie. It was a welcome relief to hear the delicacy achieved on their recordings maintained – and even enhanced – on stage, with improvised moments adding a more distinct texture to the blend of floor drums and gritty guitars.

A pitch-perfect a capella verse opened ‘Hundred Dollar Suit’, followed by ‘Animals And Freaks’, which gelled even better on stage thanks to Gawenda’s mesmerising ability to tell stories through song. The lullaby-paced melodies did become a little

32 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

monotonous through the middle of the set, and ‘Tidal Wave’ dragged rather than flowed – but an energetic, foot-stomping ‘Fake Moustache’ and their unlikely yet popular folksy rendition of INXS’ ‘Need You Tonight’ kept the crowd hooked.

The real highlight happened late in the set, when Preiss opened ‘The Woods’ with an epic classical keyboard solo that left the Oxford Art Factory punters unexpectedly awestruck. Husky then invited The Trouble With Templeton back on stage to sing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Lover Lover Lover’, and got everybody swaying and singing ‘Lover come back to me’. It felt like a wholesome campfire sing-a-long.

Finally, with the crowd chanting ‘Hunter’, the quartet returned to the stage and obligingly ended their set, and The Woods Australian Tour, as quietly and beautifully as they had arrived.

By Roslyn Helper

THE DARKNESS UNSW Roundhouse Sunday May 6

Justin Hawkins has a few new habits – moustache-twirling, yoga, a raw diet, sobriety. It’s probably the yoga rather than the moustache that gives the formerly weedy frontman the power to execute a perfect handstand composedly on the drum riser for a full minute while brother Dan shreds out front, but a combination of all of the above sees him in better form than ever both as a singer and guitarist. No junk no soul, goes the old adage, but no heroin goes an awfully long way towards reminding any doubters that Hawkins is much more than a glam clown with killer pipes, but also a technically and theatrically brilliant player.

The sound at the Roundhouse tonight is a bit muddy, letting down a band who (while undoubtedly a four-man show) relies somewhat on attention being paid to the showy vocals and guitar. But from the moment they emerge on stage – the elder Hawkins in a hilariously apt, sprayed-on green tartan three-piece suit and no shirt that perfectly plays off his toffy vowels and inked-up torso, Frankie Poullain in his usual fro-scarf combo that makes him look like the love child of Nigel Tufnel and Seth Cohen, Dan and drummer Ed Cowan dressed like humans – they display nothing but showmanship and gratitude to the fans.

How many other bands would play all ten songs from a nine-year-old debut record when they have a new one to promote?

(They open, as all bands ever should do, with the searing ‘Black Shuck’.) Hawkins even thanked the audience at one point for listening to the unfamiliar material (which is, for the most part, promising, without any of the self-conscious frivolity of One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back). But we’re also here for the LULz, and Hawkins delivers, facetiously promising to listen to the entire contents of the “demonstration cassette” thrown on stage, collecting hurled bras, coaching the crowd through eighteen different rock god howls, and cheerleading: “Gimme a D!” he commands. “D!” reponds the audience dutifully, gearing up for a lot of letters.

“Gimme an Arkness!”

But the highlight of the night – apart from the obligatory hands-in-the-air, slow-clap communion of the a capella breakdown in ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’ – is their cover of ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’. Dan’s guitar chugs and squalls with doomy aggression, Cowan thrashes the life out of the kit and Justin takes Thom Yorke’s morose histrionics to their logical conclusion: total falsetto annihilation. Laugh all you like, but it takes a true genius to reveal old-school Radiohead as Sabbath homage.

Caitlin Welsh

MORE SNAPS p.34

OUR PHOTOGRAPHER :: GEORGE

POPOV

Remedy

More Than The Cure Since 1989 with Murray Engleheart

RETURN OF THE KING

The king of southern rock, Jim ‘Dandy’ Mangrum (from Black Oak Arkansas – the outfit that in their ‘70s heyday made Lynyrd Skynyrd seem socially and politically progressive) is now the grand old age 64. Be glad that he no longer wears skin-tight white tights (sans shirt) on stage.

Anyways, the grand old dude has a new album on the way, called Memphis Mean Time – which we’re guessing shouldn’t be even remotely confused with the John Haitt tune, ‘Memphis In The Meantime’.

Mangrum, who used to play a washboard with Black Oak, has also revealed in Nervous Breakdown mag that for some reason he was locked up and questioned after John Lennon’s death. “Seven and a half hours in a little room with no water,� he recalls. “I just tried to do like Ray Charles said and stay country dumb. But I’m a natural born agitator, live and die.�

RECYCLER

What with ZZ Top working with Rick Rubin on that ridiculously-long-awaited new album (which is expected to be a back to the roots type exercise), the title of the first shot from the sessions made us shift less-thancomfortably in our booster seats. You see, it’s called ‘I’ve Got To Get Paid’ – which is pretty damn close to their classic ‘Just Got Paid’, and thus kinda like AC/DC releasing a new song called ‘Back In Black Jack’ (which actually isn’t bad at all...). So are the Texan trio that once named an album Recycler now doing exactly that themselves? We’ll see when the full thing finally sees daylight.

Anyways, the new tune got its first major airing as part of an online beer ad for Jeremiah Weed, which is much more like it.

NB: DIG IT UP!

Just a slight amendment to our rave the other week about the Dig It Up! Festival: it wasn’t Chris Masuak who played in Tek & Younger but rather Dave Kettley from The New Christs. Bloody good job he did too.

Our apologies for any teeth gnashing that might have resulted from our error.

BLACK SABBATH CONT. The brutally contracted Black Sabbath reunion tour seems to be slowly

expanding again, with a hometown show in Birmingham on May 19. That makes for a grand total of three shows now. The Birmingham date sold out in ten minutes.

Still no word about whether Bill Ward will be in the striker’s seat for any of the gigs – it no longer matters, it seems. All that outrage about Ward’s exclusion was bound to die off when it came down to deciding whether to actually buy a ticket, or to stand on principle and miss out on three quarters of metal history.

BRIEF BUZZ

Those Buzzcocks shows (the original lineup, with Howard Devoto) happen in Manchester on May 25 and 26 – which will be the first time they’ve played together on stage since 1977. Will it be a strict four songs and off? Devoto said in Mojo magazine, “We’ll see. I’m from the side of the fence that says you should never overlook an opportunity to be brief. It’s going to be the best kind of blast – a brief one.�

LV L 3 , 3 8 3 B O U R K E S T S U R RY H I L L S

L I V E M U S I C , V I S U A L A R T, T H E AT R E , CO M E DY, B U R L E S Q U E & B O O Z E

WED 16 MAY THU 17 MAY

LINKIN SNARK

Had to laugh recently when Triple M aired an ad for a competition they’re running involving Linkin Park, who are previewing their new album at the House Of Blues on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. That’s all fine and good, but the voiceover mentioned that The Stones, Guns N’ Roses and ZZ Top have all played at the venue, and now so too were Linkin Park! Too damn funny.

MY BLOODY WTF?

Expect a new My Bloody Valentine album and EP this year, reckons the band’s Kevin Shields. Apparently, the LP will be built around what was started in the band’s heyday of the ‘90s but shelved when other humans got involved. We’re not sure quite how excited we are about this. Time and tide – all of that. After all, we seem to recall some years back that Shields, who used to lead one of the loudest acts to ever grace a stage, more recently complained to his local council about noisy patrons at a nearby pub... Bigger news is that the longawaited 2CD version of Loveless is finally available from Amazon UK. Not sure how long this will be; we’ll let you know in a few weeks when the package hits our post box.

PRESENTS

VISUAL RESPONSE 06 ‘NATIVE’ PLUS SPECIAL GUESTS

2@ 3: AC/D=Â&#x2019;8/G 9/BHÂ&#x2019;A6/<56/7

LINDSAY MCDOUGALL (FRENZAL RHOMB) & DANNY HEIFETZ (MR BUNGLE)

FRI 18 MAY SUN20MAY

DANIEL &

PLUS

DOG TRUMPET

MOHSEN SOLTANI & EMBER + ROSIE

ON THE TURNTABLE On the Remedy turntable is Torcheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s third album proper, Harmonicraft. These guys are the ABBA (or maybe even The Beatles) of metal, and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s anything but a put-down.

In fact, somewhere in another universe theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re festival headliners and chart-toppers with several Greatest Hits packages already to their credit, thanks to them having the biggest and best riffs in tightly compacted roar-along songs. But in this present universe, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re only revered by a very smart few.

TOUR AND INDUSTRY NEWS Mark Gardener

FRI 25 MAY SAT 26MAY MARCH OF THE R E A L F LY

CELSIUS KILLAWATTZ RIVALS & LC BEATS

HEY GERONIMO

(HUMAN BEATBOX SET)

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COMING UP

MAY 8C<3

The female hurricane that is Michele Madden has a Wednesday residency at the Sandringham this month. The next show is on May 16.

As we mentioned a few weeks back, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve recently been flogging Rideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s debut album of warm, feedback-drenched pop, Nowhere. Now itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spookily come to pass that to celebrate the 20th anniversary of

7+( 7+ 3$57 ,1 $ 6(5,(6 2) 68%0,66,21 %$6(' 9,68$/ 5(63216(6 %528*+7 72 <28 %< $8675$/,$1 ,1)5217 7+( :,11,1* 3,(&(6 :,// %( 21 ',63/$< $7 /2 ), &2//(&7,9( 7+856'$< 7+ 0$<

their follow-up effort, Going Blank Again, the bandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mark Gardener is coming to town to perform some Ride classics, along with his solo work. His backing band will be US psych-rockers Sky Parade, featuring ex-Brian Jonestown Massacre alumni Tommy Dietrick. The reformed Underground Lovers will be opening the shows. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be at the Metro Theatre on August 4.

27th 31st 1st 2nd 8th 9th

THE GRISWOLDS

THE MONEY GO ROUND

SPEAKEASY SUNDAYS - CHRISTA HUGHES NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH MAT. MCHUGH FROM THE BEAUTIFUL GIRLS. DEEP SEA ARCADE ELIZABETH ROSE WOLF & CUB

OPEN TIL 3AM COME VISIT US AT FACEBOOK.COM/THESTANDARDSYDNEY

TICKETS ON SALE NOW AT WEARETHESTANDARD.COM.AU

Send stuff to remedy@ozemail.com.au by 6pm Wednesdays.

Pics to art@thebrag.com www.facebook.com/remedy4rock BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 33

snap sn ap

up all night out all week . . .

black cherry party profile

It’s called: Black Cherry It sounds like: Three rooms of the greatest alternative rock (live bands and DJs) from the ‘50s to now – punk rock, swingin’ rockabilly and dirty blues, Celtic punk, horror country, ska, glam – and some ‘80s classics for good measure!

Who’s playing? Barbarion (Melb), The ReChords (Melb), guest DJs Jack Shit (FBi Radio), Limpin’ Jimmy & The Swingin’ Kitten (Jump, Jive n Wail) and Black Cherry DJs Ruby Riot and CeeCee; plus boylesque ‘bogan’ Mali de Goey (Bris), pole champ Chelle Hafner, Dita-esque vixen Frankie, and our sassy MC, Lauren La Rouge (debuting a red-hot latex-clad act!)

Sell it to us: Black Cherry is Sydney’ biggest band, burlesque and DJ event for a reason: awesome music, great vibe, multiple rooms of hand-picked entertainment, a huge licensed outdoor area, live rock karaoke by Jungle Rump Rock’n’Roll Karaoke – and now the Mexican Cantina Mobile food truck on site. O-fucking-lé!

The bit we’ll remember in the AM: Shakin’, grindin’ and interpretive dancin’ 'till 3am!

Crowd specs: Rockers, punks, mods, rockabillies, goths, burlesque and tattoo artists, roller-derby gals – dress tight and get loose!

Wallet damage: $18+bf (factorytheatre.com.au) / $22 at the door.

Where: The Factory Theatre / 105 Victoria Road, Marrickville

fu manchu

PICS :: KC

When: Saturday May 19 / 8pm-3am

rapids

05:05:12 :: FBi Social :: Kings Cross Hotel 248 William St 9331 9900

kim churchill

04:05:12 :: The Standard:: Level 3/383 Bourke St Surry Hills 9331 3100 PICS :: GP

the darkness

06:05:12 :: UNSW Roundhouse :: UNSW Anzac Pde Kensington 9385 7630 34 :: BRAG :: 462: 14:05:12

PICS :: TL

04:05:12 :: World Bar :: 24 Bayswater Rd Kings Cross 9357 7700

PICS :: KC

mum

PICS :: TP

03:05:12 :: The Hi-Fi :: Entertainment Quarter 122 Rd Moore Park

:: LEIGH BOIN :: DOM S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HONCHO) EVICIUTE :: ASHLEY MAR :: OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER JUSK A RAS :: JANG AN NATH :: GREENWOOD :: KATRINA CLARKE OV :: TIM WHITNEY :: POP THOMAS PEACHY :: GEORGE

snap sn ap

the music makers club

PICS :: TL

up all night out all week . . .

major raiser

PICS :: NJ, DG

04:05:12 :: Oxford Art Factory :: 38-46 Oxford St Darlinghurst 9332 3711

husky

PICS :: TL

05:05:12 :: Beach Road Hotel :: 71 Beach Rd Bondi Beach 9130 7247

03:05:12 :: Oxford Art Factory :: 38-46 Oxford St Darlinghurst 9332 3711

liz martin party profile

It’s called: Dance A Little, Live A Little album launch It sounds like: The sweet spot between pop, folk and jazz, with a poetic groove and a remarkable collection of songs that reference glam rock, New Orleans big bands, Parisian noir thrillers and sci-fi romanticism.

Who’s playing? Liz Martin and special guests Jacqueline Amidy and Entropric.

Sell it to us: One of Sydney’s finest independent talents and most beautiful voices presents her brilliant and tender new album – Dance A Little, Live A Little. Supporting her are two of her favourite Sydney acts: Jacqueline Amidy and Entropic. All up? This is three of the best.

The bit we’ll remember in the AM: Great music – with still a little bit of cash left in your pocket, and your dignity intact.

Crowd specs: All ages, genders, sexual preferences and professions – from hobby enthusiasts to accountants and pole dancers.

Wallet damage: $20 on the door.

Where: Notes Live / 75 Enmore Road, Enmore

:: LEIGH BOIN :: DOM S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HONCHO) EVICIUTE :: ASHLEY MAR :: OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER JUSK A RAS :: JANG AN NATH :: GREENWOOD :: KATRINA CLARKE OV :: TIM WHITNEY :: POP THOMAS PEACHY :: GEORGE

bearhug

PICS :: AM

When: Saturday May 19 / doors open 7.30pm

04:05:12 :: Goodgod Small Club :: 53-55 Liverpool St Sydney 8084 0587 BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 35

g g guide gig g send your listings to : gigguide@thebrag.com Dirty Three photo by Annabel Mehran

pick of the week

WEDNESDAY MAY 16 ROCK & POP

Xxxx

FRIDAY MAY 18

Oxford Art Factory

Catcall,

Palms, The Fabergettes Darlinghurst $12 (+ bf) 8pm MONDAY MAY 14 ROCK & POP

After Party Band Marlborough Hotel, Newtown free 10.30pm Bernie The Observer Hotel, The Rocks free 4.30pm City and Colour (CAN), Bahamas (CAN) Enmore Theatre $68.90 (+ bf) 7.15pm sold out Open Mic Night Hard Rock Cafe, Darling Harbour free 8pm Unherd Open Mic Downstairs, Sandringham Hotel, Newtown free 8pm

JAZZ

Jim Gannon Dee Why RSL Club free 6.30pm Monday Jam: Danny G Felix, Djay Kohinga The Lansdowne, Broadway free 9pm Sonic Mayhem Orchestra feat. Trish Delaney-Brown

Blue Beat Bar & Grill, Double Bay $10 8pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Russell Neal, Massimo Presti, Shane Coombe, Chris Brookes, Dan Crestani, Lorias James Kelly’s On King, Newtown free 7pm

TUESDAY MAY 15 ROCK & POP

Adam Pringle and Friends Downstairs, Sandringham Hotel, Newtown free 8pm Carl Fidler The Observer Hotel, The Rocks free 4pm City and Colour (CAN), Bahamas (CAN) Enmore Theatre $68.90 (+ bf) 7.15pm all-ages Dan Spillane Maloney’s Hotel, Sydney free 8.30pm Kaiser Chiefs (UK), Deep Sea Arcade, Loon Lake

The Hi-Fi, Moore Park $82.50 (+ bf) 6.30pm Musos Jam Bald Faced Stag, Leichhardt free 8pm The Songwriter Sessions The Sandringham Hotel, Newtown free 7.30pm Wavves (USA), Sures Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst $45 (+ bf) 8pm

JAZZ

Alison Penney Dee Why RSL Club free 6.30pm Bluelounge Chinta Ria, Temple of Love, Darling Harbour free 6pm licensed all ages Jazzgroove: ACRONYM Orchestra, SHOWA 44 505 Club, Surry Hills $8 (conc)–$15 8.30pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

SongsOnStage Songwriters Showcase: Starr Witness, Josh Overette, Phil Bracken The Basement, Circular Quay $15 (+ bf)–$40 (dinner & show) 7.30pm

Andy Mammers Duo Maloney’s Hotel, Sydney free 9.30pm Bernie Hayes and Friends Downstairs, Sandringham Hotel, Newtown free 8pm The Blues Caravan: Eugene ‘Hideaway’ Bridges (USA), Ray Beadle, Matt Andersen (CAN) Brass Monkey, Cronulla $39.80 7pm Brad Johns Dee Why RSL Club free 6.30pm Dan Spillane Mean Fiddler, Rouse Hill free 6pm Danny & The Cosmic Tremors, The Aston Martinis, DJ Brian Rock Lily, The Star, Pyrmont free 7pm Dead Marines Downstairs, Sandringham Hotel, Newtown free 8pm Dj Jason Bettinger Harbord Beach Hotel free 6.30pm Expatriate Spectrum, Darlinghurst $12 8pm Fitz Jam Night Fitzroy Hotel, Windsor free 7.30pm Gemma The Observer Hotel, The Rocks free 8.30pm Holy Balm FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel free 1pm I’m With Stupid O’Malley’s Hotel, Darlinghurst free 9.30pm Jagermeister Presents: Heads Will Roll, Thomas Covenant, Maze, Ben McIntyre Annandale Hotel $8 7.30pm Jamie Lindsay Northies, Cronulla free 7.30pm Krishna Jones Coogee Bay Hotel free 9pm Lakeside, The Shire, Immersions, Ventures, Thrashed Valve Bar, Tempe 7pm Live and Local: Mark Cashin & The Lil Hussys, Mimosa Duo, Kym Campbell, Larissa McKay Band Lizotte’s Restaurant, Dee Why $15 7.30pm Matt Price Summer Hill Hotel free 7.30pm Musos Club Jam Night Bald Faced Stag Hotel, Leichhardt free 8pm Mutemath (USA), The Cairos The Hi-Fi, Moore Park $48 (+ bf) 8pm Nicki Minaj (USA) Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park $99.90 7pm sold out Opossum (NZ), Kill City Creeps, Bloods GoodGod Small Club, Sydney $10 (+ bf) 8pm Parachute Youth, Tokyo Denmark Sweden Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm Playwrite, Little Napier, Fanny Lumsden FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel $10 8pm Speck, Surfing Scientist The Vanguard, Newtown $15.80–$50.08 (dinner & show) 8pm TrickFinger Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly free 7.30pm

JAZZ

Sandie White 505 Club, Surry Hills $10 (conc)–$15 8.30pm

Mutemath

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Chosani Afrique Macquarie Hotel, Sydney free 8pm Daniel Hopkins, Raoul Graf, Jules Backman, Micah Christian Taren Point Hotel free 7pm Greg Sita, Warren Munce Cat and Fiddle Hotel, Balmain free 6.30pm Jasmine Beth, Benja William, Dan Crestani, Jake Bennett, Alby Bach, Matt Hall, Ella Stathis, Helmut Uhlmann The Loft, UTS, Broadway free 6pm Kyle Dessent, Jaime Baquiran, Black Diamond Cookies Lounge and Bar, North Strathfield free 8pm Michele Madden, David Swan, Melissa Jayne Wylie, Mo Fkn Mayhem, Adam Camm Sandringham Hotel, Newtown $10 8pm Mofo Concert: The Lurkers, Chaika The Basement, Circular Quay $15 (+ bf) 7.30pm Russell Neal Evening Star Hotel, Surry Hills free 7pm TAOS, L J Phillips, John Chesher, Gavin Fitzgerald Coach & Horses Hotel, Randwick free 7pm

THURSDAY MAY 17 ROCK & POP

Bahamas (CAN) FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel, Darlinghurst $27.50 8pm The Bird Has Flown: A Beatles Cabaret, Lisa Schouw, Edoardo Santoni, Ali Carter, Dave Rodriguez Trio, Peter Bailey, Robin Gist, Penelope Wells, Andrew Stapleton, Philippa Vaughan, Dave Mackie, Emma Leigh El Rocco Jazz Cellar, Woolloomooloo $18 7pm licensed all ages The Brian Jonestown Massacre (USA), The Raveonettes (DEN) Metro Theatre, Sydney $73.70 (+ bf) 7.30pm The Chemist, Playwrite Rock Lily, The Star, Pyrmont free 7pm Hivemind, Doctor Fungi, Skinpin, Spent Case, Liberty County Annandale Hotel $5 8pm Hot Damn Mexican Moustache Fiesta: Endless Heights, Thorns, Reality, Legions, Hot Damn DJs, New Found Glory DJs Spectrum & Q Bar, Darlinghurst $15-$20 8pm How To Survive A Bullfight, Jesus Christ Posse, The Braves, The Reflections Valve Bar, Tempe 7pm Hue Williams Belmore RSL free 6.30pm Jess Harlan, Lissa, Anthony

Ousack Notes Live, Enmore $17.35 7pm Johnathan Devoy Dowstairs, Sandringham Hotel, Newtown free 8pm Jon Stevens Blue Beat Bar & Grill, Double Bay $25 9pm Kate Martin, Ben Wells & The Middle Names, We Are The Birdcage GoodGod Small Club, Sydney $8 (+ bf) 8pm Kimbra, Daniel Merriweather, Sam Lawrence Enmore Theatre $49.92 (+ bf) 7pm sold out Lawrence Baker Coogee Bay Hotel free 10pm Live Thursdays: After Dark Hard Rock Cafe, Darling Harbour free 8.30pm Open Mic Excelsior Hotel, Glebe free 7pm Ruby Boots, The Eastern Camelot, Marrickville 8pm Rude Heads Launch: Ranger Spacey, Dusker, Jon Kenner Band, The Heart Attack Machines, DJ Skar The Lansdowne, Broadway free 8pm Shinola Macquarie Hotel, Sydney free 8pm Wild Thing: White Knuckle Fever, Black Lion, The Gilbert Gantry Union, Wild Gamma The Imperial Hotel, Newtown free-$10 8pm

JAZZ

The Cellar Jazz Jam: Phil Stack Trio The Spice Cellar, Sydney free 6pm Double Standard Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly free 7.30pm Ian Blakeney Dee Why RSL Club free Rocksteady 505 Club, Surry Hills $10 (conc)–$15 8.30pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Andrew Denniston, Ben Moore & Jodie Gibson Narrabeen Sands free 7pm Marty From Reckless Marlborough Hotel, Newtown free 8.30pm Russell Neal, Paul B Wilde, Nick Domenicos, Spencer McCullum, Massimo Presti Kogarah Hotel free 7pm

FRIDAY MAY 18 ROCK & POP

Aaron Lyon Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly free 7.30pm AM 2 PM Coogee Bay Hotel free 10pm Bayonets For Legs, Ben David and the Banned, Let Me Down Jungleman Roxbury Room, The Roxbury Hotel, Glebe 8pm

“I saw it all clear from a house on a hill in a country far away. I thought to myself til the day I die, that’l be where my heart remains.” - JOELISTICS 36 :: BRAG :: 462 : 14:05:12

g g guide gig g

send your listings to : gigguide@thebrag.com Building Bridges Festival: The Herd, Watussi, Mohsen Soltani & Ember, Dog Trumpet, ROSiE The Standard, Darlinghurst $20-$30 (+ bf) 6pm Catcall, Palms, The Fabergettes Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst$12 (+ bf) 8pm Chartbusters Rooty Hill RSL Club free 8pm Chase The Sun, Cass Eager & The Velvet Rope Brass Monkey, Cronulla $19.90 7pm Club Blink: Red Remedy, Red Bee Club 77, Sydney $10-$12 8pm Cover Notes Duo Vineyard Hotel free 9.30pm Damn Terran, Chicks Who Love Guns, Corpus, Sweet Teeth FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel, Darlinghurst $10 8pm Darth Vegas, The Tango Saloon, The Rescue Ships, Jay Katz The Factory Theatre, Enmore $18.50 (+ bf) 8pm The Flaming Stars Rose of Australia Hotel, Erskineville free 9pm The Flat Earth Confederacy, Senza Sole, Howboy Cat, DJ Alley Cats The Lansdowne, Broadway free 8pm Gluv Nem Slep, Physical Graffiti, Unknown to God Valve Bar, Tempe 7pm The Good Stuff The Marlborough Hotel, Newtown free 10.30pm The Great Gig in the Sky: The Pink Floyd Celebration The Basement, Circular Quay $39.90 (+ bf)–$103.80 (dinner & show) 7.30pm Harbour Masters Trio Level 1, East Leagues Club free 8.30pm Hue Williams Avalon RSL free 9pm Ian Moss The Vanguard, Newtown $38.80–$73.80 (dinner & show) 8pm Intentions The Pitz, Marrickville $5 8pm Jconnexion Engadine Tavern free 9.30pm Jive Bombers Eastern Suburbs Legion Club, Waverley free 8pm Lynkyn Chain Engadine RSL & Citizens Club free 8pm Megastick Fanfare The Wharf Sessions @ Sydney Theatre Company, Walsh Bay free 10pm Mickey Avalon (USA), Kid Mac The Hi-Fi, Moore Park $51 (+ bf) 7.30pm Movement: The Vaudeville Smash Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm MUM: The Go Roll Your Bones, The Magic Bones, Bones Bones Bones, Mannequins, Catkings, Lloyd Healy, 10th Avenue, Hand Games DJs, Cries Wolf DJs, Dimes The World Bar, Kings Cross free 10-$15 8pm Number Station, Feverpitch, Morgan Joanel, Kristy Lee The Beresford Hotel, Surry Hills free 6pm One Night In Paris Excelsior Hotel, Glebe free 7.30pm Original Sin INXS Show Pioneer Tavern, Penrith South free 9pm Paul Greene The Factory Floor, The Factory Theatre, Enmore $20 (+ bf) 8pm Pete Hunt Tahmoor Inn free 8pm Quini Figtree Hotel free 8.30pm Richard In Your Mind, The Otchkies, The Upskirts, Hand Games DJs

GoodGod Small Club, Sydney $12 (+ bf) 7.30pm R.U.S.T, Topnovil, Blazin’ Entrails, C.O.F.F.I.N. The Sandringham Hotel, Newtown $10 8pm Steve Edmonds Band, DJ Smithers Rock Lily, The Star, Pyrmont free 7pm Stone Monks Notes Live, Enmore $12.25 7pm Tales In Space, The Dreamboats, Fox Hermann’s Bar, University of Sydney, Camperdown free 7pm Take A Hit Kingswood Sports Club free 7.30pm Ted Nash Chatswood RSL free 5pm Thieves Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst free 8pm TZU, Galapagoose Annandale Hotel $20 (+ bf) 8pm The Vaudeville Smash Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Beach free 8pm

JAZZ

Directions In New Grooves Blue Beat, Double Bay $15 Tim Clarkson Quartet faet.

Barney McAll The Sound Lounge, Seymour Centre, Chippendale $15-$25 8.30pm Todd Hardy Swing Orchestra, Monica Trapaga 505 Club, Surry Hills $20 (conc)–$25 8.30pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

The Beatnix Lizotte’s Restaurant, Dee Why $47-89 (dinner & show) 7pm

SATURDAY MAY 19 ROCK & POP

Alternative Times, Supect Behaviour Stones, Manly Fisho’s 8pm Ashes, The Sweet Jelly Rolls, Adam Roche Excelsior Hotel, Glebe free 7.30pm Ben Mingay, Amanda Harrison, Kate Kendall and Alex Rathgeber.

Lyric Theatre, Star City, Pyrmont $135.90 7.30pm allages Benjamin’s Big Band North Bondi RSL Club free 8pm Black Cherry: Barbarion, The Rechords, The Vampers, The Drey Rollan Band, Neon Heart, Jack Shit, Limpin Jimmy & The Swinging Kitten, Rockabilly Rhino vs Wolfman Dan, TheBlack Cherry DJs The Factory Theatre, Enmore $18 (+ bf) 8pm Blues Caravan, Eugene ‘Hideaway’ Bridges (USA), Matt Andersen, Ray Beadle The Vault, Windsor 8pm Bonjah, Alex Bowen, Quixotics The Lair, Metro Theatre, Sydney $18 (+ bf) 8pm Cath & Him Engadine RSL & Citizens Club free 8pm Chance Waters, Forbes, High Noon FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel $12 (+ bf) 8pm Constant Mongrel, Model Citizen, Family, Oily Boys The Square, Haymarket $10 8pm CROW, Peg, Medicated Youth, Post-Lobsterman Annandale Hotel $20 (+ bf) 8pm Dave Tice and Mark Evans Downstairs, Sandringham Hotel, Newtown free 4pm

Dirty Deeds – The AC/DC Show Oatley Hotel free 8.30pm Dune Rats, Gung Ho, Pear Shape Spectrum, Darlinghurst $10 (+ bf) 8pm Fatt Lipp Carousel Inn, Rotty Hill free 8.30pm Frankie J Holden, Wilbur Wilde North Sydney Leagues Club, Cammeray $30 8pm The Furious Five Panania Hotel free 8pm Glenn Whitehall Hollywood Bar & Café, Hoyts Broadway free 6pm The Great Gig in the Sky: The Pink Floyd Celebration The Basement, Circular Quay $39.90 (+ bf)–$103.80 (dinner & show) 7.30pm Harbour Master Hoyts, Entertainment Quarter free 5.45pm Ian Moss The Vanguard, Newtown $38.80–$73.80 (dinner & show) 8pm Josh McIvor Coogee Bay Hotel free 10pm Josh Pyke, Gossling, Jackson McLaren York Theatre, Seymour Centre, Chippendale $48.30 7.30pm Kirk Burgess Newport Arms Hotel free 8pm Kurt Williams Panthers, Glenbrook free 8pm Kurt Williams Duo Engadine Tavern free 9.30pm Liz Martin Notes Live, Enmore $23.50 7pm Luke O’Shea, Medicine Wheel Brass Monkey, Cronulla $19.90 7p Ma Gallery 3rd Birthday: La Mancha Negra, Glitter Canyon, The Walk On By, Mother & Son, Kill City Creeps Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst 8pm Made In Japan, The Faults, Excellent Robot, Pretend Eye, Paper Crane, Yeah Man Glebe Hockey Club $10 6pm The Mike Whitney Band The Marlborough Hotel, Newtown free 10.30pm Millennium Bug Mounties, Mount Pritchard free 8pm Mr Wilson, DJ Urby Rock Lily, The Star, Pyrmont free 7.30pm Myd Nyt Sun Level 1, East Leagues Club 8pm New Manic Spree, Mavens, Sydney Girls Choir, DJ Alley Cats The Lansdowne, Broadway free 8pm Paul Collins (USA), Southern Preachers, Mick Medew, Richard Lane, Glenn Morris The Sandringham Hotel, Newtown $25 (+ bf) 8pm The Preachers, The Walking Who, Jason & the Lyrebird, Bert & Ernie The Beresford Hotel, Surry Hills free 6pm Professor Groove’s Blaxploitation #2 Blue Beat, Double Bay $18 9pm Sabrina & The Red Vans, Junk, Henry Fraser Roxbury Room, The Roxbury Hotel, Glebe $10 8pm SFX: I Escape, Safe Hands, The Archivist, Adversary St James Hotel, Sydney $12-$15 9pm Stone Parade, Shed Muzak & Is it Her Lizotte’s Restaurant, Dee Why $20 (show only) 8pm Swingshift Cold Chisel Show

Bradbury Inn free 8pm Take Two Brighton RSL Club, BrightonLe-Sands free 8pm Tunnel Vision, Bones Atlas, Feick’s Device, The Call Valve Bar, Tempe 8pm Vices, Directions, True Lies, Mowgli, Sierra, Cold Youth Valve Bar, Tempe 12pm

JAZZ

Andrew Russell Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly free 7.30pm Barney McAll 505 Club, Surry Hills $15 (conc)–$20 8.30pm Blue Moon Quartet Supper Club, Fairfield RSL free 7pm Dereb The Ambassador The Sound Lounge, Seymour Centre, Chippendale $15$258.30pm Yuki Kumagai, John Mackie Well Co. Café / Wine Bar, Leichhardt free 7.30pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK Andrew Denniston Belrose Bowling Club free 7pm Nathan Cole Terrey Hills Tavern free 7.30pm Russell Neal, The Pug Earlwood Hotel free 7pm

SUNDAY MAY 20 ROCK & POP

Ace Brighton RSL Club, BrightonLe-Sands free 7pm

Amazing Woolloomolloosers, Shaggin’ Wagon The Sandringham Hotel, Newtown $10 7pm Blues Caravan, Eugene ‘Hideaway’ Bridges (USA), Matt Andersen, Ray Beadle The Basement, Circular Quay 8pm Blues Sunday: Mark Hopper Artichoke Gallery Cafe, Manly free 7.30pm Bonjah, Tim Chaisson, Steve Clisby Blue Experience, Morgan Joanel Rock Lily, The Star, Pyrmont free 7pm Daniel Merriweather, Toucan The Standard, Darlinghurst $26.20 (+ bf) 8pm The Delivery Botany View Hotel, Newtown free 7pm Fastrack Zodiac The Three Wise Monkeys, Sydney free 10pm Global Battle Of The Bands The Valve, Tempe 1pm Hitseekers Marlborough Hotel, Newtown free 10.30pm Hue Williams Crowne Plaza, Terrigal free Hunter & Suzie Owen’s Band Marrickville Bowling Club free 4.30pm Jill Birt and Alsy MacDonald, The Morning Night, Big Smoky The Vanguard, Newtown $28.80–$63.80 (dinner & show) 8pm Jive Bombers Cronulla RSL free 8pm Johnny Casino Downstairs, Sandringham Hotel, Newtown free 4pm Kurt Williams Duo Riverstone Sports Hotel free 2pm

Liza Ohlback, Jo Elms Lizotte’s Restaurant, Dee Why $28 8pm Paul Greene Brass Monkey, Cronulla $17.85 7pm Rachel Eldon Waverley Bowling Club free 3pm The Royal Artillery The Lansdowne, Broadway free 6pm Salsa Night Hard Rock Cafe, Darling Harbour free 8.30pm Salty Merton Estate Hotel, Rozelle free 3.30pm Screaming Sunday Annandale Hotel 12pm allages Sunday Stampede Valve Bar, Tempe 4pm Sunset People: Day Ravies, Velcro, Mornings, Cool Drinks Hollywood Hotel, Surry Hills free 4pm Tom Trelawny Coogee Bay Hotel free 7.30pm

JAZZ

Sydney Fusion Jazz Jam The Beauchamp Hotel, Velvet Lounge, Darlinghurst 3pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Aimee Francis Salisbury Hotel, Stanmore free 2pm Darren Bennett, Black Diamond Hotel William, Darlinghurst free 6pm Josh McIvor The Belvedere Hotel free 4pm Shane MacKenzie Cohibar, Darling Harbour free 3pm

wed

16 May

(9:00PM - 12:00AM)

thu

17 May

(9:00PM - 12:00AM)

fri

18 May (5:00PM - 8:00PM)

(9:30PM - 1:30AM)

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

sat

19 May

(4:30PM - 7:30PM)

SATURDAY NIGHT

(9:00PM - 1:30AM)

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

sun

20 May

(4:30PM - 7:30PM)

SUNDAY NIGHT

(8:30PM - 12:00AM)

BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 37

gig picks

up all night out all week...

THURSDAY MAY 17 The Brian Jonestown Massacre (USA), The Raveonettes (DEN) Metro Theatre, Sydney sold out 7.30pm Kate Martin, Ben Wells & The Middle Names, We Are The Birdcage GoodGod Small Club, Sydney $8 (+ bf) 8pm Kimbra, Daniel Merriweather, Sam Lawrence Enmore Theatre $49.92 (+ bf) 7pm sold out Kimbra Barbarion

FRIDAY MAY 18 Megastick Fanfare The Wharf Sessions @ Sydney Theatre Company, Walsh Bay free 10pm

Kaiser Chiefs

TUESDAY MAY 15

WEDNESDAY MAY 16

City And Colour (CAN), Bahamas (CAN) Enmore Theatre sold out 7.15pm all-ages

Mutemath (USA), The Cairos The Hi-Fi, Moore Park $48 (+ bf) 8pm

Kaiser Chiefs (UK), Deep Sea Arcade, Loon Lake The Hi-Fi, Moore Park $82.50 (+ bf) 6.30pm

Opossum (NZ), Kill City Creeps, Bloods GoodGod Small Club, Sydney $10 (+ bf) 8pm

SATURDAY MAY 19

Parachute Youth, Tokyo Denmark Sweden Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm

Black Cherry: Barbarion, The Rechords, The Vampers, The Drey Rollan Band, Neon Heart, Jack Shit, Limpin’ Jimmy &

Bonjah, Alex Bowen, Quixotics The Lair, Metro Theatre, Sydney $18 (+ bf) 8pm Dune Rats, Gung Ho, Pear Shape Spectrum, Darlinghurst $10 (+ bf) 8pm Josh Pyke, Gossling, Jackson McLaren York Theatre, Seymour Centre, Chippendale $48.30 7.30pm

SUNDAY MAY 20 Daniel Merriweather, Toucan The Standard, Darlinghurst $26.20 (+ bf) 8pm Xxxx

Wavves (USA), Sures Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst $45 (+ bf) 8pm

MUM: The Go Roll Your Bones, The Magic Bones, Bones Bones Bones, Mannequins, Catkings, Lloyd Healy, 10th Avenue, Hand Games DJs, Cries Wolf DJs, Dimes The World Bar, Kings Cross free $15 9pm

The Swingin’ Kitten, Rockabilly Rhino vs Wolfman Dan, The Black Cherry DJs The Factory Theatre, Enmore $18 (+ bf) 8pm

Tuesday May 15th

Friday May 18th

A RATIONAL FEAR

+ DAMN TERRAN +

Live Comedy Show Broadcast on FBi 94.5

+ CHICKS WHO LOVE GUNS + + CORPUS + SWEET TEETH +

DAN ILIC + CHRIS TAYLOR CLAIRE HOOPER + LEWIS HOBBA TIM FLANNERY (AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR)

8pm $10

++++++

ROBOPOP

+ PLUS LOADS MORE +

“PUMPING IRONY WITH A FISTFUL OF CHEESE” FREE Entry - From 11:30pm

7:30pm // $10

Wednesday May 16th

Saturday May 19th

LUNCH BREAK presented by Alberts:

CHANCE WATERS

- HOLY BALM 1pm // FREE Show - Broadcast Live on FBi 94.5

Thursday May 17th

++++++

BAHAMAS (CAN)

- PLAYWRITE -

BOY OUTSIDE + GUEST

+ FANNY LUMSDEN + LITTLE NAPIER + 8pm, $10 through oztix or on the door

8pm // $27.50 through oztix Or $35 on the door if still available L2 Kings Cross Hotel

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www.fbisocial.com

(PREVIOUSLY PHATCHANCE)

+ FORBES + HIGH NOON + 8pm, $12 through oztix or $15 on the door

LATE NIGHT SOCIAL: FRAMES + MATTTTT +ANDERS

Midnight - late // FREE - Broadcast live on FBi

BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 39

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facebook.com/PinballZball 40 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

brag beats

BRAG’s guide to dance, hip hop and club culture

dance music news club, dance and hip hop in brief... with Chris Honnery

five things WITH Growing Up The first six years of my life 1. were spent in absolute darkness, deep inside a cave in the Himalayas. Sensory deprivation leads to some pretty extraordinary psychedelic experiences, and as such I’ve always felt a real connection with groovy music from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Jamie 3:26

ANDY WEBB

with my boy Tunnel Signs, where I’ve been picking the pockets of artists like Midnight Savari, Domeyko/Gonzalez and Sleep D. It’s your usual spectrum of music, including film soundtracks, techno, psychedelic weirdness and disco. If I did produce music, it would probably be very sedate. I really enjoy lying down.

Inspirations Music, Right Here, Herbie Hancock is the man.

Right Now 2.

5.

From being part of Miles’ best Sydney is horrifically venueever band (fact), to putting sex on a record with Head Hunters and all the rad fusion albums that followed, to rocking the vocoder in the ‘80s, to being the coolest 70+ year old I’ve ever seen on stage – HE IS THE MAN. Your Crew You want me to play the name 3. game, eh? Well you can usually find me spinning alongside my Picnic pals Steele Bonus, Tamas Jones, Perfect Snatch, Kali, Mirror Mirror, The Loin Brothers, Marcus King and Matt Trousdale, as well as Tunnel Signs, Slow Blow, Frames, the Future Classic fellas… chumps like that. Together we make Sydney a safer place for the elderly.

4.

The Music You Make I don’t make music – I profit off other people’s music. I run a label called Death Strobe Records

deprived, so it’s promising to see that the music scene isn’t dead and buried thanks to the work of good, passionate promoters.

Dudes like Astral People, Subsonic, Future Classic and of course Picnic have the balls to put on shows with awesome and unique underground acts, and people turn up, so the city isn’t completely falling apart. Also, Vivid is coming up, and we can all be pretty chuffed about that.

BOOM BOOM FT JAMIE 3:26

Where: Ken Cloud, Kali, Mike Witcombe Where: Picnic’s One Night Stand @ warehouse location TBA When: Saturday May 26, 10pm until infinity More: Also playing the Future Classic party at Vivid LIVE, alongside Isolee, Jacques Renault, Flume and more, on Friday June 1 at the Studio, Sydney Opera House

KLARTRAUM

Highly touted live Berlin techno act Klartraum will make their Sydney debut this Saturday May 19 at GoodGod Small Club, in a party put on by Chemistry and Subsonic. Klartraum is made up of two highly regarded producers in their own right: the prolific Nadja Lind, who has released on labels such as Soma and been remixed by the one and only Terry Francis, and Helmut Ebritsch, who put out the excellent single ‘Modern Times’ under his Hatikvah moniker, which was subsequently reworked by the quirky German, Efdemin. Klartraum arrive in Sydney on the back of releasing their second LP, Evolution, last August via their own Lucidflow imprint, a label Ebritsch and Lind founded almost four years ago. Evolution spawned a remix album before 2011 was out, which featured reworks from the aforementioned Terry Francis, plus Silicone Soul, Steve Rachmad, Mark Henning, G-Man and Marek Hemmann among others. Such a formidable list is an indication of Klartraum’s standing in the electronic music scene, and they’ll be bringing their live show to Australia for the first time having showcased it at UK clubbing colosseum fabric not long ago.

BEYOND THE WIZARD’S SLEEVE RETURN Danny Brown

DANNY BROWN + MED

Niche Productions is hosting a night for Vivid LIVE at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall featuring two of the more singular voices to emerge in the underground hip hop scene in recent years: Detroit’s Danny Brown and LA’s MED, both of whom will be making their Australian debuts. Danny Brown recently topped end-of-year lists with his second mixtape XXX, which offered a mix of minimalist beats and synthesisers underlying Brown’s open discussions of his drug use and financial woes (what’s not to love about that?!). Meanwhile, Stones Throw’s MED has collaborated with the crème of the hip hop world, working with premiere beat makers like Madlib, The Alchemist, and most recently Portishead’s Geoff Barrow – and his recordings have featured luminaries and newcomers such as Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Aloe Blacc and Odd Future’s Hodgy Beats. Also playing on the night will be Ellesquire and Halfway Crooks DJs, with $30 presale tickets available online.

Erol Alkan’s Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve (‘B.T.W.S.’) project will release a new single before the month of May is out, breaking a production drought that stretches back to a remix of Midlake’s ‘Roscoe’ back in early 2010.

For anyone behind the curve on this one, B.T.W.S is the union of electro-leaning DJ Erol Alkan and The Time & Space Machine mastermind Richard Norris. Collectively, the pair specialise in off-kilter psych-rock, as evinced by their 2008 Ark 1 collection, and have accumulated an incredibly varied catalogue of remixes for the likes of Peter Bjorn And John, The Chemical Brothers and a slick as funk rework of Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Ulysses’. The pair’s forthcoming release is a 12-inch called Black Noise – the title track sits pretty on the A-side, whilst ‘Door To Tomorrow’ occupies the flip – which will be available via Alkan and Norris’ 3rd Mynd imprint.

One of Sydney’s genuine underground brands, Boom Boom, will host Chicago’s Jamie 3:26 at a secret warehouse venue on Saturday June 9. Jamie is one of the musical sons of the Chicago house scene, which is closely associated to the energy and DJing style of the Music Box (Jamie’s artist name ‘3:26’ is actually a reference to the Box’s physical address, 326 North Michigan). Over the years, Jamie has earned his stripes via collaborations with prolific producers like Marshall Jefferson, Chip E., Anthony Nicholson, Glen Underground, Boo Williams and Paul Johnson, with his latest releases and the Basement Edits series all apparently selling out within days of their release on the ParteHardy Records label. Though the promoters are tight-lipped about the venue of the upcoming night, they have revealed that aspiring revellers can expect an amazing sound system coupled with the Boom Boom E&S DJR400 (to anyone I lost there, just nod your head with vigorous enthusiasm).

Also spinning will be The Paradise Lost DJs, Magda Bytnerowicz and resident Daniel Lupica. Presales are available online at a mere $10.

GOODGOD @ VIVID LIVE!

On Saturday June 2, the crew behind GoodGod Small Club will bring their irrepressible party vibes to the Sydney Opera House Studio with a party boasting cult heroes from ‘80s hip hop, New Orleans bounce Jamaican dancehall and Australian garage. Nostalgic hip hop renegade Egyptian Lover leads a lineup also featuring Diplo-approved Nicky Da B and Jamaica’s Prince Zimboo, in a “cross cultural celebration of booty shaking moves and music”. An extensive support cast will also represent, including No Zu, Geoffrey O’Connor, Donny Benét, Straight Arrows, Levins, Yo Grito DJs and Goodgod Sound Unlimited. $30 presale tickets are available online.

SILICONE SOUL

Quickly making up for their tour cancellation in March, veteran duo Silicone Soul are headlining The Spice Cellar this Saturday – and they’ve expressly stated they’re “definitely coming” this time. First appearing on Scotland’s seminal Soma label in the late ‘90s, Silicone Soul boast a formidable sonic CV, releasing regularly over the years and being reworked by everyone from Ewan Pearson and DJ Hell to current ‘it boy’ Maetrik. Last year, Silicone Soul celebrated their 50th Darkroom Dubs release, and also featured prominently on the 20th anniversary Soma label mix which was compiled by their close allies Slam. The Berlinbound YokoO heads up a strong support that also features the veteran Robbie Lowe, Murat Kilic and Nic Scali. Doors open at 10pm, with free entry with guest list before midnight.

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dance music news

free stuff

club, dance and hip hop in brief... with Chris Honnery

FREESTUFF@THEBRAG.COM

he said she said WITH

BLAZE TRIPP

an advantage when it came time to learn beatmatching and how to DJ. My dad had an Atari ST and he used to make and edit his own backing tracks, so I was exposed to that environment at quite a young age.

Inspirations I get inspiration from anything and 2. everything. From funk & soul to rock & blues all the way through to deep house & juke. In the last few years Switch has definitely been a big influence for me, and there’s a bunch of other fresh guys like Hudson Mohawke and Rustie doing really interesting things in electronic music. I even get inspiration from bands like Sleigh Bells and Crystal Fighters, who are also doing things differently.

Your Crew I don’t really have a crew per se, but 3. that’s the way I prefer it. I think it all started

1.

Growing Up My parents are both musicians so I grew up sleeping under the stage while they would perform. I was also a drummer back in the day, which gave me a bit of

SAMPOLOGY ALBUM + TOUR

Sampology will play Oxford Art Factory on Friday June 8 as part of a national tour in support of his debut LP Doomsday Deluxe, which drops on the first day of June. Sampology is a DJ, AVDJ and producer all-in-one who has remixed Pnau, toured internationally with Australian theatre company Strut & Fret, and performed at the Big Day Out since the tender age of seventeen. Doomsday Deluxe features a number of noteworthy collaborations: with Brisbane’s Hannah Macklin on lead-off single ‘Stars’, UK’s reggae vocal don Serocee, and Spikey Tee. Sampology will be showcasing his ‘Super Visual Apocalypse’ audio visual live show, which is performed on two turntables and one “big ass screen”, montaged together from TV, movies, custom animations and music videos.

when I was about 12 or 13 – I would often chill in my room attempting to listen to the closest dance radio station, which happened to be in the next city, about 100km away. I didn’t get very good reception but I did get to hear some fresh sounds, and electronic music quickly became a passion.

Music You Make Essentially I make and play slightly 4.The

heavier club music including house, electro, moombahton and more. My stuff has a slightly harder edge compared to others, but it’s definitely great for getting down and sweaty on the d-floor. I’ve been working a lot on collabs lately, working with Sharkslayer, Peo De Pitte, Autodidakt, The Mane Thing, Whiskey Pete, Racknruin, MC Shureshock and more, so keep an eye out for these, plus a bunch of original singles in the coming months too.

Music, Right Here, Right Now The electronic music scene is 5. absolutely taking over right now, and that means more and more kids are getting involved with the scene. This is an amazing time for these exact reasons, but some people are getting into it for the wrong reasons. Don’t jump in and think you’re going to be the next Skrillex – just be yourself and be true to what you stand for.

That’s how you get longevity in this scene.

With: Tigerlilly, Bart Johnson, Tom Kongats,

Saywhut?!, Mike Hyper, Adam Bozetto, Daigo and more Where: Cakes @ The World Bar When: Saturday May 19

SILICONE SOUL

They cancelled their tour last month and you cried like a little girl, but Silicone Soul promised they’d make it up to you – and that’s exactly what they’re doing. The critically respected German production/DJ duo of Craig Morrison and Graeme Reedie are heading down this weekend to play a huge party at The Spice Cellar on Saturday May 19, with Murat Kilic, Robbie Lowe, YokoO and Nic Scali on support duties, and we’ve got two double passes to give away. If you want one, let us know the name of the label that the headliners run.

CHINESE LAUNDRY’S SWEET 16TH

Remember those days back when Chinese Laundry didn’t exist? Us neither, but they sound horrible. The clubbing institution is celebrating its sweet 16th this Saturday May 19, and it’s looking to be the sweetest – they’ve got Bass Kleph and Robert Babicz (aka Rob Acid) coming town, the former who started out as a Laundry resident, and the latter who’s got more pseudonyms than Ghostface. All the regulars will be spinning, too – A-Tonez, Rent Rackus, Rif Raf and more – with two hours of $5 drinks for their Happy Birthday Happy Hour, and special packages if it’s your birthday too. We’ve got five double passes to give away – just email us with your favourite memory from our favourite Laundry...

Bass Kleph

PICNIC FT KEN CLOUD

Ahead of their warehouse bash with Simon Caldwell (which is slotted for Saturday June 16), Picnic are throwing a warehouse party on Saturday May 26 headlined by Simon’s regular partner in crime, Mad Racket resident Ken Cloud.

Cloud’s reputation is well known and rightfully deserved: he has always delivered when sharing the bill alongside dance music deity such as Theo Parrish, Daedalus, Chris Duckenfield and Steve Bug. In addition to Cloud, Picnic mainstays Kali, Mike Witcombe and maverick pen-for-hire/ selector Andy Webb will be spinning an array of house, disco and genre-free oddities, with the revelry commencing at 10pm. Presale tickets are available online, with the venue to be revealed closer to the date. That’s pretty much all you need to know, aside from the fact that it’s also BYO.

Miike Snow

Guy Gerber

MIIKE SNOW WINTER TOUR

The self-proclaimed “three headed band with the one man name”, Miike Snow, will perform at the Metro Theatre on Monday July 30. Two-thirds Swedish producers Bloodshy & Avant and one-third Mark Ronson collaborator Andrew Wyatt, Miike Snow are currently basking in the afterglow of the reception won by their new album Happy To You, which is out now through Universal. And while I haven’t heard the LP, I’m happy to endorse anything that utilises strings, horns, trumpets, glockenspiels and a marching band. Miike Snow will bring a new live show Down Under, having recently performed to recordbreaking crowds at the Coachella Festival. Tickets officially go on sale to the general public at 9am on Monday May 21, but if you don’t want the ‘peasant’ treatment, sniff around online for details of a Frontier Members pre-sale happening this week

GRAEME PARK GERBER & DIDDY: AN ODDBALL BROMANCE

Israeli DJ and producer Guy Gerber will mix fabric’s next CD. Gerber’s addition to the London club’s long-running series of mix CDs follows a well-received release from the Australia-bound Levon Vincent. While following on from Vincent is undoubtedly a tough ask, Gerber has an ace up his sleeve that Vincent doesn’t – the backing of one P Diddy.

A famed house music convert – cynics will say he was just late to discover ecstasy – Diddy has been fascinated with club culture for a while, as evinced by his collaboration with DJ Hell: ‘The DJ’. And it seems that Diddy has had a direct influence on Gerber’s fabric mix. With Gerber and Diddy supposedly having finished a collaborative album titled 11.11, Gerber openly spoke of the ‘Diddy effect’ on his fabric compilation in a recent interview with Pulse Radio. “Since I’ve been working with Diddy and I was also doing some indie stuff, I was getting a little bit bored of just making normal tracks. So [with my approach for the fabric mix] I didn’t need to make an intro and outro... I could start putting in other melodies. It created... like a journey inside my soul. A collection of moments.” It will certainly be interested to see how such concepts have been executed by Gerber. And for anyone heading to Ibiza this season, keep your eyes peeled: Diddy is regularly spotted jumping on stage at Ibiza blow-outs, to mixed reactions from audiences. Give him hell from us, please.

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Manchester veteran Graeme Park will play the next High Flyers Little Secret warehouse party at Sun Studios in June, his first Australian show in more than ten years. The series, the brainchild of DigDeep Promotions in collaboration with Funkdafied, has made its name by hosting intermittent harbour cruises and warehouse shows since 2010. For the forthcoming instalment they’ve enlisted Park, one of the original resident DJs at Manchester’s iconic club The Haçienda throughout the late ‘80s and early ‘90s – think 24 Hour Party People – who is regarded as one of the key figures in the acid house movement.

Since those glory days, the Englishman has maintained a consistent presence in the house music scene, hosting shows on various radio stations for the past 15 years as well as continuing to DJ regularly in the UK and abroad.

Park will throw down at Sun Studios on Saturday June 23 along with a lengthy lineup of local support acts including Simon Caldwell and Russtee, in a bash that will run until 3am.

LUSINE AFTER HOURS AT THE ABERCROMBIE

Here’s some late mail that was worth stopping the presses for: Seattle producer Jeff McIlwain, who produces under the moniker Lusine, will play an exclusive ‘after hours’ live show at the Abercrombie on Sunday morning, May 20, sometime after 4.30am.

Lusine makes music that sits somewhere between microhouse and ‘IDM’ (intelligent dance music), with his most recent album, A Certain Distance, showcasing a number of melodic, dare I say pop-influenced cuts such as the irresistibly catchy ‘Two Dots’, which was remixed by Nic Fanciulli and Pezzner. Lusine will be flanked by Marcotix and Dave Stuart on the decks, with speculation abounding as to the possibility of an additional secret international guest joining the fray. The party will run from 4.30am “till you drop”, with entry via $10 presale tickets on sale via Resident Advisor – or the $15 door charge.

Chance Waters

Spoonbill J

im Moynihan is your typical happygo-lucky musician; a humble bloke kicking along, enjoying what he does and copping his due props along the way. “I started out being influenced by my brother who played in bands as a kid,” he says, of his beginnings in the music world. “My brother was five years older than me. We lived in the country, a little past Hurtsbridge [Victoria]. He rehearsed with his band and I was around the scene with those sorts of musicians from a young age.” But it was the drums that really captured Jim’s attention. “I went to play in a few bands myself, and then moved into using samplers with more traditional band formats.”

Somewhere in between, Moynihan completed a degree in industrial design and began freelancing as a product and sound designer on a broad spectrum of commercial and art-based projects, which saw him exhibit his creative concepts in museums around the world. He won a wide range of audio production awards, including the First Place and People’s Choice Award at Electrovision 2004 and Best Sound Design in the 15/15 International Film Festival of 2003. “Things progressed from there, and I started writing and recording my own music. I started sampling friends and things, but also creating grooves out of live recordings; live fragments and tiny snippets to create new lines. I was doing it for my own enjoyment – I never really wanted to release anything, it was just the process I enjoyed.”

After honing his skills – “and people twisting my arm to release things” – Moynihan released his first album under the Spoonbill moniker in 2005. His music has evolved since then, but it’s still edit-heavy, glitch-type electronica, with a jazzy angle influenced by hip hop and big beat. “Technology has changed and my influences have changed,” Jim explains. “So now it touches on this glitch-hop sound, which is popular in the US. Overall, it loosely brushes on different genres like IDM and broken beat I suppose, but it’s bouncy and quirky and comical at times.”

to define? “I used to call it ‘wonky’ before that was a genre,” he laughs. “It’s definitely abstract, but it’s pretty fat and chunky as well.”

Astro Archipelago is Spoonbill’s latest EP, and he considers it as quite different from his previous releases. “It’s a 15-minute bunch of tracks that I wrote for a video game, actually!

It came up after this mob got onto me to use a depth camera which connects to the Xbox – so we developed this fun game which is basically a music thing, where the music is all pre-composed in tiny fragments and then arranged in terms of how you perform. It’s a linear composition of dynamically generated soundscapes, if you know what I mean?” ...I don’t, but it sounds cool.

Jim is prepping for a wicked gig with partnerin-crime Dub FX, who’ll be co-headlining in his first big event since his popularity started climbing in Melbourne. “You’ll hear everything from funky and disco to glitch and proper electronic sounds; there should really be something for everyone. There is a lot of talent coming out – the lineup is great,” Jim says. “It’s innovative music and I think it wilrl really be a dancing as well as listening event.

Other than the ear candy, there will be a lot of visual awesomeness too!”

hen he first started out in the Australian hip hop scene, Sydney’s Chance Waters (formerly known as Phatchance) impressed the industry with honest and witty lyrics, next level beats and crazy performances. Now five years into his career, things have only gotten better – and the solo MC has celebrated by ditching the alias and settling down with his given name. “I was 16 when I first began writing music under the alias and I guess over time I fell out of love with the name,” he explains. “I was opting for something more natural, that reflects who I am as an adult.”

W

Redman, Chance Waters’ new track ‘Infinity’ dropped this year – the lead single and title track to his forthcoming second album, which was produced by Adelaide artist-to-watch One Above (most recently responsible for The Hilltop Hoods’ #1 single ‘I Love It (feat. Sia)’). With the release of the single and accompanying mixtape Approaching Infinity, Chance announced a series of East Coast shows. “I’m really looking forward to catching up with all the friends I’ve made through music,” he says. “I’m definitely keen to road test the new material, which is always an awesome learning experience.”

Last year, Waters co-headlined the ‘Hey, Where’s Your DJ?’ Tour, the first ever acoustic Australian hip hop tour which took in Brisbane, Melbourne and a three-week capacity residency at Oxford Art Factory. The string of shows were highly regarded in the hip hop scene, but according to Chance it was a daunting project to embark on: no longer fitting into a genre box posed numerous difficulties, and it was impossible to predict how people would take the music. Still, it all came good in the end.

“Even though it was an intimidating experience, it was probably the most fun I’ve had on stage,” Chance says of the creative freedom that the tour offered him. And it certainly helped that he was amongst friends – he headlined the tour alongside Sydney’s Coptic Soldier, another member of the I Forget, Sorry! crew that Waters belongs to: Sydney-based independent artists and close collaborators who come from a tight-knit (and extremely talented) friendship group, and include Mind Over Matter and Johnny Utah.

The new track is a masterpiece of conscious determination that proves this solo artist is a star on the rise – but as effortless as his music seems, Waters admits that these days he sometimes struggles to finish a song. “It was easier [writing for Inkstains], because it was a very personal record and much of the writing was stream-of-conscious. There wasn’t much structure involved, which in turn made the songs come together much more quickly.” Today, the artist has to invest a lot more effort in the process, in order to create the sculptured tracks he’s aiming for.

After 2009’s critically-acclaimed debut record Inkstains sent the artist touring the country with the likes of De La Soul, Method Man and

Where: FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel When: Saturday May 19

Xxxx

Second Chance By Vanessa Klevenz

Get The Bill By RK

Chance Waters is hitting up FBi Social this weekend to show off the new material born from that hard work. One to watch for? ‘Maybe Tomorrow (ft. Lillian Blue)’, the LP’s next single – produced by One Above, Chance believes “it’s easily one of the best songs on the album.”

What: Dub FX, Bumble And Itsu Where: The Metro Theatre When: Saturday May 19

Clearly then, his music is anything but easy

Building Bridges Festival

Troubled Waters By Roslyn Helper

“I

d like to see an end to mandatory detention and a complete scrapping of offshore processing, and I’d like to see us deal humanely with the very small number of refugees that we do take in, and to stop turning it into a political shit-fight.”

These are not Julia Gillard’s words, nor are they Tony Abbotts, or Christine Milne’s. It’s The Herd’s MC Ozi Batla, aka Shannon Kennedy, who’s talking politics for a cause.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of mandatory detention in Australia, and the Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) is putting on the Building Bridges Festival, featuring The Herd, Watussi, Dog Trumpet and ROSiE, to raise funds for their campaign to fight for refugee rights and bring an end to mandatory detention.

It may have been a shock to many people when Howard sent the military out to turn back the Tampa in 2001, but Goudkamp points out that the decision had 77% support of the Australian population. “So we thought, ‘We’ve got an uphill battle here.’” The statistic also inspired The Herd’s 2003 song ‘77%’ (‘77% of Aussies are racist’) which reached #46 on triple j’s hottest 100 and added to the active national debate surrounding the Tampa affair. Batla says that he likes his music to do more than just entertain. “People have different upbringings and experiences that lead them to the opinions that they have.

But I like that. I like to challenge people, to challenge the way they think. I think that’s the most important thing we can do as musicians.

“There’s a general malaise in the political culture

of this country, and I think that’s partly our fault for letting scumbags get away with [these policies], and for not having enough energy to feel like we can do anything about it. That’s always been part of The Herd’s ethos: that we want to do something with the tools that we have.”

The Building Bridges Festival is a continuation of the RAC’s efforts to increase awareness about refugee issues, to dispel misconceptions, to answer questions, to raise money for their campaign, and to connect people to refugee issues in a creative and meaningful way. “I absolutely think art and music make political issues more accessible,” says Goudkamp. “I know from when I was growing up that listening to political punk as a high school student affected my awareness about what was happening in the world. It made me question and think about things.”

Apart from all of that, Building Bridges is set to be a killer night of music and poetry from some of Australia’s best versed artists – so head along to double dip in this party pack of political consciousness and blistering beats.

With: The Herd, Watussi, Dog Trumpet, Mohsen Soltani & Ember, ROSiE Where: Building Bridges Festival @ The Standard When: Friday May 18 More: refugeeaction.org.au

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The Herd

Coalition member Mark Goudkamp has been participating in rallies against mandatory detention since his days as a student at Sydney University, and became involved with the RAC when they were founded in 2000. “The world’s media were here for the Olympic Games, and we felt the spotlight needed to be shone on what was truly happening in Australia, in the way we were treating asylum seekers,” he says.

“And then a year after that it was Tampa and the children overboard incident and the Howard election victory in 2001, and we realised that this was becoming truly a very serious issue in Australia, so we redoubled our efforts.” The Committee hasn’t stopped, proving a vital voice in the Australian political landscape and working around the clock to try and change public misconceptions about refugee issues. “Questions like, ‘Why do people catch boats?’; ‘Why do people need to do that, despite it being dangerous?’,” Goudkamp explains. “We try to combat some of the hysteria around boat arrivals and people smugglers and all the rest of it.”

club guide send your listings to : clubguide@thebrag.com

club pick of the week Robert Babicz

SATURDAY MAY 19

Chinese Laundry, Sydney

Chinese Laundry 16th Birthday Robert Babicz (GER), Bass Kleph, A-Tonez, Trent Rackus, Rif Raf, Def Tonez, King Lee, Joe Barrs, U-Khan, James Cripps $15-$25 9pm MONDAY MAY 14 Scruffy Murphy’s, Sydney Mother of a Monday DJ Smokin’ Joe free 8pm The Sugar Mill, Kings Cross Makeout Mondays DJs free 8pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Monday Jazz & Latin Jam free 7pm

TUESDAY MAY 15 Establishment, Sydney Rumba Motel Salsa DJ Willie Sabor free 8pm Scruffy Murphy’s, Sydney I Love Goon DJ Smokin’ Joe free 8pm Trademark Hotel, Kings Cross Coyote Tuesday – We Love Brazil Samba De Roda, Resident DJs 7pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Pop Panic Conrad Greenleaf free 8pm

44 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

WEDNESDAY MAY 16 The Bank Hotel – Velvet Room, Newtown Lady L, Resident DJs free 9pm The Bank Nightclub, Kings Cross Money Talks DJs free 10pm Epping Hotel DTF Resident DJs free Flinders Hotel, Surry Hills Hip Hop Resident DJs free 8pm Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park Nicki Minaj (USA) $99.90 7pm sold out Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Resident DJs free 8pm The Lansdowne, Broadway Frat House Wolf & The Gang free 9pm The Marlborough Hotel – Cellar Bar, Newtown DJ Pauly free 8pm The Roundhouse Beergarden, UNSW, Kensington UNSW DJ Comp Final DJs free 5pm The World Bar, Kings Cross The Wall Ajapai (JPN), Singha, Blackmale, Deckhead, Clockwerk, The Brothers

Grimm, Nann Does Smack free-$5 9pm

THURSDAY MAY 17 Cargo Lounge, King St Wharf Dance The Way You Feel Resident DJs free 6pm The Cool Room, Australian Hotel & Brewery, Rouse Hill We Love Thursdays DJs free 9pm The Flinders Hotel, Darlinghurst Bananas DJs free 9pm GoodGod Front Bar, Sydney Girls Gone Mild Eliza & Hannah Reilly free 9pm The Greenwood Hotel, North Sydney The Greenwood Thursday Nights Resident DJs free 8pm Gypsy Lounge, Darlinghurst Naked Resident DJs 9pm Hunky Dory Social Club, Darlinghurst Beat Skool The Dark Horse 6pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Resident DJs free 8pm Oxford Art Factory,

Darlinghurst Insert Coin(s) Presents Ghost Recon Future Soldier Launch Party DJs $10 8pm Q Bar, Darlinghurst Hot Damn Mexican Moustache Fiesta New Found Glory DJs, Hot Damn DJs $15$20 8pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross Rack City DJ Tikelz, DJ Lenno, DJ Ziggy, DJ Lyrikz, DJ Rkays, Mista Cee 8pm Sugar Lounge, Manly Fat Laced Funk Resident DJs free 9pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Propaganda Jack Shit, Andrew P Street, Shag, Urby, Dan Bombings free (student)-$5 8pm

FRIDAY MAY 18 34 Degrees South, Bondi Get Down Stephen Flynn, Stu Kelly free 8pm Annandale Hotel TZU, Galapagoose $20 (+ bf) 8pm Arq Sydney, Taylor Square Fantasia Sandi Hotrod, Danny T free 8pm The Bank Hotel, Newtown Fridays DJ Delacroix free 9pm Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Movement The Vaudeville Smash free 8pm Cargo Lounge, King St Wharf Kick On Fridays Resident DJs free 4pm Chinese Laundry, Sydney Bass Mafia Glove Cats, Blaze Tripp, Tony Why & Toddy Trix feat. MC D-Tech, Scoops, Glen Darby, Daniel Berti, Digit & Jumes, Loose Tee $15-$20 10pm Cohibar, Darling Harbour Gimme Five free 9pm Dee Why Hotel DJ Alana 9pm Epping Hotel Flirt Flirt DJs free FakeClub, Kings Cross Dennis Shepard, Menno Dejong, Nirck Arbor, Thomas Knight, Scotty G, Dan Burke, Nathan Cryptic, Lyndsay LE Strange, aNSCa, T&O $35 9pm GoodGod Small Club, Sydney Dutty Dancing Dynamite Sound, Basslines, Shantan Wantan Ichiban, Nick Toth, Levins, Ability $5 11pm The Hi-Fi, Moore Park Mickey Avalon (USA), Kid Mac $51 (+ bf) 7.30pm Home Nightclub, Sydney Delicious & Sublime Fridays Flite, Iko, MC Suga Shane, Pee Wee Ferris, Matt Ferreira, John Young 9pm Ivy Changeroom, Sydney Love Gun Fridays Tina Turntables, The Apprentice & Hooligan 8pm Jacksons On George, Sydney DJ Ivan Drago, DJ Rain Julz free 9pm The Marlborough Hotel – Level 1, Newtown Resident DJs free 9pm Nevada Lounge, Darlinghurst DJ Hayden free 6pm Oatley Hotel We Love Oatley Hotel Fridays DJ Tone free 8pm Omega Lounge, City Tattersalls Club, Sydney Unwind Fridays Blended Beats DJs, Greg Summerfield free 5.30pm Pontoon, Darling Harbour Perfect Resident DJs free 9pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross My Studio Nacho Pop, Dim Slm, Digital Mouthm Mike Ruckus 8pm Scruffy Murphy’s, Sydney Frisky Friday DJs free 6pm

The Shark Hotel, Sydney Puls8 DJ Jono, Guest DJs free 9pm Soho, Potts Point Soho Fridays DJs free 9pm Space, Sydney Zaia Resident DJs 9.45pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Softwar, Frames, James Taylor, Anders $10 10pm Trademark Hotel, Kings Cross Eve Resident DJs 9pm The Watershed Hotel Bring On The Weekend! DJ Matt Roberts free 9pm The World Bar, Kings Cross MUM The Go Roll Your Bones, The Magic Bones, Bones Bones Bones, Mannequins, Catkings, Lloyd Healy, 10th Avenue, Hand Games DJs, Cries Wolf DJs, Dimes $10-$15 8pm

SATURDAY MAY 19 The Bank Hotel, Newtown Saturdays Kyle Sanders free 8pm The Bella Vista, Star City Casino Wharf nuSydney Hook N Sling, eSquire (UK), Matt Nukewood, Steve Play, Zannon, L.A.M., Rome, Frankie Jay & Alex Borello $55 (+ bf) 7.30pm Bar 100, The Rocks My Place Saturdays Resident DJs free BJs Nightclub, Bondi Junction DJ Shane Taylor 10pm Candys Apartment, Kings Cross Big Guns Nightmare, 2busy 2kiss, Sherlock Bones, Dr Lescumby, Durty Mindz, Hoodlmz, Sampy, Sgt Scotty P, Blak & Yella 9pm Chinese Laundry, Sydney Chinese Laundry 16th Birthday Robert Babicz (GER), Bass Kleph, A-Tonez, Trent Rackus, Rif Raf, Def Tonez, King Lee, Joe Barrs, U-Khan, James Cripps $15-$25 9pm Cohibar, Darling Harbour Yellow Sox DJ Brynstar & Candidate free 9pm Dee Why Hotel Kiss & Fly Saturdays DJs 9pm Epping Hotel Back Traxx DJ Kandi, DJ Hypnotixx Establishment, Sydney Sienna Timomatic, Def Rok, G-Wizard, Lilo, Troy-T 8pm FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel, Darlinghurst Chance Waters, Forbes, High Noon $12 (+ bf) 8pm Flinders Hotel, Darlinhurst Horne Dogg free 8pm GoodGod Small Club, Sydney Klartraum (GER), MSG, Trinity, Jordan Deck, Chris Honnery $10 (+ bf) 10pm Home Nightclub, Sydney Homemade Saturdays Nick Skitz $20-$25 9pm Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park Showtek (NED) $75.90-107.30 9pm Hugo’s Lounge, Kings Cross Saturdays DJ Dolso 8pm Ivy Bar, Sydney Pure Ivy Denzal Park, Cadell, Jeff Drake, Robbie Santiago, Ben Morris, Johnny Sommerville $20 6pm Ivy Pool Club & Changeroom, Sydney Bambalam & Johnny Pow, Magic Happens, Morgan, Murray Lake, Elly K, Georgia, Starjumps, Crazy Caz, Max Bon De Viere, The Beep Monster 6pm Jacksons On George, Sydney DJ Simon Laing, DJ Michael Stewart free 9pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Kitty Kitty Bang Bang Resident DJs 8pm

The Marlborough Hotel – Level 1, Newtown Resident DJs free 9pm Metro Theatre, Sydney Mixed Nuts Dub FX, Spoonbill, Mr Bill, Bumble, Itsu $30 (+ bf) 9pm Nevada Lounge, Darlinghurst DJ Hayden free 6pm One22, Sydney Co-Op’s Third Birthday San Soda (GER), Bill Brewster (UK), Co-Op DJs $25-$30 (+bf) 9pm The Orient Hotel, The Rocks Party DJs, Club DJs free 10pm Q Bar, Sydney Girlthing Farewells Q Bar Girlthing DJs, Leah Mencel, Ann Ominous, Tigerlily, Trelz $15 9pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross The Suite Charlie Bornw, Big Will, Dim Dlm, Discokid, Troy T, Jo Funk, Steve S, Adamo, J Smoove 8pm The Sly Fox, Enmore Shake That Monkey Juzlo, Drox, Typhonic, DJ G- Mo free 9pm Soho Bar, Potts Point Usual Suspects Morgan Page (USA), Nukewood, Ember, Jack Bailey, Here’s Trouble, Alley Oop, Bounce Crew DJs, Romules Remus,& The Wolf, Barfly 9pm Spectrum, Darlinghurst Kittens Kittens DJs $5-$10 11.30pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Silicone Soul (UK), Murat Kilic, Robbie Lowe, YokoO, Nic Scali $25 10pm Trademark Hotel, Kings Cross Trademark Saturdays Resident DJs 9pm Tunnel Nightclub, Kings Cross ONE Saturdays Resident DJs $10-$20 10pm The Watershed Hotel Watershed Presents… Skybar $15 9pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Cakes Blaze Tripp, Tigerlilly, Bart Johnson, Tom Kongats, Saywhut?!, Mike Hyper, Adam Bozetto, Daigo, One Hit Wonder, Illya, Hannah $15$20 8pm

SUNDAY MAY 20 The Abercrombie Hotel, Broadway S.A.S.H. Sundays S.A.S.H. DJs $10 2pm Arq Sydney, Taylor Square Dirty Disco DJs 9pm The Beresford Hotel, Surry Hills Beresford Sundays Resident DJs free 5pm Fraser Studios, Chippendale Heaps Decent Showcase – Homebase All-Stars Icey, Kurva, Monica Winter, Sai Sai, Fowl, Murk & Medz, Tasha Lee Marshall, Infamous, Supreme, Big H, Low, Tee & D-Minor, Tyrone, Enny, Maori Soldier, Junior 1 $5 4pm all-ages Goldfish, Kings Cross Martini Club Sundays Martini Club , Tom Kelly free 6pm Hugo’s Lounge, Kings Cross Sneaky Sundays Resident DJs 8pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Easy Sundays Resident DJs free 8pm Oatley Hotel Sunday Sets DJ Tone free 7pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross Sapphire Sundays Resident DJs 8pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Spice Silicone Soul, Murat Kilic $25 4am The World Bar, Kings Cross Dust James Taylor, Alley Oop, Kali free 9pm

club picks

Deep Impressions Underground Dance And Electronica with Chris Honnery

up all night out all week...

Nicki Minaj

WEDNESDAY MAY 16 Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park Nicki Minaj (USA) 7pm sold out The World Bar, Kings Cross The Wall Ajapai (JPN), Singha, Blackmale, Deckhead, Clockwerk, The Brothers Grimm, Nann Does Smack free$5 9pm

THURSDAY MAY 17 Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst Insert Coin(s) Presents Ghost Recon: Future Soldier Launch Party DJs $10 8pm

FRIDAY MAY 18 Chinese Laundry, Sydney Bass Mafia Glove Cats, Blaze Tripp, Tony Why & Toddy Trix feat. MC D-Tech, Scoops, Glen Darby, Daniel Berti, Digit & Jumes, Loose Tee $15-$20 10pm GoodGod Small Club, Sydney Dutty Dancing Dynamite Sound, Basslines, Shantan Wantan Ichiban, Nick Toth, Levins, Ability $5 11pm Mickey Avalon

The Hi-Fi, Moore Park Mickey Avalon (USA), Kid Mac $51 (+ bf) 7.30pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Softwar, Frames, James Taylor, Anders $10 10pm The Standard, Darlinghurst Building Bridges Festival The Herd, Watussi, Mohsen Soltani & Ember, Dog Trumpet, Rosie $20-$30 (+ bf) 6pm

SATURDAY MAY 19 GoodGod Small Club, Sydney Klartraum (GER), MSG, Trinity, Jordan Deck, Chris Honnery $10 (+ bf) 10pm Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park Showtek (NED) $75.90-107.30 9pm Metro Theatre, Sydney Mixed Nuts Dub FX, Spoonbill, Mr Bill, Bumble, Itsu $30 (+ bf) 9pm One22, Sydney CO-OP's Third Birthday San Soda (GER), Bill Brewster (UK), CO-OP DJs $25-$30 (+bf) 9pm Soho Bar, Potts Point Usual Suspects Morgan Page (USA), Nukewood, Ember, Jack Bailey, Here’s Trouble, Alley Oop, Bounce Crew DJs, Romules Remus,& The Wolf, Barfly 9pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Silicone Soul (UK), Murat Kilic, Robbie Lowe, YokoO, Nic Scali $25 10pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Cakes Blaze Tripp, Tigerlilly, Bart Johnson, Tom Kongats, Saywhut?!, Mike Hyper, Adam Bozetto, Daigo, One Hit Wonder, Illya, Hannah $15-$20 8pm

SUNDAY MAY 20

F

ollowing the Easter Monday bash with Stimming, Subsonic’s End Of The Line long-weekend sub-brand returns to the Abercrombie on Monday June 11, with a headlining performance by pioneering German producer Guido Schneider. As anyone who saw Schneider throw down at Mad Racket on his last Australian trip will attest, the man can work a dancefloor with rare aplomb. Schneider brings an imposing production pedigree to the decks, having honed his distinct take on minimal tech house for the past 15 years, laying the foundations in the ‘90s on his own Neue Welten imprint and releasing on labels such as Poker Flat.

Without descending into a greatest-hits list, Schneider’s collaboration with André Galluzzi, ‘Albertino’, was one of the club cuts of ‘07/’08, being heavily supported by the likes of Luciano – on his excellent Body Tonic podcast mix (which is worth seeking out online) – and Ricardo Villalobos.

Schneider’s collaborations with Sammy Dee (Pantytec), firstly as Schneider & Radecki and then on the Poker Flat 12-inch ‘Styleways’ (which was licensed to Richie Hawtin’s revered DE9: Transitions album), also deserves praise. More recently, he issued a timely reminder of his talent last year with the track ‘Zusammen In B’, which was in my opinion among the best cuts of the year. Schneider will be flanked by New Zealand’s Hayden Strom (from Fiord – aka Antix) along with an extensive local support cast that includes Thug Records mainman Carlos Zarate. Presale tickets are on sale from Resident Advisor.

A chap who is generally regarded as a dance music ‘pioneer’ and/or ‘legend’, Francois K (the ‘K’ being for Kevorkian), will return to Australia in June, and will play a set at the Goldfish venue in King’s Cross on Saturday June 9 – the Queen’s Francois K

LOOKING DEEPER SATURDAY MAY 19 Klartraum (live) GoodGod Small Club

CO-OP Third Birthday ft San Soda & Bill Brewster One22

SATURDAY JUNE 9 Francois K Goldfish

MONDAY JUNE 11

End Of The Line ft Guido Schneider The Abercrombie birthday long weekend. Francois K started out long before you and I were of age, playing drums alongside Walter Gibbons (the man often credited with being the main inspiration to Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles), and soon became a regular guest at Studio 54, The Paradise Garage, and The Loft. Far from glamorising his experiences at Studio 54 (à la the entertaining film starring Mike Myers and Ryan Phillippe), Kevorkian recalled in an interview, “There were very few people that were actually there to enjoy themselves and to sit back and just relax. You could feel this tension in the room. All these people milling about, trying to... What do you say, the ‘star f*ckers,’ ‘gold diggers'. The much better parties were elsewhere.”

As a producer, Kevorkian had a hand in smash singles such as Yazoo’s ‘Situation’, and mixed landmark albums such as Depeche Mode’s epochal Violator and Kraftwerk’s Electric Café, before returning to the top-tier of the DJ profession alongside Danny Krivit and Joe Claussell as a member of the Body & Soul trio. Anyone after a comprehensive encapsulation of the broad spectrum of tracks within the sonic arsenal of Francois K should head straight for his triple-CD Masterpiece mix compilation, which traverses house, techno, electro house, dance rock and plenty of other genres, via cuts from the likes of Cobblestone Jazz, Drexciya, Audion and Dennis Ferrer.

The new Masterpiece mix from Andy Weatherall doesn’t look too shabby either.

For everyone tossing up between the Subsonic Klartraum bash at GoodGod or the CO-OP birthday party at One22 this Saturday night, my solemn advice is to hit both. They’re within stumbling distance of each other, and both parties should be buzzin’ well into the early hours. As to the order you choose to attend the events in, I’ll leave that up to you – quite frankly, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with shouldering the responsibility of how people should spend their Saturday night. As autocratic as I am, telling you what you should be listening to is enough.

Fraser Studios, Chippendale Heaps Decent Showcase – Homebase All-Stars Icey, Kurva, Monica Winter, Sai Sai, Fowl, Murk & Medz, Tasha Lee Marshall, Infamous, Supreme, Big H, Low, Tee & D-Minor, Tyrone, Enny, Maori Soldier, Junior 1 $5 4-7pm all-ages

Klartraum Silicone Soul

Deep Impressions: electronica manifesto and occasional club brand. Contact through deep.impressions@yahoo.com BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 45

snap up all night out all week . . .

the exchange hotel

It’s called: The Warmest Place album launc h It sounds like: Indie-pop with a perfect purr; think synths, think ‘80s pop, think indie. Think awesome.

Who’s playing? Catcall, Palms, The Fabergettes .

Sell it to us: As she heads out on her first national headline tour, catch Sydney’s Catcall launching her debut album , The Warmest Place – featuring ‘Swimming Pool,’ ‘Satellites,’ and ‘The World Is Ours’ – backed by an all-star band featuring the likes of Andrew Elston (AKA Toni Toni Lee), Al Grigg (Red Rider/Palms), Bec Allen (The Fabergettes ) and Simon Parker (Lost Valentinos). We will take you somewhere…

The bit we’ll remember in the AM: Where we took you...

Crowd specs: Lovers. This means you!

Wallet damage: $12 through moshtix / $15 on the door.

Where: Oxford Art Factory / 38-46 Oxford St, Darlinghurst When: Friday May 18

PICS :: KC

party profile

catcall

toni toni lee

PICS ::AM

04:05:12 :: The Exchange Hotel :: 34-44 Oxford St Darlinghurst Sydney 9331 3100

derrick may

PICS :: TL

04:05:12 :: The Spice Cellar :: 58 Elizabeth St Sydney

the cool room

PICS :: TW

03:05:12 :: The Spice Cellar :: 58 Elizabeth St Sydney

:: LEIGH BOIN :: DOM S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HONCHO) MAR :: OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER :: RASA JUSKEVICIUTE :: ASHLEY JANG AN NATH :: RKE CLA INA GREENWOOD :: KATR :: Y POPOV :: TIM WHITNE THOMAS PEACHY :: GEORGE

46 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

orbital

PICS :: KC

03:05:12 :: The Australian Brewery :: 350 Annangrove Rd Rouse Hill 9679 4555

05:05:12 :: Metro Theatre :: 624 George St Sydney 9550 3666

CNR BROADWAY & ABERCROMBIE

Beer Tacos Schnitzels

Burgers RaveJuice Mac n Cheese balls

Cocktails Deep Fried Pizza

Beergarden

facebook.com/abercrombiehotel BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 47

snap

PICS :: KC

musik matters

chasm

PICS :: KC

up all night out all week . . .

05:05:12 :: GoodGod Small Club :: 53-55 Liverpool St Sydney 80840587

musica recordings launch

PICS :: LB

05:05:12 :: The Goldfish :: 111 Darlinghurst Rd Potts Point 8354 6630

ajapai

PICS :: AM

05:05:12 :: B2 Alexandria :: 2/46-62 Maddox St Alexandria 9690 0033

05:05:12 :: The Arthouse :: 275 Pitt St Sydney 9284 1200

04:05:12 :: Chinese Laundry :: 111 Sussex St Sydney 8295 9958 :: LEIGH BOIN :: DOM S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HONCHO) MAR :: OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER RASA JUSKEVICIUTE :: ASHLEY :: JANG AN NATH :: RKE CLA GREENWOOD :: KATRINA POPOV :: TIM WHITNEY :: THOMAS PEACHY :: GEORGE

48 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

party profile

bass mafia

PICS :: AM

movement It’s called: Movement at Beach Road Hotel, Bondi It sounds like: Australia’s best live electronica , beats and disco acts.

Who’s spinning? The Vaudeville Smash (MEL B), DJ Huwston.

Three songs you’ll hear on the night: ‘Rolle r Disco’ and ‘Hey’ – The Vaudeville Smash; ‘What My Last Girl Put Me Through’ – Nicolas Jaar.

And one you definitely won’t: ‘Glory Of Love' (aka 'I Am The Man Who Will Fight For Your Honour') – Peter Cetera.

Sell it to us: Melbourne seven-piece The Vaude ville Smash are a perfect mix of Chromeo, Electric Six, The Doobie Brothe rs and Ron Burgundy’s jazz flute.

The bit we’ll remember in the AM: The groov es, the laughter, the money still in your wallet.

Crowd specs: A mix of eastern suburbs locals and passionate live dance music fans from across town.

Wallet damage: Zip, zilch, nadda.

Where: Beach Road Hotel / 71 Beach Road, Bondi When: Friday May 18

BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12 :: 49

snap

claptone

PICS :: AM

up all night out all week . . .

strike bowling

PICS :: AM

05:05:12 :: The Spice Cellar :: 58 Elizabeth St Sydney

mayday! feat james zabiela 05:05:12 :: Sydney Harbour

03:05:12 :: World Bar :: 24 Bayswater Rd Kings Cross 9357 7700 :: LEIGH BOIN :: DOM S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HONCHO) EVICIUTE :: ASHLEY MAR :: OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER JUSK A RAS :: JANG AN NATH :: GREENWOOD :: KATRINA CLARKE OV :: TIM WHITNEY :: POP THOMAS PEACHY :: GEORGE

50 :: BRAG :: 462 :: 14:05:12

party profile

propaganda

PICS :: GP

co-op's 3rd b'day

It’s called: CO-OP’s Third Birthday It sounds like: A celebration of three years of CO-OP’s house of House, from the deep to the discofied via classics, rarities and oddities born from Berlin, Brooklyn, Brixton, Balmain (maybe) and beyond.

Who’s spinning? San Soda (We Play House / FCL – Berlin), Bill Brewster (DJHistory.com – London), and the That Keen and CO-OP DJs. Three songs you’ll hear on the night: ‘Let It Go’ – FCL; ‘Party Non Stop’ – Pirupa; and ‘I Got Bells’ – John Daly.

Sell it to us: Two highly respected (although not necessarily respectable) international talents in town for their Sydney DJ debuts plus a smattering of complementary drinks early on equals a typica lly CO-OPerative night out.

Sold.

The bit we’ll remember in the AM: That record you thought you knew, but actually didn’t, at all, and can’t find anywhere, even on Discogs.

Crowd specs: The dancers, the crate-digge rs, and the past-caring-if-I’m-hipanymore-sters.

Wallet damage: $25 +bf pre-sales (ResidentAd visor.net) / more on the door.

Where: One22 / 122 Pitt Street (entrance via Lees Court) When: Saturday May 19, from 9pm to 5am

PICS :: AM

04:05:12 :: Strike Bowling :: King St Wharf Sydney 9276 7100