The Brag #512

PRESENTS

FREE ENTRY -8PM-

MAY 15TH

SAT 18 MAY FREE 8PM

+ Danny Clayton (Channel [V]) + Hailer (live) + Devola + Isbjorn + Bernie Dingo + Silver Age

+ HOBOPHONICS + RESORT STYLES + SILVER AGE

O PE N S N E X T F R ID AY

EMPIRE OF THE SUN K R AF T W ER K [ THE C ATAL O G UE – 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8] SOUNDS OF THE SOUTH BOBBY WOMACK HERITAGE O RCHE STR A: M USIC FR O M BL A DE R U N NER BISH B OSCH A M BISY M PH O NIC G U R R U M UL: HIS LIFE & M USIC K A R L H Y D E [ U N D ER W O R L D] SUNNYBOYS CLOUD CONTROL LIVE _ TR A N S MIS SIO N: JOY DIVISIO N R E W O R K E D C.W. S T O N EK IN G THE SU N N Y B OY [FIL M ] M AT THE W E. W HITE F UTURE CL A SSIC PART Y G O O D G O D D A N CE TER I A! CLUB KOOK Y ASTR AL PEOPLE L IG H T IN G T H E S A IL S: SPINIFE X

BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 3

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BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 5

rock music news welcome to the frontline: what’s goin’ on around town... with Lisa Omagari, Natalie Amat and Nick Jarvis.

five things WITH

STEVE MITCHELL OF THE SATELLITES parents hated that music, so of course it went up even louder when they weren’t around.

Inspirations There are too many to mention. One of 2. my favourite acts in the genres we play would have to be Big Sandy and the Fly Rite Boys. I enjoy him as both a songwriter and performer, he’s just too smooth. To tell the truth I just get inspired by musicians who play well regardless of the genre.

One of the most enjoyable gigs I experienced recently was CW Stoneking. That man is a storyteller and truly captures a mysterious era of jazz/blues; he does it so well. The first time I heard a song of his on the radio I just thought it was a great bluesy record from the 1930s, so I was blown away to find out he was Australian and current.

I can’t deny that The Stray Cats were also an early influence. As a teen I was right into them and I guess they are the act that persuaded me to pursue my musical interest further and learn to play double bass.

1.

Growing Up Music didn’t really play a huge part in my childhood. I started listening to local radio stations that were playing roots, blues and

alternative styles and developed a taste for older rockin’ roots music. I recall my brother listening to ska, punk, and rockabilly, and I guess that influence kind of rubbed off. Our

Your Band The Satellites have gone through a few 3. changes over the years and with each change comes a fresh outlook on what we do. We’re thrilled to have the current line up and glad to

be out touring again. Belinda and I have been in the group since we started in about 1994 and we’ve played with all kinds of acts in all kinds of places. Some of the most memorable gigs were with bands very different to ourselves. We’ve played the Big Day Out, and lots of different festivals around the globe.

We really enjoy playing with good acts across any genre, which is why events like Black Cherry are so great. The acts are so diverse and bring everyone together. No one likes to be pigeonholed.

The Music You Make Well, it’s hard to deny our Rockabilly style 4.

– that’s clearly obvious once you see/hear our band, but we draw influence from jazz, blues, country, etc. to our sound.

Music, Right Here, Right Now The music scene for roots music seems 5. to be doing very well lately. There are plenty of events right across Australia and plenty of interest from abroad in what’s going on here too, which is great for the musicians and great for the scene in general.

What: The Satellites at Black Cherry Where: The Factory Theatre, Marrickville When: Saturday May 18

ZIGGY STARDUST

MS MR

EDITOR: Nick Jarvis nick@thebrag.com 02 9690 2731 ARTS EDITOR: Lisa Omagari lisa@thebrag.com 02 9552 6333 STAFF WRITERS: Benjamin Cooper, Alasdair Duncan NEWS: Lisa Omagari, Natalie Amat, Nick Jarvis, Chris Honnery ART DIRECTOR: Sarah Bryant GRAPHIC DESIGN: Alan Parry SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER: Tim Levy SNAP PHOTOGRAPHERS: Katrina Clarke, Averie Harvey, Ryan Kitching, Kate Lewis, Henry Leung, Ashley Mar, Pedro Xavier COVER PHOTOGRAPHER: Ed Purnomo COVER STYLIST: Jam Baylon COVER HAIR AND MAKE-UP: Kat Bardsley

Bowie may have a new album out, but word around the traps is that it’s unlikely he’ll be touring anytime soon (a delicate heart and loaded bank account precluding any work on the road). But you can see the next best thing at The Opera House in five shows across July on Thursday 18, Friday 19 and Saturday 20. Jeff Duff, Steve Balbi and Brydon Stace are reuniting for a tribute to the greatest work of the musical chameleon, with an all-star cast of Australian rock royalty. Tickets from sydneyoperahouse.com.au.

Wavves

ADVERTISING: Ross Eldridge - 0422 659 425 / (02) 9690 0806 ross@thebrag.com ADVERTISING: Les White - 0405 581 125 / (02) 8394 9027 les@thebrag.com PUBLISHER: Rob Furst GENERAL MANAGER, FURST MEDIA: Patrick Carr patrick@furstmedia.com.au, (03) 9428 3600, 0402 821 122 DIGITAL DIRECTOR/ADVERTISING: Kris Furst kris@furstmedia.com.au (03) 9428 3600 GIG & CLUB GUIDE CO-ORDINATOR: Nat Amat, Katie Davern - gigguide@thebrag.com (rock) clubguide@thebrag.com (dance, hip hop & parties) AWESOME INTERNS: Natalie Amat, Katie Davern, Mina Kitsos REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS: Nat Amat, Ian Barr, Simon Binns, Katie Davern, Marissa Demetriou, Christie Eliezer, Chris Honnery, Kate Jinx, Lachlan Kanoniuk, Jody Macgregor, Alicia Malone, Chris Martin, Jenny Noyes, Hugh Robertson, Rebecca Saffir, Jonno Seidler, Rach Seneviratne, Luke Telford, Simon Topper, Rick Warner, Krissi Weiss, Caitlin Welsh, David Wild Please send mail NOT ACCOUNTS direct to this NEW address 100 Albion Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010 ph - (02) 9212 4322 fax - (02) 9319 2227 EDITORIAL POLICY: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher, editors or staff of The BRAG. ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE: Luke Forrester: accounts@furstmedia.com.au ph - (03) 9428 3600 fax - (03) 9428 3611 Furst Media, 3 Newton Street Richmond Victoria 3121 DEADLINES: Editorial: Wednesday 12pm (no extensions) Artwork/ad bookings: Thursday 12pm (no extensions).

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6 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

BRAG PRESENTS SOME SPLENDID SIDESHOWS

Missed out on one of those golden tickets to Splendour ‘13? Well stop that sniffling because your favourite street press is here with some serious sideshow action. The Brag is presenting gigs from some of the most buzz-worthy acts in the lead-up to the festival.

Game of Thrones soundtrackers MS MR will be dazzling fans on Friday July 26 at the Metro Theatre, and while we can’t promise kick-arse princesses and dragons, we can promise some scorching tracks. 4AD luminaries Daughter descend on Oxford Art Factory Wednesday July 24 with their haunting, darkly dreamy songs in tow, before cool cats/your future BFFs Palma Violets also hit up OAF on Tuesday July 30. Tickets on sale now!

FESTIVAL OF THE SUN

Port Macquarie’s uber-chill FOTSUN is back for 2013, taking over the Sundowner Breakwall Tourist Park for Friday and Saturday December 13 and 14. Which means you can get your Black Friday on with Day of the Dead and Halloween costumes and, presumably, some spooky bands booked. The first line-up announcement isn’t until August, but you can book tickets on fotsun.com already, which we recommend as the festival is BYO and camping comes free.

SLEEP WALKERS CLUB

Hot local psych, garage and ‘60s inspired rock’n’roll bands are the order at new monthly night The Sleep Walkers Club, which launches next Friday May 24 at FBi Social, level two of the Kings Cross Hotel. Picked by the bandbooker behind last season’s Jurassic Lounge, they’re kicking things off in style with The Dolly Rocker Movement, The Nugs, The Fontaynes, Royal Headache DJs (Coco & Crisp), Ben Fester and Sleep Walkers DJs, all for $12. For more details visit fbiradio.com.

WHAT SO NOT TOUR

Flume’s other project, with Chris ‘Emoh’ Emerson, is releasing a fresh EP The Quack on June 14 and following it up with a tour – they’ll be at the Greenwood this Thursday May 16 and at Chinese Laundry on Saturday June 15. Listen out for The Quack single, which features the Ill Prosciutto himself Action Bronson – you might get a sneak preview of it when the duo take over triple j’s Mix Up Exclusives every Saturday night in May.

THE INSTITUTION

Music scouts at the ready, because on Tuesday May 21, 308 Productions in association with JMC Academy is presenting The Institution, highlighting the best performances from the JMC Academy graduate concert. Taking Berlin, an emerging “psych-boogie” band, have been gigging around the traps for the past couple of months and are headlining the evening’s bill alongside The Darlings, who fuse blues, folk and pop. It all happens in The Lair at The Metro. Tickets on the door.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MOOAAARRR

All this sideshow news is getting ridiculous – dust off that yearly planner your Nan got you for Christmas and start taking serious notes. Scuzzy surf-rock beach kings Wavves are teaming up with psychedelic “ffunny ffrends” Unknown Mortal Orchestra for a sideshow of epic genre mashing proportions. With their powers combined they’ll be bringing a night of bubble gum grunge to The Standard on Thursday July 25. But that’s not even the half of it! Cold War Kids get the sideshow thing right with us, trekking back from the wilds of Byron to play the Metro Theatre on Monday July 29, and then the Factory Theatre will play host to Irish lads Villagers come Thursday August 1.

Phew. Tickets are on sale now so get clicking, kiddos.

BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 7

rock music news

free stuff

welcome to the frontline: what’s goin’ on around town... with Lisa Omagari, Natalie Amat and Nick Jarvis.

five things WITH

FREESTUFF@THEBRAG.COM Björk

LAUREN LUCILLE The Music You Make Growing up I wrote mostly folk/ 4. pop music! A few years ago I started experimenting with jazz composition and was inspired to record an original jazz album with a jazz quartet and a string trio. Hidden Here was independently released in 2012.

The album is mostly quiet and moody, with a few up-tempo tracks in the middle of the calm! Now I’m focusing on my new ‘singer/ songwriter’ stuff and am preparing for an EP and shows in all cities!

Music, Right Here, Right Now My mother was gigging all the time 5. two years ago and getting paid well. Now it’s

Growing Up I was born into a family of musicians 1.

– my mother’s side have always been jazz musicians and my father was also a musician.

I’ve followed in my mother’s footsteps as a jazz singer and composer. I was playing guitar and piano as a kid and I started writing at the age of 10.

Inspirations As an aspiring jazz singer at 18 years 2. old, Jane Monheit and Ella Fitzgerald were two of the first jazz singers I loved, and of

Fanny Lumsden

course my mother, Sharny Russell. Aside from jazz, Ani DiFranco and Anaïs Mitchell inspire my folk/pop song writing. In jazz, Kurt Elling, Gian Slater and Sara Serpa are three of my favourite singers and musical inspirations.

Your Band For jazz I use different accompanists 3. for different gigs. When I travel, I use the top musicians in those cities. I’m currently working on my new folk/pop singer-songwriter music and I will have more of a set band – that’s still in progress though!

Australian comedy dynamo Ben Darsow and features Trevor Cook, Barry Hamilton, John Cruickshank, Liam Bradbery, Cait Johnson, Marty Morgan and Katie Burch. Headlining a night of blues infused rock’n’roll on Thursday May 16 is Blind Valley with support from Sydney rockers The Shooters Party and Harriet Whiskey Club. Friday’s entertainment comes in the way of The Tango Saloon, Little Fox and La Tarantella. Back from seven weeks in the studio are The Khanz with new material to play on Saturday May 18, with besties Ginger & Drum and Dallas Pony, followed

by Clockwerk and friends making you sweat with heavy-bottomed bass tunes at Hands Up! fbiradio.com for more.

harder to find a consistent gig, and generally we are getting paid less! I work really hard to make a living off teaching singing and gigging. It’s never-ending work! A band that has obviously worked really hard is Aluka.

They are a trio of girls singing a cappella. Also just saw in concert Leigh Carriage, from Byron Bay who is a top jazz/pop/soul singer who I recommend any aspiring singer listen to! In Sydney, Venue 505 always has something great on (not just jazz!) and Hard Rock Café supports local singer/songwriters and is a legendary place!

What: Nina Simone Tribute ft. Lauren Lucille, Matt McMahon, Jonathan Zwartz and Tim Firth Where: Venue 505, 208 Cleveland St, Surry Hills When: Wednesday May 22

ÓLAFUR ARNALDS

Dear Iceland, we’d almost lost faith in you when we realised after months of Icelandic language lessons that it was all money wasted, since we still can’t sing along to Sigur Rós (do you know anywhere we can learn ‘Hopelandic’?). Then Björk’s swan dress made an appearance at last year’s Halloween party and it was looking grim for a while, but this Ólafur Arnalds character is turning tables. Why, he’s rearranging furniture and building his own rooms of sonic majesty. His minimalist sounds shimmer and still manage to leave eerily dark shadows, and his blend of trip-hop with classical tendencies are enough to make us question his bio. Arnalds was a hardcore drummer? Now you’re just trying to be weird, so we’re going to give away copies of his album, For Now I Am Winter, to the best Hopelandic names for Björk’s swan dress.

BEACH ROAD

This week’s line-up at the Beach Road is looking just as damn fine as last week’s, with Sosueme presenting Bleeding Knees Club, Danny Clayton, Hailer and Devola in the Rex Room as well as DJs Rave Doss and Tash in the public bar on Wednesday May 15.

(Plus – make sure you put Wednesday May 22 in your diary early because the almighty Regurgitator is back and playing a free gig that night!). Dialect & Despair and DJ Secret Weapon take over Beach Road’s Fresh Fridays Reggae & Hip Hop Party on May 17, and you can also catch DJ Greg Perano from 8pm in the public bar. Then on Saturday May 18 those Neapolitan-sampling hit hucksters Yolanda Be Cool will be joined by Hobophonics. More at beachroadbondi.com.au.

Regurgitator

STEROPHONICS

The Welsh rockers are back. Stereophonics are gracing Australian shores in July to play three shows with special guests and SXSW darlings Atlas Genius. For the past 15 years, the band has toured the globe chalking up five UK number ones along the way. They play Enmore Theatre in Sydney on Thursday July 18, The Hi-Fi Bar in Brisbane on Friday July 19 and The Palace in Melbourne on Sunday July 21. Tickets on sale now. Visit livenation. com.au for more.

NOVA & THE EXPERIENCE

Indie-pop lovelies Nova & the Experience are back this year with their new single ‘Dragonflies and Waterfalls’. N.A.T.E have spent the past year locking down a rehashed sound; brother and sister vocalists Anna Buckingham and Nova Smith have let the acoustic guitar take a back step in favour of clean electric reverb – something best heard on their new EP, There’s Something Here. The duo will launch it at the Beresford Hotel on Friday May 31.

COUNTRY ROAD

We much preferred the name of Fanny Lumsden’s backing band when they were the Glorious Whores, instead of the more family friendly Thrillseekers.

But names aside, we love their gentle country rocking styles, and you can love them too when they play OAF with Lucky Luke and his Shooting Stars and Andy Golledge this Thursday May 16 for a tenner.

FBI SOCIAL

Punny LOLs are kicking off this week’s FBi Social, with The Laugh Stand Festival after party on Wednesday May 15. A perfect way to come down from the highs of The Sydney Comedy Festival, the unofficial festival after party will be hosted by South 8 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

Airbourne

THE RED PAINTINGS

Sydney’s art school kids are back with a new album out June 7, and a big fancy stage show touring the country – catch them at the Hi Fi on Friday June 14. They’re also on the look out for punters who want to be human canvases onstage, check out facebook.com/ TRPartistpage if you like the idea of being painted on.

CLARE BOWDITCH

The kissed-by-fire songwriter has a new album and single out right now, and she’s plotting another Winter Secrets tour this August. She’s bringing wunderkinder Splender on the road, and one lucky musician in each state can win the chance to join Bowditch and band onstage to play with them. Info on the audition process at clarebowditch.com, and catch her live at the Factory on Saturday 3 August – tickets on sale now!

AIRBOURNE

Heads – prepare to bang. Airbourne are back and touring their new album Black Dog Barking, out this Friday May 17. Catch them turning it up to 11 at the Hi Fi on Saturday July 27 and at Splendour in the Grass, where they may well be carrying a Best Live Band award from the Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards (they’re nominated in the June 17 ceremony).

CELEBRATING THE RETURN OF THE BRITISH & IRISH LIONS!

THE LIONS TOUR WITH SPECIAL GUESTS

HUNGRY KIDS OF HUNGARY

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CHUGGENTERTAINMENT.COM

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BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 9

Industrial Strength Music Industry News with Christie Eliezer

THINGS WE HEAR

licence, so they axed it. * An English Vaccines fan claimed that he was turned away from a sold-out show because he couldn’t tell security the name of the band’s singer and their albums. Security said there’d been a lot of pickpocketing in the area and wanted to ensure only real Vaccines ticket holders got in. * Someone get Rihanna a watch. She was soundly booed when she came on three hours late for a Boston show. Watching a basketball match apparently. * Bill Clinton reveals he tried to get Led Zeppelin to reunite for a Hurricane Sandy benefit in New York last year. * Demand for Dash Berlin’s three-hour

* Big Day Out announced its new home on the Gold Coast as Metricon Stadium & Carrara Parklands, which we tipped back in January. The deal is for five years. BDO Gold Coast draws 45,000 and brings $30m to the local economy. * Weekend Vines, the camping festival to be held for two days after the May 17 world premiere of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories in Wee Waa NSW, is cancelled.

Promoters discovered that the Seplin Estate Winery site had a liquor licence but it did not extend to the whole site. Local authorities weren’t breaking speed records to get a new

SOUND SUMMIT MOVES TO SYDNEY

could have been sorted out just by talking.

Two managers (Michael McMartin of the Gurus and Keith Welsh of Icehouse) and copyright lawyer Adrian McGruther are holding a seminar on dispute resolution in the arts called Fuck You! at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday May 25, tickets are $15 at oztix.com.au.

The Sound Summit Festival of Independent and Innovative Music is moving from Newcastle to Sydney, scheduled for Thursday November 7 to Sunday 10. The organisers say there are “many reasons” for the trek down National Highway 1 and the change of date, but “the main issue has involved Sound Summit’s funding.

This has forced (us) to rethink its financial sustainability and its position as a festival to be able to continue to provide distinctive, challenging and engaging content.” They add that the conference segment will make more of a contribution to the debate on issues facing the local music industry. The first call out for applications opens on Tuesday May 21. If you’re interested in participating, go to soundsummit.com.au.

VIVID #2: INERTIA’S RISING BAND PLAN

Inertia will “develop” a plan onstage for an emerging artist as part of Vivid Ideas. Label rep Mark Dodds (Inertia Access), triple j Unearthed’s Dave Ruby Howe, Chris Twite of Handsome Tours, FBi’s Stephen Goodhew, manager Jo Gray and Select agent Rob Giovannoni will go through the plan. New artists are invited to enter to be the focus of this session by leaving their details at inertia-music.com/accessallareas.

Inertia Access will also release the chosen artist’s single in June. The event is on Sunday June 2 at 7pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Forum. Tickets are $10, you can get them from vividsydney.com.

BRAG MOVES OFFICE

This fine magazine you hold in your hands is moving its headquarters to 100 Albion Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010 from Monday May 13 – new direct line is (02) 9212 4322.

LANIE LANE RIDES IN ON GOLD

VIVID #1: TWO MANAGERS & A LAWYER SAY FUCK YOU!

Ivy League Records has revealed that Lanie Lane’s debut To The Horses has hit gold status. The album entered the ARIA chart at #12 and won the FBi SMAC Award for Album of the Year and AIR Award for Best Blues

The creative industries abound with disputes over royalty splits, music used without permission or photographers wanting a share in merchandising, where many

MusicIsLife shows was so intense that Sydney had to increase its capacity, Melbourne sold out, and Adelaide and Perth are close to putting out the House Full sign. * At the Byron Bay Liquor Accord’s annual general meeting last week, local police said that Byron Bay has had its lowest assault rate in five years since the trial 1.30am lockout was introduced in March. * Serial loonies the Westboro Baptist Church are threatening to protest at Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman’s funeral and break into Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘Crazy Train’. * The National played their song ‘Sorrow’ 105 times in a row for six hours straight for an art installation at New York’s MoMA. and Roots album. Lane is working on album number two as we speak.

WHOOPS! YOURS OR MINE #1: JUSTIN BIEBER

See the bad karma you get when you abandon your monkey? Justin Bieber is being sued for $10 million over the 2010 track ‘Somebody To Love’. R&B singer Devin Copeland (AKA De Rico) and songwriter Mareio Overton say it has the same name, same time signature and beat pattern and similar chords and lyrics to a song they wrote.

WHOOPS! YOURS OR MINE #2: WILL.I.AM

will.i.am blames a misunderstanding for the conflict over his track ‘Let’s Go’ (featuring Chris ‘Thumper’ Brown), which uses ‘Rebound’ by Russia’s Arty and Mat Zo. Zo tweeted “Arty and I are not bitter about this, more surprised. We knew will.i.am was interested in this track, but declined working with him at the time.” will.i.am said, “Arty is a dope producer so I wrote this song to ‘Rebound’ this last year. I got in touch with Arty and showed it to him, did a different version to it ‘cause I asked him [to] make it newer ‘cause I don’t just wanna take your song and rap over it… We preferred writing over and using the [original] ‘Rebound’.

Something happened and the clearance... hopefully we resolved the issue." He’s also being sued by Brit act Tulisa over ‘Scream & Shout’, while Freeland say ‘Mancry’ was nicked for Black Eyed Pea’s ‘Party All The Time’, and Daft Punk say their song was used for ‘I Got It From My Momma’.

TRIPLE J DOES 20

triple j is on the search to find the Hottest 100 songs from the past 20 years. Listeners are asked to cast their vote for any song between January 1993 and Dec 2012.

Voting begins this Tuesday (May 14) and ends June 2.

E HIFI 1300 THO M.AU THEHIFI.C

DOIDGE LEAVES SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE

Victoria Doidge has left her post as director of marketing, communications and customer services at the Sydney Opera House. Way back in the dark ages, Doidge co-founded Australia’s first music download site ChaosMusic.

Just Announced

HTC & Speaker TV Presents

Airbourne

Hungry Kids of Hungary

Sat 27 Jul

MANAGERS TEAM UP FOR CUB SCOUTS

Spark and Opus’s Briese Abbott (PVT) and London-based Rowan Brand (ex-Boy and Bear, now UK’s Bear’s Den and Sydney’s Tigertown) are jointly managing Brisbane’s Cub Scouts. They are currently touring Europe and Asia and getting airplay on US college radio.

Sat 6 Jul

Coming Soon

Born Of Osiris (USA)

HTC & Speaker TV Presents

BriBry (IRL)

The Red Paintings

Sat 18 May

Birds of Tokyo

Sun 9 Jun

Fri 14 Jun

SE LL IN G

FA ST

This Week

Thu 23 May

Municipal Waste (USA)

HTC & Speaker TV Presents

Mono (JPN)

Dappled Cities

Thu 27 Jun

Sun 16 Jun

Thu 20 Jun

Saint Vitus (USA) & Monarch! (FRA)

SE LL IN G

FA ST

Fri 19 Jul

Hardcore 2013 Feat.

Youth of Today (USA) + More

Haim (USA) Wed 24 Jul

Nejo Y Dalmata (PUR) Fri 26 Jul

Sat 13 Jul 18+ | Sun 14 Jul All Ages ENTERTAINMENT QUARTER, BUILDING 220, 122 LANG RD, MOORE PARK, SYDNEY

10 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

NEW SIGNINGS #1: RED REBEL REASON WITH JACOB BUTLER

Red Rebel Music signed Melbourne singersongwriter Jacob Butler. “Jacob has been on my radar for a while now, but it wasn’t until I was sourcing songs for the Australian feature film Occupied that the stars finally aligned,” RRM director Karen Waters said.

His debut album Reason is out late 2013 through MGM, with lead off single ‘Mind Waltz’ already winning overseas accolades.

NEW SIGNINGS #2: BIRD’S ROBE GET THE NERVE

Bird’s Robe Records has opened its roster to alt-rock quartet The Nerve. It features Ezekiel Ox (Mammal, Over-Reactor), Lucius Borich (Cog, Juice, FloatingMe), Davarj Thomas (Pre-Shrunk) and virtuoso guitarist Glenn Proudfoot. New single ‘Down There’, out May 31, is the follow-up to the triple j and community radio supported debut ‘Witness’. They tour through June.

Lifelines Expecting: both Josh Pyke and Urthboy had to cancel shows on the weekend as their respective wives were due to deliver.

Marrying: former MTV presenter Erin McNaught and Brit muso Example tie the knot on May 18 at a “very private” ceremony in her hometown of Brisbane.

Split: One Direction’s Liam Payne and Danielle Peazer.

They met while auditioning for X Factor in 2010 and been struggling to maintain a long distance relationship.

Split: Chris Brown said ta-ta to Rihanna, and just after she spent almost $1 million on a sports car for his 24th birthday. He says she’s too young (25).

Recovering: Biffy Clyro frontman Simon Neil tweeted that he is “almost back to full strength” after suffering from acute bronchitis.

Ill: former Guns N’ Roses drummer Steven Adler is back in rehab.

Arrested: US metal band As I Lay Dying singer Tim Lambesis for allegedly hiring someone (happily, an undercover cop) to have his estranged wife murdered.

Arrested: Phillip Schaeffer, 53, checked into a Minnesota hospital claiming to be Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd and left $100,000 in unpaid bills.

Arrested: Bone Thugs-nHarmony’s Layzie Bone for two traffic violations.

Jailed: former Fugee Lauryn Hill for three months in prison and three months home confinement for not paying taxes on $1m in earnings.

Released: Ja Rule after jail time for gun possession and $3m tax evasion.

In Court: former Brisbane choreographer Wade Robson, who earlier denied being abused

by Michael Jackson as a five yearold at his Neverland ranch, has changed his tune and wants millions saying he suffered from trauma.

He appeared in Jackson’s ‘Black or White’, ‘Jam’ and ‘Heal the World’ videos.

Died: Greg Quill, singer and songwriter with early ‘70s band Country Radio (‘Gypsy Queen’) and one time writer for Go-Set magazine, in Canada aged 66, after a long illness. He moved to Canada in the late ‘70s, where he continued to play and was a long time entertainment writer for the Toronto Star.

Died: Austrian-born DJ and dance producer Peter Rauhofer, 48, from brain cancer. He stormed the New York gay club scene in the ‘90s, remixed for Cher, Britney Spears and Madonna and won a Grammy Award in 2000 for Best Remixer for his remix of Cher’s ‘Believe’.

NEW SIGNINGS #3: DEW LONDON GRAMMAR

British trio London Grammar are the latest of Dew Process’s international signings. They’ll release their debut EP Metal & Dust on May 17; first single ‘Hey Now’ received 900,000 plays on Soundcloud in a couple of months.

NEW SIGNINGS #4: BREAKAWAY, MEMPHIS, PARTNER

Australia’s Breakaway Recordings and London-based Memphis Industries have struck a label partnership. Memphis Industries has been home to the likes of The Go! Team, Field Music, and Dutch Uncles with upcoming releases from the POLIÇA affiliated Marijuana Death Squads, and debuts from Pure Bathing Culture, Elephant and Junip alumni Barbarossa (AKA artist James Mathé).

BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 11

“I

’m coming to see everybody down there at just the right time. I was green before, but I’m well-seasoned now.” Bobby Womack is the last person who can believably refer to himself as inexperienced, in any way. But then again, the man who is known as the Greatest Soul Singer In The World isn’t really in the business of being believable.

Last year he was preparing to tour The Bravest Man In The Universe – his first album in 12 years – when he was hospitalised. His immediate diagnosis of pneumonia swiftly worsened. “I got real sick real fast,” Womack says. “I slipped into a coma for more than two weeks – I was out for 17 days. All the doctors were talking about pulling the plug. They were telling the family to be prepared.”

Somehow he regained consciousness. “I had bills to pay, and other things to take care of,” he says matter-of-factly. Did the need to resolve outstanding utility payments really summon him back to the land of the living? “Well, I think God knew I needed a chance to play Australia. You know I’ve never played down there?”

That last bit is a bit of a porky pie. Womack was here in 2011 as part of Damon Albarn’s massive Gorillaz global tour. He contributed vocals on multiple tracks on 2010’s Plastic Beach, most notably the soaring vocal hook on lead single ‘Stylo’ where he duels throughout with rapper Mos Def. His involvement in the album was all the more significant given it occurred by chance.

Initially Albarn had intended to feature Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb on ‘Stylo’, but the disco star was sidelined with an earache. Cue Womack

schooling the world in how to kick an epic vocal groove, old school style(o).

Being involved with Gorillaz has been hugely fulfilling for Womack. At the same time, it has reminded him of his limitations. “I’ve been singing a long time, and I’ve never got sick before. That tour with Gorillaz was the longest tour I’ve ever been a part of, and it showed me that the body is not getting any younger. I can still sing – truth be told I think I’m singing better than ever – but sometimes I got to take it all a little slower.”

This will be Womack’s first time playing his own music and shows in Australia. Then again, he’s got good reasons for taking so long to venture south. The Cleveland-born artist has been busy since debuting in 1954 at the age of 10 as a member of The Womack Brothers. During the 1970s he had a successful solo career, the skills for which were implemented during the years he played bass and guitar for gospel artist Sam Cooke as part of The Valentinos. The group’s June 1964 hit ‘It’s All Over Now’ was covered one month later by The Rolling Stones, and the Womack co-written number went on to become the British band’s first UK hit.

Cooke and The Stones are just a couple of the big names that Womack has worked with throughout the last half century. “People think I’m bragging when I start talking, but they’re all my constituents,” Womack says. “I knew all of them, and most of them were my friends. Sam Cooke, Janis (Joplin) and Marvin Gaye were very dear to me. When I get up there it’s about them, you know? It’s about the old school, because these

“I knew all of them… Sam Cooke, Janis Joplin and Marvin Gaye were very dear to me.”

12 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

2013

BOBBY WOMACK

vivid LIVE

The Last Soul Man

By Benjamin Cooper

people deserve to have monuments erected in their honour. People talk about the sound of pop music now – well, look at a guy like Michael Jackson and how much he changed things. Now years before Michael Jackson there was another Michael Jackson – his name was Little Richard.

Nothing exists without the past.”

Womack and Cooke had a particularly close relationship at a time when the particulars of touring life for black musicians differed greatly to others. “When I was 16 years old I was playing guitar for Sam,” Womack says. “We’d play all over the country, and wherever we went the white folks would be staying in hotels, and we’d have to stay in motels. One day I asked Sam why we couldn’t stay in a hotel with the rest of them. And he turns to me and says, ‘Don’t worry about staying in no hotel. It’s just a bunch of hoes running around.’

“Another time Sam called me up to his house,” he continues, changing tack slightly. “He’d just finished writing ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, and he wanted to know what I thought about it. I told him straight that the song was something else. That it was a different kind of hit. Then I asked him if he thought that one day a change was gonna come. And he said to me that soon enough the world would change forever. He said one day there’d be a black president. That seemed pretty strange to me, back then. Sam said he wouldn’t see it in his life, but he thought I would.

“We have to thank music a lot for where we at today. I guarantee you there would be no Barack Obama without all the musicians that went before him. And that’s because music is the universal language. Music can anger people and it can soothe them, but most of all it’s what brings people together and helps them get past all that other bullshit. You know?”

Womack’s absence from recording and performing since the turn of the century was

a great loss. He recorded Christmas Album in 2000, and spent a good chunk of the next decade battling ill health. In 2009, the same year he worked with Albarn on Plastic Beach, he was inducted into Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood.

After a period of relative exile from the industry, it was a joyful return to the city of his birth at the Public Hall. The singer dedicated the occasion to Cooke, telling the audience of 6000 people that he wished he could share it with the man who had plucked him and his brothers out of Ohio and set them on the road to fame.

“When they told me they were going to induct me, they asked who I wanted to do my speech.

I told them I’ll do my own damn speech. Ain’t nobody left to do my speech; they all gone now,” he says.

The 69-year-old was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in January this year. It doesn’t seem to have affected his conversational skills – at one point he asks mischievously, “You do know I’m making a special effort to come and see you all in your winter?” Nor has it affected his live performances – in February he performed at the Hall of Fame again and intermittently mused on the origins of soul music with the audience, while delivering a set laden with classics like ‘Across 110th St’ with an electric backing band and massive gospel choir.

He is particularly proud of last year’s Albarn and Richard Russell (Gil Scott-Heron) produced The Bravest Man In The Universe. “I think it’s a great album. I had to make this album for all the ones out there who struggle. There’re too many Wilson Picketts out there who never really get what they deserve. I hope people will listen to it, and they will have hope.”

Where: Sydney Opera House for Vivid LIVE When: Friday May 24, Saturday May 25

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2013

vivid LIVE

Heritage Orchestra

my vivid live top five

By Creative Director Fergus Linehan

I love this year’s Vivid LIVE. It’s not the showiest line-up we’ve ever assembled but the more time I spend on it, the more it reveals incredible musical depth and some of the best stories you’ll ever hear – the story of Sunnyboys, the story of Bobby Womack, the story of Alan Lomax and the story of Gurrumul to name but a few. Narrowing this down to five top picks was very, very hard. In truth there are more than five – Scott Walker’s album deconstructed into the sound installation BISH BOSH should be there, as should the stage extravaganza that Empire of the Sun are dreaming up to play their new material. I am pumped about the return of C.W. Stoneking, and the Studio Parties deserve a whole section of love and attention. Anyway, since I’ve been forced into a corner, here are five picks – not top picks, just picks.

Reworking The Classics

By Alasdair Duncan

I

nternational touring requires a great deal of planning and preparation, but when you’re the leader of dozens of musicians, you truly need to go above and beyond. Christopher Wheeler, producer and founding member of the Heritage Orchestra, is in a mild state of panic when I call him to ask about their upcoming Australian trip.

1. SOUNDS OF THE SOUTH:

Obviously the big draw card on this show is Justin Vernon (AKA Bon Iver) but wait until you hear the rest of the team – the incredible Matthew E. White, Frazey Ford from The Be Good Tanyas, Megafaun and Fight the Big Bull. This is the sort of show Vivid was made for – a once in a lifetime opportunity to hear artists at the height of their powers doing it for the sheer love of the music. In this case it is the sounds from the Southern States – old-time hymns, deep delta blues and plaintive folk ballads.

“Oh my god, it’s just ridiculous,” he says with a nervous laugh. “There are so many things to do, logistically as well as artistically, to get everything up to scratch. It’s a massive undertaking – there are so many instruments and cases and specialised bits and bobs that we’d never be able to rent anywhere. It’s the farthest and most adventurous trip that we’ve ever done with the orchestra, and not only that, we’re performing two shows when we get there! It’s great, but it’s a lot of work.”

Heritage Orchestra are different from your standard, polite orchestral players – while they count strings, horns and woodwinds amongst their number, their repertoire is anything but standard.

2. BOBBY WOMACK:

“We started this orchestra as we were coming out of university,” Wheeler explains, “and there was a lot of post-college idealism there.

We thought that we could change the world by forming an orchestra that didn’t play classical music. The idea has always been to take a wider view than what we learned at school – we specifically sought out young players who had really aspirational ideas about their instruments, and were willing to try new ideas.”

At a basic level I just want to hear the great Womack singing ‘Across 110th Street’, ‘Woman’s Gotta Have It’ and ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’, but I’m also a huge fan of The Bravest Man in the Universe, that he recently made with Damon Albarn and Richard Russell. The back catalogue is staggering, his performance is electrifying and the stage show is pumping. Vivid’s perfect party-starter.

In a career spanning nearly a decade, they have collaborated with everyone from John Cale to Jamie Cullum, but when they come to Australia for Vivid Live, their true range will be on display.

3. KRAFTWERK 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8:

The group will play two shows over the course of Vivid LIVE, one of them inspired by the sci-fi classic Blade Runner, the other by cult post-punk outfit Joy Division. Of the two, the Joy Division project is the strangest, not to mention the most ambitious. Entitled Live_Transmission, the work was originally commissioned for the UK’s Brighton Festival, and it serves as a modern reimagining of the Manchester band’s output.

I’ve seen the band do their 3D extravaganza in a festival field in Gothenburg and the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London, but that will be nothing compared to the experience of hearing all eight albums with the pristine acoustics of the Opera Theatre. This will be a mindmelting journey through a catalogue whose tentacles reach into almost every area of popular music.

“Someone said that this show is possibly what Joy Division might sound like if the singer Ian Curtis was still around,” Wheeler says. “God knows if that’s true, but what a statement to live up to!” The show, in fact, pays homage to Joy Division, taking elements of their music, then deconstructing and reinterpreting them through a modern lens.

4. KARL HYDE:

5. BLADE RUNNER:

This has always been one of my favourite film scores. Like so much of this year’s program it proved to be ahead of its time and informed not just film scores but a whole generation of artists working with electronic music. Heritage Orchestra have taken various unofficial versions and created their own spectacular and spellbinding tribute to Vangelis. With almost 50 musicians on-stage it is a truly epic undertaking, even

by Sydney Opera House standards.

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Fergus Linehan photo by Prudence Upton

Another very Vivid kind of show – it took me a few listens but the Underworld frontman’s solo album is now on repeat on my stereo. This will be a magical concert – a brilliant playing of the lush melodies of the new album and a revisiting of Underworld favourites for the Concert Hall.

Putting the show together proved quite a feat. “I was aware of Joy Divison before, but didn’t have a massive amount of knowledge,” Wheeler says, “so I scrambled around to find a musical director who could recreate the band’s music as electronic demos, and Robin Rimbaud, otherwise known as Scanner, was the perfect guy for that job.”

“Someone said that this show is possibly what Joy Division might sound like if the singer Ian Curtis was still around.”

The orchestra commissioned a series of electronic tracks from Scanner, and then, in a process not unlike Chinese whispers, they passed the recordings on to a live band, who jammed over them and reinterpreted them, and then on to an orchestral arranger, who transcribed the mess of sounds and reinterpreted them yet again.

The end result was a musical score so thrillingly weird that the Heritage Orchestra weren’t sure what to do.

new wave sound Drone, contemporary classical, amplified strings, experimental guitar and glitch R&B are just some of the sounds you can put in your ears when the Seymour Centre gets in on the Vivid LIVE action. New Wave Sound takes over the Everest Theatre and Sound Lounge at the Seymour on June 7 and 8, kicking off with a forum of music creators and curators revealing what’s hot in their musical worlds, followed by a string of performances from a truly diverse range of music makers. Catch everyone from members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra getting loose and experimental to piano composer Anthony Panteras (who opened for Mondo Cane recently) and Jeremy-Scott loving future R&B scamps Collarbones.

Full program at the Seymour Centre website.

“When we got the written scores from the orchestrator, we gave them to the orchestra to play, with no idea of what they would sound like or what had come out of this process,” Wheeler says with a laugh. “It was a really experimental approach, and it was very exciting.

Even the day before the first concert, at the Brighton Dome, we still didn’t know what was going to happen or how successful it was going to be. The idea behind the show was to present the essence of Joy Division and the signature spirit of that band, while deconstructing it and exploring musical motifs and ideas. The music always comes back to the tone of Joy Division, the essence.

Miraculously, I think it worked.”

Just how did it go over with the band’s fans? “The old beardy guys who went to their gigs seem to love it!” Wheeler says. “It’s a respectful tribute, but a total artistic deconstruction of the music.”

On a slightly less mad tangent, Music From Blade Runner sees the group playing their own version of the score from Ridley Scott’s scifi classic. “That show was originally conceived for Massive Attack’s showcase at the Meltdown Festival,” he says. “I love the film and its Vangelis soundtrack very much, but the interesting thing is that there’s no written score, so we had to transcribe it ourselves, and reinterpret it in our own way. I love the sound of Blade Runner, and I’m not just talking about the music, but about the background noises – the blips and beats and the sounds of the rain, because they’re very important, and they appear on the soundtrack recording as well.

I deconstructed it all as I saw it, and passed on my notes to three amazing orchestrators, and that was that, really.”

Choosing what part of Blade Runner to put where was the difficult thing. “We had debates about whether to play a particular melody on a French horn or keep it on the original CS-80 synth,” Wheeler says. “Usually we opted to keep it on the original synth, to be true to the sound of Blade Runner. There were a lot of decisions as to what Where: Sydney Opera House we could do to avoid sounding like (Concert Hall) a terrible pastiche of the original, and bring something new. The When: Music From Blade bottom line is that it’s a tribute to Runner Sunday May 26 / the music of Blade Runner. It’s our Live_Transmission Wednesday own version of the music, with total May 29 respect for the original.”

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vivid LIVE

2013

party in the studio

Trashy swagged-out Texan rappers, Acid legends from Detroit, Deep House sirens with Nile Rodgers dreads, soulful sexy disco, shimmering future house, Chicago foot-work club stompers and so much more – the Studio Parties for Vivid LIVE are covering bases we never knew we wanted covered, and now we can’t live without them.

See what Future Classic (Saturday May 25), Goodgod (Friday May 31), Club Kooky (Saturday June 1 – sold out) and Astral People (Sunday June 2) have put together by visiting vividlive.sydneyoperahouse.com.

Matthew E. White

The Melting Pot

By Krissi Weiss

G

uitarist/vocalist/songwriter/producer/ arranger/free jazz virtuoso Matthew E. White (a legitimate slashie) is heading to Australia for Vivid LIVE, and apparently figured he’d be a part of not one but two mammoth shows for the festival.

“In some ways the idea of a solo project is a bit of a myth,” he explains. “With me, I’m leading the project but I’m still working with a lot of people just like I do with Fight The Big Bull. Conceptually, things aren’t really that different, apart from the fact I’m singing my songs as opposed to playing my compositions. When you’re singing and you’re truly a front man there’s a little bit more of a personal energy that goes into it I guess, but I think the main difference is stylistically. Fight The Big Bull is basically avant-garde, experimental music while Matthew White is songs that are far more in-the-box compositions. I like having that dual outlet; it’s more than it being a group and solo thing. It’s far out, experimental compositions versus songs that people can easily listen to and relate to.

“Trying to take what works on the album and make it work on stage can sometimes be tricky but it’s coming together OK and we’re having a good time,” White says. “We’re putting a lot of energy into it and we’re trying to create an energy where everyone can have a good time, you know? The audience and us. Live shows should be special events; they’re a time and place that should only happen once so we try to approach playing in that way and that’s what makes a live show so incredibly different to just listening to a record.”

“I feel the most comfortable in song-based stuff at the moment. I think my journey has been through all other music to that, and I think the more I’m touring all over the world playing these songs the more it makes me want to keep doing it. At the same time going through Fight The Big Bull and learning about composition and learning about arranging has been like a laboratory where I can bring my own songs and I’m able to bring that element into what I do in these songs.”

For those who have followed White’s career it’s easy to assume that Big Inner is a typical solo album – a singer alone, on stage with a guitar and their innermost secrets – but for White this experience is totally removed from that concept. He explains that while he’s performing under his own name and not a band name,

What: Sydney Opera House for Vivid LIVE When: Matthew E. White Sunday June 2 / Sound of the South Saturday June 1 and Sunday June 2

Megafaun Sunnyboys

Dawn of a New Day

By Benjamin Cooper

and facing each day’s challenges separately.

In July 2011 Burgman came back to Australia for his grandmother’s 90th birthday, and was encouraged by Peter to visit Jeremy, who was living in Brisbane. The two friends sat together, reminiscing and playing songs, while Jeremy’s partner Mary looked on.

ichard Burgman has been in a bunch of bands. He played in underground heroes Weddings Parties Anything and legendary punk outfit The Saints, but he’s probably best known as guitarist for 1980s quartet The Sunnyboys.

R

Some months later Peter and Jeremy were asked if they would be interested in playing an acoustic set at one of the smaller venues during Hoodoo Gurus Dig It Up! invitational.

Jeremy explained he could only play an electric set, and the band fell into place again.

The band burned onto the Sydney scene at a gig with Lipstick Killers on August 15, 1980. After that legendary show at Chequers nightclub they released a self-titled EP on Phantom Records. They had started mucking about the previous year with a roster comprised of brothers Peter and Jeremy Oxley on bass and guitar respectively, ‘Big’ Bill Bilson on drums and Burgman playing guitar. The Oxleys and Bilson hailed from Kingscliff in northern NSW, and had met Wagga Wagga’s Burgman when the latter was playing in a band called Shy Imposters with Peter Oxley.

“We were dealing with massive unknowns,” Burgman says. “We didn’t know if anyone would be into it – we didn’t even know how we would perform.” Yet, as the DVD of their show at the Enmore attests, they put on one hell of a show. “It was brilliant, wasn’t it?” Burgman asks. “We were so nervous walking out on stage, and we looked down into this sea of waiting faces, and Jeremy just started playing and we were on. There were grins everywhere – I can honestly say I’ve never been in a room with so much joy and love. I didn’t come down for months.”

These days Burgman resides in Kingston, in eastern Ontario, where he’s lived since emigrating in the late 1980s. After the band imploded in 1984 – Jeremy Oxley had told Burgman earlier in the year that he was drinking to drown out the voices in his head – things remained in stasis. There was a brief period between 1987 and 1990 where Jeremy recorded an album ‘by The Sunnyboys’ entitled Wildcat with three other musicians, and in 1991 they played a short tour to commemorate the release of the compilation album Plays The Best. Then in 1998 the Oxley brothers and Bilson played two of their classics with Tim Oxley on guitar at the MCG, for Mushroom Records 25th Anniversary.

Since then the band have headlined Meredith Music Festival and played a handful of shows at A Day On The Green. “Every gig we’ve done has been special for many reasons,” Burgman says. “We’ve been able to have our families at the shows, and the sense of anticipation each time is like nothing else.

We are so grateful to be performing, because Jeremy’s been through hell and come back.

And now we’re playing the Sydney Opera House – this is big bananas.”

For nearly 30 years Jeremy Oxley battled schizophrenia. For much of the time he did it on his own, and the four friends had limited contact over the years. They were all living in scattered parts of the world, raising families

scoring the sails

For the first time in a long time, The Sunnyboys’ future looks bright. “We don’t feel like this is the end. We don’t know if there will be an end. We’re just going to take it easy, and grab our chances when they come.”

Where: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall for Vivid LIVE When: Sunday June 2

Sydney duo Heavenly Antennas created the closing song of the Doha Games, have worked with Steve Spacek and Daniel Merriweather and created a score for an SBS documentar y using just antique vibrators, but this June they’re extending their reach over the whole of Sydney Harbour . They’re creating the score for the Lighting of the Sails at the start of Vivid, collaborating with visual cross-media artists Spinifex (the first time Australian artists have worked on the Lighting of the Sails). Find out more about the duo at heavenlyantennas.com.

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Deep Roots

By Krissi Weiss

A

fourteen-piece band bringing to life the grandiose history of American folk and blues music (with the project drawing heavily on the field recordings of Alan Lomax) sounds like a mammoth task, and yet it fits perfectly within the cutting edge ethos of Vivid LIVE. In the hands of Fight The Big Bull (lead by Matthew E. White), psych-folk band Megafaun, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Frazey Ford, Sounds of the South is going to be huge in every way.

Megafaun’s Phil Cook is exploding with enthusiasm for this ambitious project. “It was born probably five if not more years ago when Megafaun met Matt White,” Cook says. “We played a show with his old band and we became instant brothers and have remained close for all these years. We started talking ideas as soon as we met because it was so obvious that we needed to work together at some point. We pitched the idea to Duke University in town here [Durham, North Carolina] and they went along with it.”

This is not a show of theatrical presentation and imitation though; all fourteen members – accomplished musicians in their own right – have contributed a lot of themselves to every part of this project. Cook explains that they feel as connected to the music as they would if they were their own compositions.

“Especially when you’ve had a hand in it from the beginning and you feel the weight of it from beginning to end; that puts a lot more punch in the back end,” he says. “With all that work going into it and all that patience, when we’re there and playing this we mean every bit of what we’re saying to the audience. Also, when do people get to play with 12 or 13 people at a time?

None of us get to do that, it’s ridiculous, you can’t organise that, so this is just so amazing.

The band sounds so thick and huge and it’s so densely arranged and all the musicians are just top notch, it’s great.”

American folk and blues music is so embedded in the Western cultural psyche that Sounds of the South isn’t going to be an educatory or introductory experience. “The people that are gonna come to this show are gonna have moments of real recognition, even if it’s just when they hear a song that’s so old they’ve heard it in some way at some point in time,” he says. “I don’t think it’s gonna feel unfamiliar, with people thinking, ‘Wow, I really learned something tonight,’ I think when people leave they’re gonna feel Americana, to put it simply.”

Bringing something so regionally specific to a global audience has ignited a new passion in Cook. “I’m so curious to present this in another country to see how that comes across,” he says.

“Sometimes in Megafaun’s music I feel like we’re some sort of ambassadors because we’re taking such a heavy American folk and roots influence that it feels like we’re somehow representing the country. A lot of more contemporary music is opting to take a global approach, it seems, and they draw from a lot of places but with this, and us, when you have such a direct lineage you do feel a little bit like you have a job to do. It’s a great job though because everyone on that stage has absolute reverence for all the music this country has produced and the whole story of American music, and everyone onstage is well versed and in love with that.”

What: Megafaun and Fight the Big Bull present Sounds of the South for Vivid LIVE When: Saturday June 1 and Sunday June 2 Where: Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall

Matthew E. White photo by Sara Padgett

While he’ll be sharing the stage as co-creator of Sounds of the South for two performances, he’s slipped in a third – a performance of his debut solo album, Big Inner. Critics are busy labelling this album an “instant classic from a relative new comer,” but there’s nothing “new” about White. Yes, this is his first journey away from the chaotic free jazz of his most famed project Fight The Big Bull and into a more song-based project of Stax/Motown-inspired blues. Yes, he’s also taking on the role of front man and vocalist, but White is an old hand - at the mere age of 30 - when it comes to music (arranger for The Mountain Goats and guitarist for psych folk outfit The Great White Jenkins are some of the more prominent projects that also find themselves on White’s resume).

things aren’t really that drastically different in terms of the creative process.

Having just embarked on a busy tour of the US to promote his latest album, White is repairing his voice. It’s on its way out when we chat, but tea and time are healing it well and he’s excited about his first Australian visit.

Bringing this album to a live environment is a completely new journey for White.

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2013

vivid IDEAS

more ideas highlights

vivid ideas

With Lisa Omagari

Festival Highlights Unpacked With Ideas Director Jess Scully

By Alasdair Duncan Data itself is a massive trend. “We hear a lot of things about fridges having microchips and TVs being able to connect to the internet,” Scully says. “Your phone can trace and record every step you take when you walk through the city on your way to work. The question is, what are the creative and commercial opportunities that come from that data?”

The power of design thinking is a third one.

“Designers no longer work from assumptions,” Scully explains. “They interrogate and redefine problems, and come up with new ways of designing solutions. The problem may be people getting drunk and fighting in Kings Cross, it may be a business being inefficient,” she continues. “With the rise of design thinking, there’s a huge opportunity for creative people to use that mindset.”

The rise of hacker culture is another strong trend. “A few years ago, it was really common for commercial information to be closed, to be locked in and encoded,” Scully says. “Now, it’s really common to have open APIs, to give the community the ability to modify software or data in order to make it useful for them. This came from hacker culture and open source culture online, but it has started to influence the business world.”

What should you see?

There are dozens of events at this year’s Vivid Ideas, so to make things easier, Jess Scully has picked her top four.

Prioritise Creativity, MCA, Monday June 3 “Here in Sydney, we have three cultural policies about to be implemented where we once had zero,” Scully says. “For the first time, we’ll have representatives from local, state and federal government together in a room, talking about how their policies work together, and answering questions about where people can turn for support if they need it.”

Make Data Beautiful, MCA, Tuesday June 4 “In this session, we’ll be talking about the emotional and creative storytelling possibilities that come from having so much data out there in the world,” Scully says. “We have artist Jonathan Harris, who takes all that data that we give away freely on social media, through status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and turns it into art.”

S

ometimes, it’s tricky being a creative person. You may have a brilliant idea – for a movie, a magazine, a business or any of a million other things – but no idea how to turn that idea into a reality.

The Vivid Ideas festival, running in tandem with Vivid Live, is all about helping creative people achieve their goals. It’s about the work that goes into creativity, and about building a sustainable career.

That, however, is the tip of the iceberg. Vivid Ideas is also about celebrating the best creative minds of the current generation. It brings together an array of speakers from all around the globe to talk about their engagement with technology and culture,

“Designers no longer work from assumptions.

They interrogate and redefine problems, and come up with new ways of designing solutions.”

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and to dazzle you with their tremendously cool ideas and innovations. Where do you even start with a festival like this? Director of Vivids Ideas, Jess Scully, is here to help.

Who gets the most out of Vivid Ideas?

The festival is for people at all stages of their creative careers. “We’ve got a really strong weekend program for people who are emerging practitioners, or at the early stages of their careers,” Scully says. “People who want to find out about the opportunities available to them, and about creative education and getting the business skills they might need.”

During the week, the festival has an industry-focused program for people who are already working in the creative industries who want to dive deeper into their chosen field. That’s kind of our daytime program. Weeknights are a free-for-all, aimed at anyone who is curious about the future of creativity, and the cultural trends that will shape our lives in years to come.

What are the emerging creative trends of 2013?

Four main trends have emerged among this year’s Vivid Ideas participants. The first of these, Scully tells me, is a focus on healthcare and the body. “The body is a huge market in Australia, and our government spends the majority of its budget on health care,” Scully says. “We get a lot of data from this – the question is how creative people can take that and turn it into artworks, into apps and into business opportunities.”

“We also have George Khut, who makes art from biofeedback. He’s currently working with Westmead Children’s Hospital to create an app that will help kids relax before traumatic procedures. There’s another speaker in that session who’s working with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. They’re working on a game called Run That Town, which is like SimCity, but using real-world census data.”

Embrace Mutations, MCA, Wednesday June 5 “This session is all about the influence of hacker culture, and where it’s going next,” Scully says. “Matthew Gardiner will be talking about how people are taking military technology and modifying it for everyday use. There’s another speaker, called Tricia Flanagan, who is going to be talking about the rise of wearable technology and where that’s going next. The keynote speaker is a woman named Anab Jain, a really interesting designer from India.”

Keep It Real, MCA, Friday June 7 “We always talk about technology as if it’s the driving force behind innovation,” Scully says, “but really, basic human desire drives innovation. This session features an anthropologist named Genevieve Bell. She works for Intel, and she travels the world trying to understand people’s interactions with technology – what they want and how technology helps them achieve that. It’s about looking to real people rather than gadgets.”

What: Vivid Ideas When: May 24 – June 10 Where: Various venues More: vividsydney.com for full program

Incredibly Short Film Festival

Friday May 31, MCA The Incredibly Short Film Festival (ISFF) is bringing GIFs – graphic interchange format for the technophobes among us – to the party. The festival has been curated and commissioned from around the world and will celebrate looping animated GIFs as short format films. The inaugural ISFF will be screened in two parts at the MCA as part of Vivid Ideas and on and around various venues in the Cross thereafter. And to our delight, the MCA installment of ISFF will be set to electronic music by a super-group of performers including Michael Di Francesco (Touch Sensitive/ Van She), George Nicholas (Seekae), dummer Joel Farland, Yama Indra AKA Gloves, and Adam Maggs (Ableton). Put it in the diary folks!

The Making Of… Transformative Theatre

Monday May 27, MCA Big hART are celebrating 21 years in 2013 as one of Australia’s most prolific arts and social change companies and they’re here to tell us their story. Established in 1992, the collective started out as a response to the downturn in regional economies, disadvantage in rural communities and increasing cultural isolation.

Vivid Ideas’ ‘The Making Of’ series offer fastpaced, hour-long tag-team sessions designed to give punters insight into the worlds of TV, gaming, music, animation and art to investigate how massive creative projects actually happen. The Transformative Theatre installment will present movers and shakers such as Deborah Myers, Trevor Jamieson and Sophia Marinos who will showcase the Big hART model, philosophy and body of work through film, music and storytelling.

Late Night Lounge

Thursday May 30, Powerhouse Museum Fancy some chocolate? What about some chocolate in a swanky design? Well, you can have both at Powerhouse Museum’s Late Night Lounge: Eat The Collection! The after hours program, designed to explore digital fabrication technologies, will see ten industry professionals design new objects. The catch? The designs will be printed in 3D. In chocolate of course.

Participating creatives include design studio Frost Design, artist Damian Butler, industrial designer Adam Goodrum, architect Chris Bosse among others.

19th International Symposium on Electronic Art 2013

June 7-16, Various The International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2013) aims to investigate the farreaching grip and diversity of the electronic media arts in contemporary society. Founded on a belief that digital art is an embedded part of everyday life, ISEA2013 comprises presentations, debates, and experimental performance to engage a dialogue about the city’s social, digital and physical infrastructure. Symposium highlights include special keynote Julian Assange who will address audiences from a live video link from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, the Australian premiere of Ryoji Ikeda’s test pattern, a largescale immersive artwork at Carriageworks, and anatomically experimental artist Stelarc’s Meat, Metal & Code where bodies perform choreographies of remote interface and interaction while hanging from hooks and rope. Be warned: the latter is not for the weak stomached.

FEEDBACK

Monday June 10, MCA Aimed at peeps between 12-25 years, FEEDBACK is a full-day music conference giving artists and music industry professionals the chance to share entertainment, inspiration and insight. Y’all know that familiar phrase: it’s not what you know, but who you know. Obviously this is not always the case, but hooking yourself up with some sweet connections ain’t going to go astray! Featuring panel discussions, keynotes, live performance, Q&As and networking opps, FEEDBACK’s where it’s at.

COMING SOON…

Don’t miss forthcoming issues of BRAG for interviews and extended features on Late Night Lounge: Eat The Collection, ISEA2013, Ryoji Ikeda’s test pattern and more.

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BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 19

vivid IDEAS

2013

reportage photography indie magazines: festival High End Content, Deepening The Exposure Low End Budgets

By Benjamin Cooper

R

eportage Photography Festival is packing quite a few surprises in its 11th season. The documentary photography festival will premiere as part of Vivid Ideas, and show works across a range of platforms including exhibitions, outdoor projections, workshops and discussions.

David Burnett, a work from Soul Rebel: An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley Tamara Dean, a work from The Edge, 2013

Special guests at the festival include American husband and wife photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, and co-founder of New York’s Contact Press Images David Burnett. The latter will be exhibiting two bodies of work – Soul Rebel: An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley, and The Presidents: From JFK to Obama – that examine vastly different topics.

The festival’s co-founder and director Stephen Dupont has just come back from America, where his exhibition Papua New Guinea Portraits and Diaries recently opened in Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. “I actually had time to catch up with David Burnett, which was great,” Dupont says. “He’s one of the photographers we’ve got coming out who will be here for the very first time, which is exceptionally exciting. I’m also a huge and unashamed Bob Marley fan, so I’ve personally got a lot to look forward to.”

How To Get Lucky In Publishing

By Alasdair Duncan s a founding editor of Lucky Peach magazine, Chris Ying is an independent publishing success story who’s presenting Indie Magazines: High End Content, Low End Budgets as part of this year’s Vivid Ideas program. You may have a subscription to Lucky Peach yourself, or have seen it in the kitchen of a hipster friend, but if not, then all you need to know is that it’s a new generation of cooking magazine; a quarterly journal that blends recipes with gorgeous design and photography, irreverent personal essays and even the occasional short story. It’s a work of art as much as it is a magazine.

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“I’ve discovered, over time, that people who really care about food also care about books and music and photography and art,” Ying tells me. “I’ve discovered that people who are writers and artists and photographers also care about food. When we started Lucky Peach, the idea was to try and reach out across genders and age groups to people with multiple interests. My own background was at McSweeney’s, who are champions of traditional publishing, so I just wanted to create a big, glorious, art-filled magazine.”

A few years ago, Ying and his friends started their own digital publisher, Ying Horowitz & Quinn.

Publishing is a scary business in this day and age, but he’s nonetheless confident. “From the time I graduated college, and even before that, I’ve heard people talk about the death of print,” he laughs. “It doesn’t scare me anymore. When you’re working on a small scale, when you’re passionate about the quality of what you’re doing, and you have a passionate audience, I think you’re okay.”

Each issue of Lucky Peach is themed, with some more obscure and bizarre than others, like the

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recent Apocalypse Issue. Ying tells me that coming up with a theme is usually a straightforward process. “Take our Chinatown issue,” he says. “Chinese food is a really broad topic, so we decided it would be interesting to approach that through the lens of Chinatowns that exist all over the world, as little outposts of Chinese culture within larger cultures. That was a vehicle for us to talk about a subject we like a lot, without just having the typical discussion.”

The magazine’s success points, perhaps, to a trend among young people, who now favour quality cooking and ingredients.

As someone in the field of food publishing, Ying for one hopes that this trend is here to stay. “I often wonder about the fierce interest that people have shown in food over the last 15 years, and whether that will continue,” he says. “There’s more affluence now, and there’s more accessibility, so everyone cares more about food. I wonder, though, is it like Pokémon, a trend that will go away in time?”

This trend towards quality food has given rise to the term ‘foodie’ – it’s more or less in common usage now, even if, like me, it makes your skin crawl whenever you hear it.

As someone who’s associated with the movement himself, I ask Ying for his take on it. “I think …” he pauses, choosing his words carefully, “I have no fierce objection to it. I think that it’s the same with any label – when somebody puts a label out there, those who are that thing tend to object to it. People hate the word hipster for the same reason they hate the word foodie and pothead, I guess.”

What: Indie Magazines: High End Content, Low End Budgets When: Sunday May 26 Where: MCA More: vividsydney.com for full program

Cuba will occupy a significant element of the program.

Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb will launch their inaugural exhibition Violet Isle: Two Visions of Cuba, while three of Cuba’s most accomplished photographers will visit Australia for the first time. Cuban master Raul Cañibano Ercilla will have a retrospective of his work at Customs House, while photography couple, Leysis Quesada Vera and Arien Chang Castan will also exhibit.

Reportage will continue its commitment to collaboration by working with New York’s United Photo Industries. Part of the Photoville Festival will be transported from its Brooklyn home to Central Avenue in Hyde Park: four shipping containers will be placed near the Archibald Fountain to show three of the major exhibitions that were on show in New York last June.

The festival’s director admits he will be focusing on the highly anticipated projections. “Reportage was born with those projections, so I’m particularly interested in how they will work this year,” Dupont says. “They’re going to be outdoors next to the Museum of Contemporary Art, and we’re doing everything we can to ensure they are really amazing.”

“I’m also really looking forward to an exhibition Anna (Maria Antoinette D’Addario) is curating entitled 4 Stories,” he continues. D’Addario is the festival’s assistant director and will present Australian photographers Jodi Bieber, Tamara Dean and Claire Martin alongside American Paula Bronstein in an investigation of the importance of and difficulties faced by women in the field.

“I really can’t pick just one thing that I’m particularly excited about,” Dupont says. “I am doing a workshop with James Nachtwey, and that’s pretty fucking exciting for me given he is one of my heroes.”

What: Reportage Photography Festival When: May 25 – June 13 Where: Various venues More: reportage.com.au

vivid light Let The Light Begin

By Lily White

Vivid Light render, Lighting The Sails by The Spinifex Group

T

his year, Vivid Light is extending its out reach with public works spanning Campbell’s Cove to Walsh Bay, Fort Dension, Sydney Ports tower and Sydney Harbour Bridge. “We are creating a nighttime playground of interactive light installations for everyone to enjoy, adults and children alike, with artists creating exciting and entertaining pieces that explore the relationship between light and sound,” says Vivid Light Director Anthony Bastic.

With so much on offer, we’d better narrow things down for you so here’s BRAG’s top picks of Vivid Light 2013.

Lighting The Sails & Collaboration #3

The Spinifex Group Every year Vivid enthusiasts wait with bated breath to see what will become of the Sydney Opera House for the festival’s most public event, Lighting The Sails.

This year it’s Australia’s The Spinifex Group who will take to the sails with their newly commissioned artwork PLAY. Spinifex has also teamed up with content creator Gemma Smith in an effort to drench the

MCA in colour, movement and light. The collaborative project will showcase lively 3D mapped illuminations to light up the façade of the museum for a harbourside bonanza.

Vivid Light Walk

Circular Quay/Walsh Bay Vivid’s much-adored Light Walk guides audiences into a far away world where colour, design and cutting edge technology rein supreme. This year, Vivid’s footprint has broadened,

overtaking terrain from Sydney Opera House to Walsh Bay and we’re hella keen to check out what light art sculptures will be on offer. On the Circular Quay promenade, Bucky Bulb will be hard to miss; a huge old-fashioned light bulb will pulsate with LED lights and translucent tubes and down at Campbell’s Cove in The Rocks you’ll find the Enlightened Piano.

Colour The Bridge

Intel Australia with 32 Hundred Lighting Vivid’s enlisted the help of Intel Australia and 32 Hundred and they’re going to let us colour the Bridge all by ourselves! Using the latest interactive lighting technology, a world-first immersive projection will grace the bridge’s western face. You’ll be able to choose a section of the

Bridge to light up, select a colour and stand back while your creation is brought to life.

Darling Harbour

Hurrah! Darling Harbour has finally joined the Vivid bill and we’re about to get a decked out acquatic theatre as a result. Vivid Acquatique combines a 20 metre wall of light, colour and music inspired by the fountains of Versailles. And for primary enjoyment be sure to bunk down early at one of the waterfront boozing hot spots along Cockle Bay Wharf, Darling Quarter or Harbourside.

What: Vivid Light When: All events from 6pm, May 24 – June 10 Where: Various venues More: vividsydney.com for full program

The Edge, 2013 image courtesy of Tamara Dean/Olsen Irwin Gallery

The intersection of professional and personal is a recurrent and welcome part of Dupont’s role. “Obviously working on my own exhibitions is much less stressful, because directing and curating is a massive challenge. The challenge of getting my favourite photographers and artists together at one festival is what makes the job, and this festival, so great. The level of responsibility doesn’t actually bother me, because I have a sense that this is going to create an enormous and very real buzz in Sydney. There is just so much being shown that people will never see anywhere else, much less in the one city,” he says.”

A plethora of distinguished photographers will be part of Reportage, including renowned Russian photojournalist Yuri Kozyrev and Contact Press Images co-founder Robert Pledge. 10b Photography co-founders Francesco Zizola and Claudio Palmisano will hold a number of discussions and workshops throughout the festival on subjects including advanced post-production and operating the world’s preeminent digital darkroom.

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Wire High Tensile Art Punk By Benjamin Cooper

V

ery few bands enjoy the status afforded to Wire. The British postpunk outfi t are credited as formative infl uencers by a raft of talent including R.E.M, Blur and Bloc Party. The constant citations mystify Colin Newman, the band’s primary vocalist and songwriter. “It’s quite strange when you’re the most famous band no-one’s ever heard of. People are forever claiming us an infl uence, but I doubt most of them have ever heard any of our music.”

Between 1977 and 1979 Wire released three albums that are widely credited as the finest examples of angular, unorthodox and original punk to emerge from Britain. Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154 exploded out of the blocks with a minimalist ferocity unmatched by an army of imitators in the years since.

More than 30 years later the four piece have released their 10 th record, Change Becomes Us. Critics have rushed to hail it as the kind of sparse and savage affair that should have opened their account in 1980.

“We’re very happy with this record, particularly as we didn’t really go into the process with much of a plan,” bassist and vocalist Graham Lewis says. “We did a second tour of the UK in 2011, and it was necessary for us to have some new material, so we started looking at what we already had. It was really quite satisfying because we were able to pick and choose from material from 1979 and 1980 that had just been abandoned. Over the years we’ve been aware of its presence, and we’ve dipped in and used some of it occasionally, but now we’ve integrated all the parts and have got the group feeling confi dent and strong with the songs.

“We’ve been able to take that strength and power and intuitiveness and let loose,” he continues. “We’ve been able to let it transcend its beginnings – it feels very fresh and alive, and once we started we really hunted down what we needed.”

The band has recently fi nished performing the album in full at its own inaugural mini festival in London entitled Wire – Drill. The venture was a co-production with online magazine The Quietus, and featured a swag of young London creatives like Comanechi, Land Observations and highly anticipated Australian visitors Toy. “Having the festival enables us to have much more overt contact with younger bands,” Newman says. “Panda (Toy’s bassist Maxim Barron) was telling me after their set how much he likes Githead (Newman’s side-project with his wife Malka Spigel). That thought doesn’t come from nowhere, and it won’t go nowhere now. Interfacing on that level, and the possibilities that come from that contact, are only possible because of the directness that comes from being at a festival.”

The direct contact with admirers occasionally presents the band with unexpected pleasures. “Years ago we were playing in Austin and Interpol were playing the day after us. I think it was 2002 and they were still a very young band, and they came up to us afterwards. We had this really interesting moment where they told us how much they loved one of our first EPs. That was incredibly surprising,” Newman says.

Lewis attributes the impressiveness of the album to the experience of touring the material prior to recording. “We had the opportunity to check if it was up to muster, or whether things needed to change,” he says.

“After that first period of touring we knew we had to complete the album. There just seemed to be an inevitability about it, which is the best test of a piece of work.”

“It’s quite strange when you’re the most famous band no-one’s ever heard of”

undergroundLOVERS

What: Change Becomes Us out now on Popfrenzy

“You can have a horrifi c moment and then have a beautiful moment, you can get bullied on Facebook and then someone can do something beautiful for you all in the space of one hour.”

Xxxx By Krissi Weiss

undergroundLOVERS have never played into the hands of industry expectations, and even now they’re making music because they want to, not because they’re obliged to.

“We always had this sense of being apart from whatever was going at the time,” he says. “We’re awkward, we’re daggy, we don’t look like…well we just aren’t all the things musicians are supposed to be. We do feel very comfortable with what we do and we love it; it’s so instinctive and natural and it just happens for us.”

For a long time they resisted their audience’s call to return to regular gigging, but at least for this year, fans can rest easy knowing the band are going to do all they can to support this album.

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he ‘90s were a busy time for indie rock/electronic Melbourne band undergroundLOVERS. They released seven albums, got a tick of support from the powers that be via an ARIA in 1992, and while they were always somewhat of an underground band, they achieved a steady stream of success both in Australia and abroad.

They reunited (a term that implies there was some sort of personal separation, which there wasn’t) for Homebake last year, and are up to album number two since that reunion. Their latest, Weekend, is an homage of sorts to ‘60s pioneering filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal movie of the same name.

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“You can’t have a Tarantino film without a Godard film because Godard invented the language,” Giarrusso says of the man that inspired Weekend. “Just like you can’t have reality TV or films that have a documentarystyle without the neo-realists, they invented it back then. I guess you just look at those earlier films and think, ‘Wow people were doing that back then and people are still doing it now but it has less importance because it’s a rip off in a way.’”

Musing on the notion that the ‘60s was film’s ultimate period, Giarrusso goes on to explain the writing and recording process for this latest album, and how the influence of Godard emerged in these songs.

“It’s exactly the same as how we made albums in the ‘90s – we work stuff out on acoustic guitar, we go into the studio and experiment and then we think about the record,” he says. “We always think about the record as a long player experience. We’re always open to different genres and different sounds and the more I thought about it the more I realised you could apply that way of working to how Godard worked. He would mix genres and mix different ways of saying things and while it’s kind of a mess, it kind of reflects how we live life and how life falls together. You can have a horrific moment and then have a beautiful moment, you can get bullied on Facebook and then someone can do something beautiful for you all in the space of one hour. We think music should reflect that energy of life: that it’s disparate, it’s angry, it’s beautiful, it’s all of those things at once.”

“The new songs seem to be going down a treat, we’ve managed to incorporate the old stuff and successfully mix them with these new tracks,” he says. “It was very nerve-wracking and scary to play them for the first time; I got pretty tanked to deal with it actually. We really wanna promote this album for the rest of the year and keep going. We’re also doing a split 7-inch single with a band from China called Dear Eloise and that’ll be our second single out around August.”

What: Album launch with The Morning After Girls Where: Oxford Art Factory When: Friday May 17 And: Weekend out now through Rubber Records

xxx photo by xxx

It’s almost impossible to talk to vocalist and songwriter Vince Giarrusso without the conversation moving back into the medium of film. He loves diving into the world of music,

but as a lecturer in film and critically acclaimed filmmaker, his love of the moving image and its influence on his music are intrinsically linked.

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Noah And The Whale With A Little Help From My Friends By Alasdair Duncan

T

he video for Noah And The Whale’s plaintive indie pop track ‘There Will Come A Time’ is a striking thing, a story of tearaway teens sent to live on an island in the dystopian near future. If you think it looks like a mini-movie, you’re right – the video clip actually serves as a trailer for the upcoming short film by Noah And The Whale singer Charlie Fink.

“I’ve always liked to involve film in what we do,” Fink says. “I’m interested in investigating that marriage of film and music. I thought it would be really great to make a short film and tie it in to this new album.”

When the band was thinking about which of their songs to pair with the trailer, they decided that ‘There Will Come A Time’, with its themes of friendship and romance, was the perfect

If the songs on Heart Of Nowhere seem to have a greater sense of immediacy and urgency than on previous albums, that’s because the album was recorded live. “We toured our last album for 18 months straight,” Fink says. “When you play live so often, you develop an intuition as performers, and we really wanted to capture something like that in the recording studio.”

As well as recording live, the songs were also conceived in a much more collaborative way.

“In the past, I’d bring in a mostly-finished song and we’d work on the arrangement together,” Fink says, “but this time, there were a few where I’d bring in an idea and we’d turn it into a song together. It’s a much more enjoyable process to do it that way.”

Recording live does, of course, come with its own unique set of challenges. “When you make music that way, you trade technical perfection for emotional intensity and energy,” Fink says.

“You embrace the flaws and mistakes that you get from that as signifiers of unchecked feeling and emotion. They often talk about the magic of recording music live – you get moments that you can never recreate. That’s what a great take is.”

Picking the best take isn’t always easy. “It’s funny, because there’s no such thing as a perfect take,” Fink says. “Each one offers you something different. It’s about learning to listen, learning to feel a song. When you’re playing, you might think one take is the best, but when you listen back a while later, it will often be a completely different one that gets the best reaction.”

While Fink sees Noah And The Whale continuing for the foreseeable future, he

would love to try his hand at making a full-length feature film. “You need to do something like that at the right time,” he says. “I need a story that I want to tell enough. I feel like I learn so much every time I work in film, about the medium, that I’m accumulating enough knowledge to eventually make a feature.”

What: Heart Of Nowhere is out now on Universal

Ólafur Arnalds Winter is Coming By Benjamin Cooper

Ó

lafur Arnalds makes music that is the stuff of dreams. The 26-year-old composer and performer cuts up piano, strings and beats and overlays them with consummate ease, using loops to create an aural richness that guides the listener through all manner of emotions.

Arnalds is quite circumspect when it comes to what he does. “The music itself is very simple, in a way,” he says. “There are actually not very many notes, and it is often low in tone and quite slow, and that minimalism can create difficulties in live performance.”

There were apparently no such difficulties at the first live performance of his new album, For Now I Am Winter. Arnalds has just returned to his home in Mosfellsbær in Iceland after playing with an orchestra at Volksbühne in Berlin. The album is his third full release, and first since being picked up

by Universal Music’s Mercury Classics (Tori Amos, Brooklyn Rider).

“The show in Berlin was with a full orchestra called the Berlin Music Ensemble. It was pretty good, especially because we only had a short time to rehearse. It was sold out, so that’s always good!”

Are there particular challenges with entrusting your compositions to others? “It’s always a stressful process, but these are extremely professional musicians who are able to make things happen quite quickly. I was able to get them the sheet music a couple of weeks in advance for them to study. I think the biggest problem is getting the feeling right. What I do is quite different, and they might not be used to it because they have such classical backgrounds. The minimalism can make it hard, but once we get in there together and start working it comes together.”

Arnalds comes from an atypical background for a composer of exquisite Icelandic music.

He first rose to prominence as the drummer in hardcore groups Fighting Shit and Celestine.

In 2003 he was playing in the support act for German metal band Heaven Shall Burn during their Icelandic tour, and gave them a demo with some of his classical compositions. They later used his work on their successful 2004 album Antigone, and shortly after Arnalds began writing and recording the songs that would form the basis of his 2007 debut Eulogy For Evolution.

In the years since he’s been kept busy working on film and television scores, including the David Tennant ITV series Broadchurch. “I love working on film scores,” he says. “I actually met with Darren Aronofsky recently, to talk about soundscapes.” Does he have any plans to work with the Black Swan director? “Well, he’s got Clint Mansell at his side, who is a god…”

His latest album is resonating in the right places.

It opened at number one on the classical traditional charts in America, and was followed by a triumphant performance at Le Poisson Rouge with Ensemble LPR in New York.

“I am actually very happy with this one,” Arnalds says. “It was a really long process, and I went through many different things while making it. There were many circles, and moments of changing my mind and ultimately I managed to finish it all. I managed to do what I set out to do, which was to explore something different and try to learn something new in the process. I had to change up my music and add new elements, and it has been difficult. But that is exactly why I had to do it. I don’t like it when people expect something of me. I like the challenge of pushing everyone.”

What: : For Now I Am Winter out now on Mercury Classics/Universal

Neon Trees Not Rihanna By Augustus Welby

U

tah four-piece Neon Trees has experienced huge mainstream success in recent years, starting with the glossy pop-rock of ‘Animal’, the lead single from 2010 debut album Habits.

Last year the band extended their airwave domination with their second album Picture Show and the single ‘Everybody Talks’, which cracked the US top 10. Sudden success means the band has spent a lot of time touring of late, and for lead vocalist Tyler Glenn, acclimatising to living on the road hasn’t been easy.

“We’re still conscious of the fact that we did something great on the first record and when we went to make the second record we didn’t want to pull the rug from under people that had become really invested in the band. At the same time you can’t completely be devoted to making music for other people all the time.”

“It can provide a weird emotional space, but I’ve gotten used to it more, not completely, but more in the last few years. I used to not need people and was thrust into the touring life and being around people in close quarters all the time. I don’t mind it, I just think I forget that I also enjoy quiet and giving my mind time to breathe.”

‘Animal’ was the highest played track on Australian radio in 2011 and reached platinum status in the US. Glenn says the band was nervous about having an equally strong lead single from Picture Show. “‘Animal’ was such a beast. It didn’t go away, which was a really great thing for us because it was our first time, but at the same time it was like ‘what if we can’t put something else out?’”

It sounds as if Glenn would largely keep to himself if he weren’t in a touring band, which prompts the suggestion that being forced into a social setting could be healthy. “I have fantasies more about throwing away my phone and being 50 years old and living with a dog on a beach somewhere. It is healthy to be reminded that I have people that I really love,” he says.

Luckily, ‘Everybody Talks’ managed to eclipse the success of ‘Animal’, and Glenn is clearly surprised. “I didn’t think ‘Everybody Talks’ was a hit when we released it. I thought of it as like a bridge between the two albums, I thought, ‘oh this is a nice segue,’ but it became even more popular than ‘Animal’. Now we’re enjoying the fact that we’re not a one hit wonder.”

Even though he pines for a secluded idyll, Glenn doesn’t deny the perks of singing for a successful band. “It’s giving me more purpose, playing shows and seeing that edification instantly. It’s very gratifying to see that I’ve got a role, not only for myself, but that I provide some sort of joy to selections of people around the world.

Indeed, having songs on high mainstream rotation can lead to being dismissively classed as a ‘singles’ band, but Glenn is determined to make enduring albums.

“Most of the time, especially when shows go well, of course I want to meet everyone.

I like contact with fans, I like social media.

Sometimes we’ll just Facebook message with fans. I’m grateful for those people, I think they’ve really helped us.”

The success of Habits might have compelled Neon Trees to simply satisfy fan expectations

24 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

with the follow-up album – those second album pressures weren’t far from Glenn’s mind as they recorded Picture Show.

“I think it’s good that we love the art of making albums – we love putting complete devotion into every song, we like making a sequence on a record, we like album packaging – because I think at the end of the day it shows to the people that are really into the band that we care. We’re not Rihanna, we’re not putting an album out to put one song out and then move on.”

Where: The Standard When: Thursday May 16

Xxxxx photo by Xxxxx

The songs on Noah And The Whale’s Heart Of Nowhere deal with friendship and comingof-age, themes that resonate strongly in the film. “The film is really about friendship,” Fink says. “It’s about these four friends who live in a dystopian environment where teenagers are separated from society until they’re deemed mature enough to return. When we started filming, I gave the actors a DVD bundle of films that were influential on the story. There were two in particular – a pair of ‘80s teen films called Over The Edge and Breaking Away.”

fit. “The film itself is a half-hour short that has a couple of songs from the record and a specially-written score, but ‘There Will Come A Time’ was the ideal song for the trailer.”

Jinja Safari Writing In Reverse By Simon Topper arcus Azon – singer, multiinstrumentalist and songwriter – is stumped. We’re sipping coffee in a Glebe café as the breakfast crowd dwindles, and he’s pondering that old chestnut of a question: ‘How did we get here?’

M

are basic needs that need to be addressed in terms of prevention of disease and clean water and government corruption… I suppose the more time I spent with missionaries, the less time I wanted to spend with missionaries,” Azon says.

The ‘we’ is his five-piece band Jinja Safari, a dance-inspiring Sydney band that stands tall above the glut of same-old indie pop by drawing strong influences from traditional African, Indian and Eastern music. The ‘here’ in question is the release of their first proper full-length album, on a major label no less. But the context of the question is more involved – if Azon’s been touring and exploring the world for the past few years to visit and get to know the far-flung places that have lent their sound to his band’s music, how did he come to be so influenced by these cultures in the first place?

Is he writing in reverse?

“I didn’t feel like Geldof or Bono when I came back at all. We are simply writing pop songs. I didn’t feel the need to be a spokesperson… Just in seeing the way Ugandans react to Afrobeat and reggae music – it’s how us as Australians relate to classic rock. You hear it in all the tradie trucks and at work sites and all these funny riffs and Diblo Dibala, and just good vibes everywhere, and it’s kind of a pretty stark contrast to their landscape and their history and their current political climate. I guess that relationship with the people and how they relate to their music, was what I got most out of it.”

Jinja Safari began in 2010 on the NSW Central Coast when Azon was introduced to Cameron ‘Pepa’ Knight. A songwriting partnership developed, with Azon the fresh-faced singer and Pepa, with a longer history in bands, as the ideas-heavy producer. It was just the two of them, and within 12 months they’d won triple j Unearthed, played Splendour, and their gigs started selling out. It was at this point Azon and the now five-piece band started crossing the earth. “We toured India with the band, went to the UK a couple of times, the US a couple of times,” Azon recounts. “Canada, Germany, I went to Cambodia, we went to Indonesia, I went to Uganda, and we’ve got a lot of samples from all these places on the album.”

Where: Oxford Art Factory When: Thursday May 30 (sold out), Friday May 31 And: Jinja Safari out Friday May 17 on Universal

He says the new self-titled record features samples the band recorded of a choir at a Ugandan school for girls, temple chants from India, and rocks from the Nile. “We got one WAV recorder each, and we just tried to get as much as we could,” Azon says. “It’s amazing with sense memory, hearing these files can bring back memories that are just lodged in part of the brain somewhere. Re-listening to this 11 year-old kid rapping, and he’s got the voice of a 45 year-old taxi driver, and you close your eyes and it brings back all the memories and laughs and smells of sitting with these kids at Bujagali Falls (near the Ugandan town of Jinja).”

“The way Ugandans react to Afrobeat and reggae - it’s the way us as Australians relate to classic rock” “But as you say, it’s in reverse, because we’d already drawn inspiration from all these places, then there’s this need to go there and justify it in some way. Kind of give it a bit more weight,” he says. “It felt a bit phony naming our whole band after a place neither of us had ever been, so obviously Jinja was high on the priority list of travels. It didn’t change too much, but I guess it gave it a bit more authenticity, especially having all those samples in there.”

He’s been thinking about the influence of African and Eastern music for a while now.

Azon says he’s well aware people might think they’ve jumped on the recent indie Afrobeat bandwagon, but it runs far deeper than that.

“I’m truthfully not sure. It didn’t seem like a really specific genre or style we were going for. Because Cameron’s pretty advanced in his electronic production, he likes to go for the world music instrument before he goes to electronic synth…so straight away it gives you more of an Eastern feel,” he says.

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“Lyrically I guess your brain goes to those places before it goes to the places that a synth takes you – which is in your 20s in the city I guess. That’s why I wanted to get out of Sydney to create this music, to the Central Coast, to escape what all my friends were doing and make it more, I can’t think of a better word than ‘organic’.”

Xxx photo by JXxx Xxxx

It’s at this point that Azon reveals his grandmother has spent the last 30 years as a missionary in Uganda. Despite this familial tie to the country that’s inspired him creatively, he says he hasn’t been consciously influenced by that.

“I don’t know how to say this in the most sensitive way, but I guess…the western philosophy that we need to save the world from itself isn’t what I took away,” he says. “If you go to some of these places, in the villages in particular, out of the cities, they’re very happy and full of love and there’s a lot of laughter.

There’s a sense of community that we in the West could learn a lot from. And while there

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arts frontline

free stuff email: freestuff@thebrag.com

arts, theatre and film news... what's goin' on around town... with Lily White

five minutes WITH

GARRY STEWART

eruptive choreography; the work is a product of modern dance utilising an electronic score and hovering LED screens to enhance the narrative. G opens at Sydney Dance Theatre on May 16 so we caught five with Stewart before opening night.

G takes the classical ballet Giselle as its inspiration. How did G come about? My first major work for Australian Dance Theatre was a deconstruction of Swan Lake titled Birdbrain. It eventually toured the globe with around 250 performances. Years later, I was drawn to the narrative of Giselle, which is the other ballet standing at the pinnacle of the classical ballet canon. Giselle was a standout masterpiece in its time so it does beg scrutiny and reinvigoration in our contemporary era.

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passion for dance and a commitment to social justice have been the hallmarks of Garry Stewart’s working life as a dancer, choreographer and Sydney Dance Theatre’s artistic director. Stewart’s current work G, enigmatically deconstructs the canonical ballet narrative of Giselle wherein a lovelorn young peasant girl joins the spirit world to dance out her grief after discovering the man she loves is engaged to someone else. G pushes boundaries to fuse the technical prowess of classical ballet with

GALLERY BURLESQUE

The dancers in G… Being a dancer in G is like being caught in a perpetual motion machine. It simply doesn’t stop. This is mainly because of the device where the dancers cross the stage entering from stage right and exiting stage left. The audience sees a continuously moving panorama of dancers moving in one direction across the stage for 60 minutes delivering the narrative and concepts in small, accumulating fragments.

What about the costumes? All dancers wear green. In the original ballet Giselle, the first act is set in a medieval village where the design is represented in rustic green and orange tones so I’ve chosen green as the colour for G. It represents the village setting also the forest

Black Cherry’s Frankie Valentine

For their next monthly installment of amazing outfits and artistic clothes shedding, Gallery Burlesque have gathered the burlesque performers whose shows were too crazy, weird or risque to make it into the Miss Burlesque Australia Finals. Catch leggy legend Diesel Darling, the avant garde Memphis Mae, gorgeous Honey B Goode, hilarious Tootsie Caloola, boylesque wonder Defy and others on Sunday May 19 in No More Queens at The Standard. For more info at wearethestandard.com.au

SFF’S FULL PROGRAM

Hurrah! The Sydney Film Festival’s (SFF) full program has officially launched and we’ve got the shivers because the lineup’s pretty damn exciting.

The SFF 2013 bill offers more screenings of more films from more countries in more venues than ever before, opening with the world premiere of Australian film, Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road and closing with Australian premiere of Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet From Stardom. To give you an idea of just how big this year is going to be: an additional 38,000 extra seats have been made

where the second act takes place and of course it symbolises envy and jealousy.

G uses hovering LED screens and an electronic score. Explain. The screens are used as a lighting source, but predominantly they are there to convey text. This text pertains to elements of the narrative as well as a linguistic reference to the various concepts that permeate the work such as hysteria and madness, power, gender as well as the culture of classical ballet itself.

The electronic music score is by Luke Smiles.

Luke is an accomplished dancer himself, but many years ago turned his hand to music making as well. The music to G is a real achievement. It’s incredibly powerful and drives the entire work like an unstoppable machine.

How will audiences react to G? We’ve toured this work quite extensively throughout Europe including a sold out season in Paris. Going on the response there, I think audiences come out exhilarated and stimulated, intellectually engaged and also overwhelmingly impressed by the achievements of 11 phenomenal dancers.

What: G by Garry Stewart When: May 16-18 Where: Sydney Theatre More: sydneytheatre.org.au

The Reluctant Fundamentalist hits cinemas on Thursday May 23 and we’ve got ten double passes to give away. To score your tix just email freestuff@thebrag. com and tell us who directed the film.

BLACK CHERRY

available across screenings of nearly 200 films including 19 word premieres, five international premieres, and 122 Australian premieres. Festival highlights include Richard Linklater’s (Dazed and Confused, School of Rock) Before Midnight, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives direct from the 2013 Cannes Official Selection, Grigris from African filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, and the French drama The Past from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. The SFF Hub at Lower Town Hall will also return for a second year to celebrate the theme of ‘Cinema, Reconstructed’

with exhibitions, talks, panels, parties and performances late into the night. SFF runs from June 5-16 June. Visit sff.org.au for full program and event details.

WEIRD SCIENCE

MCA ARTBAR will bring the party on Friday May 31 to celebrate its first birthday. The theme for MCA’s special edition, curated by Sydney artist Keg de Souza, is ‘weird science’ drawing inspiration from the teen sci-fi classic written

by John Hughes. While you get your booze on you’ll also be able to enjoy an inflatable planetarium, screenings from the infamous Mu Meson archives, an encounter with Wade Marynowsky’s robots, Diego Bonetto’s testtube gardens and Justice Yeldham’s unhealthy obsession with sheets of broken glass. Need more convincing? Vivid Sydney's going to be in full swing too so there’ll be plenty of other action around the foreshore traps. Do it. For more details see mca.com.au

ALASKA PROJECTS

The Drawing Book Studios are presenting some of the best illustrative talent from Australia, the UK, USA and Spain. Affectors #1 Monsters will be hosted at m2 Gallery in Surry Hills (Shop 4/450 Elizabeth St) on Tuesday June 4 for one night only and will showcase the work of 20 artists who explore abstraction and fear. Artists include Andrew Millest, Anna Wilkenfeld, Anton Emdin, Bill Hope, Billmund, Chris Nixon, Chris Wahl, David James, Frantz Kantor, James Briscoe, Jason Paulos, Joe Ley, Joe Whyte, Kevin Odonnell, Luzy Izzard, Mike Watt and Nathaniel Eckstrom. The Drawing Book Studios represent illustrative and animation artists worldwide. m2gallery.com.au for more.

Artists Ron Adams and Kylie Banyard have collaborated for the first time in a new exhibition Anonymous Séance and the Domes of Silence, which opens at ALASKA Projects on Thursday May 16. The repetition of numbers, words and symbols in Adams’ paintings bounce off the chromatic patterning and swirl of Banyard’s geodesic forms. Adams is intrigued by coincidence in the everyday and Banyard by the unending potential of colour. Together, their work plays with form in both physical and psychological ways; Adams’ work is autobiographical, primarily text based geometrical abstraction while Banyard works across a range of media including painting, sculpture, photography and optical devices. For more details visit home.alaskaprojects.com

RUNNING THE CITY

As part of the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art 2013, CoFA is presenting Running the City, an exhibition brining together artists who use cities as their raw material. Dutch artist Marnix de Nijs’ work Run Motherfucker Run is the centerpiece of the exhibition and is a

Jenevieve Chang by Dave Tacon

STORIES THEN & NOW

Taking its audience from the conflict zones of China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Korea and Sri Lanka, Stories Then & Now (May 22-25) traces the journeys of six lives across several generations and multiple continents to reveal how the past has shaped the present. Directed by artist William Yang and writer Annette Shun Wah, and presented by Carriageworks and Performance 4a, storytellers Ien Ang, Jenevieve Chang, Michael C.S. Park, Sheila Pham, Paul van Reyk and Willa Zheng bring a lively theatrical performance to life through word and images taken from private family collections. Dealing with themes of marginalisation as part of an Australian-Chinese family, and gay and Aboriginal communities Stories Then & Now will resonate with Sydney’s multicultural community by offering insight into the hybrid fabric of Asian culture. For more details visit carriageworks.com.au

massive immersive installation asking gallerygoers to literally run in order to traverse the electronic cityscape in front of them. The images you experience, both filmic and 3D, are determined by the running course you choose and the eerie soundscape aims to generate uncertainty and begs the question, who are you running from?

Running the City is showing at CoFA from June 7 – July 20.

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Set in the years following 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist follows Changez, a young Pakistani man chasing corporate success on Wall Street. Living in the suspicious terrorism-altered Western world Changez ultimately finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis and the enduring call of his family’s homeland. The film features actors Kate Hudson, Riz Ahmed, Keifer Sutherland and Liev Schreiber.

Burlesque fans at the ready because Black Cherry’s back with their first show of the year happening at The Factory Theatre (105 Victoria Road, Marickville) on Saturday May 18. Raucous circus acts are set to bring the party with the glamorous and wacky Lillian Starr, hula hooper extraordinaire Anna ‘Rocket Rocket’ Lumb, smouldering femme fetal Frankie Valentine and Tarantino’s ‘Titty Twister’ Burlesque Knockout Competition all on the bill. Visit blackcherrypresents.com. au for more info.

Bill Hope, Bath

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Trent Baines, Christie Hayes and Wayne Bradley in SET

Tabu [FILM] A Haunted Lisbon Where Something Went Wrong By Gerard Elson

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While The Artist scored a popular hit in 2011 by aping silent movie tropes, at heart it shared more with the exuberant entertainments of Hollywood’s golden age, like Singin’ in the Rain. Not so Tabu. Gomes’ film (his third, following 2004’s The Face You Deserve and 2008’s beguilingly sui generis Our Beloved Month of August) is a swoony yet paradoxically unsentimental meditation on memory, nostalgia and colonial guilt, improbably pervaded by a winning absurdist streak. It’s a rich and immaculately conceived fin de siècle of sorts that parallels the abrupt end of the Eden of youth with a murky chapter in Portugal’s past, and in which the impulse its characters feel for fiction and romance actually influences the form of its hypnagogic latter part, a poetic recount of (young) Aurora’s (Ana Moreira) youth in Portuguese-colonised Mozambique.

As Gomes puts it himself, “White people just having fun, playing Out of Africa and looking completely unaware of any political issue.”

In this, the second of Tabu’s two distinct halves (the first is captioned ‘Paradise Lost’; the second simply ‘Paradise’, a cue borrowed from the film’s F.W. Murnau-directed namesake, 1931’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas), dialogue is foregone in favour of an exquisitely literary voiceover track and an expressionistic sound mix devoid of all but a smattering of judiciously elected diegetic noises. For Gomes, this was an effort to recapture a time – both historical and personal – when cinema’s power to transport and

Carloto Cotta and Ana Moreira in Tabu

SET photo by Kent Mathews

ill 2013 see a film harder to sell than Miguel Gomes’ quietly brilliant Tabu? Shot in black and white in the same squarish 1:37:1 aspect ratio that in recent years has framed both Andrea Arnold’s revisionist Wuthering Heights and Kelly Reichardt’s laconic feminist western Meek’s Cutoff, Tabu is in summary a difficult film to endear to non-boffin contemporary viewers. Quite apart from the deceptively mundane surface elements of its story — essentially, three middle-agedto-elderly women in modern day Lisbon navigate recent retirement (Pilar, played by Teresa Madruga), impending senility (Aurora, played by Laura Soveral) and domestic servitude (Santa, Aurora’s Cape Verdean housemaid, played by Isabel Muñoz Cardoso) — is the unusual fashion in which Tabu’s retrograde design extends to its soundtrack.

convince was near absolute. “Cinema has now had more than 100 years of existence,” says Gomes. “The innocence viewers had some years ago is lost nowadays. People have seen more and more so they have all this memory of other films. This innocence is something that I would like to pursue, to regain something of this kind of wonder of watching a film and being completely amazed by the things you see. Maybe there is a connection between childhood and cinema, because while watching a film or while you’re a child, you believe in things you cannot believe nowadays.”

Addressing Tabu’s split narrative format and central thematic contrasts (past/present, youth/senescence, fact/fiction, memory/ imagination, naïveté/guilt, etc.), Gomes says he aimed to depict present day Lisbon as a place haunted by the sensation that “something went wrong”.

“First, you are in a post time – post-colonial, post-youth – because [the ‘Paradise Lost’ segment] is about old age,” says Gomes.

“The characters in [this] part are quite normal, they are not characters that ‘come from the cinema’. And I think normal people have the desire for fiction. So in the second part, literally it’s like a film that comes to them, with characters that look like characters of cinema, with rock bands and melancholic crocodiles and taboo love stories – everything the first part does not have. You get to see 50 years earlier all these white people having the time of their lives but maybe going too far – killing each other and doing stupid stuff.

Like having a colony.”

What: Tabu When: In cinemas Thursday May 16 More: palacefilms.com.au/tabu

SET: The Play [THEATRE] Satire, A Cult Soapie and A Murder Mystery By Patrick Lenton

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hether you’re a bona fide soapie enthusiast or cynic, NIDA’s Independent Program has just the thing for you. Sam Atwell’s SET: The Play is a murder mystery that takes a satirically comedic look at the ‘glamorous’ world of television, peeks behind the clapper board and examines what is real and what is projected. And true to NIDA’s philosophy, SET is as much about the creative process as it is about final product; a group of artistic collaborators have come together with the ultimate goal of entertaining an audience while simultaneously enhancing their skills as creative practitioners.

While I knew I would be conducting a phone interview with Atwell, the play’s co-writer and director, I couldn’t shake the feeling I would be chatting to his alter ego Kane who he played for many years on cult soapie Home and Away. Even though Atwell may no longer make appearances down at the Bay, I still worried the slightest mention of Alf or The Diner might make him explode into instant self-righteous anger in the style of Melissa George. Turns out my worries were unfounded – Atwell was only too happy to talk about Home and Away and how in many ways SET was inspired by his experiences with the show.

Not only is the subject matter of SET centred on the steamy world of Australian soaps, but in actual fact half the cast and crew of Home and Away worked on the show. Atwell pitched the project to a collection of the show’s in-house writers who he thought might be willing to flex their TV writing skills in a

less restrictive and perhaps even ridiculous atmosphere. “The writers feel liberated.

There’s a lot they can’t do in a PG timeslot,” he says.

For Atwell, collaborating with a group of TV writers on a theatrical project has been an exciting and rewarding experience. He’s keen to point out that despite utilising the tools of television, SET is very much a theatrical project, which in no way, shape, or form could be mistaken for a TV show. “We’ve taken the collaborative method of TV writing, but put it on a very theatrical stage which breaks the fourth wall and does all sorts of other things that TV can’t do,” he says. You’d be forgiven, however, if you were at least a little confused; not only have Home and Away’s writers been borrowed for SET’s script, but the show’s entire crew of actors have journeyed from the Bay to bring everything to life.

And I couldn’t help but ask whether or not the core foundations of SET were cemented in a secret desire to bitch about Home and Away.

Apparently, such is not the case. Atwell credits the talent of the actors as bringing humanity to the comedic roles he has created. “The cast are really adept at turning the characters into real people that I recognise from the set. There can be a real loneliness I think in TV people. They devote their lives to it and sometimes the rest of life goes by.

They can get a bit stir crazy in the machine.”

What: SET: The Play by Sam Atwell Where: NIDA Parade Theatres When: Until May 18 More: settheplay.com.au

Broken [FILM] When Everything’s Broken By Alasdair Duncan Skunk, in terms of her personality and her naïve optimism.”

Tim Roth and Eloise Laurence in Broken

Norris and the producers saw close to 850 girls around Britain before deciding on Eloise Laurence for the part of the plucky 11-yearold Skunk. “We didn’t give up until we found someone we were really happy with,” he says.

“As soon as I met with her and started reading with her, I felt an immediate affinity. She was coming at it very fresh, because she had never acted before. We knew we wanted her to have a trusting relationship with everyone in the cast, especially Tim Roth, who plays her father. Everyone who worked with her got with the program, on the understanding that if we didn’t get a good performance from her, we didn’t have a movie.”

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the way into any story has to be personal,” he says. “I have two young children, and while they’re either side of Skunk’s age, the same issues come up. I worry about protecting them enough, and loving them enough, and the ways we all manage to screw up our parenting.

I myself also associated very strongly with

If you go and see a piece of theatre, you leave the house, you go and sit down in a dark room with no distractions and watch the story unfold – if you don’t like it, it’s difficult to leave, unless you want to leave at interval. Film is similar, Norris says. “As a filmmaker, you can work on atmosphere – you know you have 90 minutes or 120 minutes to tell your story,” he explains. “With television, it’s different, because the audience is watching at home, and are therefore much more easily distracted – someone comes in and talks to them, they go and make a cup of tea, so as a storyteller, you have to keep people from reaching for the remote. There’s a very different pressure on you.”

What: Broken opens in cinemas Thursday May 16

Broken photo Nick Wall

B

roken, the debut feature film from British theatre director Rufus Norris, is a story of fear and paranoia in the suburbs.

The protagonist of the story is a strong-willed young girl named Skunk, and it was the depth of this character that drew Norris to the project.

“I think that for me and for most storytellers,

Roth and Laurence make for a convincing onscreen father and daughter – a fact that may be down to the bonding they did before filming began. “At the start of rehearsals, Tim asked for a day when he could take Eloise and Bill Milner, who plays her brother, and have a family day out. They went to the zoo, they mucked about in London, Tim spoiled them and they all took the piss out of each other. They had a great laugh together,” he continues, “and they created a family unit. Tim really gave himself over to it. Tim is a father, so he understands. He’s very much a family man. That was a crucial aspect of the film, and the bonding they did makes it seem far more real.”

Before embarking on Broken, Norris spent years directing theatre, and many of the lessons he learned in his former career carried over. “Film and theatre are very different mediums,” he says, “but there are many ways in which they cross over.” Ultimately, he says, your job as a director is to tell a story in the way that you want, and extract the best performances that you can from your actors.

“In that sense, they’re the same,” he continues.

“The visual style and the rhythms are different, the tools are different, but I think the basic craft is very similar. It’s often been said that there is a closer correlation between theatre and film than between theatre and television.”

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

Arts Snap Where you went last week...

Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes in The Place Beyond The Pines ■ Film

■ Theatre

In cinemas now

Until May 26

Where Blue Valentine was epic in its intimacy, turning a macro lens on one relationship from go to woe, Derek Cianfrance’s follow up is epic in perspective, spanning two generations of two families and their intertwined fates, with grand themes of sons and fathers, loss and forgiveness. And it’s as ambitious in style as it is in content, compounding the eerie gothic horror of David Lynch with the majesty of Terrence Malick. The effect is bewitching, if occasionally overwrought.

The independent scene in Sydney has been a bit rattled lately. With important venues like B Sharp and the Old Fitz falling by the way side, there’s been a sense of fear about where future artists would present their shows. But where there are artists desperate to make work, it is inevitable that venues will emerge for them to fill and the Old 505 Theatre, with its handy three minutes from central location, is beginning to step up as a place for independent theatre to thrive.

With its small capacity and intimate feel, it’s the perfect place for theatre makers to get their work up close and personal with audiences.

The setting is the verdant backwater of Schenectady, New York (which could be straight out of Twin Peaks), where the film opens in the midst of a travelling carnival. Enter Luke (Ryan ‘Hey Girl’ Gosling, who also starred in Blue Valentine), the resident motorbike rider in the dome of death. Cianfrance quickly sketches his character as fearless, footloose and fancy-free – and then gives him something to care about: a baby son he never knew he had. The mother (Eva Mendes), a one-night-stand from his last trip through town, is now shacked up with a decent, stable, God-loving fellow – but she and the baby become an obsession for Luke, who determines not to repeat his own history but to instead insert himself into their family as husband, father and provider.

The first half of the 140-minute film focuses on Luke as his best attempts to be a better man than his own father combust in slow motion; you can see where it’s going, but the effect is no less compelling or tragic. Then the film does something pretty radical in the scheme of narrative cinema: it switches protagonists. It takes up with Avery (Bradley Cooper), a rookie cop from a wealthy family, who may or may not have political ambitions. The less you know about the plot from here the better.

Suffice to say, if you do succumb to this story, you’ll find yourself sucked into a deeply moving, melancholic fugue.

Arguably, one of the film’s flaws is that Cooper’s role and performance aren’t strong enough to follow Gosling’s, which leaves the audience looking back over their shoulders – distracted. Another weakness is the almost distracting surfeit of style, which includes some odd choices: crane shots of a lone car driving on a road through a forest are overlaid by synth chords scream Twin Peaks; the use of the same Arvo Pärt piece that featured prominently in There Will Be Blood and Malick’s To the Wonder seems lazy.

01:05:13 :: Archive Space :: 5 Eliza St Newtown

A Butcher of Distinction benefits from this closeness, shoving the dank pub basement setting, brought to ridiculously detailed life by designer Dylan James Tonkin, in our faces. Hugo (Liam Nunan) and Hartley (Heath Ivey-Law) have come to this basement in search of their father’s fortune. They’ve been brought up in country aristocracy, safe from the reality of modern life, but after the passing of their parents, they come to London in the hope of finding a future in the place where their father often travelled. It quickly becomes apparent that their vision of their father is very different from reality when they meet Teddy (Paul Hooper), his former associate.

James Dalton’s production is tight and well crafted, overcoming some logic problems in the script with impressive performances. Nunan and Ivey-law have a strong brotherly bond and we very quickly become attached to their misguided natures. Hooper is suitably repulsive, but also shows his range, bringing some legitimate emotion when required.

With its slamming together of upperclass British ideals with a seedy, gory underworld, this show won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s guaranteed to inspire a visceral reaction.

sca east sydney grad show 01:05:13 :: Sydney College of the Arts :: Rozelle Campus Balmain Rd

Arts Exposed What's in our diary...

Simon Binns

Accomplice Until June 16/ Tue – Sun 11am – 5pm Artspace, 43-51 Cowper Wharf Road, Woolloomooloo

Overall, however, the soundtrack is one of the film’s most effective weapons: Mike Patton’s original compositions, all synthy and chordal, set a ominous tone à la Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks work, interspersed with lighter fare like Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark’, and weighty, ‘sacred’ numbers from Vladimir Ivanoff and Pärt.

Dee Jefferson

archive space gallery launch

PICS :: TL

A BUTCHER OF DISTINCTION

PICS :: TL

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

A Butcher of Distinction

See www.thebrag.com for more arts reviews

The walls of Artspace gallery are being defaced as we speak. Who’s to blame? Robots, yes robots. The gallery’s latest exhibition Accomplice features the work of Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, who combined, have experience in interactive media arts, machine performance, design, planning and installation.

What to expect? Autonomous robots – a colony of curious, social machines hidden within the space, each fitted with a motorised punch, camera and microphone – will react to your ‘knocks’ on gallery walls by producing patterns and holes.

Accomplice brings to the fore a dialogue about our world’s complex mechanic ecology – an immersive experience not to be missed. For more details visit artspace.org.au Zwischenräume, Forum Stadtpark detail, 2011 BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 29

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

ALBUM OF THE WEEK XXX PRIMAL SCREAM Cosmogramma More Light Warp Ignition/Inertia x

Xxxx Very few bands so far into their career make albums as evocative and diverse as More Light.

It’s been five years between the release of Primal Scream’s 2008 album Beautiful Future and now, and almost a year and a half of that time was taken up touring their landmark 1991 release Screamadelica. It was during this period of revisiting the past that the band began taking steps towards the future. However, if anyone’s hoping for an album that pays homage to their breakthrough record, More Light is definitely not it.

Over 70 minutes long, More Light is an intense, euphoric, aggressive, stimulating journey. It’s like every other Primal Scream album in that it doesn’t sound like any other Primal Scream album.

NO JOY

CAVEMAN

Wait To Pleasure Popfrenzy / Mexican Summer

No Joy are undoubtedly shoegaze-y; the Montreal-based three piece owe Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine some serious props. But there’s a bit more going on beyond the feedback and vocal loops. There are elements of dream pop, along the lines of Asobi Seksu, but also an attitude that’s all their own. On Wait To Pleasure, lyrics are about texture more than content – they form another gauzy layer, one that swirls around the listener forming part of a rich aural tapestry.

Many of the songs feature contrasting elements with interplay adding another dimension. Opening track ‘E’ is a highlight, it begins simply enough, but gradually builds to a noisy wall of sound. The softly looped and chopped up vocals of ‘Blue Neck Riviera’ glide over fuzzy feedback, and ‘Lunar Phobia’ fades to an interesting dichotomy of drum pads and Grimes-like “ooh aahs”.

‘Ignored Pets’ is driven by a pounding bassline, but it’s mixed right back so it is more of a pulse, rather than overwhelming the other elements.

And that’s basically the case on all the tracks. None of the elements are mixed too high so everything plays its part in the fabric of the song, coming to the fore only to fade out at the end.

The songs are warm and rich, but are lighter than other more soupy fuzzdriven bands like The Laurels, which is where “pop” blends with “noise” for No Joy. The album is well produced, but not to the point where it is too perfectly slick. The songs have room to breathe and are distinct from each other while still maintaining a cohesive sound. Basically it’s kind of like The Powerpuff Girls – it’s made of sugar, spice and everything nice.

Wait To Pleasure is a teasing, lingering and absorbing record with an unexpected depth.

Opener ‘2013’ is an epochal eight-minute mini-symphony driven by distorted horns and electronics. It finds Bobby Gillespie spitting out the most biting and political lyrics he’s sung since XTRMNTR. Social observation, indignation, isolation and alienation are a recurring lyrical theme through a lot of the songs, especially in ‘Culturcide’ and ‘Tenement Kid’.

‘Invisible City’ has a similar groove to a lot of the tracks on Beautiful Future. It works well in loosening the mood at the album’s halfway point. Robert Plant adds his distinctive voice to ‘Elimination Blues’, his second appearance on a Scream album after playing harmonica on Evil Heat.

After all the intensity, ‘It’s Alright, It’s OK’ feels like a burst into the light. It sounds like the step-sibling

Hanging Gardens Future Classic

Weekend Rubber Records One of last year’s most underrated albums, for me, was Caveman’s debut, CoCo Beware. It didn’t get a lot of press, and when it did the reviews were middling. I could understand the criticisms of the Brooklyn band’s debut, which played it a little safe and might easily be written off as a nice but mild listen.

The lack of dynamics in their music can make for an underwhelming experience at first, but the restraint of the compositions eventually proves to be their greatest asset.

Holding back from being over-emotive, they let the elements simmer away together, resulting in music that sounds like a less complicated Here We Go Magic or a pulled-back Local Natives.

Caveman’s new, self-titled release is a moodier collection than their debut, its songs plagued by denial, isolation and uncertainty. Despite the gloomy disposition, they still know their way around a good tune and bed down their strongest compositions early in the album with the hypnotic sheen of single ‘In The City’ and the slow-building, pessimistic ‘Where’s The Time?’.

The album is bookended by the songs ‘Strange To Suffer’ and ‘Strange’, and there’s little to separate the two apart from the closing track losing ‘to suffer’ in its title and adding the lyric “It’s not forever”, along with a more settled, comforting percussion.

This soft sleight of hand, shifting the mood, is indicative of the subtleties that make Caveman such a rewarding band.

Chris Girdler

Natalie Amat

The brilliant pool party staple ‘I’ll Get You’ was released by Classixx through Kitsune in mid-2009. It’s been almost four years and Classixx have finally got around to releasing their debut album. ‘I’ll Get You’ and their sundrenched disco remixes of Phoenix, Ladyhawke, YΔCHT and the like had put the LA duo at the helm of the nu-disco revival, but have they waited too long to make their move?

Title track and album opener ‘Hanging Gardens’ is a six minute instrumental that begins with dappled synth pads before a beaming, recursive synth lead sends the track into the stratosphere, suddenly becoming the perfect soundtrack to a jet plane montage.

The duo definitely know their way around a billion sounds on a Moog, and ‘All You’re Waiting For’ is a delicious nu-disco cut that shows off Classixx’s knack for paying homage to old school synth sounds with some contemporary pizzazz.

‘Supernature’ is another snazzy instrumental, and it’s that partBalearic, part-Beverly Hills Cop vibe that the then-duo Aeroplane went for in their album We Can’t Fly. ‘Long Lost’ features Active Child, and the collaboration yields one of the album’s best tracks. The smooth hollowness of Active Child works well with Classixx’s synthesisers and we get something between Hall & Oates and CFCF. Their oldie ‘I’ll Get You’ made it onto the album too, but its inconspicuous inclusion into a 2013 album really begs the question of how far Classixx have progressed in the past four years.

Similar to Classixx, artists like Viceroy and Goldroom are still waving the tropical 80s disco flag like it’s going out of style, and the unfortunate thing for them is that, well, it kinda is.

Hanging Gardens is a masterful bit of disco from LA’s finest, but it’s about three years too late.

Labelling this release a comeback album is a lazy and inappropriate statement; the band didn’t go anywhere, there was no bitter feud, they were just busy doing other things and music wasn’t at the top of their list.

That said, you can’t escape the fact this is a return of sorts and for salivating fans; Weekend has been a long time coming.

Thankfully, undergroundLOVERS don’t disappoint. While their most culturally significant albums Dream It Down and Rushall Station will forever remain etched in our cultural landscape, there’s something about this latest album that feels more complete, more organic, and certainly not second place to their youthful endeavours.

The lineup is as it has always been, with Giarrusso and Phillippa Nihill swapping lead vocal duties and the band edging in some more organic elements to their electronic sound.

Nihill’s sweetness soars on ‘Spaces’ while Giarrusso roughs things up a little on ‘Au Pair’.

Everything sounds a little more Go-Betweens and a little less Joy Division but what has always made them them remains. It is by no means flawless, with the occasional drab hook and predictable melody, but they set out to capture the unpredictable and ever-changing nature of life in all of its extreme and mundane glory and have managed exactly that.

It is that collision of influences, that merging of genres, that almost jarring nature of the electronic and the organic that makes Weekend a splendid return for undergroundLOVERS. Krissi Weiss

Rachitha Seneviratne

INDIE ALBUM OF THE WEEK BROTHERS GRIM AND THE BLUE MURDERS Roll It In Unpure Records

It is my absolute pleasure to welcome you to the Australian Blues-Rock Revival, ceremoniously led by the brutal and bearded BROTHERS GRIM AND THE BLUE MURDERS; a world where your girlfriend is a ‘Wahmuuuuun’, and if your fictional daughter is wronged, you are encouraged to shoot the offender in his cheatin’ sonbitch face. Repeatedly.

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Michael Hartt

UNDERGROUNDLOVERS

CLASSIXX

Caveman Fat Possum/Shock

of Screamadelica’s ‘Movin’ On Up’ and closes More Light on an upbeat note.

I last came across the Brothers Grim one Drunken Moon ago, and my jaw was resting somewhere on the beersodden dance floor of Manning Bar – a vast contrast to the environment in which Roll It In came to life. Against the still, picturesque backdrop of Empty Room studios, the band spent just three days (on what I guess was very little sleep) throwing every last inch of energy into Ryan ‘Coach’ Nelson’s mixing desk. The result is a slightly deranged capturing of the heaviest f*cking blues you’ve ever heard.

Opening track ‘Been A While’ is the obvious single choice. Its gritty, bluesy guitar intro may as well have been taken from a scratchy ‘30s record engineered in the Deep South. As the band kicks off, it’s

catchy and carefree; littered with handclaps and the smooth backing vocals of Kira Puru. The track list takes a sinister turn in the addictive bends of ‘My Kind of Love’, and dampens into the flawlessly drunken tempos and hopeless slurs of ‘Ease On In’.

Roll It In is a delicious display of prolific musicianship, and a groove indicative of a true understanding of the blues, not one developed robotically through years of swing-feel study.

It takes only the best elements of rock and blues, and manages to fuse them into something ‘blues-rock’ wouldn’t sufficiently describe.

Sheridan Morley

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE Like Clockwork Matador

While this record brings in yet another lineup change for the Josh Homme lead outfit, it seems the crew assembled for Like Clockwork has paid off for the desert rock ambassadors.

Guest collaborators including Sir Elton John, Trent Reznor (who they’d hoped would produce the record) and Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys bring fresh perspective here, but long time collaborators such as Mark Lanegan and Dave Grohl appear, well, like clockwork.

True to form, the record is awash with the sludgy, viscous basslines that throb and ooze their way into your system in only the way a Queens of the Stone Age song can. Six records down the line, Queens have moved from the full throttle, testosterone fuelled vibes that powered the masterpiece ‘Songs For The Deaf’, and past the radio readiness that was ‘Era Vulgaris’ into a new stone age altogether. This record is far more reflective and raw; Homme lays it all out with weary honesty.

His vocals are at their smouldering, mournful best on ‘If I Had A Tail’, while lead single ‘My God Is The Sun’ is frenetic, pushing along with full voltage energy, killer riffage and ploughing bass lines; but there is an unfortunate, underlying sense of going through the motions here, almost as though someone had reminded them they needed a loud and proud banger in amongst the grandiose melancholia.

Elsewhere, ‘I Appear Missing’ is a rolling, six-minute long rock opus featuring one of the most delicious guitar licks on the record.

Like Clockwork is a welcome reminder that no one does stoner rock quite like QOTSA. Perhaps not their strongest effort to date, but the fragility and well-layered complexities make for a compelling return.

Marissa Demetriou

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

REGURGITATOR - Unit FLEETWOOD MAC - Rumours VAMPIRE WEEKEND - Modern Vampires of the City

JAY-Z & KANYE WEST- Watch the Throne TH' DUDES - Be Mine Tonight

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

THE TEMPER TRAP

Enmore Theatre Wednesday May 1

To say the last twelve months have been kind to this group would be an understatement. Last year, having completed a stadium tour with Coldplay, cleaned up at the ARIAs and booked dates at Lollapalooza in Chile and Brazil, The Temper Trap’s triumphant homecoming promised to deliver.

Support came from theatrical and captivating indie darlings Alpine. Singers Phoebe Baker and Lou James are a yin and yang of voices and outfits on stage, harmonising beautifully on dreamy tracks like ‘Hands’ and ‘Villages’. As the room filled and the band built towards closer ‘Gasoline’, it was clear from the crowd’s appreciation that their loyal fanbase is growing.

VEY PHOTOGRAPHER : AVERIE HAR

Half older fans and half squealing young girls, the audience greeted The Temper Trap with a huge roar and a blaze of flashing lights. Anticipation peaked as

frontman Dougy Mandagi unleashed his huge vocals on ‘Love Lost’ and ‘Fader’, wearing an equally loud leopard print shirt. The band ripped through a representative selection, covering all their bases, from heart-wrenching renditions of ‘Down River’ and B-side ‘Everybody Leaves In the End’ mid-show, to generous portions of Conditions and highlights from their latest self-titled album.

‘Science of Fear’ brought things back up to pace, with Mandagi jumping into the crowd in the excitement. As their set drew to an end, faces still beamed and mouths still moved to a solid version of ‘Drum Song’ complete with the water on the drums trick. ‘Trembling Hands’ and the inevitable closer ‘Sweet Disposition’ finished the set with spine-tingling greatness and another crowd surf from Mandagi, proving that delayed climax is not just a Tantric philosophy. “This is how we do it, that’s rock and roll,” joked frontman Mandagi, and not even a broken guitar string could fault their return to Sydney, with a great set list and collective stellar performance.

Carla Pavez

HING PHOTOGRAPHER : RYAN KITC

TOOL

Allphones Arena Friday May 3 A single spotlight illuminated a table made from scaffolding as Tool’s mystery support DJ walked onstage to complete silence.

Dropping straight into Prince’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, Tool fans began to second guess if they were at the right venue. Grooving though a selection of feel-good party hits, the DJ’s set slowly became darker as he ventured from Chemical Brothers to Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ and closed with Aphex Twin, his real aim becoming apparent to those who scoffed too early.

A thudding heartbeat echoed around the arena. American psychonaut Timothy Leary appeared on the screens surrounding the stage, addressing the audience to “think for yourselves; question authority”. As the speech started to repeat, the inverted colours on the screen began to distort as Tool walked onstage, opening with ‘Third Eye’.

Guitarist Adam Jones and bassist Justin Chancellor stood on each side of the stage underneath swirling spotlights. Lurking in the background, Maynard stomped side to side next to Danny Carey’s drum kit, intermittently yelling into a speakerphone attached to his belt.

As the drums crashed down for ‘Vicarious’, so did a large sheet behind the band, revealing five pillars embellished with artist Alex Grey’s iconic faces. Lasers, geometric patterns and Tool music videos

accompanied the set list of greatest hits, as spotlight chandeliers moved up and down to ‘Schism’, ‘Pushit’ and ‘Lateralus’ on the constantly moving stage set. As the band suddenly disappeared offstage, an intermission sign appeared displaying a twelve-minute countdown. Bewildered punters battled their way to get a quick beer, before Danny Carey returned to the stage alone for a drum solo to an electronic backing track.

As the full band returned to the stage for ‘Jambi’ and ‘Forty Six & 2’, a massive second half convinced you that Maynard was here for more than a case of wine.

“Goodnight! It’s been great! Bye! You have been wonderful! Bye!” Maynard sarcastically bade the audience farewell, before the intro of ‘Ænema ‘ kicked in. The whole of GA head banged en masse as Tool turned things up to eleven.

Dedicating their final song to Jeff Hanneman from Slayer, who had passed away that morning, ‘Stinkfist’ concluded proceedings with two massive glitter cannons. Maynard and Carey quickly disappeared, leaving Jones and Chancellor to wander around the stage, waving goodbye to their Sydney fans.

I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Tanydd Jaquet BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 31

snap sn ap

the griswolds

PICS :: HL

up all night out all week . . .

fbi social

PICS :: HL

01:05:13 :: Oxford Art Factory :: 38-46 Oxford St, Darlinghurst 9332 3711

02:05:13 :: FBi Social :: Kings Cross Hotel 248 William St 9331 9900

03:05:13 :: The Standard :: 3/383 Bourke St Darlinghurst 9331 3100

party profile

matt price

PICS :: AM

smokescreen music festival It’s called: The Smokescreen Music Festival.

It sounds like: Anything but a breath of fresh air, rock and hard hitting hip hop. The sort of music with a heady mix of super glam that makes you scream your lungs out if they are not full of cancerous growths.

Acts: Headlining are the Coughin’ Nails & M4-C EMA, with special guests lung cancer, heart disease, clogged arteries, stroke , amputated limbs, gum disease, yellow teeth and premature ageing.

Sell it to us: The most dangerous line-up of killer acts all together in the one festival that will truly take your breath away.

The bit we’ll remember in the AM: Smoking can really mess with your health. It’s really easy to start when you are young but really hard to give it up later and it ain’t cool on any level.

Crowd specs: The 2.8 million or so Australians aged 18 years and over who smoke.

Wallet damage: Around $20 per packet for the smokes and many millions of dollars for nearly 15,000 Australians dying each year from smoking related illnesses.

Where: Australia wide.

step-panther

PICS :: HL

When: Now and for the rest of your life.

03:05:13 :: Brighton Up Bar :: Level 1/77 Oxford St Darlinghurst 9572 6322 KATRINA CLARKE :: AVERIE S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HONCHO) LEY MAR :: PEDRO XAVIER OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER ASH :: IS LEW RY LUENG :: KATE HARVEY :: RYAN KITCHING:: HEN

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matt & kim

PICS :: KC

kathryn rollins

PICS :: AM

04:05:13 :: The Standard :: 3/383 Bourke St Darlinghurst 9331 3100

01:05:13 :: Oxford Art Factory :: 38-46 Oxford St, Darlinghurst 9332 3711

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

MELBOURNE SKA ORCHESTRA The Metro Theatre Friday May 3

After more than a decade of soldout shows and electrifying festival appearances, Melbourne Ska Orchestra brought the jims, the jams and the swing when the 30-piece band hit the stage on Friday night. Imagine the force of more than a dozen horn players, a mean rhythm section, percussionist, two organists and three singers and you may begin to understand the wonderful, uncontrollable mayhem of the skankin’ powerhouse that is Melbourne Ska Orchestra.

Walking into the theatre, a few of us had no idea what we were about to witness: an explosive celebration of music unfolding right before our eyes, as the Metro ignited with opener ‘Katoomba’.

Fronted by Nicky Bomba (Bomba, Bustamento, John Butler Trio), with his professional, fun and impulsive conducting style, they pumped out hit after hit, including their first ever single ‘Lygon Street Meltdown’ and ‘When Dean Went to Mexico’.

TAME IMPALA, MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS Hordern Pavillion 2 May 2013

If there’s one place that you can abandon cultural cringe once and for all, it’s at Sydney’s favourite metal barn on a freezing Thursday.

The hangar is already at half capacity when Melbourne’s reigning champs of Weird Electronica Midnight Juggernauts take to the stage. They roar through a stellar set, which includes road tests of new material from their upcoming third record and some firm favourites like ‘Road to Recovery’ and ‘Into The Galaxy’. Having been out of the spotlight for so long, it sometimes felt like this trio had ceased to exist. Tonight proves that they never went anywhere, and that album number three could be the one to make them popular, not just critical darlings.

Facing no such problems of their own is Tame Impala, returning to Sydney for a victory lap to celebrate the entire world liking their latest release at once. Kevin and the boys have never put on a sub-par show in their lives (at least in the eight that

With darkness and alcohol to cure any inhibitions, there was more than enough bad dancing in the crowd. Their cover of The Specials’ ‘A Message To Rudy’ and ‘Night Boat To Cairo’ had the floor ablaze as Bomba tore around the stage in style backed by his solid band, some of Australia’s preeminent names in ska and reggae.

The crowd put in as much as the band on stage, with Bomba initiating crowd chantoffs and hand swaying, getting everyone to bend down to the theatre floor in unison; the crowd couldn’t have been having more fun.

Finishing their two-hour set with ‘Monkey Man’, that raw feel-it-in-your-bones energy was definitely present; it’ll be hard to top off the fun we had in these short lived two hours. After this show it’s easy to see how the combination of their on-stage energy and the support from their rapidly swelling fan-base has them soaring in popularity.

Melbourne Ska Orchestra are fast becoming a fixture of Australia’s musical landscape.

Carla Pavez

I’ve seen) and after navigating teething issues with sound at the start, they’re clearly onto another winner. The Hordern drowns even the best of bands, but Tame Impala have done their homework with their sound guy and their music sounds full, crisp and utterly compelling in a venue seemingly designed to do the opposite. The band also indulged in extended jams, added sections and solos that really indicate how much they enjoy being in a live setting and how spontaneously, awesomely gifted they all are at improvisation.

Watching Tame Impala perform is a reminder that engaging, uplifting gigs can actually be performed with live instruments and vocalists. Parker probably never imagined that a throwaway piece of falsetto like the chorus of ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’ would ever be sung back at him by five thousand kids, but he handles it like a pro. We’ve been waiting for some official rock stars in this country who aren’t throwbacks for years. Parker may sound a bit like Lennon, but the band is truly something unique. Who would have thought that an amazing record was only half the story.

Jonno Seidler

IS PHOTOGRAPHER :: KATE LEW

BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 33

g g guide gig g

send your listings to : gigguide@thebrag.com

pick of the week

SATURDAY MAY 18

The Satellites

Factory Theatre, Marrickville

Black Cherry feat.

The Satellites I Can't Believe It's Not Porkers, Pat Capocci Combo, Electrik Dynamite, The Tearaways $20 (+ bf) 8pm MONDAY MAY 13 ROCK & POP

Collective ft. Betty & Oswald, Charlie Graden Venue 505, Surry Hills $10 8.30pm

Frankie’s World Famous House Band Frankie’s Pizza, Sydney free 9pm

TUESDAY MAY 14

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

ROCK & POP

Helmut Uhlmann, Cheyne McFarlane, Chris Brookes, Massimo Presti Kellys On King, Newtown free 7pm Singer Songwriter

Co-Pilot Orient Hotel, The Rocks free 9pm

JAZZ

Divergence Jazz Orchestra,

Simon Barker Solo 107 Projects, Redfern free 7.30pm Old School Funk and Groove Night Venue 505, Surry Hills free 8.30pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Beth Orton St. Stephen’s Uniting Church, Sydney $75 7.30pm Carolyn Woodorth and guests Newington Inn, Petersham free 7pm Helmut Uhlmann, David White, Gabriella Brown, Ryan McClenahan, Justynn Harcourt Tea Gardens Hotel, Bondi Junction free 7pm

WEDNESDAY MAY 15 ROCK & POP

Beth Orton 34 :: BRAG :: 512 : 13:05:13

Deftones, Letlive UNSW Roundhouse, Sydney sold out 7pm Jimmy Bear Coogee Bay Hotel free 9pm Live & Local: Gene Fahlberg Trio, Starr Witness, Bec Sandridge, Bin Juice

Lizotte’s Restaurant, Dee Why $10 7.30pm Local Natives Metro Theatre, Sydney $60 8pm One Wild Night Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket free 10pm Rigasurous, Sour Cream Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $5 8pm Sosueme Presents Bleeding Knees Club, Danny Clayton, Hailer Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm Vibrations: A.M.O.R.A, Lavinia Row, HAM Radio, The Drying Shed, Cadence Empire Valve Bar, Tempe $15 7pm

Darlinghurst $10

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

COUNTRY

Angelene Harris and guests Cat and Fiddle Hotel, Balmain free 7pm Bianca Meier, Strangerous Collective, Nikita Rolleston Brass Monkey, Cronulla $15 8pm Mark Travers Orient Hotel, The Rocks free 9pm The Rhythm Hunters, Medicine Rhythms The Basement, Circular Quay $20 7.30pm TAOS, John Chesher, Gavin Fitzgerald Coach & Horses Hotel, Randwick free 7pm

COUNTRY

Musos Club Jam Night Bald Faced Stag Hotel, Leichhardt free 8pm

THURSDAY MAY 16 ROCK & POP

Balmain Blitz: War Flower, Jeremy Harrison, Sonic Sunday, Malvina Parade, The Pipes, Tiger & The Rogues, Dirty Nice The Bridge Hotel, Rozelle $15 7pm Beautifully Mad ft. Tony King and Nina Vox Blue Beat, Double Bay $20 9pm Blind Valley, The Shooters, Particles FBi Social, Kings Cross $10 8pm Cambo Observer Hotel, The Rocks 8.30pm Daniel Hopkins, Cheyne McFarlane, Alan Watters, SugarSun, As Angels Bleed Brass Monkey, Cronulla $15 8pm David Agius Dee Why Hotel 7pm Drey Rollan Band Rock Lily, The Star, Pyrmont free 8pm Fait Accompli, Ramps, Firesaint The Backroom, Potts Point $10 8pm Neon Trees, New Empire The Standard, Darlinghurst $44 (+ bf) 8pm Karl Marx, Yo Put That Bag Back On, Unbranded Animals, Riot Nine, Dog Act, Metcalfe Valve Bar, Tempe 7pm The Legendary Glenn Shorrock, Liza Ohlback Lizotte’s Restaurant, Dee Why $54 7.30pm Peter Head Harbor View Hotel, The Rocks free 8pm Stan Ridgway The Basement, Circular Quay $49 8pm Vanna Annandale Hotel, Annandale $20 8pm The Walking Who, Virgo Rising, Big White Brighton Up Bar,

JAZZ

The Big Ol’Bus Band Venue 505, Surry Hills $10/$15 8.30pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Face The Music (YoungBloods) Venue Final Palm Beach RSL Club free 7pm Peach Montgomery, Bonnie Kay Forest Lodge Hotel, Glebe free 7.30pm Victor Valdes & Mariano Gonzales Camelot Lounge, Marrickville $27.70 7pm Country Roads with Andy Golledge, Lucky Luke & The Shooting Stars, Fanny Lumsden & The Thrillseekers Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst $10 8pm

FRIDAY MAY 17 ROCK & POP

Alien Beach Party ft.

Shining Bird / The Super Trip / Captain of the Push The Standard, Darlinghurst $8 (+ bf) 8pm Black Label, Mad Charlie, Black Aces Bald Faced Stag Hotel, Leichhardt $18 8pm Dave Phillips O’Malleys Hotel, Kings Cross 8pm Diesel, Tim Chaisson The Vanguard, Newtown $43.80 6.30pm Emma Louise Metro Theatre, Sydney $23.70 8pm Heath Burdell Clovelly Hotel 8pm The Hollow Bones Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst free 8pm Isaiah Mitchell, BLACKIE, Kellie Lloyd, Robert MacManus Hermann’s Bar, Darlington $15 (+ bf) 8pm James Higgins Dee Why Hotel 7pm Jerrico, Dead In A Second, Neotokyo, Beggars

Orchestra Annandale Hotel, Annandale $15 8pm John Marathon & Jacki Cooper, George Golla, FLIP Lizotte’s Restaurant, Dee Why $19 7.30pm Jonathon Jones, Reckless Orient Hotel, The Rocks $5 after 10pm Killrazor, Lethal Vendetta, Abacination, Hematic Valve Bar, Tempe 7pm Latinaotearoa (NZ), Skylounja, Kongofunk Bluebeat, Double Bay $20 8pm Matt Price Duo Sidebar, Sydney 8.30pm Michael McGlynn Crows Nest Hotel 6.30pm My Fiction, Creo, Young Romantics, Enerate Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $10 Oslow, Yo Put That Bag Back On, Brinkworth, Palmar Grasp Blackwire Records, Annandale $10 7pm Purple Doves perform the music of Prince Camelot Lounge, Marrickville $22.70 7.30pm The Tango Saloon, Little Fox, La Tarantella FBi Social, Kings Cross $10 8pm UndergroundLOVERS, The Morning After Girls Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst $22 (+ bf) 8pm Vanity Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket free 10.30pm

JAZZ

Darren Percival Venue 505, Surry Hills $15/$20 8.30pm The Vampires The Sound Lounge, Seymour Centre, Chippendale $10$20 8.30pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK 1927, Craig Woodward Brass Monkey, Cronulla $45 7pm BG Sound Project Sydney Opera House $65 8.30pm Buffalo Tales, Tom Stephens, Martha Marlow Upstairs Beresford, Surry Hills free 6pm Northern Beaches Festival with The Green Mohair Suits, Distant Sons, Phil Bracken, Lunch Mothers, Leroy Lee and more Local Natives

LEARN HOW TO

SING

Are you interested in learning how to sing?

Becoming the next winner on the Voice? or just singing for the pure love of it?

Well its now your time to shine. How do I do this you may ask?

Just pick up the phone and book your first lesson today...

I am Hayley Milano, I have been performing and teaching professionally for over 10 years, I have toured Australia and have a lot of contacts in the industry from people, gigs and inside the studio. I enjoy nothing more then to share my love and passion for singing with others. I have two studios - City and Vaucluse. Im looking for dedicated, hard working students who are committed to reaching there goals. I have students ranging from 8 - 65 year old students. It is very important to have a connection with my student so i can unlock the performer within. Hayley 0422 963 373

g g guide gig g

send your listings to : gigguide@thebrag.com Newtown Jets Sport Club, Tempe $15 12pm Shake ‘n’ Bake Brass Monkey, Cronulla $17.85 8pm Songwriting Society of Australia Showcase with Pete Scully and Fields Of Mars Mars Hill Cafe, Parramatta $15 8pm Wintercoats (Melb), Rainbow Chan, The Townhouses, Astral DJs Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $10 Yobfest ft. Headbutt, Eager 13, The Scam, Topnovil, Crooked Face, Family Values Valve Bar, Tempe 7pm The Khanz Berry Reserve, Narrabeen Lakes $15-$100, from 6pm 17-19 May Oliver Goss Customs House Bar, Circular Quay free 7pm

SATURDAY MAY 18 ROCK & POP

The Amazing Woolloomooloosers The Square, Haymarket, $10 8pm Black Cherry feat. The Satellites, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Porkers, Pat Capocci Combo, Electrik Dynamite, The Tearaways Factory Theatre, Marrickville $20 (+ bf) 8pm Black Diamond Hearts Rock Lily, The Star, Pyrmont

9.30pm The Conics, UACSC, Bin Juice Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst free 8pm Dan Lawrence Sir Joseph Banks Hotel, Botany 7pm Diesel, Tim Chaisson The Vanguard, Newtown $43.80 6.30pm Enerate, The Nectars, Beat Cl9ub & Capitol The Standard, Darlinghurst $10 (+ bf) 8pm Frank Sultana & The Sinister Kids, Sam Joole Band, Lyall Maloney Annandale Hotel, Annandale $15 8pm Greg Byrne, Endless Summer Orient Hotel, The Rocks $5 after 10pm Jay Parrino Dee Why Hotel 6.30pm

Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School of Medicine Metro Theatre, Sydney $49.70 8pm Jon Stevens, Sally Singleton Lizotte’s Restaurant, Dee Why $62 7.30pm The Khanz, Ginger & Drum, Dallas Pony FBi Social, Kings Cross $10 8pm Lime Cordiale, Citizen Kay, Sheppard, Govs Upstairs Beresford, Surry Hills free 6pm Lorde, Guerre Goodgod Small Club, Sydney sold out 8pm River Of Snakes, Small Town Incident, Buddy Glass Blackwire Records, Annandale $10 7pm Rock on Tempe: 15 Bands for 15 Bucks

JAZZ

The Bland with guests Valve Bar, Tempe 12pm Chris Gudu Camelot Lounge, Marrickville $22.70 7.30pm Ignition Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket free 10.30pm Matt McMahon Trio The Sound Lounge, Seymour Centre, Chippendale $10-$20 8.30pm Yuki Kumagai, John Mackie Well Co.Cafe/Wine Bar, Leichhardt free 7.15pm

Marrickville $22.70-$27.70 6.30pm Dave Sattout, Richie Cuthbert The Vanguard, Newtown $13.80 7.30pm Kaki King (USA) The Basement, Circular Quay $30 6.30pm The Letter Tellers, Bin Juice, Moonlight Cowboys Annandale Hotel, Annandale $5 7pm Matt Price, Jess Dunbar Duo Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel 4pm Mojo, White Bros Orient Hotel, The Rocks free 4.30pm Senile Sircus, Steel Swarm, Paralysis, Harmony of Hate Valve Bar, Tempe 4pm Steve Edmonds Band

The Beach Club, Collaroy 4.30pm Suite AZ Rock Lily, The Star, Pyrmont free 9.30pm

JAZZ

Peter Head Band Harbour View Hotel, The Rocks free 4pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK Bronte Oatley Hotel free 2pm Greg Sita, John Kwiecinski, Gabriella Brown, Oliver Smith, Daniel Hopkins Evening Star Hotel, Surry Hills free 12pm Peach Montgomery and guests Salisbury Hotel, Stanmore free 2pm

SUNDAY MAY 19 ROCK & POP A Requiem For Improvisation Camelot Lounge,

Emma Louise

tue

14 May

(9:00PM - 12:00AM)

wed

thu

15

16

May

May

(9:30PM - 12:30AM)

(9:00PM - 12:00AM)

fri

17 May (4:30PM - 7:30PM)

(9:30PM - 1:30AM)

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

sat

18

(4:30PM - 7:30PM)

SATURDAY NIGHT

May

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

sun

19 May

(9:30PM - 12:30AM)

(4:30PM - 7:30PM)

SUNDAY NIGHT

(8:30PM - 12:00AM)

BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 35

gig picks

up all night out all week...

The Walking Who, Virgo Rising, Big White Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $10

Kaki King

Frank Sultana & The Sinister Kids, Sam Joole Band, Lyall Maloney Annandale Hotel, Annandale $15 8pm

Cam Raeburn, Warchief, Liam Gale & The Ponytails, The Spoon Collectors Hermann’s Bar, Darlington $12$15 8pm

Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School of Medicine Metro Theatre, Sydney $49.70 8pm

BG Sound Project Sydney Opera House $65 8.30pm

The Conics, UACSC, Bin Juice Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst free 8pm

The Khanz, Ginger & Drum, Dallas Pony FBi Social, Kings Cross $10 8pm

Emma Louise Metro Theatre, Sydney $23.70 8pm

Enerate, The Nectars, Beat Cl9ub & Capitol

Lime Cordiale, Citizen Kay, Sheppard, Govs Upstairs Beresford, Surry Hills free 6pm

Alien Beach Party ft.

Shining Bird / The Super Trip / Captain of the Push The Standard, Darlinghurst $8 (+ bf) 8pm

Beth Orton St. Stephen’s Uniting Church, Sydney $75 7.30pm

WEDNESDAY MAY 15 Deftones, Letlive UNSW Roundhouse, Sydney sold out 7pm Local Natives Metro Theatre, Sydney $60 8pm Sosueme Presents Bleeding Knees Club, Danny Clayton, Hailer Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm

THURSDAY MAY 16

Jerrico, Dead In A Second, Neotokyo, Beggars Orchestra Annandale Hotel, Annandale $15 8pm

Blind Valley, The Shooters, Particles FBi Social, Kings Cross $10 8pm

My Fiction, Creo, Young Romantics, Enerate Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $10

Country Roads with Andy Golledge, Lucky Luke & The Shooting Stars, Fanny Lumsden & The Thrillseekers Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst $10 8pm

Oslow, Yo Put That Bag Back On, Brinkworth, Palmar Grasp Blackwire Records, Annandale $10 7pm

Fait Accompli, Ramps, Firesaint The Backroom, Potts Point $10 8pm Neon Trees, New Empire The Standard, Darlinghurst $44 (+ bf) 8pm

HOSTED BY

BEN DARSOW 8PM // $15

UndergroundLOVERS, The Morning After Girls Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst $22 (+ bf) 8pm

FEATURING

TREVOR COOK

+ BARRY HAMILTON + JOHN CRUCKSHANK + LIAM BRADBERY + CAIT JOHNSON + MARTY MORGAN + KATIE BURCH

FRIDAY 17TH MAY

BLIND VALLEY

THE TANGO SALOON

8PM // $10

level 2, kings cross hotel

36 :: BRAG :: 512 : 13:05:13

River Of Snakes, Small Town Incident, Buddy Glass Blackwire Records, Annandale $10 7pm Wintercoats (Melb), Rainbow Chan, The Townhouses, Astral DJs Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $10

SUNDAY MAY 19 Dave Sattout, Richie Cuthbert The Vanguard, Newtown $13.80 7.30pm

Lorde

Kaki King (USA) The Basement, Circular Quay $30 6.30pm

SATURDAY 18TH MAY

THURSDAY 16TH MAY + THE SHOOTERS PARTY + HARRIET WHISKEY CLUB + PARTICLES

Lorde, Guerre Goodgod Small Club, Sydney sold out 8pm

The Tango Saloon, Little Fox, La Tarantella FBi Social, Kings Cross $10 8pm

WEDNESDAY 15TH MAY THE LAUGH STAND

The Standard, Darlinghurst $10 (+ bf) 8pm

The Amazing Woolloomooloosers The Square, Haymarket, $10 8pm

FRIDAY MAY 17

TUESDAY MAY 14

SATURDAY MAY 18

THE KHANZ + GINGER & DRUM + DALLAS PONY 8PM // $10

HANDS UP! SO FRESH YOU CAN SMELL IT THROUGH A ZIPLOCK

+ LITTLE FOX + LA TARANTELLA

DJ CLOCKWERK & FRIENDS

8PM // $10

11:30PM // FREE

www.fbisocial.com

BRAGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s guide to dance, hip hop and club culture

brag beats inside

alex niggeman

also + club g : + club s uide na + weekl ps y column

BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 37

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 DANIEL

Flight Facilities

FARLEY

FLIGHT FACILITIES

Growing Up Unlike most 1. interviewees, I have to

Your Crew I just moved here from 3.

NZ six months ago so a

say I came from the most un-musical background I know. My parents barely listened to music and I did science and economics in school, I thought taking music would be something I’d never use (oh how I was wrong). I did steal my dad’s vinyl of Dark Side Of The Moon though.

lot of my tight crew is over there. We started a club night called The Nark a few years ago and right now I’m focusing on the Sydney launch of that (it kicks off May 15 at The Abercrombie!).

I’ve done a lot of stuff with Tom Piper, who’s a good friend, and we have a little record label called Bakehaus records. The whole Sweat It Out crew are sick dudes with similar interests also – I have a single out with them later this month under the alias Terace, which is less clubby and more musical..

Inspirations I’m not quite sure who 2.

I’d name as my favorite musicians and idols; I get stuck in the world of electronic music for months and then I sit down and listen to some jazz or something classical and I wonder if we’re all mad spending our lives listening to house music. DJ wise, I really, really looked up to Ajax and his style and taste in everything. I’ve been DJing for nearly 10 years and feel like there was some real craft in it back then, and remember watching him in awe when I was learning to play.

The Music You Make I got into music 4. properly when my motor racing “career” wasn’t working, I had just quit law school and my mates forced me to attend a ‘rave party’. These days, I love all different genres of dance music, mainly 4/4 stuff, house, tech, and bass.

A-Trak and Diplo have been playing my latest solo single so I’m working on a new EP

and a few big names are interested, which is cool.

My latest collab with Piper got up to #11 in the UK club charts!

I’m digging a lot of big techy type stuff but I understand you have to play to the crowd so I always like to pack the crates with some classics and favorites, and coming from NZ there is always a slight bass/ hip hop influence, even for a little white boy like me.

Music, Right Here, Right Now 5.

I think there are a lot of good things and a lot of shit things happening in the scene right now, so you just have to ignore/laugh off the rubbish that is going on and focus on what you’re actually into. I’ve really been getting into live electronica acts and am going to try and get fully behind new talented producers with this new night.

Sydney duo Flight Facilities recently released their new single ‘I Didn’t Believe’ through Future Classic, a collaboration with vocalist Elizabeth Rose that also includes Marcus Browne and Alexander Burnett (of Sparkadia fame) on the song writing credits. Flight Facilities have been travelling the globe of late, slipstreaming behind their successful streak of hit singles including ‘Crave You’ and the recently released darker atmospherics of ‘Clair De Lune’. Their latest single ‘I Didn’t Believe’ is touted as a “(non) guilty disco pleasure” and includes remixes from disco revisionist duo Tiger & Woods, New York based label owner Lou Teti and cohort Light Year. While Flight Facilities’ solo Sydney shows have sold out, they are also playing at Splendour in the Grass, which is – uh – also sold out. But good for you if you snared a ticket!

COSMIN TRG

Romanian-born, Berlin-based Cosmin Nicolae, AKA Cosmin TRG, will play a three-hour set as the headliner of the next Compound party on Saturday June 8 at Goodgod Small Club.

Since announcing himself with his breakout cut ‘Put You Down,’ Cosmin TRG has been at the forefront of the UK bass music scene, releasing on Dutch imprint Rush Hour, Modeselektor’s lauded 50 Weapons label and Untold’s Hemlock stable. His forthcoming tour follows the recent release of his critically acclaimed sophomore album Gordian, which spans dubstep, techno and experimental house sounds, and despite Nicolae’s original intentions, turned out to be “fairly musical” and melodic. Support comes from local DJs Community, Subaske and Zeus, with $15 presale tickets available online.

After performing alongside the likes of Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins at the close of the inaugural ’09 Vivid, singer, producer, artist, photographer and poet Karl Hyde will renew his affiliation with the Vivid LIVE festival when he performs at the Sydney Opera House on Monday May 27. Hyde is best known for being the frontman of seminal Essex dance outfit Underworld, who’ve created timeless cuts of club culture such as ‘Born Slippy’, ‘Cowgirl’ and ‘Rez’ over the years. Hyde arrives in Australia following his work as the co-musical director of the 2012 London Olympic Games opening ceremony, where he continued his ongoing collaboration with filmmaker Danny Boyle that began with the classic film Trainspotting. He’ll be performing his latest album Edgeland in full alongside a selection of Underworld rarities and classics.

xxx photo by xx

TERMINAL PROJEKT

38 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

Caspa and Dynamite MC will headline the Bass Mafia Garden Party at Ivy on Saturday June 1. Londoner Caspa is renowned for the FabricLive compilation he released with Rusko, and has since remixed the likes of Deadmau5, Miike Snow, Swedish House Mafia, Depeche Mode, Kid Sister and Buraka Som Sistema. In more recent times he’s made his mark via singles like ‘War,’ which featured Keith ‘Firestarter’ Flint from The Prodigy.

ShockOne will also be showcasing material from his barnstorming debut album, Universus, along with Doctor Werewolf, A-Tonez and Glovecats. As with all Garden Parties, this will be a daytime affair, with beats commencing at midday.

KARL HYDE

What: The Nark Collective Launch Party at the Abercrombie When: Wednesday May 15

Terminal Projekt is a new component of Vivid, being introduced this year and offering two nights of electronic music at Sydney’s Overseas Passenger Terminal at Circular Quay on Saturday June 8 and Sunday June 9. The Saturday line-up consists of French trio and Circus Records family members dOP, bringing their experimental live take on jazz, hip hop, house and techno to Australia for the first time. dOP will be flanked by the New York pair Sepalcure, the collective moniker of Machinedrum and Praveen, along with multitalented Detroit impresario Jimmy Edgar. The mood shifts slightly on Sunday, with Hamburg producer Marco Niemerski, AKA Tensnake of ‘Coma Cat’ fame, throwing down. Rounding off the bill will be Hot Creations’ HNQO and Scotland’s Graeme Clark, better known for his house and disco influenced output as The Revenge (and, with Craig Smith, 6th Borough Project). In addition to the internationals, a host of local DJs will also be on hand for both nights, including Simon Caldwell, the Co-Op DJs and Astral People DJs. Presale tickets are available through the Pulse Radio website.

BASS MAFIA GARDEN PARTY

KORA

Jimmy Edgar

New Zealand quintet Kora will return to Australia for a series of shows to support the release of their Light Years album, which dropped at the back end of last year. Eschewing guitars in favour of an arsenal of synthesisers and a mixture of live and sampled drums to create “alien funk,” Light Years showed Kora branching out across different genres. You can expect them to do something similar when they perform live at Oxford Art Factory on Thursday June 20.

FEATURING

FEEL THE LOVE, NOT GIVING IN, HELL COULD FREEZE & WAITING ALL NIGHT PLUS COLLABORATIONS WITH

EMELI SANDÉ, ALEX CLARE, JOHN NEWMAN, ANGEL HAZE & MORE

DEBUT ALBUM HOME OUT NOW

WWW.WARNERMUSIC.COM.AU

WE ARE THE NARK COLLECTIVE FEAT.

EMOH INSTEAD DANIEL FARLEY FRONT LEFT

THE NARK COLLECTIVE

JUBILANTS DJS DANIEL REDFERN ZWELLI

WEDS 15 TH MAY @ THE ABERCROMBIE

FREE ENTRY / $10 JUGS $5 HOUSE SPIRITS / 100 BROADWAY / FACEBOOK.COM/WHOISTHENARK? BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 39

dance music news

free stuff

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

FREESTUFF@THEBRAG.COM

five things WITH

BRYTE

we walked the north side streets of Brisbane.

By this time I was already listening to the likes of Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Bone Thugs and Cypress Hill. I was listening to Cypress Hill in my room one night when all of a sudden my cousin and his mate jumped through my window with a garbage bag full of weed. That was quite memorable.

Inspirations I must say that those who work with 2. me influence me the most. Artists from the Sound Magnetiks Affiliation, which I’m a part of, inspire me a lot. Incredible producers like Lord Dazastah and Rob Shaker are a huge inspiration to me, as are other major acts like Hilltop Hoods, Bias B, Downsyde, Drapht, A Tribe Called Quest and Immortal Technique.

Your Crew Dazastah (SBX - Downsyde) produced 3. both my debut album Full Stop and my

Growing Up Not long after starting year eight, I met 1. two TI [Thursday Island] fellas who would beatbox and rap during lunch breaks. I started hanging around them a lot, even outside school, learning how to beatbox and rap as

latest album Bryte Side Of Life. Working with him has been one of the best experiences in my hip hop career to date. Highly motivated, immensely talented and downright professional, it’s been a true blessing. The amazingly talented Zeke works closely with me as my DJ for all my live performances, he’s incredibly knowledgeable and has won a multitude of awards on his journey as a turntablist.

The Music You Make My first release Full Stop was quite 4. political, hard hitting and had a lot to do with teaching youth but also had a slight touch of humour. It had tinges of reggae here and there, mixed with funk, soul and Boom Bap. I was lucky enough to record with Porsah Laine (SBX) on both of my album releases and collaborate with Real Talk Battle League legends Kase Won and Savij Tung. I’m also constantly collaborating with Perth emcees and producers, some of which include the late Hunter (SBX), Cortext, Complete and Omac.

The local scene in Perth is awesome, it’s real community, where everyone gets in and supports each other.

5.

Music, Right Here, Right Now I tend not to think too much about what’s happening out in the wider music scene, my focus is almost always on hip hop and its bridging styles. I’m always rummaging around for old school stuff and finding new ways to bring the real elements of hip hop culture to the youth. One of the main obstacles for me as a muso was the business behind the music, so studying the music industry at Abmusic College in Perth was like 100 steps in the right direction.

What: Bryte Side Of Life out now on TOO SOLID Records/MGM

PICNIC

Craig Smith and Graeme Clarke, collectively known as 6th Borough Project, headline the next Picnic bash at the Burdekin on Friday June 7. With their roots in jazz, boogie and funk, and their tips in disco, deep house and warm tech, the pair should prove well suited to the Picnic brand, which has hosted heavyweights Ivan Smagghe and Genius of Time in recent months. Aside from their work as a duo, which culminated in the release of debut One Night In The Borough earlier this year, the pair also have formidable solo pedigrees. Smith has released on labels such as Jisco and Permanent Vacation and crafted remixes of Roy Ayers, Moloko and Illya

Jesse Boykins III

Alex Niggemann

S.A.S.H SUNDAYS The S.A.S.H crew are draping themselves over your shoulder this Sunday (much like an acronym-less sash) with slick bass and spine-tingling house soundscapes to mark two years of postponing ‘Recovery Sundays’ to ‘Recovery Mondays’ at the Abercrombie.

Alex Niggemann will man the decks for a killer three-hour set, before Jake Hough, Robbie Cordukes, Matt Weir and Kerry Wallace bring their groove-inducing tech mastery. Much like your second birthday (we assume), it will be on a terrace in the glistening Sunday sunshine. Unlike your second birthday, there will be no Seal soundtrack. We have two double passes to give away for the bash on Sunday May 19.

Just tell us who you’d bring and why.

Rudman, while Clarke is known for his output as ‘The Revenge’, and will be DJing solo at Terminal Projekt later on the long weekend.

WEEKEND VINES CANCELLED

The Weekend Vines camping festival, which was set to take place at Seplin Estate Wines outside Wee Waa this weekend, has been cancelled.

Festival organisers promised refunds to all ticket buyers, laying the blame on liquor license difficulties in a statement that read, “We hung our balls out there, but unfortunately on this occasion it just wasn’t meant to be.” Anyone with questions should direct them to info@weekendvines.com.

Dr Dre

OUTSIDEIN

Astral People’s boutique inner city festival event OutsideIn, which last year featured performances from the likes of Flume, Smoke DZA, Oliver Tank, Shigeto, Jesse Boykins III and Africa Hitech, will return on Saturday September 21. This year they’re showcasing an “expansion of the open-minded attitude that made 2012 such a great success.” As soon as we get word on the 2013 OutsideIn line-up you’ll read about it on these hallowed pages.

MARC ROMBOY

40 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

PLAYER HATERS BALLZ

This Saturday Levins, Joyride and Shantan Wantan Ichiban are paying tribute to the G Funk Godfather Dr Dre at the Player Haters Ball. Joyride is playing two live sets of hip hop and R&B covers, replete with plenty of Dr Dre hits dating back to the late 80s. Doors open 11pm, with entry $10 before midnight.

Jesse Boykins III photo by Mel D Cole

Marc Romboy

German tech producer Marc Romboy, of the Systematic label, will headline Chinese Laundry on Saturday June 1 as part of his forthcoming Australian tour, his first visit to our shores in two years. Romboy began his Systematic label back in the sunkissed spring of 2004, launching the imprint with the release ‘Every Day In My Life,’ which he produced with Booka Shade. Romboy then went on to collaborate with people like John Dahlbäck, Abysm and Detroit luminary Blake Baxter for the label, and has also branched out with releases on labels like Ovum and 20:20 Vision.

Romboy has also accumulated a vast catalogue of remixes of underground titans like Moritz von Oswald, Robag Wruhme, Martin Buttrich and Roman Fluegel. He’s currently basking in the success of his most recent album Taiyo from earlier this year, a collaboration with techno stalwart Ken Ishi.

Alex Niggemann I Think I’m Paranoid By Alasdair Duncan

The overall reaction has been better than he could ever have hoped for. “I’ve received so much positive feedback,” Niggemann says, “both from inside the dance music scene and outside of it. That really makes me happy, because my main intention was to reach people outside of those who are familiar with EDM.” Dance music moves pretty fast – a genre or sound will be in clubs one week and in the dustbin the next. Thinking about this was one of the biggest challenges Niggemann faced when putting the album together.

“When I was working on the tracks, I knew they might not be released until a whole year later,” he tells me. “Because of this, I tried to keep the sound as timeless as possible.

Another thing that really challenged me was that it’s pretty hard to create an album that sounds homogenous without the tracks being too similar to each other.”

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ast year, Berlin’s Alex Niggemann released his debut album, Paranoid Funk, which met with wide acclaim for its combination of intricate beats and catchy melodies.

Niggemann says he was determined to make the kind of record that you could throw on at home or in the club and have a similar effect.

“I tried to combine modern, deeper and slower elements with the roughness and coolness of dark old-school sounds. These things might not fit together at first sight but

in the end this is exactly what turns out to be the perfect combination, and is also the reason for my album’s name Paranoid Funk.”

Explaining further, he says that the two words ‘paranoid’ and ‘funk’ don’t necessarily have much to do with each other, yet they fit together well when you hear them spoken one after the other. “‘Paranoid’ in the title stands for the dark and clubby part of the album,” he says, “while the ‘funk’ stands for the laid-back, more groovy and musically-orientated part.”

He started with 80 songs, of which 20 were finished, and 11 made it to the album. “It was a long process,” he says, “but I’m more than happy with the result.”

These days, Niggemann inhabits the world of club music, but he got his start as a child learning classical piano, and he says that this, more than anything, helped deepen his understanding of composition and structure.

“My piano was the beginning of my musical

career,” he says. “It’s how I started making music myself. I started lessons when I was four, and I learned all the basics and got a good musical knowledge.” His parents had to force him at first, but later in life he discovered the advantages of playing an instrument.

“In my teens, I found out that playing the piano and singing Backstreet Boys songs was something that really impresses the girls, so I went a bit more in the pop music direction!” he says.

Needless to say, Niggemann eventually grew out of his ‘I Want It That Way’ phase and into the acclaimed electronic producer he is today – but he often thinks back on those early stages of his musical development.

“I tried a lot of different styles, and I even tried to produce some hip hop tunes,” he says. “Later on when EDM became interesting for me, it was matter-of-fact to start producing my own tracks. So I would say the piano was more the source of everything, and it’s accompanied me throughout my musical development process.

Even today I still have a piano in my studio – I used it for the track ‘Lovers’ on my album.”

Where: S.A.S.H Sundays Second Birthday at the Abercrombie Hotel When: Sunday May 19

Flatbush Zombies Dawn of the Dead by Jody Macgregor

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here are two ways to go when you’re a rapper who gets blog-famous, discovered on YouTube and written about on the strength of a solid mixtape. You can be like Drake, Kid Cudi, Wale and all the other rappers who signed to a major label and then kicked off a career of releasing disappointing albums that, restricted by worrying about your sample-clearance budget and demographics, lack the unrestricted, freewheeling joy of the music that made you famous.

The upshot is you might get to be one of the few people in the music business actually making crazy money, but you’ll have to compromise. You might get to make some decent music on half of your album regardless – Nicki Minaj, never forget – but you’ll have to sit it alongside tunes that aren’t so great, that sound a little more aggressively market-tested.

Then there’s option two, which is basically “be Odd Future”. The LA crew were releasing full albums as well as mixtapes online before anybody over the age of 21 had a clue who they were – well-realised and complete experiences rather than just bundles of gags and good ideas.

They’ve maintained that output even after money and fame, or at least infamy, came calling. The other thing they did was have a crew. Odd Future brought back the idea of having a gang of friends on stage with you rather than just an entourage of hangers-on. Even if some of them stumble, the others pick up the slack. Like the Wu-Tang Clan they branch out, but strengthen the core by doing so. There are plenty of people loving Frank Ocean who can’t stand Tyler, the Creator, and vice versa.

Odd Future made it in LA, but New York is where it’s at now. A collective of collectives under the flag of ‘Beast Coast’: groups like A$AP Mob, The Underachievers, World’s Fair, The Progressive Era and Flatbush Zombies. While A$AP Mob’s breakout star A$AP Rocky signed a three-million dollar record deal and then pumped out a predictably compromised album, the Flatbush Zombies – apparently next on the list to break through, with their first world tour lined up in preparation – are determined to go the other way.

“Everyone coming out of New York right now is pretty original ... no one in the world sound like us, son”

“What is it about signing to a label?” says Erick Arc Elliott, the trio’s producer and leaststoned member. His compatriots Meech Darko and Juice are in the background, laughing and heckling, but this is one question serious enough for them to let him be while he answers. “As of now I feel like we’re making our own music, we’re doing it our way. I mean how can someone else not see that?”

The other thing they take seriously is making videos. A lot of their fans discovered them via their clip for ‘Thug Waffle’, which features the three sitting around a table piled high with weed and waffles, gold on their teeth and smoke filling the room. According to Meech, they wanted to make a video that showed them “in their comfort zone and not the artist being an actor. Not saying there’s anything wrong with acting, like scripts and shit, but there’s something wrong when you’re portraying someone else as an artist. Like, our fans like videos that show the artists, that doesn’t feel like some industry-made shit.”

Erick is quick to dismiss comparisons between the sounds and attitudes of the

various groups who have been called Beast Coast. “I think we all have respect for hip hop, but that’s about it,” he says of what they’ve got in common. “Everyone coming out of New York right now who’re actually making noise are pretty much themselves, are pretty original I would like to say. I don’t want to say it’s a new second coming of anything.”

The Flatbush Zombies recently collaborated with fellow New Yorkers The Underachievers on a song called ‘No Religion’ that suggests a few similarities, however. They’re both equally fierce in spite of being equally high, and they’re both equally ambitious, audaciously taking the rest of hip hop to task for living in the past: “Stop tryna be Tupac / try and be better.” That’s youth for you. Something else that gives away their Generation Y membership is the constant casual referencing of technology in their metaphors, with The Underachievers boasting that their weed is so potent it’ll “put you in sleep mode” while Juice from the Zombies boasts that he plans to “give her the hard drive.”

The final thing they have in common is a shared mythology made up of references to third eyes, chakras and indigo children, the kind of New Age philosophy that comes from an interest in psychedelic substances and watching documentaries about “spirit science”.

Like the Wu-Tang Clan’s five-percenter ideology it’s slightly below the surface but once you go looking for it you realise it’s all over their work like a thumbprint.

Unsurprisingly, the Zombies are big fans of the Wu. “I don’t want to give ‘em sole credit ‘cause I don’t give anybody credit for shit,” says Meech, “but I would say a big percentage of it is those guys, so that is what I say. I definitely loved listening to Wu-Tang when I was a child.”

Juice, who has been laughing and talking about Law & Order in the background this whole time, finally steps forward to have his say after that. “Nah, I think no one in the world sound like us, son,” he says. “Nobody sound like us.”

Where: Oxford Art Factory When: Wednesday May 29

BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 41

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

club pick of the week Alex Niggemann

free 9pm The World Bar, Kings Cross The Wall $5 8pm

THURSDAY MAY 16 Bridge Hotel, Rozelle Balmain Blitz $15 7pm Exchange Hotel, Darlinghurst Hot Damn Hot Damn DJs $15-$20 8pm Goldfish, Kings Cross Miami Nights Jay-J & Friends Residency Jay-J & Husky, Mars Monero Free (before 10 pm) 8pm Goodgod Front Bar Dip Hop Levins, Joyride, Elston Free 8pm Ivy Pool Club, Sydney Pool Club Thursdays Resident DJ free 5pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Resident DJs 10pm Oxford Art Factory Afrika Bambaataa (USA), NTSC, Mike Who, DJ Mathematics, Juse Crew Breakers $44 8pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross Rewind Resident DJs 8pm Trademark Hotel, Kings Cross Take Over Thursday Resident DJs $10 9pm Whaat Club, Potts Point Chakra Thursdays Robust, Brizz Free 9.30pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Propaganda Gillex, DJ Moody Free for students/$10 9pm

FRIDAY MAY 17

SUNDAY MAY 19

Abercrombie Hotel, Broadway

S.A.S.H Sundays 2nd Birthday

Alex Niggemann (GER) Jake Hough, Robbie Cordukes, Kerry Wallace, Matt Weir $10 2pm MONDAY MAY 13 Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket Mother Of A Monday DJ Smokin’ Joe free 7pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Latin & Jazz Open Mic Swim Team DJs free 7pm

TUESDAY MAY 14 Brighton Up Bar Ziggy Pop Tuesdays Guest DJs $5 Scruffy Murphy’s, 42 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

Haymarket I Love Goon Resident DJs free 7pm The Establishment, Sydney Rumba Motel Salsa DJ Willie Sabor free 8pm Trademark Hotel, Kings Cross Coyote Tuesday Resident DJs free 9pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Chu $5 7.30pm

WEDNESDAY MAY 15 Abercrombie Hotel The Nark Collective Launch Emoh Instead, Jubilants DJs,

Daniel Farley, Front Left, Daniel Redfern, Zwelli free 9pm Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Sosueme Bleeding Knees Club, Hailer, Devola Free 8pm Ivy, Sydney Salsa Resident DJs free 8pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross KIT Wednesdays Resident DJs 10pm The Lewisham Hotel Garbage 90s Night Garbage DJs free 7pm Goodgod Small Club Arrested Development Trivia free 8pm Whaat Club, Potts Point Whip It Wednesdays DJs: Camo, Snillum, Jaimie Lyn

Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Fresh Fridays free 8pm Brighton Up Bar, Twist & Shout 60s Dance Party Mr Chad, Dylabolical $5 11pm Candy’s Apartment, Darlinghurst Something Wicked DJs Axl, Robust, Prolifix, Audiotrash, Harper, Aydos, Oh Dear $10$15 8pm Chinese Laundry, Sydney The Mane Event The Mane Thing & Miracle, Oceans, Ventures, Clockwerk, Kilo G, Daly, Pash n Hop, Detektives, Hooligans, Dutchies, Aaron Smith, JL $15-$25 10pm Gay Bar, Darlinghurst DJ Alex Taylor free 5pm Goodgod Danceteria 100% Silk Octo Octa, Magic Touch, Bobby Browser, Astral DJs, Pelvis, $15 +bf, 10pm Goodgod Front Bar, Sydney Yo Grito! Yo Grito! DJs free 9pm Home Nightclub, Darling Harbour The Guestlist $15-$25 9pm Jacksons On George, Sydney $5 @ 5 On Fridays Resident DJs free 5pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Fridays Resident DJs 10pm Marquee, The Star, Pyrmont Mashup Fridays Dangerous Dan & tyDi $20 10pm Oatley Hotel We Luv Oatley Hotel Fridays Resident DJ free 8pm Omega Lounge, City Tattersalls Club, Sydney Unwind Fridays DJ Greg Summerfield Free 5.30pm The Soda Factory, Surry Hills Factory Fridays, 5pm Soho, Potts Point Soho Fridays Starfuckers, Skinny, Daniel Wheeler, Rocco, Pat Ward, Fingers Free Entry on Guestlist 9pm Spice Cellar SOFT & SLOW Pink Lloyd,

Dreamcatcher 12am Tatler, Kings Cross Mantra Collective Set/ Mo, Magic Bird, Venda, Spacejunk, Whitecat, Aboutjack, Antoine Vice $10 9pm Trademark Hotel, Kings Cross TGIF Resident DJs 10pm Whaat Club, Potts Point Think Fridays DJs 8pm $10-15 The World Bar, Kings Cross MUM MUM DJs $10-$15 8pm

SATURDAY MAY 18

SUNDAY JUNE 24

Abercrombie Hotel, Broadway Strange Fruit Free 9pm Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Yolanda Be Cool, Falcona DJs free 8pm Candy’s Apartment, Potts Point Vengeance Sherlock Bones, SMS, Front To Back, Tova, Wrecks, Bronx, Bustacapp, Buu, Amadoro $20 8pm Chinese Laundry, Sydney Balance Compilation Launch Radio Slave (UK), U-Khan & Pharley, Whitecat, A-Tonez, Katie Valentine, Nat Noiz, Subsonic, Fingers, King Lee, E-Cats $15-$25 9pm Civic Underground, Sydney Sequential Chymera, Ben Shield, Brendan Clay, Dave Rogers $20-$25 +bf, 10pm Goldfish, Kings Cross Hold Me EP Launch Shaun Warner, Natalie Conway, Emmett Greene, Southlight DJ Set, Tom Kelly, Johnny Gleeson $15 Goodgod Small Club, Sydney Player Haters Ball Joyride, Levins, Shantan Wantan Ichiban $10/$15 after Midnight, 11pm Home Nightclub, Darling Harbour Homemade Saturdays Resident DJs $20-$25 9pm Ivy, Sydney Pacha Peking Duk, Ben Morris, Tigerlily, Fingers, Devola, Hansom, Trent Raxkus, Adam Bozzetto, Pablo Calamari, NAD, Deckhead, Kid Crookes, Program, Polina, Lola Siren $35/$40 6.30pm Jacksons On George, Sydney Resident DJs free 9pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Kitty Kitty Bang Bang Resident DJs 10pm Marquee, The Star, Pyrmont Generik $30 9pm Oxford Art Factory Trance Central 3 $20 +bf 10pm

Yolanda Be Cool

Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross The Suite Resident DJs 8pm Sky Venue, Sydney Tower Parkside: An Evening Above Canyons, Touch Sensitive, Parkside DJ’s $60 10pm Soho, Potts Point Usual Suspects Van She DJs, Nukewood, Oakes & Lennox, Barto, Eratik, 9pm Spice Cellar Atish (USA), Mike Witcombe, Stephen Sullivan $20 +bf 10pm The Soda Factory, Surry Hills Soda Saturdays, 5pm The Watershed Hotel, Darling Harbour Skybar Saturdays Resident DJ $20 9.30pm Whaat Club, Potts Point After Dark DJs $10-15 8pm Warehouse Party @ Abandoned Club Disco Delicious 6th Birthday Andy Webb 113 William St $5 9pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Cakes $10-$30 8pm

SUNDAY MAY 19 Abercrombie Hotel, Broadway S.A.S.H Sundays Alex Niggemann (GER), Jake Hough, Robbie Cordukes, Kerry Wallace, Matt Weir $10 2pm The Beresford Hotel, Surry Hills Beresford Sundays Resident DJs free 3pm Crane Bar Restaurant, Potts Point DUST Robbie Lowe, Gerrit Oliver, Hannah Gibbs, James Taylor $10 10pm Gay Bar, Darlinghurst Resident DJ free 3pm Goldfish, Kings Cross Martini Club Straight Up Steve, Tom Kelly, 6pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Easy Sundays Resident DJs free 10pm Oatley Hotel Sunday Sessions DJ Tone free 7pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross Sapphire Sundays Resident DJs 8pm Secret Location Soul Of Sydney B’day Block Party rsvp soulofsydney@ gmail.com for details The Spice Cellar, Sydney Spice After Hours Robbie Lowe, Matt Weir $20 4am The World Bar, Kings Cross Soup Kitchen The Soup Kitchen DJs free 7pm

club picks up all night out all week...

Afrika Bambaataa

WEDNESDAY MAY 15 Abercrombie Hotel The Nark Collective Launch Emoh Instead, Jubilants DJs, Daniel Farley, Front Left, Daniel Redfern, Zwelli free 9pm

THURSDAY MAY 16 Goldfish, Kings Cross Miami Nights Jay-J & Friends Residency Jay-J & Husky, Mars Monero Free (before 10 pm) 8pm Goodgod Front Bar Dip Hop Levins, Joyride, Elston Free 8pm Oxford Art Factory Afrika Bambaataa (USA), NTSC, Mike Who, DJ Mathematics, Juse Crew Breakers $44 8pm

FRIDAY MAY 17 Chinese Laundry, Sydney The Mane Event The Mane Thing & Miracle, Oceans, Ventures, Clockwerk,

Kilo G, Daly, Pash n Hop, Detektives, Hooligans, Dutchies, Aaron Smith, JL $15$25 10pm Goodgod Danceteria 100% Silk Octo Octa, Magic Touch, Bobby Browser, Astral DJs, Pelvis, $15 +bf, 10pm Marquee, The Star, Pyrmont Mashup Fridays Dangerous Dan & tyDi $20 10pm Tatler, Kings Cross Mantra Collective Set/Mo, Magic Bird, Venda, Spacejunk, Whitecat, Aboutjack, Antoine Vice $10 9pm

SATURDAY MAY 18 Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Yolanda Be Cool, Falcona DJs free 8pm Chinese Laundry, Sydney Balance Compilation Launch Radio Slave (UK), U-Khan & Pharley, Whitecat, A-Tonez, Katie Valentine, Nat Noiz, Subsonic, Fingers, King Lee, E-Cats $15$25 9pm Goldfish, Kings Cross Hold Me EP Launch Shaun Warner, Natalie Conway, Emmett Greene, Southlight DJ Set, Tom Kelly, Johnny Gleeson $15 Goodgod Small Club, Sydney Player Haters Ball Joyride, Levins, Shantan Wantan Ichiban $10/$15 after Midnight, 11pm Marquee, The Star, Pyrmont Generik $30 9pm Sky Venue, Sydney Tower Parkside: An Evening Above Canyons, Touch Sensitive, Parkside DJâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s $60 10pm Spice Cellar Atish (USA), Mike Witcombe, Stephen Sullivan $20 +bf 10pm Warehouse Party @ Abandoned Club Disco Delicious 6th Birthday Andy Webb 113 William St $5 9pm

JAKE HOUGH & ROBBIE CORDUKES MATT WEIR & KERRY WALLACE

SUNDAY 19 MAY

BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 43

Deep Impressions Underground Dance And Electronica with Chris Honnery

Terre Thaemlitz he intriguing Terre Thaemlitz, who releases house music under the monikers of Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion (K-S.H.E) and DJ Sprinkles, will release a compilation of his/her finest remix work entitled Queerification And Ruins in late June. (A crossdresser who challenges accepted norms and lectures on gender and social issues, Thaemlitz chooses to switch between gender pronouns when writing or talking about him/herself, and I’ll adopt that disorienting register for this week’s column.) Thaemlitz chose the name Sprinkles since she wanted a moniker that sounded “totally pussy” in opposition to macho DJ culture, and has established himself as one of the foremost proponents of deep house through albums such as 2008’s Midtown 120 Blues, while using her status to impart political commentary and create soundscapes for thinkers and dancers alike. An example of this was the recent Sprinkles compilation, Where Dancefloors Stand Still, which was a reaction to Japan’s baffling ‘Fuzoku’ laws, which allow police to enter and raid clubs for the ‘crime’ of dancing. Following hot on the heels of that mix, Queerification And Ruins collects tracks such as Sprinkles’ remixes of Adultnapper, regular Henrik Schwarz collaborator Kuniyuki and Leftroom label boss Tolfrey, and contains material stretching back to his ’06 rework of the enigmatic Parallax Beat Brothers’ ‘Exhalation,’ which clocks in at a whopping 11 minutes. Not that there’s anything wrong with tracks that length – as Thaemlitz told a recent interviewer, in no uncertain terms, “If one doesn’t do everything completely standard and at the same level, people get disoriented. It’s a kind of cultural compression going on, similar to audio compression, where everything has to be ‘punched up’ to the same intensity or people feel lost. What the fuck is so wrong with being lost?”

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Glaswegian DJ/Producer Brian d’Souza, who plies his trade as Auntie Flo, will headline the next HAHA bash on Friday May 24 at Goodgod. Auntie Flo broke through with his debut EP Goan Highlife and has since chalked up releases on Kompakt Records and established himself as one of the more interesting producers on the club circuit by pushing everything from Chicago house, Detroit techno and disco to Cumbia, Kwaito, Afrobeat and assorted other world music sounds.

As d’Souza asserts, “It’s important to acknowledge that black music is more than house and techno, yet explaining to folk that we play music from all round the world – but not what you think of when you speak about ‘world music’ – can be testing.

It’s an incredibly arrogant term, coined by mainstream record stores to help appeal to a lazy Western audience, but we’re working on it.” Ah, editor, is it too late to scrap my use of the term ‘world music’? Sod it, I can’t be stuffed…

LOOKING DEEPER SATURDAY MAY 18 Radio Slave Chinese Laundry

FRIDAY MAY 24 Auntie Flo Goodgod Small Club

SATURDAY JUNE 1 Omar-S Sydney Opera House

MONDAY JUNE 10 Alexkid The Abercrombie

Auntie Flo

Deep Impressions: electronica manifesto and occasional club brand. Contact through deep.impressions@yahoo.com 44 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

Terre Thaemlitz photo by Bart Nagel

Muscovite producer Anton Zap will release his debut full-length album in June through Apollo Records (though it must be said, at seven tracks it isn’t the most endowed ‘album’ ever to be released – it toes that middle ground between robust EP and undersized album). Entitled Water, and opening with the eponymous track that was originally released back in 2011, the release does disappointingly feature only two unreleased productions: ‘Funky Man’ and ‘Miniature’. However, if you’re not a hardcore Zapophile and are largely unacquainted with the man’s output, then Water presents the perfect opportunity to gain an overview of the Russian’s accomplished discography in one sitting. For anyone who doesn’t want to wait for the release and would prefer to chase up some of his back catalogue right now, Zap has released luscious deep house cuts on labels like Underground Quality, Uzuri, Millions Of Moments and Deep Explorer, and also has a number of smooth mixes available online – such

as his rare mix for the now defunct Berlin nightclub Tape – that I recommend readers seek out.

snap

hot damn

PICS :: HL

up all night out all week . . .

true vibenation

PICS :: AM

02:05:13 :: The Exchange Hotel :: 34-44 Oxford St Darlinghurst Sydney 9331 3100

03:05:13 :: Goodgod Small Club :: 53-55 Liverpool St Chinatown 8084 0587

s.a.s.h 2nd birthday It sounds like: Deep, warm house with a sprink le of tech and rolling bass lines.

Acts: Alex Niggemann (three hour set); Jake Hough; Robbie Cordukes; Matt Weir; Kerry Wallace.

Three songs you’ll hear on the night: Ray Okpara – ‘Chi This Wonder Up’ (Rodriguez Jr. Remix); Jay Shepheard – ‘Right Reason’; Hector – ‘Start Stop Dream.’

And one you definitely won’t: Disclosure.

sash sundays

PICS :: HL

party profile

It’s called: S.A.S.H 2nd Birthday.

05:05:13 :: The Abercrombie Hotel :: 100 Broadway Ultimo 9211 3486

Sell it to us: Warm vibes in the afternoon sun, a with a double shot of quality house on the rocks. cheeky outdoor Sunday session The bit we’ll remember in the AM: An absol utely pumping terrace and a dark descent into the den.

Crowd specs: Heaps and heaps.

Wallet damage: $10/$15 on the door.

Where: The Abercrombie Hotel.

PICS :: HL

fbi social

shockone

02:05:13 :: FBi Social :: Kings Cross Hotel 248 William St 9331 9900

PICS :: HL

When: Sunday May 19.

03:05:13 :: Oxford Art Factory :: 38-46 Oxford St, Darlinghurst 9332 3711 :: KATRINA CLARKE :: RYAN S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HONCHO) RO XAVIER :: OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER PED :: MAR LEY ASH :: RY LEUNG KITCHING :: KATE LEWIS :: HEN

BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13 :: 45

snap

matt caseli

PICS :: HL

up all night out all week . . .

max cooper

PICS :: AM

04:05:13 :: The Goldfish :: 111 Darlinghurst Rd Potts Point 8354 6630

04:05:13 :: Chinese Laundry :: 111 Sussex St Sydney 8295 9999

the nark collective party profile

It’s called: The Nark Collective It sounds like: Fun, good party music - indie, disco, hip hop, trap, electronica etc.

New producers showcased every week and guest DJs. Just the good stuff.

Acts: EMOH INSTEAD; Daniel Farley; Jubila nts DJs; Zwelli Gurns; Front Left; Daniel Redfern.

Three songs you’ll hear on the night: What So Not – ‘The Quack’; Touch Sensitive – ‘Pizza Guy’; a throwback 90s jam you thought you’d never hear again.

And one you definitely won’t: Anything by Pitbull, ever.

Sell it to us: Fun vibes, free entry, super cheap drinks (good food if you come early too), new and eclectic line-ups each week, all on a Funktion-1 soundsystem.

The bit we’ll remember in the AM: Your furnitu re dancing moves, empty jugs, the wacky bar décor.

Crowd specs: Student-ey crowd, cool casua l attire all good!

Wallet damage: Always free!

Where: The Abercrombie Hotel, Broadway.

When: Launch night Wednesday May 15 and then each and every Wednesday from 9pm.

love bombs no strings 04:05:13 :: Goodgod Small Club :: 53-55 Liverpool St Chinatown 8084 0587 46 :: BRAG :: 512 :: 13:05:13

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halfway crooks 04:05:13 :: Phoenix Bar :: 34-44 Oxford st Darlinghurst Sydney 9331 3100 :: KATRINA CLARKE :: AVERIE S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HONCHO) LEY MAR :: PEDRO XAVIER :: OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER ASH :: NG LEU RY HEN :: IS LEW HARVEY :: RYAN KITCHING :: KATE

thehangover3movie.com.au

IN CINEMAS MAY 23