Melbourne – Page 2

Denise Hylands Introduces Listeners To The Dark Side of Country on 3RRR’s Twang

Denise Hylands with musician Joshua Hedley.

Every Saturday afternoon, driving home from teaching a Pilates class, I’d hit the freeway right as the theme song for Twang introduced Denise Hylands’ regular 2-hour country music show on 3RRR. I have to admit, I’ve never been a fan of country music, but there’s something contagious about Hylands’ pure passion and knowledge. I never change the dial, never even consider it. Whether it’s a rarity from the ‘50s, or a recent release by an Australian country music artist, Hylands treats every song and artist with so much respect. She’s been in the game long enough that if she didn’t love it, there’d be no point doing this.

“I’m usually the one doing the interviews!” Hylands tells Audiofemme. “I always just want to make people feel comfortable – in fact I just think of it like a chat, a conversation. I love talking to people, getting their story, finding out where they come from so that listeners get the full story.”

Hylands applied to 3RRR as an administrative assistant shortly after completing high school in 1983; landing the job eventually led to doing graveyard shifts and filling in for absent presenters. She presented her first regular 3RRR show in 1984, the Selection Show on Sunday afternoons, showcasing new releases. She was also part of the Breakfasters lineup, a show which still kickstarts many Melbournian’s mornings.

“I was already at 3RRR from 1984 when I was 18, and I did shows for 12 years then approached the program manager and proposed an idea for a country show,” explains Hylands. “There was already High In The Saddle, but I wanted to show off more alternative country, less mainstream. So, I started Twang on Monday nights in 1996 from 10 to 12pm. I did it for a year and by the year end, I was given Saturday afternoons, which I’ve done for the past 24 years. I loved that first year,” says Hylands, then adds with a juicy laugh: “The amount of people who complained!”

Recent episodes of Twang have offered interviews with Calexico, Tracy McNeil, Marlon Williams, Charley Crockett, Slim Dusty’s grandson and a tribute to the late, great, troubled troubadour, Justin Townes Earle and the legendary John Prine.

Hylands raves about McNeil and Dan Parsons, both of whom are performing in Melbourne in May. “Tracy turned up nearly ten years ago from Canada,” Hylands recalls. “She was hanging out with Jordie Lane. He’d recorded an EP in his bedroom and I really liked it, then Tracy had given me a CD when I was hanging out with Jordie and I loved what she was doing. She’s a really great songwriter, and every album she gets better and better. I was lucky to have her and Dan Parsons come to my house and do a concert there. I have an old church in the country and it was just like, wow.”

Hylands prides herself on introducing people to “the dark side” of country music. “That whole alternative country scene, that whole Americana thing which started around 1995/1996 in terms of music charts, has gone a bit crazy, and I’d like to think I’ve had a hand in this,” she says. “With country music, so many people like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, but they say they don’t love country music.” Hylands has nailed me as a listener; maybe it’s time I re-evaluate my stance.

When she’s not interviewing on air, Hylands writes reviews and stories for both Rhythms and Stack magazines. It turns out we’ve both reviewed Loretta Lynn’s 50th album.

“When she hooked up with Jack White, I love that she found new people to work with. Even hooking up with Margo Price – I love seeing her with these younger, strong female artists,” Hylands raves. “The last few albums, she brings up different versions of songs she released so many years ago. These are songs that have to be heard. She was a forerunner who spoke up on women’s rights and women’s issues, I mean she spoke about the pill and got banned on the radio. She’s an incredible woman. Her and Wanda Jackson.”

In fact, Jackson is one of Hylands’ favourite international interviews. “Wanda Jackson is in the league of Loretta Lynn, right? She was the queen of rockabilly. She dated Elvis Presley who convinced her to move from country toward rock ‘n’ roll,” says Hylands. “I’ve done two really long interviews with her. I love Wanda Jackson! She’s in her eighties now, and she calls out to her husband during the interviews, Wendell, sitting in the background.”

Jackson also interviewed another royal in the country world, Dolly Parton. “I spoke to her about her biography, and originally wanting to be a bluegrass singer,” she remembers. “I only had ten minutes, so I had to get her engaged. I talked to her about her music and her charity work, and she was just so gorgeous, so appreciative. I also spoke to Porter Wagoner once, and she wrote ‘I Will Always Love You’ about him. Talking to someone so legendary, those kind of interviews are so fantastic.”

Legends are one thing, but Hylands also has a knack for recognizing the legends of the future, like the “extremely good looking” Charley Crockett. He started out as a busker in New Orleans; now he’s released at least half a dozen albums. Plus, “he can wear a cardigan like nobody’s business,” says Hylands. “I was meant to be his tour manager but he had open heart surgery months before the tour was meant to start.”

Hylands has over 25 years of brilliant stories and has made lifelong friends with many artists, including Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. “They open their mouths and play guitar, and you just go, ‘oh my god’.” She also goes way back with previous Audiofemme subject and fellow 3RRR alumni, Mary Mihelakos; they’ve known each other since they were teens. “She was hanging around, this incredibly enthusiastic young girl obsessed with music,” Hylands says, whole-heartedly agreeing with Mihelakos’ recent induction into the Melbourne Hall of Fame. “If you’re gonna give an award to someone, give that girl some acknowledgement.”

Hylands can’t have guests for the time being due to COVID-19. But on the horizon, Hylands is very excited about the new album from Southern Culture on the Skids, who are responsible for the Twang theme, and loves being introduced to new albums by the up-and-coming indie artists managed by her friends in the States. She says, “My excitement is discovering new music every week.”

We know how she feels – perhaps that’s what keeps us coming back to Twang.

International listeners can tune in to Twang live or listen back via the 3RRR website.

Emma Volard Unpacks Femininity With Latest Single

Emma Volard’s sound melds rhythm ‘n’ blues, neo-soul and electro in a contemporary, Australian ode to classic soul/hip hop artists like Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. Her 2020 single “Femininity” epitomises the brave, take-me-as-I-am-or-don’t attitude Volard espouses in both her music and her life. The artwork for the single depicts a voluptuous, nude Volard sitting cross-legged amidst a collection of fellow naked bodies lying prone on the floor about her. She looks, unapologetically, at the viewer, as if to say, “What?”

The artwork for the single was an idea that came up during a band trip in Byron Bay, a celebrity-favored beach town in New South Wales. “We came to the idea that it would be beautiful to get a bunch of friends – men, women and non-binary – together to show we’re all just bodies, skin and bone,” Volard explains. “The photographer turned out to be a sexual harasser, so we don’t like to name him. He had over 100 accusations of sexual harassment within Victoria. I continue to put it out there because I want to claim that space back – the art was my own idea, and I was reclaiming my art as a woman.”

<a href="https://emmavolard.bandcamp.com/track/femininity">Femininity by Emma Volard</a>

Volard believes that femininity is not about a specific aesthetic, or ideals that have ultimately been imposed by white men, but that it is about being authentic, being empowered. The claims of harassment that emerged after the single was released were a blow to her, but she refuses to let that be the storyline.

Rather, her personal challenges and convictions are what deserve attention. Volard’s confidence in her own body, her sexuality, her music and her femininity come from perspective, hard-earned. The power of expression is one that Volard knows is not to be taken for granted, nor used carelessly, a lesson she learned from her sister, Adelaide, who is non-verbal, severely autistic and epileptic.

“Adelaide is two years younger than me and was born fully cognitive. When she hit six months old, she started to regress. She was beginning to walk but then soon after, she couldn’t do anything, even eat,” Volard relays. “She was able to make noises, and she’s very good at expressing emotions, especially when she’s being cheeky. I learnt a lot at a very early age; I matured very fast, because we’d go to hospital at all hours of the night. It wasn’t your regular lifestyle.”

Volard says her sister provides a daily reminder to use her voice for those who cannot, to challenge listeners to consider the impact we have environmentally, politically and personally on each other and the land. “She’s been my biggest inspiration,” Volard says. “She really, really goes through hard times but always has such a positive outlook.”

Volard grew up Southeast of Victoria on Phillip Island, known for its penguins (“country by the sea, an incredible place!”) for four years of her life, so a lot of imagery in her music is inspired by the ocean, the tides coming in and out, and the ideas of change and moving on, especially on luscious, indulgent 2019 single “Peanut Butter,” which oozes with style and soul. It’s jazzy, it’s slinky, it’s unashamedly sexy.

<a href="https://emmavolard.bandcamp.com/track/peanut-butter">Peanut Butter by Emma Volard</a>

“That track was originally a demo I was sent by a dear friend, [Melbourne artist] Moses Carr, who said I should put some vocals on it. It was called ‘Peanut Butter’ when he sent me the beat, so we stuck with it. The song is nothing to do with that at all!”

But it’s so smooth, with just a little bit of crunch to the beats, I protest.

Volard indulges me.

“Maybe it has peanut butter undertones?” she says with an easy laugh.

Volard believes that expression is dependent on having a comfortable, supported space, something her relationship with her band provides. Despite a band full of boys, Volard has never felt her femininity sets her apart and perhaps it even enables her to feel more confident in the fact she identifies with being a tomboy at heart.

“Femininity is the most socio-political song I’ve written, inspired by being a tomboy,” says Volard. “Why am I less feminine than anyone else because I have some masculine traits? It was surreal to see how many people who got behind that song. It’s so important to me as a woman in the music industry to have that level of support. People from the industry got behind it, it got on the top 5 songs on both Triple J Unearthed and PBS radio. I got messages from people I’ve never met before saying it touched them, which was really great.”

Volard will be playing a few festivals, doing an International Women’s Day event at a local brewery, and, later this year, releasing her debut album – or, to give her band credit where it’s due, “their” album.

“A lot of the songs I write with the boys in the band. We’ve known each other for over five years now and we’re a really close team. We have Jake Amy on keyboards, Harry Leggett on guitar, Hugh Heller on bass, and Jordan Pereira on drums,” she says. “We’re hoping to get it out by September, but we’re still in the early stages of production. I’m recording vocals at Sunderland Studios in Phillip Island. We wrote the songs in two months around November/December last year, under this huge time pressure we put on ourselves. Boundaries are a fun thing to work with, they make you push yourself out of the box. It was really hard to create during lockdown, because I wasn’t able to go out and be inspired by others. All I had was a daily trip to the supermarket, a one hour walk and four walls.”

Volard’s working title for the album is, of course, Femininity.

“I want to show the day to day life, our existence, and gratitude for being a woman,” she says. “I’m finally at a point where I’ve found a sound that really signifies my own musical identity, and me as a person.”

Follow Emma Volard on Facebook for ongoing updates.

Alt-Country Artist Tracy McNeil Explores New Beginnings on You Be The Lightning

At the beginning of 2020, country singer Tracy McNeil had decided to finally stop dividing her life, giving up her day job as an educator and packing up her belongings to dedicate her life to touring her music. That new chapter began with the February 2020 release of her fifth album You Be The Lightning via celebrated label Cooking Vinyl Australia; it features her Americana-style approach to country, influenced by both her Canadian roots and adopted hometown of Melbourne. While the universe had other plans, necessitating a temporary return to teaching, You Be The Lightning has been critically acclaimed, securing high rotation across mainstream stations ABC Radio & Double J, and community radio airplay across Australia.

Tracy and her five-piece band The GoodLife finished off 2020 by achieving an ARIA Award nomination for Best Blues and Roots Album, an Australian Music Prize nomination, and an award for Best Country Album at the Music Victoria Awards. From April to July this year, McNeil and her band will tour around Australia. It’s not the rollicking, barnstorming tour she may have envisioned when writing You Be The Lightning, but it’s live and loud and that’s redemptive in itself.

“You Be The Lightning is a rejuvenation, a rebirth, sparked by a human place, wanting to feel alive and connected the world,” says McNeil. “It’s about really wanting to feel something. It’s not biographical, but it’s inspired by what I was seeing around me in terms of people sleepwalking through life and not recognising their full potential.”

<a href="https://tracymcneil.bandcamp.com/album/you-be-the-lightning">You Be The Lightning by Tracy McNeil & The Goodlife</a>

McNeil studied dance in Canada after finishing high school and began doing open mic nights a few years later. This was the beginning of her solo music career; she assembled a band in 2006 for her first album, Room Where She Lives, and at the same time was offered a position in post-graduate studies in Australia. McNeil opted to research the music scene in Melbourne, which conveniently enabled her to network and befriend local musicians including Jordie Lane, Liz Stringer, Steve Hesketh from The Drones, Melbourne singer-songwriter Suzannah Espie, and The Idle Hoes, some of whom went on to appear on McNeil’s records. McNeil organised a few gigs around town, ultimately juggling both study and full-time employment with her fledgling Melbourne music career.

“I moved here in 2007 to do my teaching post-graduate diploma in education,” recalls McNeil. “I was going to go back to Canada ten months later as a performance and dance teacher. However, I ended up teaching in a high school here. In fact, I’m doing some teaching in Brisbane at the moment. It’s a double-life: music and a solid day job as a teacher! I did quit in 2020, which was because I intended on music being full-time, so I was purely writing music and planning the tour and now I’m doing some short-term teaching work until the tour starts.”

In February last year, just prior to Melbourne’s first lockdown, McNeil lead Dan Parsons (guitar), Bree Hartley (drums), Brendan McMahon (keyboards) and Craig Kelly (bass) into a compelling live set at the Stag and Hunter Hotel in New South Wales’ Newtown. That night, she performed “Drunken Angel,” the track labelmate Lucinda Williams made into a classic on her 1998 album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. McNeil likes to do justice to each song, much as Williams has done her entire career. There is no strict genre that McNeil feels beholden to, apparent in the variety on You Be The Lightning. “There was a Neil Young Harvest-esque vibe on one track, whereas on another we layered up the drums and tracks in a very pop style,” McNeil says.

Recorded live to tape – a mix of analog and digital – at The Aviary Recording Studios over three weekends, You Be The Lightning took over a year to complete. This was due to McNeil’s teaching obligations, but it was also the meticulous layering of overdubs, vocals, guitar, and final touches co-produced with Parsons at the helm. It’s been a time of endings and awakenings for McNeil, whose marriage to a fellow musician (that she prefers not to discuss) ended during the making of the record but created the space in which Parsons and McNeil could fall in love with each other.

“The whole experience was tumultuous,” she admits. “It was a very personal time for me, the making of that record. I recall the tape machine broke during ‘Stars’ and we had to go back and start again. I’ve never had a more emotional rollercoaster ride making a record. It was a vulnerable record in terms of themes and working with Dan to produce it. The whole process of falling out of love and into love made it a crazy time to make this album.”

The songs are largely fictitious, a change in approach after the rawness of grief and healing captured on 2016 album Thieves, which was emotionally and energetically sculpted by the death of her father, Canadian singer-songwriter Wayne McNeil. You Be The Lightning was less of a catharsis and more of a record of her emotional landscape over the four years it took to write, rehearse and finally record the songs she’d labored over.

Parsons has proven the ideal collaborator and partner in every sense. “Dan and I have similar musical taste and we think very much on the same page when it comes to music,” McNeil explains. “Dan is far better than me on articulating how to execute ideas in a way that we can accomplish it in studio. Dan’s the musical director of the band, I would say. I trust him completely, and he trusts me completely.”

The irony, McNeil explains, is that when two artists pursue their dreams, it can have dire consequences for the relationship in the long run. “Being on the road together is romantic on so many levels, but it’s not my first rodeo with being with another artist… it’s hard,” she says. “You’re both chasing an end goal that, if everything goes to plan, would move you away from each other.”

The couple have been writing together, and often played shows as a duo prior to the pandemic, scouting audiences and venues for GoodLife gigs. The forthcoming Australian shows will be a welcome treat to fans who’ve waited to see You Be The Lightning live – not to mention a relief for McNeil, her partner, and her band. “We’re chasing the same target and our dreams merge,” she says. “We really look forward to focusing our energy in one direction for a little while.”

Follow Tracy McNeil & the GoodLife on Facebook for ongoing updates.

Sarah Mary Chadwick Makes Friends with Ennui

Multi-instrumentalist, visual artist and intrepidly candid singer-songwriter Sarah Mary Chadwick will release her seventh full length studio album, Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby, on Friday, February 5th, via Ba Da Bing Records/Rice is Nice. Known both for her solo work and for a decade spent as frontperson of Batrider – which formed while Chadwick and her bandmates were still in high school in New Zealand – Chadwick has explored some dark places and difficult terrain. Going solo certainly sent her on a new trajectory – one that has kept listeners compelled to discover what she’s just done and what she’s doing next. Her latest album justifies plenty of curiosity and attention, not only for its exploration of intense emotions – she is, as ever, starkly honest, articulate and unfiltered – but also for the approach to recording it.

Ennui is almost entirely singing and piano, all recorded live in one day with Chadwick’s friend, bass player Geoffrey O’Connor. Chadwick and O’Connor recorded on a Yamaha upright piano in her friend’s studio. The upright added to the “bar-roomy feel of the record, which wasn’t intentional but definitely came through when we were recording,” Chadwick says.

It immediately follows 2020’s Please, Daddy – a painful, introspective work that, according to Chadwick, was more ambitious in terms of instrumentation. Though it seemed a logical trajectory to do something more complicated after its release, the stripped-down nature of Ennui is a result of Chadwick’s conscious desire to free herself of expectation. “The last record had Geoff engineering, a drum and four other musicians. This was just me and Geoff sitting in a small, intimate room for a whole day,” she says.

“In terms of doing it in one day, my thinking has always been that there’s only so good I can play and sing a song,” explains Chadwick. “It doesn’t get better if I do it 50 times. I think you lose a lot of energy if you iron things out. I wanted to capture a lot of energy in this record. I usually only record in one or two days, with only two or three takes of a song.”

It’s all part of Chadwick’s effort to retain some of that “demo energy” when recording songs for her albums. “My process is the same for music and visual art. Working fast, you’re not afforded the space to second-guess decisions, so you get into the habit of making decisions quickly; you just make choices to realise what you think is important,” she says. “For me, that energy is so important. If you’re doing it right, you’re making good decisions that enable you to realise what is important about art.”

<a href="https://sarahmarychadwick.bandcamp.com/album/me-ennui-are-friends-baby">Me & Ennui Are Friends, Baby by Sarah Mary Chadwick</a>

Even while making choices that seem intuitive rather than heavily and lengthily considered, Chadwick is deliberate. One of those choices is the cover art for the album, revealing her parted legs in shorts that don’t cover everything. It’s quite brave, confronting even. “I wanted to free myself up from having to put my own artwork on the cover every time,” she says. “It’s a candid photo that my partner took. I like the colours of it. It works well as a cover and as an image. The album itself is quite earnest in parts, so it’s a nice counterpoint to have something a bit garish, a big vulgar, as cover art.”

Chadwick is very much in the practice of constant creation, always engaged with visual art and music. When putting together a record, she books the studio three months prior and works each week on new songs, which typically take half an hour to an hour. “When I was quite young, I was concerned with stagnant periods and writing block but now I don’t encounter that ever,” she admits. “Doing lots of work subsequently makes me feel not guilty for when I don’t want to work or can’t be bothered. It makes my downtime guilt-free. I have always been in the habit of having something ticking over.”

Having the deadline ensures she has selected songs which are in the process and refines them in preparation. She’s already working on the next album and is considering doing demos to prepare, in contrast to the off-the-cuff nature of Ennui. “I’m always writing,” she says. “Because we’re just about to put this one out, I don’t feel pressure to rush the next one, which means the next one will come pretty easily.”

Perhaps, for Chadwick, there is a security in constant creation and self-analysis, working hand-in-glove to keep her on an even keel. Readers, beware: the following discussion may be triggering or difficult; those struggling with mental health issues may want to take a breather here.

Both Ennui and Daddy are the continuation of a trilogy of albums, beginning with The Queen Who Stole the Sky, that focus on Chadwick’s attempt to take her own life in 2019, following the death of her father and a close friend, as well as the intense breakup of a long-term relationship. They openly explore the event itself as well as the trauma that precipitated it, and continue the healing process Chadwick has undergone in its aftermath, particularly her views on psychoanalytic therapy.

“I’ve always had, since a child, depression and anxiety, but it’s gotten a lot better in the past six years. I’ve always seen psychologists on and off since I was a teenager but never found it particularly useful and was disappointed by it no matter how much work I put into it,” admits Chadwick. “It became clear that it wasn’t my fault. I started psychoanalysis and that was far more rewarding. The more I put into it, the more it gave back.”

Rather than process first and write later, Chadwick made the writing of these albums part of her journey toward healing. “Did I want to explore it? Definitely, I did,” she says. “I was in treatment five times a week afterwards, and the experience only informed my creative process. I draw unconsciously and very naturally on day-to-day things.”

Chadwick has released her latest batch of records through Rice Is Nice, run by Julia Wilson and Lulu Rae. Chadwick met Jules through an ex-girlfriend. “Jules is a really, really dear friend and a great person,” Chadwick says. “We’ve worked together since 2015 and done over four records together. Jules works super hard on things for me and she’s not doing it for finance, since I’m a relatively small artist, so I’m really grateful for the fact she does so much because she loves me and she loves my work.”

Chadwick is scheduled to do a series of launch events, in which she’ll play music from the trilogy of albums for small crowds in Melbourne. The events will be live-streamed so international audiences can tune in.

Despite the emotional weight of Ennui, there’s something triumphant in its self-deprecating tone. Perhaps Chadwick’s Bandcamp describes it best: “On Ennui, Chadwick is free, there is nowhere for her or us to run from the need to very presently and repeatedly articulate her trauma until it is simply, ‘articulated out.'” Another brave choice from an artist who, decades into her career, still stuns with her bravery.

Follow Sarah Mary Chadwick on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Raven Mahon on The Green Child, Her Duo With Mikey Young

Raven Mahon doesn’t do predictable. The mixed-media designer is also a musician, currently half of The Green Child with Mikey Young (of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and Total Control). The duo started out as a long-distance collaboration, but Mahon and Young now live in the same house. The Green Child references ’60s dream-pop along with adventures into experimental synthesizer and drum machine. Mahon’s vocals, familiar to fans of her former work with San Francisco post-punk outfit Grass Widow, are the human connection to an ethereal soundscape.

“Music has always been self-initiated and self-guided,” she tells Audiofemme. Though she is evidently well-practiced in working with others, at heart her creations are, as she describes it, a solitary practice. That worked out well given The Green Child’s origins: Young was living in Australia and Mahon in California when they’d created their self-titled debut album of 2018.

“Mikey and I met playing a gig together in 2013,” explains Mahon, who has pulled over to talk to me on the drive back to Rye from Melbourne. “He was touring with Total Control and my previous band, Grass Widow, shared a practice space with one of the members of Total Control for the live tour. We had a mutual musical community, and it turned out he knew a lot of people I knew in San Francisco.”

The gig where they met ended up being the last one that Grass Widow played; they broke up later that year. Mahon stayed in San Francisco and Young went back to Rye, and the two started working on music as a natural extension of their long-distance relationship. “We’d record things in overdubs, but most of the songs were created in separate places and sent back and forth. They weren’t constructed into a process of jamming or trying to create songs live in the same place,” Mahon explains. “Most of them started out as electronic instruments, synths and beats, and slowly we’d add layers to me. How people are able to effectively recreate that in a live setting battles me.”

Eventually, Mahon moved to Australia, and the experience of relocating resulted in the lyrical exploration on their sophomore record, Shimmering Basset, released via UK imprint Upset the Rhythm, in October 2020: the impact of being distant from your birthplace, family and past life; making a home in a new place; how to remain connected with the people and places that you love. Young and Mahon, living in their beachside home in Rye, an hour away from Melbourne on the Mornington Peninsula, worked on the album in their basement. There is a sense of having found their footing, being able to dance in step completely and ultimately, a greater confidence to Shimmering Basset than their debut.

<a href="https://thegreenchild.bandcamp.com/album/shimmering-basset">Shimmering Basset by The Green Child</a>

There is a cosmic, dark vibe to much of The Green Child’s work, perhaps a sense of raising ghosts that are not entirely harmless or escapable once conjured up. Layers of drums, synthesizers, horns, reverb and fuzzy psychedelia build up to an all-encompassing atmosphere – it’s anarchic, almost intoxicating.

Neither Mahon nor Young have done much, if any, media around The Green Child. “Honestly, I don’t do interviews that often because [Grass Widow] was pretty political and we communicated more through our interviews than our music,” says Mahon. “So, I used to do that a lot; for this project, I’m surprised anyone’s even heard of it! We haven’t played live up until this point, so it feels almost like a secretive project.”

Fittingly, the band is named after The Green Child, the sole novel written by English anarchist poet Herbert Read. Published in 1935, it is inspired by the 12th-century fantasy-folk tale of two green children who appeared, inexplicably, in the English town of Woolpit. The two children speak an indecipherable language in this mythical tale, which divided critics both at the time and ever since, on whether it was a great work of philosophy in the spirit of Plato or whether it was too obscure to be understood. Read wrote a letter to the famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung explaining that the novel resulted from a stream-of-consciousness series of writing sessions, that it was born more as result of a meditative state than of any particular publishing ambition, derived from his interest in the difference between wisdom and understanding, intellect and intuition.

“Mikey had come out to California and we went to this far flung town and found that book,” she remembers. “I later found out that it was a cult novel in some circles, but it was the only novel he released. We both read it on this holiday together in California and later decided to name the band after it. I wrote a lot of lyrics on the first album based on imagery and sci-fi concepts of that novel.”

A passionate reader, Mahon can name titles and authors she adores with ease (she’s currently reading Monkey Grip by Australian author Helen Garner). When it comes to formative music experiences though, she is reluctant to name names. “I would have to say that there’s an obvious answer, but it’s hard to articulate,” she says. “It’s more to do with San Francisco in the early 2000s and the ethos of the community I was in when I started making music: [people] putting on shows and touring with whatever resources they had.”

“It’s so different to now because you’ve got the internet at your disposal to connect with people and broadcast your music in this anonymous, broad-spread way,” she adds. “It was so concentrated in a pocket of a neighbourhood of San Francisco when I started out, so people were hijacking power from the bus station and playing on the street corner and putting on house shows. That said, lots of bands like the riot grrrl bands were formative. Politics in the music scene and conversations about gender really shaped how we communicated with each other while I was in Grass Widow.”

Both Mahon and Young are prolific creators, though while Young’s remit is entirely music-related, Mahon is a furniture designer and maker by trade, and she can appreciate the parallels in both crafts. “I think that they are probably both expressions of personal propensity towards working independently,” she says. “I’ve played with other people, and sometimes I’ll collaborate with clients and designers and architects, but for the most part I’m in a space crafting something by myself. There are these potentials in both realms to be inventive, staying within convention to the degree that things are functional and meets needs, but there’s potential in both places because I’m not working for someone, or beholden to anyone.”

At home in Rye, where Mahon is about to return once I release her from her roadside stop besides a cow paddock, she and Young are often talking about music, or making reference to it. “I’d say our life is art and music is really integrated into our lives – there’s dimension to our musical lives too,” she says. “Mikey is mixing and mastering at the home studio, and four times a year he has a radio show on NTS he contributes to, plus other projects like curating records of obscure songs from the deep web. We’re constantly talking about some element of music, not necessarily our music.”

It’s hard to say when those discussions will turn toward making another record, but last year, The Green Child also released three stand-alone singles: a cover of Canned Heat’s “Poor Moon;” their contribution to Melbourne’s Chapter Music comp Midnight Meditations, “Rats on the Roof”; and “New Dungeon,” part of Mexican Summer’s Looking Glass Singles Series. “We never make a concerted effort to write a Green Child album, so it could be another two years. We talked about playing a show, but I’m not sure if that will manifest,” Mahon says. But, she adds, “We’re always tinkering with different songs and ideas.”

Follow The Green Child on Bandcamp for ongoing updates.

Melbourne’s Taylah Carroll Preps Debut and Shares Third Single “I’m Not Sold”

Born and raised in Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs, Taylah Carroll recalls entertaining her family and friends with musical performances from an early age, often until her audience relented and sought escape. It was never Carroll who ended a performance. Now, larger audiences have started to take notice – Australia’s Triple J radio station, responsible for discovering and championing many new and upcoming artists, has likened her sound to Sharon Van Etten, Jeff Buckley, and Mazzy Star no less.

Carroll’s music is intimate, genuine and confessional. “I drink too much coffee, I don’t sleep enough,” she sings on latest single “I’m Not Sold,” revealing that she buys things just to have things to hold, but that it isn’t satisfying a deeper need. Without the rampant post-production polish that can remove all human fingerprints from music, there’s an old-fashioned vibe to Carroll’s songs. Not Victorian, mind you – but her gothic-edged romanticism is redolent of Nico’s Velvet Underground days, with the pared-back storytelling skill of folkie Joan Baez.

“I think I would describe my music as alternative folk meets rock. I think especially the stuff I’m writing lately leans more into rock. [It’s] a bit darker and I’d say there’s a focus on lyrics,” Carroll says. In 2019, she released two songs – “Sometimes Good People Do Bad Things” and “Vermont” – but there’s a lot more to come from this rising star.

Before Melbourne’s first lockdown, Carroll had been preparing to start pre-production for an album with producer Tim Harvey. It was essential to Carroll that she work with people who could honour her vision and enhance her sound rather than try to impose their style on her. Carroll reached out to Harvey (who has also worked with Jade Imagine and Gena Rose Bruce) through a mutual acquaintance. “We worked on the three singles I’ve so far released and we regularly catch up and talk ideas. He’s a very gentle soul. I can say very little about where I want a song to go, and he just knows.” The two worked together in Harvey’s home studio, in addition to Soundpark Studios in Northcote (in Melbourne’s inner northern suburbs). “It’s a really lovely space – really close to home, which is nice,” she says. Unfortunately, the ongoing pandemic has changed her plans for releasing the album.

“That was incredibly frustrating. I’ve had everything ready for a while now,” she shares. “We’re still fine-tuning what will end up on the album because I’ve been writing. I need to work out what fits with the theme of the album, to ensure it’s cohesive – the rest will be for the second album! There’s three [more] tracks ready to be mastered and released.” This includes her next offering, “To Please You,” a song about the challenge of making choices versus letting life happen, and sacrificing authenticity for the sake of not rocking the boat. Carroll has felt the struggle to maintain her own perception of the world whilst also loving and honouring the perspective of people around her.

“I’m Not Sold” was inspired by Carroll’s fear of failure, a quarter-life crisis of sorts. “I was in a long-term relationship that I’d been in since I was 17, so there was pressure building in that. I felt like 25 was looming. I feel like I should have done all these things by 25 and felt this pressure to have gotten all my ducks in a row by that age,” Carroll explains. “I’d also internalised this pressure that I felt from the music industry to be young, and I’d given myself a finite period of a year after my degree in psychology to do my music in before returning to do my Masters.” Though she hasn’t gone back to school yet, her music career is certainly picking up. Just as her childhood performances would continue until her audience finally left, Carroll is built for endurance. She believes work, faith and dedication will ultimately prevail.

“The way I deal with periods where I focus on something stressing me out or affecting me adversely, I focus and feel it, feel it, feel it and let go. Then it doesn’t evoke the same response in me anymore when I think about it again,” she says.

“I’m Not Sold” features Jade McInally on drums, Damian Meoli on bass, and Harvey on lead guitar, but her live band, which played the Corner Hotel in Richmond this past weekend, is shaping up to look a little different. Carroll met Ruby Whiting, who plays synths and keyboards in the live band, via bass player Sean Gage (also with Foreign National) whilst Gage and Whiting were dating. Cassie Kumashov plays drums – she had been in Hot Springs when Carroll first saw her and felt that her “emotive, feeling-based” drumming was the perfect fit for the band. Carroll and company will support Olympia at the Gasometer on the 20th of January, and are slated to play Federation Square towards the end of January, in Melbourne’s central city district.

Carroll’s intentions for the next video clip may challenge those close friendships, if the athletic requirements prove necessary to make art. She’s working on a video clip for the next single with Nick Mckk, who’s collaborated with Julia Jacklin, Estella Donnelly and John Butler Trio. “The ideas are still in the works,” says Carroll. “I really wanted to have the band in this one, but it’s a really fast song; I wanted to record in double-time then put it into slow motion, but that would mean everyone playing an already fast song twice as fast. So we’re nutting that out at the moment.”

Later this year, the album will be finalised, and in the meantime, her next three singles are scheduled for release in February, April, then July approximately. “Provided all goes to plan, which normally it doesn’t!” admits Carroll with a laugh. Whatever happens, we’re sold on the soulful folk singer, and can’t wait to hear what comes next.

Follow Taylah Carroll on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

PLAYING MELBOURNE: NOE Wants to Make You “Sweat”

Noelani Petero is on a mission to bring back early the iconic 2000s R&B sound. The Melbourne-based singer-songwriter is unabashedly old-school in her approach to hip-hop and super-smooth R&B in the vein of Janet Jackson, Lauryn Hill and Aaliyah. Under the stage name NOE (pronounced “Noii”), which includes a loose collective of beat-makers and producers, Petero just released debut single “Sweat.” With a string of new tracks set to drop in 2021 in the lead-up to her debut EP, NOE’s bold sensuality fairly oozes out of the speakers, even while the beats threaten to blow the bass.

NOE stands for New Old Experiment, and in its clever channeling of ’90s hip hop, funk and R&B into the 2020 world of streaming 24/7, where only the catchiest tunes will survive, it does indeed combine the Old and New.

“I’m a ’90s kid, so I always revisit artists like Ashanti, Ja Rule, Aaliyah and Janet. R&B from the early 2000s was so dominant, but it was only three or four years before it became really poppy with artists like Britney Spears,” says Petero. “After Aaliyah died – and she was meant to be the future of R&B – it stopped with her. That’s my motivation, to bring that back. That early 2000s R&B has such a drive and energy to it. I feel like it’s much more chilled and relaxed, the R&B these days.”

Over the years, Petero has been working as a producer, an artist, a dancer and a writer within the Melbourne improvisational hip hop and R&B community. She was vocalist of Killah Hurtz, an early vocalist of acid jazz collective Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange (now based in Berlin), and a singer with LOGO.

Her emergence as a solo artist happened along with her new role as a mother. Petero has a 18-month old son who is “going through the annoying toddler phase early, but [is] the most fun.” Even so, becoming a mother has posed challenges to NOE as an artist. “My content is very sexually driven. I like to be very empowered in my sexuality, but I kind of lost that with having a child and not going to gigs anymore,” she confesses. “I reached out to Michael Cooper, also known as Mikki From Preston, and producer 2Point0, and said I feel like I’m stuck, I need something to drive me to write.”

2Point0 (aka Myawae Tarwo Sonkarlay) sent NOE some beats, which she listened to for weeks while at home or walking. “When I heard the bass beat for ‘Sweat,’ I went ‘yep!’” she remembers. It mattered very little to Petero that 2Point0 is still in high school.

“He’s so beyond-his-years as a producer and an artist. He’s very shy, he’s very quiet. He’s one of those kids who can just absorb so much knowledge. I was sending him opera, classical and country samples and he just absorbs it and puts it into his bass beats,” Petero gushes. “We were giving him a lot of information, so I’m really excited to see what he does. Mikki and I were just like, ‘We have got to keep working with him.’ It’s a collaboration. That’s why [we call it] NOE: it’s a New Old Experiment with a whole bunch of collaborators.”

Growing up, Petero was able to pick up music very easily. Her mother was a classically trained in piano, her brother played cello, and her sister played clarinet. She attended various band camps, though her school wasn’t strong in its musical offerings (to this day she says she feels let down by how boring their curriculum was).

After graduating from high school, NOE modeled in Queensland for a couple of years; she moved to Melbourne when she was 21, and modeling took a back seat to musical theatre, songwriting and performance. “It was an overwhelming feeling when the plane landed in Melbourne. It’s hard to explain,” she recalls. She knew this was home, though, and the arts scene embraced her as enthusiastically as she embraced it.

Ten years later, the arts scene is looking much different – certainly quieter under pandemic conditions. “The arts sector really got hard done by. After the bushfires, a lot of artists donated their time and funds towards the victims, and then COVID-19 hit. A lot of artists were left behind when they really needed it,” NOE points out. “A lot of musicians I’m around weren’t able to get government support because of all the red tape involved with being sole traders. A lot of artists slipped through the cracks in the system designed to support the arts.” Though more than $250 million worth of emergency funding to arts and culture in Australia was announced over the summer, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has yet to disburse much of the money. “We just haven’t seen it. I’m concerned about how artists and venues will continue their work to the same standard,” Petero says. “Not one dime has been spent. They couldn’t even answer public questions about it. The arts, especially in Victoria, is relied upon for revenue, so it’s disappointing that this has happened.”

Though the Australian government has left many artists and musicians unaided, artists in Melbourne are resourceful. They’ve embraced online performance and collaboration across genres. Like many other projects this year, “Sweat” was recorded at home, mixed and finished all within the space of a month during the pandemic. NOE usually has an early dinner with her husband, then heads up to the studio for two hours to “smash out” lyrics and vocals.

“I get the bass beats from 2Point0, then I record the vocals at home,” she says. “When I realised we were going into lockdown, I got some really good equipment. After recording the vocals and backup vocals, I clean it up and send it to Mikki. Then, Mikki adds the synths, fine tunes the vocals – which he’s really good at – and then we send it to another producer and good friend, Amin Payne. Amin Payne is a DJ and makes his own music. He can hear things Mikki and I can’t necessarily hear through the speakers when a song is turned right up, but Amin does his own little mix on it to tweak it. Then we send it to Choi Productions to do the mastering.”

NOE intends to do a music video for “Sweat,” but at the moment her focus is on putting music out regularly – and promoting it on her own. She hopes to release a song every two to three months, with the debut EP slated for July 2021. “At the moment, I want to get my songs out to prove to myself that I’ve been productive in lockdown,” she says. “I want to come out on the other side showing I’ve been busy.”

Follow NOE on Instagram for ongoing updates.

PLAYING MELBOURNE: Woodes Builds Playful Fantasy-Inspired Pop Universe with Crystal Ball

Elle Graham is a Melbourne transplant, having moved with her piano from Townsville, in regional Queensland, to the hub of Australian indie music. Best known as Woodes, she released her debut album Crystal Ball on November 13 – an ethereal, hypnotic, meditative exploration of inner and external landscapes.

The album was a balm for Graham’s soul after relentless touring off the back of her Golden Hour EP. She teamed up with producer Danny Harley (aka The Kite String Tangle) to co-write “Close,” a combination of flute, saxophone and anthemic vocals. Written in just three hours, Graham took the ease of its coming together as a sign that she’d write a full-length album just as quickly.

And she did – “Close” was such a powerful instigator that Graham wrote 40 songs for the album, much of it done during a three-week period in Los Angeles with Grammy-nominated songwriter/producer Scott Effman. Effman built his reputation as a producer who can defy genre boundaries to craft earworm pop music by working his magic with Akon, Kelly Clarkson, Mike Posner, Dean Lewis and Tiesto; Graham had worked with him previously for one of her favorite Golden Hour cuts, “Dots.”

“It was my first ever writing trip. I went over to play Canadian Music Week and then my publishers and management arranged for me to do a day with Scott Effman. In only two days, we were immediately on the same wavelength,” she remembers. “We work very well together, so I reached out to him to do an extended period of writing for Crystal Ball. That was a lot of fun, sometimes spending 15-hour days where all we were doing was writing and working on music and only breaking to get food.”

It was also during this period in LA that Graham wrote “Crystal Ball” with collaborator Jason Hahs. The song is inflected with Graham’s sonic tribute to the sci-fi and fantasy aesthetic and vibe that she’s long been in love with. “We both really love Game of Thrones and sci-fi,” she admits, which makes it into the playful song. “There’s lots of weird spells and sound effects, like wizards dueling. There’s about 100 layers of mandolins, vocoders and different sounds in it.”

“Writing about 40 songs for the record, there’s a lot of variety,” she adds. Electric guitar soars over Graham’s romantic promises on “How Long I’d Wait,” “Queen of The Night” reveals a dreamlike imaginary world in its curious instrumentation, and Graham revels in the melancholy sweetness of “This Is My Year.”

The last song on the album, “Distant Places” was a collaborative consequence of working with US producer Alex Somers, who had also worked on one of Graham’s favorite records, Valtari by Sigur Ros.

Between those first and last songs, “Staring At The Fire” was her paean to home. Graham was raised in Townsville, a northern Australian town where the heat and humidity are well-suited to the dreamily perfect beaches and lush mangroves. Graham’s mum is a marine biologist and her father, a park ranger. For Graham, music was as much of an obsession as nature and her childhood was immersed in both. She wrote “Staring At The Fire” on the old piano she’d brought from Townsville. It now resides in her home studio in Brunswick, a suburb in Melbourne’s inner north.

“I’ve lived in Melbourne now for seven years,” says Graham. “It’s been rough this year [with COVID19], but I love it here. All my family are American and they’re living on the West Coast. I’m an American citizen so I got to vote in the recent election. It was surreal.”

Graham moved to Melbourne to study music composition at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), one of Austalia’s leading arts colleges. “I worked hard to build a folio to apply there to study Interactive Composition. You’re right next to dancers, visual artists and musicians. It’s a lot about creating your own Melbourne groove,” she explains. “It’s very special because my band are all from VCA too. The students who attend VCA are dedicated to turning their practice into a job. I actually mentor and teach students there now. It brings me a lot of joy to be able to share the things I wish I’d been taught.”

While at school, Graham kickstarted her career by releasing a string of singles warmly received by radio audiences. “The Thaw” was added to full rotation on Triple J, and “Rise” received over 3.1 million streams on Spotify; they would eventually land on her self-titled debut EP. Stand-alone single “Change My Mind” was featured on fifteen international New Music Friday playlists, including from France, the UK and Vietnam, and the subsequent release of Golden Hour in 2018 officially made Woodes an artist worth watching.

Graham wanted Crystal Ball to bring fantasy into the everyday, so walking through her suburb in armor felt like the ideal way to do this. “It takes a while to find community when you move to a new place. Brunswick is a perfect place for that… I’ve lived in a bunch of sharehouses around Melbourne and Brunswick is very close to the city, but sort of in the suburbs still,” she says. “A lot of my musician friends live around the corner. We have board game nights, dinners and gathering around the fireplace. There’s a lot of co-working spaces and studios around here.” Suffice to say, her neighbors didn’t bat an eye to see her traipsing about dressed like a Medieval warrior.

Her community provided creative connections, too. “During lockdown, Nick Mckk, who lives just down the road, dropped off camera equipment on my veranda, then he takes it away and edits it. We worked on the ‘Crystal Ball’ music video and a bunch of making of videos too,” Graham says.

But perhaps her biggest break through to date has been in a well-known virtual community – Minecraft. “All of my work has a visual element, so I’d work with directors and game developers, including with the Minecraft project. Minecraft is a very creative game, almost like The Sims; you can create your own dream house, so in mine there’s a giant train and a crystal ball in the middle of the town. You can visit each of the songs on the album via this train network,” Graham explains. “I’ve played a lot more Minecraft than I ever expected! I thought it was so cool to allow access to this place if you bought my album, so you could hear my songs for the first time in the world and interact with me by asking questions about how I made them.”

Graham is excited to finally allow the world beyond Minecraft to enter her auditory universe. From Townsville to Melbourne, via Los Angeles, the album is an amalgam of all her worlds. Now it can be ours.

Follow Woodes on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Something For Kate Bassist Stephanie Ashworth Talks New LP, The Modern Medieval

Something For Kate is, like black coffee and rooftop beer gardens, fundamentally part of Melbourne. The trio – guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Paul Dempsey, drummer Clint Hyndman and bassist Stephanie Ashworth – have been performing and releasing albums since the mid-1990s. Their latest album, The Modern Medieval, arrives after an eight year hiatus to defy modern rock’s subgenre classifications, though Ashworth agrees that the band is a quintessentially Melbourne creation.

“Something For Kate has always been that way,” she says. “We’d been living overseas prior to this but we’ve always come back to Melbourne. Paul met Clint here, and formed the band here.” Dempsey and Ashworth, married with two children, have lived between Melbourne and New York for the past decade. “We moved to New York before we had kids,” she shares. “We had our first child when in New York, where half my family is from. We’d been there touring, recording and it got to the point where we just thought we should move there, so we did. Eventually, we came back to Melbourne and now we’re back and forth. We came back from Los Angeles just before COVID-19, fortunately.”

Hyndman remained in Australia, and though the distance – or even being the odd one out in a band with a married couple – might’ve broken up less tenacious bands, Ashworth assures me that the drummer is like family.

“Clint is Paul’s best friend and he’s like my brother. I talk to Clint probably more than I talk to Paul! Clint loves to chat, he loves a gossip, he’s really fun. It’s the perfect combination for a three-piece: a married couple and we’re best friends between us,” she says. “The three of us have a reputation for being a very, dark, serious band, thanks to a magazine article back in 1997, but we laugh a lot. The three of us have an absolute blast; we’re sillier than anyone would ever expect. When Paul and I moved to New York, we didn’t see Clint for eight months and yet when he walks into the room, we all laugh at the same thing. The two of them are my world and I don’t go a day without talking to either of them.”

Though they haven’t released music as Something For Kate since 2012’s Leave Your Soul To Science, the band has been busy with other pursuits. Dempsey spent late 2017 and early 2018 touring his sophomore solo album Strange Loop internationally, as well as touring Europe with David Bowie’s band in Celebrating David Bowie. In 2018, Dempsey, Ashworth, and Hyndman set aside any outside interests and committed to the writing of The Modern Medieval, their seventh album.

“The boys in the band know when I’m right into a particular song. I’m insufferable, banging on about it!” Ashworth says, noting that she’s not coy about picking favourites. “The closing song, ‘I Will Defeat You,’ is my favourite on the record. For us, it’s quite playful. We don’t often take another genre and decide to bend it, but we did with that. It’s our version of a soul, blues song. I love the fact that the subject matter of the song is so dark, but it has this almost ZZ Top bassline. I find it hard to restrain myself and play bass so minimally, but I loved doing it for that song.”

The demands of writing an album and spending 24/7 together might break some couples, or some individuals, but Ashworth gives no sense that this has been, or could be, a challenge for her marriage. “Any couple that work together are going to bring their work home,” she says. “We might have inappropriate conversations at 3am, fiery moments with business decisions and writing songs, but there’s always a level of respect that is very strong.”

Ashworth was the last member to formally join Something For Kate, replacing touring bassist Toby Ralph, who in turn had replaced original bassist Julian Carroll, after the recording of the band’s 1997 debut LP, Elsewhere for 8 Minutes. “I still have my perspective of [Paul] as a songwriter and [Something For Kate] as a band before I came along… I have an enormous respect for Paul as a musician, and I’ve never taken that for granted,” Ashworth says. “I’ve not worked with many musicians who can do what he does – he has perfect pitch, which is freakish. When I first met him, he did an eight-minute drum track, put the bass track down, the guitar track down on his solo album and watched the engineers go ‘holy crap.’ If he hears a piece of music, he can play it back to you within a minute. When you play with someone like that, it’s really intimidating because you know – I’m a very punk rock bass player compared to him.”

Much like The Slits’ Viv Albertine – who told NPR last year that without role models, there was little option other than to be self-taught, which led to more intuitive and authentic playing – Ashworth believes the lack of formal training has been an asset, one that Dempsey, too, recognised as valuable. “Paul pursued me as a bass player because he said I approach the melody in a way he hadn’t heard before. He appreciated that I haven’t had the creativity beaten out of me by a rule book,” she remembers.

Ashworth’s love affair with music began aged 10, with her ear pressed up to her brother’s bedroom door as he played 7-inch records from The Clash, The Cure, The Smiths, and Siouxsie and The Banshees. “As a 10 year-old it was intriguing to me and I was like, ‘what is that? I need to know more!’ So, I started buying 7-inches and staying up late to watch Rock Arena, buying English music magazines like Melody Maker and learning about all of these bands,” she says. “I bought keyboards and messed around with them in my bedroom, then I started sneaking into punk rock gigs in Perth as a teenager. When I moved into a sharehouse in Melbourne, aged around 19, I ended up teaching myself bass guitar because someone I knew needed a bassist at short notice.”

Ashworth has not played the game other bands of the 1990s and early 2000s have – their female members appearing in fashion and lifestyle magazines to answer questions about their skincare regime, favourite fashion labels and hairstyle tips in an effort to hopefully draw attention back to their music. “Throughout the past two decades, I was often asked to be in an article on women in music. The reason I turned those articles down was I felt like I was being treated like a novelty. Even if it was women putting these articles together for mainstream media, it felt like, ‘How cute, you’re in a band and you’re a girl!’ I felt like it was tokenistic – the whole tone of the articles would be titillating, voyeuristic, focused on women’s clothing choices,” Ashworth says. “I told my record company I wasn’t going to perpetuate the idea that I’m a novelty, a minority, and what I do is a novelty act. It’s only been the last couple of years that I’ve started talking to people about why, and I’ve seen things change. There’s a lot of women in bands now; for a long time, I felt like I was out there on my own.”

“Misogyny has been an issue,” Ashworth adds. “I definitely experienced this patronising attitude from older men, particularly when supporting international bands. Their roadies and crew would give this vibe. I didn’t acknowledge it and got on with what I was doing. Until more women are in positions of power, and there’s much more discussion than there was, there’s a lot of tokenism still happening.” She says Something For Kate have made a point of employing women as booking agents and managers, but that there’s still room for improvement in the industry. “I’d like to see more female crew – that’s an area that needs work. In America, there’s all-female crews but Australia is yet to get there. Those jobs need to get offered to women in the first place so that they can get the experience,” she says. “I’ve seen women who are incredible at their jobs, really intelligent and deserving of promotion, just get passed over for the big boys’ club. We’ve always tried to subvert that, where we can.”

Much of the press in Australia has presumptuously reported that the band had broken up, or been on holidays for the past eight years, labelling The Modern Medieval a “comeback album.” Ashworth is bemused.

“We never broke up. We don’t think of this as a ‘comeback record’ – we’ve been touring the whole time, we’ve done festivals the whole time,” she states. “Paul went over to Chicago, made a record, and toured that for two years. When I had a child, we couldn’t tour for a while. When Bowie died, his band asked Paul to sing, so we had to wait until the touring with them eased, so that we could work on the album. We had to lock Paul down – that’s why it took eight years. Children, world touring, and Bowie.”

Follow Something For Kate on Facebook for ongoing updates.

Deadly Hearts Showcases Indigenous Artists Performing Iconic Australian Songs

Mitch Tambo covers Vanessa Amorosi on the latest compilation from Deadly Hearts.

What is Australian music? Does it have a signature sound? Ask anyone from Arnhem Land to Arakoola, Melbourne to Mungo, and you’ll get a different response. What can’t be denied is that the original owners of Australian land had their own language – both literally and musically. In the last decade, there’s been a push by government and remote regional councils to preserve records and document Aboriginal languages, to recognise that the many languages of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Australians define the land, the spirit of place and people for generations of families and communities.

Recently, the National Indigenous Music Awards showcased the diversity and wealth of talented Indigenous artists of all genders, ages and musical genres. The latest Deadly Hearts compilation (and third in the series) features many of those artists. Versions of Vanessa Amorosi’s joyous pop song “Absolutely Everybody”, Crowded’s House sadly sweet “Don’t Dream It’s Over” and the political ferocity of Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning” are all given a fresh interpretation.

The Deadly Hearts series began in 2017 as a platform for a new generation of Indigenous Australians to respond musically to the question: “What song has spoken strongest to you about growing up an Indigenous Australian?” The 12 tracks on the original album combined synth, jazz and hip hop to reimagine songs that each of the artists had a personal investment in. Jimblah covered Warumpi Band’s “My Island Home” with an electro vibe, while Birdz turned Yothu Yindi’s “Sunset Dreaming (Djapana)” into a hip hop ode. Deadly Hearts 2, released last year, featured accomplished artists Alice Skye and Dan Sultan as well as upcoming artists Tia Gostelow, Electric Fields and Dallas Woods.

The latest drop from the series, subtitled Walking Together, comes ahead of NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Week 2020. NAIDOC began as a week long event in 1975, an observance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians’ history, culture and achievements.

Ziggy Ramo opens the comp with “Tjitji,” a soulful hip hop track that combines a trippy beat with a harrowing, vulnerable rap about contemplating and handling suicidal thoughts (“I see your pain, I felt the same. If you want real change, you gotta play the long game”). Just as he did in a recent performance for the Sydney Opera House Live series, Ramo skillfully blends the personal with the political even as he sings words originally written by Anangu/Torres Strait Islander Miiesha, who is also featured on the track.

She appears again backed by handclaps and a Woorabinda choir on a rendition of Brooks & Dunn country classic “Neon Moon,” raising it to the level of spiritual sanctuary. There is a lush spaciousness, where the voices are so divinely in harmony that you might be convinced Miiesha has been performing this for a lifetime. It’s quite a departure from Miiesha’s soulful debut album Nyaaringu, an award winner at the National Indigenous Music Awards this year, but the singer says, “We go mad for country music up here so picked one of our favourites.”

Miiesha covers Brooks & Dunn for Deadly Hearts, and features on a Ziggy Ramo cover of her own song, “Tjitji.” Photo Credit: Clare Nica

Stan Walker and Isaiah Firebrace duet on the gently compelling, lovely reimagining of Crowded House’s 1986 hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” Walker’s voice sounds close to breaking into tears, while Isaiah introduces traditional language, an unexpected, fresh element to such a well-known song. Walker has just released an autobiographical book that reveals his experience of sexual and physical abuse growing up in New Zealand – while it isn’t imperative to know his history and life stories to be moved by this track, it does give it an additional layer of meaning and heartbreak. Firebrace was Australia’s Eurovision contender in 2017. Together, the pair highlight the original song’s subtle message of resilience.

DRMNGNOW is the moniker of Naarm/Birraranga-based Neil Morris. The Yorta Yorta MC and instrumentalist applies his poetic rapping skills to a simple piano-beats-synth backdrop on a cover of Archie Roach’s “Get Back To The Land.” Morris recently told Double J’s Tim Shiel, “It doesn’t appear that people fully understand the depth of Indigenous spirituality and the power of this country… We need more anthems. If people aren’t aware, maybe we need to put some anthems out there for that. Also for the empowerment of our people; to feel strong and empowered, that there’s anthems that represent them.” It makes sense then, that Morris would gravitate toward Roach; both hail from Mooroopna, and the song resonated with Morris in the years he spent “living off country on Wurundjeri land.”

As a member of the Steering Committee for Kimberwalli at the Western Sydney Indigenous Centre of Excellence, Sydney-based soul singer Mi-Kaisha is politically active, advocating for young Indigenous voices to be heard. But it is her own flawless acapella, paired simply and perfectly with piano and nothing more, that stands out loud and clear on Bee Gees cover “How Deep Is Your Love.” The Darumbal Murri and Tongan woman was also the NAIDOC Youth of The Year in 2019 – no surprise with a talent that rivals Beyonce and Christina Aguilera for stadium-worthy, diva vocals.

Other highlights include a riotous pop tribute to “Absolutely Everybody” the anthem of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, sung by Mitch Tambo. He sings in Gamilaraay language, also adding the rich, deep bass sound of didgeridoo throughout the track. And Aodhan, a teenage Dharawal artist who won Triple J’s Unearthed High Indigenous Initiative in 2019, channels Elliott Smith on his strummy, acoustic version of Tia Gostelow’s “Always.” So thoroughly gorgeous is his rendition, it’s hard to believe he didn’t write it himself – a sensation embodied by many of the tracks on this wonderful album.

Southeast Desert Metal offer an explosive rendition of Midnight Oil’s classic Indigenous Rights anthem “Beds Are Burning” on Deadly Hearts.

As if Midnight Oil’s ferociously political “Beds Are Burning” wasn’t driving home the message enough when it first came out, a brilliant version by Southeast Desert Metal ramps up the riffs and the volume to blow minds and speakers. Based in Santa Teresa, an hour from remote Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory, the Eastern Arrernte band showcase their influences proudly. Raised on a meaty diet of Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, the four-strong members released a debut self-titled album in 2015, following it with their Break The Silence LP in 2018. Both works aimed to meld Indigenous culture with heavy music.

“I just want to send a strong message to young people today,” singer Chris Wallace told Blunt magazine last month. “They don’t seem to care about their culture anymore; they’re just sort of going on their own paths, doing the wrong things. I grew up with my uncles and all that, [with a] cultural way of living. That’s the reason why I just wanted to share a bit of the story that I was told. I just wanted to pass it on through music.”

Deadly Hearts: Walking Together is uniquely poised to accomplish that mission, not just with “Beds Are Burning,” but with its entire tracklist. If you love this album, which may happen on the first listen or the fifteenth, it makes a great jump off for discovering a wealth of Australian artists past and present – and when you’ve explored Walking Together thoroughly, there are still two previous Deadly Hearts compilations to delve into.

From Dessner to Dickinson, Luluc Recounts Inspiration Behind Latest LP Dreamboat

Zoe Randell and Steve Hassett of Luluc (pronounced “Loo-Luke”) have been riding the rollercoaster of pandemic feels, just like the rest of us. While it wasn’t in their plans to be back in Australia for the indeterminate future, the duo have been embracing the beauty of Sorrento. For those readers unfamiliar with Sorrento, it’s a picturesque, coastal town in Victoria – just outside of Melbourne – that attracts beach-loving holiday tourists, surfers and artistic types looking for some solace from city life.

“We visit every year, usually in the summer,” says Randell, “but this is the first time we’ve stopped here for long enough to experience the winter and smell the first hints of springtime arriving. Melbourne is very different to New York; the light, the colours. It is quite a magical experience, like catching up with an old cherished friend.”

Randell and Hassett founded Luluc in Melbourne in 2008, then moved to Brooklyn, New York in 2010. Their indie-folk sound has attracted attention and acclaim for each of their three past records (2008 debut Dear Hamlyn, 2014’s Passerby, and 2018’s Sculptor) from NPR, Uncut, and artists ranging from Iggy Pop and Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss to Lucinda Williams, who Luluc supported on tour. Luluc’s latest, Dreamboat, is already hot property. It was featured on NPR All Songs Considered (a personal pick of host Robin Hilton), and single “Emerald City” featured on Australian radio, Double J’s Mornings show.

Co-produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner, “Emerald City” is one of the many Randell was working on pre-pandemic, when life as usual, frenetic and glorious in New York, was taken for granted. Dessner had invited Randell and Hassett to Berlin for the PEOPLE Festival (run by Dessner and Justin Vernon), which is where the three artists began work on Dreamboat. The album was recorded across both Berlin and their Brooklyn studio, then mixed in isolation in Sorrento.

Guests on the album, other than Dessner, include Bon Iver’s JT Bates on drums, and Arcade Fire’s saxophonist, Stuart Bogie. “I took a few songs to PEOPLE Festival that were close to finished, but these particular songs both Steve and I felt needed different instrumentation and textures,” says Randell. “So, a couple of the songs on this record have beats and synths that Aaron played, as well as two incredible drummers. But with all these newer sounds we’ve explored, it is still very much in keeping with our vibe. Really we feel like we can explore any sounds we want to, if the song is there at the core.”

“Emerald City” is gloriously atmospheric. Randell’s melodic voice, a lullaby, effortlessly graces a downtempo, glitchy beat that hints at the restlessness of urban life. “Finally sleep takes the wheel,” sings Randell. “I won’t let this pull me under, I won’t let you pull me under.”

For Randell, inspiration is not as clear cut as sounding like, or taking influence from, other musicians. She refers to the practice of drawing from the artistic richness of books, music, sights, smells and ideas as an act of synthesis. “For us, our art is a whole-life pursuit, so I draw from all forms; books, film, nature, art, photography and of course music. Often I’ll go deep with an artist, a record, or an author, that captivates me, and kind of let it wash over me, leave it’s impression.”

“All the Pretty Scenery,” for instance, came into being as a result of Randell’s immersion into Emily Dickinson’s poetry, an exploration of a time before our modern imaginations were affected by all-pervasive technology, before iPhones dictated what we know and how quickly. “I was inspired by some of the pictures she created,” Randell recalls. “It felt like time travel. Like I could experience some sense of how her outlook was influenced by the times she was living in. That got me thinking about writing a poem, or lyric, that reflects my experience of the world now as distinct from her time.”

To that end, the album is thoroughly appealing to a modern listener while still being a romantic thing – a creation that recalls vinyl jazz records, the raw and textural joy of a real album that requires full attention and dedicated listening from beginning to end. Don’t press shuffle.

“That auto-shuffle function that happens makes me crazy!” admits Randell. “Songs are like chapters in a book or scenes in a film, so I very much want people to hear them as we create them. I love how you get to know an album, how you hear the next song in sequence before it even starts playing. I hope people at least start out listening to the sequence we created. The songs can stand on their own of course, but I think it helps to get to know the world that’s been created when you’re hearing a new album.”

Though touring, as we’ve become accustomed this past six months, is off the table, Luluc will be offering live performances online once the duo have organised how and when they’ll deliver these. It will be intimate, far from their opening slots for the likes of The National, J Mascis and Dinosaur Jr., Father John Misty, Fleet Foxes and Jose Gonzalez, likely closer to their past performance for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts in 2014. But the album itself unravels like a gift; as the world is forced to run into the brick wall of enforced lockdowns and cities become sparse places where people scurry – eyes down and distant – from their home to pick up takeaway and straight home again, it feels nourishing to spend time in the lushness of Luluc’s dreamscape.

Follow Luluc on Facebook for ongoing updates.

How Booking Maven Mary Mihelakos Became Melbourne Rock Royalty

Melbourne-based concert promoter Mary Mihelakos wears a cowboy shirt with embroidered red roses that match her bright lipstick and blonde bouffant — Photo Credit: Suzanne Phoenix

For those who have carved their career as artists, music journalists, publicists, label founders or roadies, there is no question of living, breathing – and working in – music. One woman who knows there is no other endeavour so addictive and enthralling as music is Melbourne’s Mary Mihelakos, who was inducted into the Melbourne Hall of Fame through Music Victoria on Friday. She’s an icon in this city, but like everything to do with Melbourne’s rock and roll scene, she doesn’t trumpet herself or demand fame and acclaim. Mihelakos just keeps creating, sharing and supporting artists and venues because there is no other way to live.

In her teens, Mihelakos began volunteering at community radio. Before she was even legally allowed in venues, she was being invited to gigs and invited to work for venues as a booker and publicist. Naturally, she began managing bands and booking live music venues in her late teens and 20s while studying media and journalism at Swinburne University. In 1995, she took on the role of Editor at Melbourne’s biggest and best known street press magazine Beat, where she remained for a decade. She also contributed to The Age newspaper’s “Sticky Carpet” column, which provided a summary of the happenings on the live music scene in Melbourne.

Not content to only write about Melbourne’s live music, Mihelakos founded the Melbourne Music Bus Tours, which ran from the Arts Centre in central Melbourne through the city, sharing local music history with curious visitors and locals alike. She also founded the Aussie BBQ at SXSW in 2003, which provides a global showcase for Australian music.

“I don’t really know what’s behind the induction,” says Mihelakos. “I did eight fundraisers for bushfires this year. Maybe, though, it’s because of 30 years of service to Melbourne music.”

In the late 1980s, Mihelakos was 14 and “a big music fan” by her own admission, with two older sisters who listened to 3RRR, so a young Mihelakos became a fan of the station by default. “I already was quite obsessed with The Models, Kids In The Kitchen and I’m Talking,” she recalls. “I’d go to the Palais Theatre by myself and mum and dad would coordinate to pick me up and drop me off. At that young age, I was so driven. There’s not many 14-year-olds who want to go to local gigs.”

Mihelakos got out the phone directory, rang up 3RRR FM and interrogated them as part of a school assignment. Mihelakos’ mother dropped her at the radio station, where she went on a tour and then returned in her school holidays to volunteer. “Everyone was a music nerd. I felt more at home at 3RRR than I did at school. One of the jobs I did was compiling the gig guide weekly. I had a typewriter, because there was only one computer at the station at the time, and I’d ring up all the venues to find out who was playing. I was a little fat Greek girl. I wasn’t annoying anyone. I was genuinely working and being enthusiastic about the records. It gave me that independence that I have now. I still, to this day, have very close relationships to all those people.”

Mihelakos did a lot of fill-ins for hosts on 3RRR; her broad musical interests meant that she was able to adapt to fill in on various programs. Though she’d later do a regular weekly hour on tour updates, she never hosted a regular show. “By the time I was 17, I was writing for Beat magazine and running the student radio station at Swinburne University. I was also booking bands at The Evelyn and Swinburne University, so hosting my own show wasn’t my focus,” she explains. Mihelakos met Scott Stevens from The Earthmen in her first year of university and began managing the band in 1991.

The Evelyn, in Melbourne’s musical heartland of Fitzroy, has been one of the city’s major venues since the ’80s; Mihelakos became the booker of the club in 1994, where she worked closely with fellow bookers, including Richard Moffatt of The Punters Club, to create events across multiple venues and in collaboration with community radio stations. “The venue only fit 300 people, but because the entry was only $2, people would come in for an hour then go elsewhere. The Punters Club front bar was full of interesting people, students… it was such an interesting place in the early 1990s,” says Mihelakos.

Mihelakos became the editor of Beat in 1995; the weekly paper is the entry point for many of Australia’s most prolific music journalists to build their portfolio and establish industry networks. “I was studying media at university and editing the student paper,” recalls Mihelakos. “But my relationship with Beat went back to when I got an interview with INXS for 3RRR FM and the editor of Beat at the time was desperate for the story, so I wrote it up for them. From that time on, I continued to do interviews for Beat magazine. I was also really good at hassling for advertising, which is why they really wanted me to stay on!”

She was also DJing at Melbourne’s iconic The Cherry Bar in an inner city laneway upon its establishment in 2000, earning her rent by playing four or five hour sets. “I’m so grateful to DJing for paying me to spend lots of time in record stores,” she says. “Really, there’s nothing I’ve been obsessed with the way I am about music. I feel confident in a room of 500 people, playing songs – that’s the thing I know. I love DJing and soundtracking people’s good times.”

Mihelakos began traveling for music events like CMJ in New York City and Austin’s SXSW, where she noticed that “a lot of Australian bands were playing there but they spent thousands of dollars to go over, play for 20 minutes, then go home.” This sparked the idea for her own day party, which she called the Aussie BBQ, which not only included Australian bands, but white bread, sausages and coleslaw salads as well. In 2003, she paid for the first event on her credit card. Record companies, booking agencies and major rock acts attended, leading to signings, bookings and tour plans. From the first year, it became an essential showcase for all Australian bands at SXSW.

“My bleeding heart mentality means I don’t do things for money, hence why I’ve gotten this award, this induction into the Hall of Fame. I’d be living in a nice house if I hadn’t started the Aussie BBQ,” laughs Mihelakos.

Sounds Australia paid Mihelakos a licensing fee in 2013, and it was a relief to Mihelakos to hand over the event to the organisation. Mihelakos had, at that point, set up the Aussie BBQ in London, Liverpool and Brighton in the UK and Nashville, New York and LA.

Mihelakos kept busy, even with Aussie BBQ off her plate – at that time, she was writing “Sticky Carpet” for Melbourne’s The Age newspaper (a must-read for any rock ‘n’ roll fans in Melbourne, though it ended in 2017 due to media budget cuts). She also founded and produced local council-run music festival Leaps and Bounds, which held around 300 musical events annually, resulting in Mihelakos being hospitalised twice for exhaustion between 2013 and 2016. As part of the festival, she also founded bus tours which guided ticket payers through Melbourne’s local music history.

Mihelakos also founded the Buried Country Tour, full of Indigenous country music legends, in 2016. Based on the book Buried Country, written by Clinton Walker, both Walker and Mihelakos were co-producers in creating the live performances. After touring the event nationally, Mihelakos and Walker retired the event in 2019. “It was a lot of time and yet another one of my crazy ideas, but it took off,” she says. “During all that time, I was DJing and writing and booking venues.” Her last gigs before the pandemic sidelined shows included booking shows for The Thornbury Theatre and The Spotted Mallard in Melbourne’s inner north and putting together several bushfire benefits throughout January and February this year.

Meanwhile, fans of Mihelakos’ writing can check out the liner notes for the second Sound As Ever compilation, Stuck on the 90s. But there’s no doubt that COVID-19 has forced Mihelakos to slow down and take stock of it all. “I started making notes for my personal memoirs. It’s so fun to think of all the adventures I had as a teenager and when I went overseas. I have danced on stage with Iggy Pop and The Stooges six times across three continents! I attended The Big Day Out even year since 1992,” she says, adding, with a laugh, “I’ve done nothing for the last six months and now I’m being inducted into the Music Victoria Hall of Fame!”

JUMAN Expands Compassionate View on Latest EP Tear Time

musician Juman holds a large flower to her face — Photo Credit: Kristy Juno Knowles

As the COVID-19 pandemic began its steady spread, Juman sensed it was time to move—physically and spiritually. The Melbourne raised singer-songwriter-producer, who is of Palestinian-Turkish-Jordanian background, had battled a sensitive immune system since childhood and knew it was time to take self-care further, so she made some sweeping life changes that had both positive and negative effects on life as she knew it. But with the loss came something she never anticipated – radical compassion.

Tapping into those feelings, Juman turned to music. Tear Time is the latest in a string of bite-sized EPs released since 2018. Like all her work, she transports listeners into an eclectic musical world—influenced by Stevie Wonder, Erykah Badu, Amy Winehouse and jazz—via chill, kaleidoscopic sounds that are as seductive as they are gently vibrant.

Today, Juman says that the process has emboldened her calling to “facilitate safe spaces for women to journey musically together.” Here she speaks to Audiofemme about radical love, healing, and acceptance.

<a href="https://juman.bandcamp.com/album/tear-time">Tear Time by JUMAN</a>

AF: What was happening during that month that inspired Tear Time?

J: March was a month of metamorphosis. Towards the closing of 2019 I made the decision to radically commit to my health and well being. My health is something that I have struggled with since I was a small child. My immune system was down, and I was extremely susceptible to catching everything under the sun. I have always been very dedicated to my health, but it was time to take it to new heights and radically commit. So, I moved in with my mum for a couple of months so that I could afford to pay for therapies and medical tests I was called to do.

Another commitment I made to myself was to move to northern NSW (New South Wales) by the end of February 2020. Since then, my health has never been better, and I now feel like I am thriving in such a newfound capacity. I have always had such a strong pull to this land and my body feels so alive here. This was an extremely hard decision for me to make for many reasons, but mainly because I was in a committed relationship. I was extremely grateful that he was in full support of my decision. He had seen me really struggle throughout our relationship with my health. Melbourne was no longer serving me, and he understood this. He wanted to see me thrive and be well. He was planning to move up with me in a few months, but that never eventuated. When I moved, an explosion of trauma arose to
the surface, boundaries were crossed, and trust was broken. We ended up parting ways.

Throughout this separation there were many fluctuations of contrasting emotions that arose, and the strongest one of them all that constantly held me together through this roller coaster ride was compassion. Such deep compassion! Compassion for our individual struggles and wounding and compassion for the terrified and hurt children that live inside of us that long to be heard, held, and loved! These series of decisions and events that then lead to this breakup inspired this EP. These songs were a way to emotionally process my experiences.

AF: You’ve recently written about “Eradicating those restricting ideas that have been existing in my mind, body and soul.” What are those restricting ideas you’ve been eradicating?

J: The ideas that I’ve been eradicating is this notion that I’m unworthy of love and believing it is unsafe to step into my power. A few stories were at play around these themes, one of them being the suppression of women by men in my culture and what they aren’t, and allowed, to do. It took much excavation to get to these core themes that were buried so deep in my subconscious. It’s all about seeking support. We aren’t here to do it alone. There are different self development modalities and therapies that aid in this exploration. Kinesiology and Somatic therapy have been life changing for me when it comes to uncovering and clearing these deep core wounding’s. When I say, ‘to make more space for greatness,’ I’m referring to this newfound life path potential that has awoken in me. A life of utmost beauty and perfection, heaven on earth!

AF: Did you grow up in a musical family?

J: I grew up with my mum and my two sisters. Nobody in my family played music or sang; they are all great dancers though, so I guess you could say they expressed music through their bodies’ movement. My soul Mumma Sandra, who I also consider to be one of my best friends, my mentor and second mother was a major musical influence in my life. She was my vocal coach and choir teacher when I was seven years old. We spent a lot of time together. She would take me to all of her jazz gigs and would always get me up with the band to sing a standard or two. I was exposed to lots of great music but mainly jazz, soul, and some folk.

My Grandmother who I feel very spiritually connected to lives in both Turkey and Sharjah (in the United Arab Emirates). She used to sing Turkish Opera when she was younger. She was the vocalist in her school orchestra when she was younger, but when her father found out he forbade her from participating. Apparently, he was a very harsh man. Just to paint a picture, he was the general of the Army in Turkey – that’s got to say something. When she married my grandfather and had the freedom to make her own decisions, she brought music back into her life. She would organize regular gatherings with her friends and they would all joyfully sing Turkish songs together. I am very grateful that her gift of song was passed down to me.

AF: What drives your creative process?

J: Creating music is my own personal therapy. I would say this is my main driving force. To give myself the space and time to honor my existence. To really hear myself out. To hold space for myself. To be my own best friend.

All my songs are created from a place of love – love for myself, love for others, love for nature, love for my experiences past, present, and future. Whether they be “good” or “bad” there is always light in the darkest places. Even when I’m expressing anger or pain in music, it is always held with love and acceptance for what is present. Self love is one of the most powerful gifts I am able to give myself. The music I create is an expression of this and is the most loving thing I can do for myself. It’s a space to feel into things without judgment regardless of how ugly or confronting. To just hold myself and the world around me with love and acceptance.

AF: What do you want listeners to experience when they listen to your work?

J: I want my music to act as therapy, motivation, and inspiration for listeners just as my music does for me. I hope that the heartwarming and healing experiences that I have with my music creation is reflected in how people experience it also. I hope that my music inspires people to love themselves more and more each day, as it does for me.

Follow Juman on Instagram for ongoing updates.

PLAYING MELBOURNE: ’90s Alt-pop Act Minimum Chips Reborn as Thibault

Thibault may be the best ’90s band that isn’t actually a ’90s band. Nicole Thibault, formerly of experimental jazz band Minimum Chips, has just released her debut album with collaborators Rebecca Liston (of Parsnip), The Ocean Party’s Lachlan Denton, and Julian Patterson, who was her Minimum Chips bandmate. Fittingly, the LP came out via long-running Melbourne label Chapter Music, founded by former Minimum Chips bandmate Guy Blackman in 1992 to distribute compilation cassettes, fanzines and CDs.

Or Not Thibault has earned the ultimate praise from Bikini Kill/Le Tigre alum, Kathleen Hanna. “Thibault is like if two of my favourite bands, Stereolab and Electrelane, merged together and were made brand new by Nicole’s originality,” she says on the label’s website. Hanna has followed Thibault’s work for a long time; though little known even to fans of Minimum Chips, Thibault was also a member of Brisbane-based riot grrl band Clag, who performed with masks taped to the back of their heads and Mr Men toys studded around the stage. A 2012 album compiled all the Clag hits, 23 in total, which was released on Chapter Music under the name Pasted Youth. And though Minimum Chips called it a day in 2007, they supported Bikini Kill, Pavement and Stereolab on their Australian tours.

As her first full-length record in nearly fifteen years, Or Not Thibault retains a lot of the vintage sweaters-and-angular haircuts feel that made Minimum Chips such a good fit with those bands. But Thibault also introduces Bacharach Baroque into the mix, with its kitschy choral flavour; she discussed her disparate influences on 3RRR’s The Golden Age of Piracy show earlier this year.

Much like Melbourne right now, Thibault’s album contains four seasons in one day. James Cecil, who also worked with Melbourne’s iconic Architecture In Helsinki, produced the album. His adeptness at wrangling a group of disparate musicians into a united sound is evident throughout the album. And it’s deceptively cheery-sounding despite confronting some weighty topics.

Take, for instance, “Centrelink,” which refers to Australia’s federal unemployment organisation. It has notoriously been a place where the jobless, homeless, students and artists have found themselves being interrogated, sneered at and – if everything goes well – provided the bare minimum not to starve in a garret.

The playful harpsichord and airy chorus are sweetly harmonic and yet, it does sound like Thibault’s voice might break into tears any moment as she sings, “Something dies inside of you that will never heal.” The song describes Thibault’s experience accessing Centrelink benefits – something most Australians can now relate to thanks to the pandemic – which was difficult to navigate. It was even harder to anticipate payments that were late to arrive. Thibault, with her children to care for, found herself racing to various appointments, crying in waiting rooms and sapped of both her patience and her dignity.

“Drama” follows up that thought (“I don’t know/What it’s like/Not have/Drama in my life” Thibault sings) by echoing the poppy, off-the-wall vibe of “Centrelink” but without the devastation; in its place hiccupy percussion, vacillating organ, nervy melodica, and a blare of horns build a feeling of anxiety.

Elsewhere, breezy cultural touchstones like a popular 1960s pull-string doll (“Chatty Cathy”) and Greek food (“Spanikopita”) to address deeper issues – the former takes female stereotypes to task while the latter illuminates the toll depression can take on relationships. “See The World” echoes the latent desire in “Spanikopita” to get away from it all, or even just to be the sort of wandering soul who freely escapes via travel.

Thibault also delves into her own psyche; on “Wanting To Be Alone” she craves the quietness of escaping everyone else, but on album closer “Too Much Time” she cautions that no matter how therapeutic, solitude can lead you too far into your own head. And on “Late Expectations” she sings of getting over self-conscious fears of what other people will think – no doubt related to her experience of returning to music after a long hiatus.

Ultimately, Thibault has thrown a whole lot of vintage influences, from Bacharach to the Psychedelic Furs, Gainsbourg to Pavement, into a bowl, whipped it up and let it rise into a very odd, rainbow-hued souffle. This is an album that confronts darkness and misery while never losing its momentum, its hookiness, its joyful vibrancy. Regardless your curiosity for oddball, obscure baroque-meets-rock sounds, you can’t deny that if Kathleen Hanna likes it, it’s totally worth a listen.

Follow Thibault on Facebook for ongoing updates.

Megan Washington Emerges Self-Assured on Epic Dark Pop LP Batflowers

Following the wave of critical acclaim unleashed by three LPs – I Believe You Liar (2010), Insomnia (2011), and There There (2014) – Megan Washington, who performs mononymously as Washington, has returned nearly a decade since her debut with epic new LP Batflowers, though not without some drama. The album is romantic and vulnerable, self-questioning and confident, and is clearly the work of a woman who has done a lot of self-investigation and remains curious about herself and the world around her.

Washington spoke with Audiofemme via phone call immediately after an infrared sauna session, in which she has embraced the solitary nature of being in a little room. She assures me she’s not avoiding the media about her album – she says she’s enjoyed interviews relating to this latest release; rather, she’s embracing any opportunity to get some thinking time away from the world. And anyway, she is not a woman who tolerates things that aren’t worthwhile. “If it doesn’t spark joy, do not participate,” she says.

That doesn’t mean things are always easy for the 34-year-old singer-songwriter. “In art, it’s necessary for me to not know exactly what I’m doing and to be in a process of discovery and search. So much important shit is based on constantly reinventing what you do, [and being] supremely comfortable with being in discomfort,” she explains. That’s the ethos behind the album’s lead single, “Dark Parts,” a synthy and seductive track with poppy, percussive undertones. And it also describes the complicated path Washington took to bring Batflowers into being.

The album went through several versions before Washington felt it was entirely an expression of herself. “I’m a total control freak, involved with every single element of the process – I don’t want random art, random music videos, and this random collaborative process. I want my work to have a strong identity,” she says. Washington was frustrated that the first and second iterations of the album didn’t meet her intentions. She knew the “vibe was off,” though she wants the people she worked with to know she found them amazing, and doesn’t blame or judge them. Rather, she says, she simply wasn’t hearing herself on her own album. The third version of Batflowers proved to be the one that “was everything that I want it to be, and I totally back it.”

Washington takes her role as songwriter seriously. “You’re literally putting words in people’s mouths if [the song is] catchy enough and people sing along,” she points out. “I have a choice about whether that’s negative energy or whether it’s a positive affirmation. For me, I want to make words that feel nice when I sing them so that you feel nice when you sing them, because there’s just too much negative energy into the world right now.” Even the two standout siren songs on the record, “Lazarus Drug” and “Catherine Wheel” have an uplifting streak to their particular fatalism.

During Washington’s six-year hiatus from releasing music, she got married to her husband Nick (a director), had a child (who is now a two-and-a-half) and moved to Brisbane. “I always thought I’d have to move to New York or LA if I wanted to be ambitious and succeed, and it was fun, but what I want is a healthy practice. I don’t want a chaotic, dramatic life so that I can make chaotic, dramatic music,” Washington says. “I want to make that music while living a healthy, peaceful life. Nick really championed my writing and my proximity to him has provided a safe environment as a non-musical writer could extend. We have films that we’re working on. The idea that I can write for other characters helps me to see myself as a character, so Washington to an extent is a persona. That separation from my artistic practice has been really good for me.”

As far as fitting the persona people expect, or trying to live a romantic dream, Washington realises she was living in the movie of her own life and that she’s now she is in a liberated, genuine place. “As I move into other areas of creative life, especially film and TV, I really see the music business rules for female artists very clearly. There’s a lot of things I used to accept but now, I really see how wrong it was. The only person who is in charge of what I do and what I make is me,” she says – and on “Not A Machine,” she delves further into themes of autonomy. “Women are taught so much to care about their age, and to be ashamed of getting older. It’s an existential insult.”

She’s wary too, of pigeonholing women as givers, something she addresses candidly on “The Give.” “We’ve been taught that apologising is giving,” she says. “I got asked about how I’ll feel about critics of the record, since it’s my guts on the table. I can’t imagine anyone who would critique a gift and that’s fundamentally what art is about. It’s on Spotify, it’s free, it’s there if you want it. Women being outrageously themselves is remarkable and that is giving. So, being apologetic isn’t a gift, being yourself is a gift.”

Ultimately, Washington is grateful for the evolution that Batflowers underwent – and the evolution she experienced while making it. “There’s this idea of risk that is inherent in art… the problem with risk is that you need it to grow,” she reflects. “Unless I’m terrified, I’m not trying hard enough.”

Follow Washington on Facebook for ongoing updates.

Melbourne’s Techno Queen DJ Kiti Spins Wax From Her Living Room

A classically trained flautist with an insatiable love for clubbing, it seemed destined that Tamara Kiti would end up behind the decks at some of Australia’s biggest club nights. Melbourne born and raised, Kiti has not only DJ’ed at major festivals, club nights and parties, but she’s started some of Melbourne’s cult club nights, including Roxy (going strong for seven years now) and LOUD (now in its fourth year) at laneway club Honkytonks. For Melburnians with a penchant for doing the Melbourne Shuffle, a signature dance style that emerged in the city in the 1980s and ’90s, into the early hours of the morning, it’s likely they have pulled dancefloor shapes to a soundtrack Kiti has curated.

Though COVID19 measures have confined her to her home, DJ Kiti is keeping Melburnians (and an international audience) nourished with murky, melodic techno feasts via YouTube, Instagram and Facebook streams.

“I was exposed to music from the minute I arrived,” confesses Kiti, who purchased her first 7-inch record at the age of four. “My mother was young and single and we would collect 99-cent 7-inch records from Kmart in Melbourne’s suburban Northcote Plaza every Saturday. I also had a record player with a tape deck. I would record pirate radio stations and listen to [community radio stations] PBS, RRR and 3CR all the time.”

Indeed, Kiti’s immersion in radio and records lead her to believe she’d be a radio DJ, encouraged by her primary school principal. “My first experience with DJing was playing one song before the lunch recess bell every day in primary school, thanks to my Principal, who knew I was an avid record collector and obsessed with music,” she recalls. ” DJs as we know them now were not around when I was a child, so I thought I’d be a radio DJ.”

As a teenager, Kiti was immersed in the formative years of rave culture that embraced strobe lights in pitch black warehouses, loud techno and neon fashion in the 1980s.

Kiti’s peroxide bob, perfectly angular cat’s eye makeup and cut-glass cheekbones might suggest slinky vocal house, but there’s a gothic essence to the techno she spins. Her sets are dark, old-school electro, techno and house that hark back to the times of illicit warehouse parties, glow in the dark wristbands and an audience of acid ravers, punks, goths, club kids and record geeks drawn to the mathematical genius and the repetitive nature of techno beats. Kim Moyes of The Presets, one of Australia’s foremost electro duos, recalled that it was one of Kiti’s legendary DJ sets during the early days of Sydney’s party crew The House of Mince that influenced the Presets’ track, “Fast Seconds.”

Dj Kiti · Dj Kiti Bunker Iso Stream April 2020

Kiti is adamant that DJing can be taught to a point, but the ability to read a crowd and respond, to adapt and instinctively know what to do to get a dancefloor pumping is all down to experience.

“DJing is all about practice, practice, practice, so that’s what I did for a whole year,” she says. “I would break records over my knee and sometimes bite them out of frustration! When it comes to track selection and being able to read a crowd, that cannot be taught in my opinion. My advice to those just starting out is to try and find your own sound and not someone else’s. Yes, you can play all the tracks you Shazam’d, but you’re not going to transform into your favourite DJ and you will always know that. Be yourself and find your thing. Be genuine.”

Equally enamoured of music and fashion, it was inevitable that Kiti’s striking looks would attract attention from brands and businesses seeking to appeal to Melbourne’s design and clubbing elite. In 2011 and 2012, Kiti curated the musical soundtrack for L’Oreal Fashion Week where she plied her signature sound: pure techno, energetic and fuss-free. Her set for Arteq Only is up on Half Wild.

Kiti is currently signed with 123 Agency, a Melbourne-based independent music company that’s grown from a staff of three to nearly five times that of late. Founder Damian Costin has said gender parity is at the core of 123 Agency: “We are passionate about gender and cultural diversity, we are conscious of the role our organisation plays in the wider industry we strive for greatness in every respect.” Over more than 12 years she’s been professionally DJing, Kiti has also established residencies at LGBTQ club nights including John, Poof Doof, Crass and Trough X.

Right now though, the clubbing atmosphere where sweaty bodies writhe under strobe lights – breathing on one another, brushing skin on skin, laughing, crying and moving in unity – is a distant memory. Even when the restrictions ease (presently at Stage 4 in Melbourne), it is likely that clubbers both young and old will feel loathe to crowd small dancefloors, or gather in huge numbers, without the seed of fear and doubt embittering the experience. As Melburnians face another four weeks of wearing mandatory masks, being allowed out of their homes for merely an hour a day and unable to go anywhere other than the supermarket, baker or chemist, dressing up and partying is something we can’t do, nor conceive of enjoying, for a long time.

But DJ Kiti provides a light in that darkness. “I’ve been making music with my partner, which has been an enriching experience because we’ve usually fought when we’ve tried before. But, we have been a success this time!” she says. “Also, I’ve done a few live streams of Instagram and YouTube sets, including Lost Basement in July.”

“I truly miss DJing, so much that it really hurts. It’s who I am, so to be without it has been very hard,” admits Kiti. “I’ve been riding the Rona Coaster and its ups and downs in this state of Utopia Dystopia.”

Follow DJ Kiti on Facebook for ongoing updates.

PLAYING MELBOURNE: How DJ Tigerlily Became one of Australia’s Most Successful Entertainers

DJ Tigerlily, much like her exotic botanical namesake, is colourful, bold and born to attract excitement wherever she goes. And the Melbourne-born DJ has gone a lot of places in her 28 years, powered by her skills and love for creating and performing electro sets. From Las Vegas to Washington D.C, Los Angeles to New York, Belgium, Sweden and Seoul, Tigerlily has performed at Lollapalooza, Ultra Music Festival, Electriz Zoo and Hakkasan. The only thing louder than her blend of commercial house, Brazilian bass, and electro beats is her ever-changing, brightly hued hair.

Tigerlily, or Dara Kristen Hayes, started DJing at 18, though her immersion in music and its technicalities began much earlier, when her parents fortuitously enrolled her in music school. Tigerlily learnt piano from the age of three through to eighteen, completing the formal Australian music (AMEB) exams. She also studied trombone performance and composition throughout high school. “I did Music and Music Extension for the High School Certificate (final year graduation in Australia) and majored in performance,” she says. “In regards to dance music and DJing though, I don’t have any official training. I first started listening to dance music in my mid teens, about 15, and fell in love with it. I began creating my own music at the age of 18, messing around in my bedroom with a set of decks that I had borrowed.”

After completing a Bachelor Degree in Marketing and Sociology at the University of Sydney, she took part in the 2011 Your Shot DJ competition. Though she didn’t win, the runner-up recognition she received “kickstarted my DJ career,” she recalls. “I’m very much a self-taught producer, too. I downloaded Ableton and started messing around with it in my own time, until I was able to write melodies, beats, and songs. Producing and mixing came really naturally to me. I loved the process of translating my knowledge for classical music into a more contemporary platform.”

Two years after coming second in Your Shot, now defunct Australian electronic music publication InTheMix placed her in their top ten DJs of 2013. As far as accolades, recognition by staff and readers of the publication was no small feat. Indeed, two years later, her single “Paradise” made the Australian Record Industry Awards singles chart, peaking at number 67 in 2015, and the uplifting “Feel the Love” soon followed. InTheMix went on to vote Tigerlily Australia’s number one DJ for three years in a row, leading to her title of “Australia’s EDM Queen” by Tone Deaf.

She’s continued to drop one-off tracks in lieu of releasing an album because, as she explains, “The dance music world is very single focused, so albums don’t make sense for an artist like me.” Her collaboration with KSHMR, “Invisible Children,” is proof of her ability to turn Bollywood style beats into a club bangers, while the vocal, melodic house track “Ashes” shows a poppier, more contemplative side. But her latest single, “Get Down” channels a slinkier, more traditional house vibe than her previous work.

As royalty goes, her friendship and professional work with Tiesto, one of EDM’s most well known DJs, seemed destined. “He has been a great friend and mentor for me over the past few years of my career,” she told Tone Deaf in 2017. “He’s provided me with opportunities to warm up the dance floor at his own concerts with up to 30,000 people. We went back-to-back about a year ago in Vegas and I’ve never mixed with anyone like him before.”

When not spinning records and winning over global festival audiences or major brand clients, including Samsung, Ford, Adidas and Women’s Health magazine, Tigerlily is tending to her own podcast, posting vlogs on YouTube, or advocating for animal rights, wellness and fitness. She has spoken at events, and raised awareness for campaigns, animal sanctuaries, environmental charities and bushfire fundraisers. In 2018, Tigerlily wrote a guide to going vegan for Cosmopolitan magazine. “The best thing about being vegan is the way that it makes you feel and the immense amount of energy and happiness that I get after every single meal,” she told PETA.

Tigerlily admits the current pandemic situation has been a challenge, but certainly not one that has paralyzed her creative energies nor dampened her enthusiasm for multimedia projects. “I’ve been focusing on writing music and getting creative online with my social media and online presence. I work with some amazing brands, so I have been continuing to do some fun work with them,” she reveals. “Not to mention, I’ve been creating my own fashion line, merch line, and am continuing to be heavily involved in the animal rights movement via @our.soul.purpose. I’ve also been performing online regularly, and have just started DJing back in clubs last week, the first socially distanced party that I have played – and I loved it!”

“The Aussie EDM scene is really supportive and it’s so awesome to see so many different people working together to make the best of this very weird time right now,” she says. “Recently, I’ve been seeing DJs, producers, club owners, promoters, and everyone else involved in the scene really join forces and support one another.”

Follow DJ Tigerlily on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

PLAYING MELBOURNE: The True Story of Bananagun Invigorates the Senses

Bananagun kick off their debut tropicalia-afrobeat-jungle safari mashup album, The True Story of Bananagun, with the lyrics “There is nothing special about me, just another apple on the tree,” but nothing could be further from the truth. This five-piece band hailing from Melbourne have something special.

A love for The Jungle Book united vocalist, guitarist and flautist Nick van Bakel and his cousin, drummer Jimi Gregg as kids. As adults, the image of Mowgli swinging wildly through the cartoon trees of a jungle canopy to this swinging safari beat makes total sense. Jack Crook (guitar/vocals), Charlotte Tobin (djembe/percussion) and Josh Dans (bass) were all friends prior to becoming bandmates, which shows in the easy harmony they find for what sounds, to my ear at least, like a lot of instruments to make work in sync; to think that Bananagun began as a solo project for Van Bakel is mind-blowing.

It’s no surprise to learn that the group provide such eclectic, unusual and yet cohesive tunes when they have spent so much time playing spontaneous late night jams, often hanging out at Melbourne producer John Lee’s Phaedra Studios in Melbourne. Certainly, the tightly-knit group make an impressive impact on record – it’s a deep shame that their May tour was cancelled and we can’t (for the foreseeable future) combine some form of Brazilian-Afro-dance with ’60s flares and oversized sunglasses in a big outdoor party somewhere.

The symbol of the banana as a gun speaks much to the peace, love and unity that the band is all about. If I told you this album was actually a cleaned up version of a sixties recording, you wouldn’t blink an eye. Beautiful afro-orchestral “People Talk Too Much” is lively and percussive, enlightened by joyful bursts of sax and strings that rise and sound before lulling back to their own worlds. The spirit of Fela Kuti lives on in this single – the highlight of the album, for my liking. A cacophony of birds turns into a symphony on “Bird Up!” flute and strummy, summery guitars raise “Perfect Stranger” into the clouds, sixties-style multi-vocalists hark to the Monkees on “Modern Day Problems,” and toy piano even makes an appearance on “The Master.”

Van Bakel lives just an hour or so outside of Melbourne, away from the hubbub of the city centre. “Bird Up!” was a mash-up of the songs of the kookaburras and parrots that soundtrack his daily life in regional Victoria. It is emblematic of the album as a whole, reflecting both the personal lives but also the daily inspirations and nostalgic influences on the band members.

“Taking The Present For Granted,” in particular, is a paean to mindful, conscientious living. It is prescient in its reminder that we must get out of our own narratives of anticipation or rehashing the past to embrace the sensory wonderland of the right now.

The True Story of Bananagun was released in mid-July via London imprint Full Time Hobby Records. Bananagun joined the label in 2019 alongside artists like Serbian-Canadian ethereal folk singer Dana Gavanski, Brazilian psych-pop duo Aldo, and dark indie-Americana purveyors Ohtis. The match seems a natural fit from an outside perspective, with an eclectic roster of international artists who have taken a world of influences, personal and collected in their physical and artistic travels, and channeled them into harmonic offerings of the individual to the collective. As diverse as Full Time Hobby’s roster is, there’s a sense of joyfulness, a searing need to tell stories and to connect, at the heart of the music – and that’s especially true with Bananagun.

Right now in Melbourne as we face mandatory mask-wearing, hundreds of new Coronovirus cases daily and constant news of deaths and illness, something as buoyant, nostalgic, and shamelessly celebratory of just being alive and making music as The True Story of Bananagun is a tonic for the spirit and senses.

Follow Bananagun on Facebook for ongoing updates.

PLAYING MELBOURNE: Alice Ivy Takes Collabs to New Heights on Sophomore LP Don’t Sleep

Producer Alice Ivy (otherwise known as Annika Schmarsel) has become a name to know in the Melbourne music scene; her blend of ’90s house beats, lush layers of synths and raw instruments along with a voice sweetly attuned to pop sensibilities made her 2018 debut I’m Dreaming an instant cult classic. Whether fans hear her doing cover versions on radio, such as the 2018 Like A Version session she did for Australian radio station Triple J (in which she covered “American Boy” by Estelle), or whether fans come to her via a collaboration she’s done with a popular artist like Bertie Blackman (“Chasing Stars“), she’s built a solid base of support for her exciting pop-dance productions. It is Ivy’s skill for partnering with complementary collaborators that makes her sophomore album Don’t Sleep such a revelatory follow-up.

Ivy’s influences include Kaytranada, the xx, The Avalanches, J Dilla, and in a similar vein, she channels the vibe of fellow Australians Pnau, who build looped beats, keys, glitchy samples and live vocals in studio and live performances. “When I was in my early twenties, and beginning to dabble in electronic production after half a lifetime of playing the guitar, I discovered J Dilla’s monumental album Donuts. It was a major turning point for me. Once I was introduced to the world of sampling I was totally hooked,” Ivy recently told Acclaim.

Her current influences are a far cry from the clarinet and guitar lessons she was given as a child from well-meaning uncles and aunts. Ivy’s family immigrated to Australia from Germany when she was very young – she was the only child in her kindergarten group (preschool) who didn’t speak fluent English. This ability to traverse languages has echoes in her love for sounds and the ability for seemingly incongruous vocal samples, radio, TV and movies to make sense when partnered with looping keyboards, horns and drums.

At only 27, Ivy has lived long enough to have explored musical genres such as house, Motown, hip hop and acoustic to borrow what she likes and to confidently twist the sounds using the digital tools that younger, DIY artists are so enthusiastic for. Ivy has used multi-faceted software Ableton to mash up her loops, samples, collages of vocals and instrumentals. “I usually build a song around a sample,” she told Linda Mariani, Triple J radio host in 2018. “I started looping stuff, I put delays on keys and started pitching the keys… then I [add] samples to it.”

Ivy played guitar in a 25-piece, all-girl Motown and soul band during high school, The Sweethearts. Her proclivity for using horns as an atmospheric texture reappears across Don’t Sleep, as it did on her first album, proving that not all of us forget everything we learned in high school upon graduation. She would later study for a music industry degree, which is where she was introduced to Ableton.

In 2017, she performed and spoke as part of the global series of TEDx Talks, TEDxYouth@Sydney. Her lively performance covered singles “Charlie” and “Touch,” impressively allowing the young producer to dance about on stage while also manipulating a keyboard, laptop and electric guitar. Her pure focus on the music and clear joy in getting lost in it is palpable.

The eclectic, celebratory nature of what is ultimately a great party album is so much richer for the inclusivity it invites, both from collaborators and listeners. Whether by choice or pure coincidence, Ivy gravitates toward collaborations with BIPOC, LGBTQI, non-binary and female artists. Indigenous Australian singer-songwriter Thelma Plum makes a cameo on “Ticket To Heaven,” which was co-written over five hours in an Air BnB set up as a studio. On “Sweetest Love” she collaborates with operatically-skilled Melbourne singer Montaigne, who is openly bisexual. Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon brings his rapid-fire skills to “Sunrise,” asking – or challenging – “Can you keep up?” “All In For You” is a killer collaboration between Ivy and Papua New Guinea-born, Sydney-based artist Ngaiire, a much respected and celebrated singer-songwriter in her own right. And South African-born, Tamil, Sri Lankan artist Ecca Vandal features on “In My Mind,” one of the album’s standout tracks.

Videos for the album’s singles have promoted the album’s joyous oddball streak. Exuberant solo choreography (courtesy dancer Alex Dyson) lends a visual expression to the vocal dexterity of SAFIA’s Ben Woolner on “Better Man,” a fun and fluent collaboration between two skilled instrumentalists. The video for tropical-edged, reggaeton-infused title track “Don’t Sleep” shows Alice Ivy, imbi the girl, and BOI alternate between synchronized dance moves and roaring around on motorbikes. “If you’re losing the vibe, how do you feel alive in your body and soul?” goes the chorus.

As for the funny, clever promo photos of Ivy with her collaborators, she told Acclaim it was a joint decision by the artist and her photographer. “When it came time to shoot the promo photos for the album, I’d planned this big meet-up in Sydney with most of the collaborators and we were going to pose together for a group photo. My photographer Michelle G Hunder and I were referencing Solange Knowles’ wedding photos for inspiration. But when the pandemic turned up that idea went out the window so I switched it out for me on my lonesome in a warehouse with a bunch of lifesize cardboard cut-outs.”

The imagery might be a humorous, but there’s nothing flippant or two-dimensional about the eclectic, constantly dynamic sophomore LP Don’t Sleep, out now on Dew Process.

Follow Alice Ivy on Facebook for ongoing updates.

Julia Wilson Discusses Melbourne Roots and Founding Record Label Rice Is Nice

Julia Wilson is a Melbourne success story in the music industry. From an early age, she was immersed in the scene, working in record stores as a teen and shooting for now defunct Melbourne street rag Inpress straight out of her photography studies – her first live shoot, as she recalls, was likely No Doubt. Working in street press often means long hours, demanding publicists and advertisers, and little, if any, pay; it’s something one does for the love of music and arts, and fortunately, Wilson has no shortage of that. She wanted to use her experience to champion artists who had something unique about them – the basis for longevity – rather than artists who were deemed popular by the mass market, so she founded record label Rice Is Nice in 2008. Now in its 12th year, the label is home to acts that represent rock, electronica, psychedelia, acoustic folk and garage punk, has succeeded in showcasing its artists at Melbourne Music Week, and gotten media coverage for artists who don’t easily fit into typical genres, all without compromising their integrity. Black Flag legend Henry Rollins even gave her record label a shout-out on his KCRW radio show. There’s no hard sell with Julia, just genuine passion – despite her busy schedule, she seemed to have nothing but time when it came to talking arts and music with Audiofemme.

Wilson was born and raised in Frankston, on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. It’s a well renowned suburb to the south-east of Melbourne, commonly and sometimes derisively referred to as “Franga.” Working in little record store that mostly sold metal records, Wilson says, “It was a seminal time for me and I used my time there to discover all I could about that genre of music. The store was full of Burzum, NOFX, Cradle Of Filth and Kerrang Magazine. I’m not sure how I got outta there alive!”

As an events photographer, Wilson became intimately familiar with Melbourne’s best-known music venues and events: The Corner, Festival Hall (“Where I saw my first concert Faith No More”), The Tote, The Evelyn, The Prince Of Wales, Big Day Out and others. “I did not love some of the competitive asshole photographers in the pit,” Wilson admits. “I was lucky to meet a few legends though, who gave me film when I had forgotten mine.” As digital photography became more prevalent, Wilson took the opportunity to move in a new direction.

Her first stop was Greville Records, located in the inner-eastern Melbourne suburb of Prahran. “That place is my spiritual home. The people and records in there paved a strong path for me,” Wilson says, giving a special shout-out to owner Warwick Brown. “You Am I played a free gig in the car park, and there were loads of in-stores signings, launches and performances at the time. I used to go to local live venue, the Duke Of Windsor all the time. I remember watching Legends Of Motorsport (I loved that band), Ground Components and Rocket Science.”

Wilson moved from Melbourne to Sydney about eight years ago to take a role with Mushroom Records, but ended up quitting and joining Popfrenzy Records, founded by Chris Wu, as a label manager and publicist. “Working with Chris proved to me that one person could do huge things. Leaving Melbourne helped me establish something that was my own,” Wilson explains. “I was generally very intimidated by Australian bands. It was a very big, cool scene and it was very overwhelming for me… Moving to a city less obsessed with music than my home city of Melbourne gave me the confidence and space to start something new. I felt that I could make mistakes without as much judgement as I’d have received in Melbourne. I just had sheer support from artists and music lovers because the scene needed so much of it.”

Missing Melbourne, Wilson recently moved back to the city. “The volume of venues and support that Melbourne has for the arts is second to none,” she points out. “The city itself has supported me through grants, throwing parties for Melbourne Music week and also celebrating my label, Rice Is Nice’s 10th birthday at Melbourne Music Week’s HUB. The people who run these venues are champions. I mean, Rich from The Tote is a hero. He also runs Aarght Records (that represents Eddy Current Suppression Ring, NUN and many others). He’s a proactive, real deal music champion. They are rare to find, I guess.”

She continues, “I think my intimidation and fear of the ‘clique’ was just because I was a kid; you have to get your confidence somewhere. “I would reluctantly go to the Tote to see bands but it always made me feel like a loser. I mean, it still does! Someone gave me shit about wearing a ‘warm jacket at the Tote’ last time I went there. Like, fuckin’ hell mate, I just had a baby, fuck off.” Though she was once “shit-scared” of grunge band Batrider, two of its members – arty indie-rock singer-songwriter Sarah Mary Chadwick and Steph Crase (harmonic, grunge-style fuzzy guitars behind Summer Flake) – now release music via Rice Is Nice (Wilson also manages Chadwick). Check out some of the label’s music below.

SUMMER FLAKE

Stephanie Crase describes the music she makes under the moniker Summer Flake as “sun-drunk guitar pop.” She’s a hippie-hearted harmony addict influenced by the dreaminess of Sonic Youth and the surfer pop of Best Coast. She’s releases three albums – You Can Have It All (2013), Hello Friends (2016) and Seasons Change (2019) – as well as a handful of EPs that “consider ideas of self-identity, movement, and the indiscriminate yet deeply personal sense of yearning for growth.”

<a href="http://summerflake.bandcamp.com/album/seasons-change">Seasons Change by Summer Flake</a>

SPOD

With cheeky albums like Taste The Radness, SPOD has taken squelchy, Gary Numan-at-Bondi Beach vibes to craft deliciously riotous electro tunes that combine smart aleck lyrics with bouncy basslines. It’s essentially the one-man project of Brent Griffin, who’s been throwing party like-sets with confetti, streamers, glitter, backup dancers since 1995. Last year’s Adult Fantasy LP was released in conjunction with a live full-length performance, shot and edited direct to tape by SPOD and Alex Smith. The Adult Fantasy TV Special was made available on VHS, and ends with a 46-minute closing track, featuring solos from Rollins, Ariel Pink and Jason Lytle from Grandaddy, among some 35 others.

<a href="http://spod.bandcamp.com/album/adult-fantasy">Adult Fantasy by SPOD</a>

THE FROWNING CLOUDS

Five-piece Geelong band The Frowning Clouds combine ’60s psychedelia with fuzzy guitar pop, pummeling percussion, catchy melodies, and a healthy dose of punk rock attitude. “[Their] randomness extends beyond their raucous sounds to their bizarre stage costumes,” Wilson warns. Their 2014 LP Legalize Everything was their first for Rice Is Nice, and their 2013 debut Whereabouts, reissued earlier this year by Anti Fade, is available via Bandcamp.

DARTS

Wilson describes Darts as “indie rockers who have clearly been influenced by ’90s grunge-rock pioneers like Dinosaur Jr.” Having released a few singles via the label, They’ve been been playing in local clubs for over six years now and have released their debut Below Empty & Westward Bound via Rice is Nice in 2015.

<a href="http://dartsdarts.bandcamp.com/album/below-empty-westward-bound">Below Empty & Westward Bound by Darts</a>

LOWTIDE

The rhythmic, swirling guitars and spaciousness in the sounds of quartet Lowtide found full expression not only on 2018 sophomore effort Southern Mind, but also on a remixed version of the album released later that year, with Ulrich Schnauss, Vive La Void (Sanae Yamada/Moon Duo), Josefin Ohrn and The Liberation, Lost Horizons (Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins + Richie Thomas formerly of Jesus and Mary Chain) and Black Cab taking the controls.

<a href="http://lowtidemelbourne.bandcamp.com/album/southern-mind-lp">Southern Mind LP by Lowtide</a>

PLAYING MELBOURNE: Meet Vivan Vo, Host of 3RRR’s New Pan-Asian Music Program Mooncake

Vivan Vo, aka Small FRY, is a Melbourne-based radio host and artist manager. She has a freshly minted radio show on community radio station 3RRR called Mooncake. The show is dedicated to the broad and colourful spectrum of pan-Asian music, including sounds from India to Japan, China to Korea, Cambodia to Bali. Vo began volunteering at 3RRR three years ago, filling in for shows and hosting The Graveyard Shift. Upon pitching Mooncake to the Program Manager, there was a lot of love for the idea, and it has finally manifested.

“I was born and raised in Melbourne, with a Vietnamese background,” says Vo. “I grew up listening to whatever was on commercial radio; pop, R&B and house music. Whilst I love these genres and still enjoy the nostalgia of ’90s/2000s music, my passion and exploration started when I was in my twenties. Volunteering in the music department in community radio exposed me to so many diverse genres and artists.”

Mooncake will explore music from all over Asia in addition to local Asian-Australian artists. “The show will cover genres as diverse as R&B and hip-hop, k-R&B, Chinese hip-hip, mandopop, jpop and electronica,” she says. “Music is a way to break down barriers between people and cultures. You don’t need to understand the language to enjoy a song, feel the music or to dance to it. It takes a great deal of learning in order to understand another’s background and their culture, but music could be a positive step towards that.” According to research by the University of Melbourne, about 12 per cent of Australia’s population is Asian-Australian and 82 per cent report being discriminated against, typically in the work environment or in hospitality environments.

Vo completed a communications degree in university, part of which involved a radio production course. This lead her to volunteer for five years with Melbourne’s student radio station, SYN 90.7FM. Her first paid music role was as an assistant at a management company for commercial pop artists, providing insight and experience on the business side of music and publicity.

Once she felt confident of her experience, Vo founded Small FRY to provide PR and management to independent Australian artists. She’s so far represented Melbourne-based electronic acts like neo-soul duo SAATSUMA, techno duo Kult Kyss, dark pop singer-songwriter Aeora, electro pop band Take Your Time and alt-R&B trio Huntly.

“I’m a small fry in a big industry,” she laughs, explaining the name – though hosting Mooncake, no doubt, boosts Vo’s profile considerably.

But Mooncake is about more than that, of course; it’s an answer to some of the tough questions Vo has asked of the industry for years now. In 2017, she spoke with Liminal Magazine – a publication founded in 2016 by Leah Jing McIntosh to represent the voices of Asian-Australians, showcasing artists and their work as well as providing a platform for their opinions and expression – about the meaningfulness of providing a role model for young Asian-Australians in creative jobs. “I’ve become more aware of the barriers towards Asian-Australian musicians and that we are an underrepresented group in the music industry…” she said. “So often, we’re competing against so much music and favour is given elsewhere. I’m always questioning, of these artists who are repeatedly supported, how many of them are people of colour? It’s obvious that we’re not being represented. In festival line-ups, music playlists and artist rosters, we’re still fighting for diversity; people of colour are a token.”

Vo has selected three Asian-Australian artists everyone should get to know.

Mojo Ruiz de Luzuriaga, Mo’Ju (previously Mojo Juju), is an ARIA Award-nominated Australian musician who has been outspoken on being queer, brown and opinionated. Her track “Native Tongue” is a personal ode to her ancestry, her outsider status and proves her adeptness as a singer-songwriter with superior skill in catchy, melodic pop vibes.

Sydney-based solo artist Rainbow Chan was born in Hong Kong. Classically trained in saxophone, piano and choral music, she is also a bowerbird for samples and finds unusual and clever ways to create montages of sound. The vulnerability and candidness of her storytelling is central to her music.

A little bit glitchy, quirky and imbued with Yeo‘s humorous spirit, his smooth ’90s trip hop vibes are catchy and fun. “Six Years” is a love song worth listening to on repeat.

PLAYING MELBOURNE: Divinyls Frontwoman Chrissy Amphlett is an Australian Icon

Chrissy Amphlett’s husband, drummer Charley Drayton, christens a Melbourne laneway in honor of his late wife.

If you’re an intrepid adventurer, or fortunate to have the time to wind your way through Melbourne city’s many interlinked laneways, you may well come across Amphlett Lane. You’ll know it, if not for the signage, for the graffiti depiction of Chrissy Amphlett’s signature schoolgirl outfit on the corner building at the entrance to her namesake alleyway. If you’re not inclined to walk for hours, Google Maps will direct you straight there with ease. If you’re at home somewhere in the US, wishing you were here, Google Map it and pretend.

Chrissy, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, was the singer and songwriter who fronted Australian rock band Divinyls. She passed in 2013 at the age of 53 from breast cancer and complications related to Multiple Sclerosis. But through acting, singing, and authoring her own memoir in her short, eventful lifetime, she achieved what she had always wanted – to be a performer.

A determinedly free spirit, Chrissy revealed that she used to escape her teenage bedroom at night to go and see Billy Thorpe. “I liked that primal kind of thing, that rock. Growing up in Australia, guitar-oriented music was a huge inspiration to me,” she said, often namechecking Easybeats, Lobby Loyde, and AC/DC as influences – each of them renowned for their primal, noisy, guitar-centred pub rock style.

She escaped the confines of her parochial, industrial hometown of Geelong (just outside Melbourne’s border) as a teenager and explored England, France and Spain – where she was detained for three months for busking on the streets without a permit at 17 (she was kept in the penitentiary for six weeks before being put on a bus full of men to be transferred prison to prison).

Chrissy met Divinyls bandmate Mark McEntee in 1980. At that time, she’d had some bit parts on Australian TV and stage productions and was toying with the idea of being an actress solely. In fact, the earliest Divinyls songs were recorded for 1982 Australian film Monkey Grip (based on a novel by Melbourne author Helen Garner), in which Chrissy starred.

By the time Divinyls manager, Vince Lovegrove, succeeded in getting the band a US record deal in the mid 1980s – the beginning of their international success – Chrissy had refined her naughty schoolgirl persona. For Chrissy though, the professional wins were undermined by a stealthy alcohol addiction, legal fights with Lovegrove, a tumultuous affair with McEntee, drug-induced paranoia and the instability of being constantly on tour.

The hot and cold relationship between Chrissy and McEntee was documented, controversially, in Chrissy’s memoir, Pleasure and Pain (named, fittingly, for the lead track on the band’s sophomore record, What a Life!). Though they were a couple, they only revealed this to bandmates two years after forming Divinyls, since McEntee had been married to someone else when their relationship had begun. Both were heavily using drugs and drinking in the early 1980s and fighting noisily and messily in New York during the recording of Desperate, their debut album.

An interview with the beautiful, cool Amphlett and her black leather-clad bandmates with Australian interviewer Andrew Denton in 1988 shows her at her peak mysteriousness. In a short, tight black miniskirt, black winged eyeliner, heavy fringe and black heels, she epitomised the height of sexy rockstar. Her glassy-eyed, mumbling, rambling bandmates were cringe-inducing in their embarrassing insobriety, but Amphlett was thoughtful, sincere and articulate.

Between 1982 and 1996, Divinyls released six albums, charting high in Australia with singles like “Science Fiction,” “Good Die Young,” and “Pleasure and Pain.” But their biggest international hit and best-known single remains 1991’s “I Touch Myself,” reaching number 1 in Australia and number 4 on the charts in 1991.

By 1996, Divinyls split up and McEntee and Amphlett were no longer on speaking terms. It wasn’t until 2006, when the band was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association, that the two spoke again. They were inducted by Hugh Jackman, calling them “the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.”

In 2015, Chrissy did an interview about her breast cancer diagnosis and battling MS for over a decade. Her signature fiery red hair, blunt fringe and kohled eyes remind us she’s a born rockstar. With her husband, Charley Drayton, she is everything he attributes to her: “confident, optimistic, curious, willing, dangerous.” “Just the wife word, I’m so not wife material!” she exclaims. “I’m happiest in a storm, calm is boring.”

This year in March, a project inspired by the song “I Touch Myself” set out to break gender bias and ensure that health messages about women’s bodies reached the women who would most benefit. Called the 2020 I Touch Myself Project, it shares breast check instructions via a voice-assistant device. The creators, advertising firm Wunderman Thompson, said that “sexist and dangerous” censorship on social media means that messages around breast checks are often misinterpreted by social media platforms as pornography due to the mention or depiction of breasts and nipples. The project had early beginnings in 2014, a year after Chrissy’s death, with female Australian artists covering the track. In 2018, American tennis star Serena Williams covered the track for bra brand Berlei.

The campaign this year was launched on International Women’s Day, something Chrissy would have loved, I think. She was a champion for women and for artists throughout her life, someone who railed against gender bias and the censorship of women’s bodies and minds. I think she would have been proud to know her lyrics and her song are still being used decades later to educate and unite women.

In every interview, what emanates from Chrissy is a core of calm and centredness. As wild and explosive as her performances on stage always were, she was an intelligent and determined woman to the end.

In February 2015, Amphlett Lane was officially declared open by Melbourne’s Lord Mayor. The naming was the result of a petition that collected over 7000 signatures over the two years prior. I’m fortunate, as a local, to walk my dog past Amphlett Lane on a weekly basis. Without even thinking, I find myself singing along to “I Touch Myself” for about an hour afterwards. To myself, mind you. My performance skills and my dress sense aren’t nearly as fabulous as Chrissy Amphlett’s. She was a rare thing, a Melbourne icon, a phenomenal woman.

Visit Amphlett Lane on Facebook.

PLAYING MELBOURNE: Violinist Xani Kolac Learned to Embrace Pop for Forthcoming LP

Pop musician Xani Kolac is a rare, prodigious creature. Best known for touring the festival circuit throughout Australia with her her violin-and-drums duo The Twoks, Kolac has been steadily releasing solo EPs that blend strings, electronics, and her beguiling voice since 2017. Her third EP, a collection of instrumentals released last year, was entirely improvised in the studio. Kolac has been building toward releasing her first full-length for a while now, and this September, she’ll see that dream come to fruition with From The Bottom Of The Well, which she says contains “pieces of personal growth, connections with other caring and surviving souls, wisdom and words of advice and pop songs to pick me up” despite being “written down in the depths of despair.”

Kolac began playing violin at the age of seven, and says, “By the time I was eleven I was recording myself playing violin on cassette tapes and overdubbing layers of additional violin and singing. I loved writing lyrics at that age, mostly songs about about knee-high socks falling down.” She recalls collaborating with her younger sister Meg as a jazz duo playing gigs at the local pizza restaurant in Melbourne, too. “We were a hit there, so we decided to write our own ’50s-inspired girl pop and started our little duo called Fluffin’ The Duck, with me on violin and Meg on double bass,” she remembers. “Some of my favourite collaborations are with my sister or close friends, just sharing music together.”

Her upcoming album, recorded in her lovingly constructed home studio, has evolved mightily from primary school topics and pizzeria tours to explore sacred music, art and instrumental adventurism. “If I had to break this album into three parts, I’d label them art-pop, instrumentals and atheist hymns,” she says. “It’s taken me ten years on a scenic route to get back to a place of clarity, knowing exactly what I wanted to make and how I wanted it to sound. I’ve recorded and performed songs I wrote in an Americana/Country style to completely improvised instrumentals for this new album, but I’ve also jumped from genre to genre to cover ambient sound and dance pop, too.” The first single from the record, “Who Would’ve Thought,” documents the unexpected twists and turns of Kolac’s journey in her typically playful style.

Kolac’s “scenic route” also saw her collaborating with various producers and engineers who sculpted her sound, though it wasn’t until the making of From The Bottom Of The Well that she felt ownership for her work. “This album was made by me. I wrote all the songs over time, reflecting on the experiences that have shaped me over the past year or two,” she says. “I chose myself as engineer and producer, invested in a home studio set up and learned to make my own album. It has been the best fun, and most challenging experience to date.”

One of those life-altering experiences included the recent completion of a semester of Indigenous Studies at university, which ultimately inspired Kolac’s most recent single, “Grey.” It’s a cheeky analysis of the conflicting actions – seemingly harmless things like buying a latte on the way to a march for climate change – that can undermine our activist ideals if we’re not careful. But Kolac isn’t preachy, ultimately landing in the titular grey area where most of us live our day-to-day lives. She wrote it while sitting on her new three-seater couch, “an extravagance my boyfriend and I awarded ourselves for being grown-ups,” just as she says in the song’s opening lines. “Here I was on this luxury furniture item, reflecting on what it meant for me to be white in a country belonging to – and never ceded by – First Peoples, writing a protest song,” she says. “One of the lines I sing is ‘Can I call Australia my home if I was born here but on stolen lands?’”

Kolac may not have the answers, but at least she’s asking the right questions. She’s working toward a more balanced future, particularly in the music industry, by founding SPIRE, a collective of female instrumentalists available for hire on stages around Australia. And her work itself is a testament to the potential for evolution, blending as it does modern electronic production, like live looping, with her classical contemporary training. Part of that process was finally finding peace with being a pop artist.

“On my record there’s a track called ‘Fix It.’ Before that song I hadn’t even considered including a pop track in my repertoire,” she says. “My uni training had made me slightly ashamed of my love for pop music, but I recorded it anyway. I remember feeling so excited. The song made me wanna sing along and dance and it felt good. Now I lay down pop tracks all the time; arty, conventional, violin-laden pop tracks. I still love that track and I try to remember that when it comes to making songs, there’s nothing to fix.”

Follow Xani on Facebook for ongoing updates.

As Host of Highly Melanated, Eva Lubulwa Connects Uganda and Australia over the Airwaves

Every Monday from 10pm to midnight, Melburnians tuning into 3RRR can hear Eva Lubulwa’s deep, resonant and impassioned voice as she hosts her weekly radio show, Highly Melanated, “a melanin-soaked show celebrating the creative genius of people of colour locally, nationally and world wide.” A powerful and articulate personality, she can speak about matters that are personal and political without breaking a sweat. Lubulwa was born in Melbourne to Ugandan parents; her parents’ history and experiences have shaped their daughter and she is outspoken on racism in Australia. She’s also an artist – her black-pen drawings have been exhibited in galleries and bars around the city.

Lubulwa went to a private girls’ school where she was the only Black student in her year, but she never felt alienated. It wasn’t until she traveled with her Serbian-Australian husband through Asia and Europe that she noticed the everyday racism of men, women and children in their attitudes and behaviour toward her (trying to snap furtive photos of her, openly laughing and pointing). Lubulwa attributes the end of her marriage to this trial-by-fire, in which the constant mental and emotional toll of racism exhausted their partnership.

Fast forward a couple of years to 2017 – Lubulwa was given a graveyard shift at 3RRR, one of Melbourne’s longest running community radio stations. “My first engagement with radio resulted from my friend inviting me to do an arts show, and part of the promotion for the show was being interviewed on radio. I discovered that radio is a rush, you know? Trying to talk to people and be comfortable even when they’re not in the room, it’s a blessing,” she remembers. Having proven herself, she went on to establish Highly Melanated.

“My experience working with Triple R has been amazing,” she says. “They have loved my shows and my ideas, and are willing to let me go on this amazing journey. It’s not often you can say ‘I’m doing a show on Uganda and Australia!’ Tim from Teenage Hate used to do a show next to me, Mia Timpano has been a wonderful friend and mentor during this time – there’s so many presenters and people on the board and in the background who have done so much for me.”

The show “is about highly melanated people and all that we do,” Lubulwa explains. “I interview these people making amazing music in Melbourne, really exploring what it means to be African Australian. People who wake up and can’t do anything but making music – those are the people I’m super excited to talk to. I’ve been able to interview huge stars from Uganda recently: A Pass Bagonza; Judith Heard who is a Ugandan model and founder of Day One Global (an organisation that seeks to end rape and sexual assault); Suzan Mutesi; and Mwanje, who is a singer and songwriter gaining more radio time and attention locally through performing in digital festivals like The Drive-In.”

For the radio host, it’s as much about showcasing others’ talents as it is connecting the two cultures that have shaped her very existence. “I’m a Ugandan-Australian constructing my identity backwards,” Lubulwa says. “Racism robs me of my Australian heritage and location robs me of my Ugandan heritage, because Australia is where I live most of the time. For me, I explore heritage through music. As time has gone on, I focus on Uganda and Australia and then I extend that out to the wider diaspora. The intention is to bring Australia and Uganda together over the airwaves.”

Lubulwa says she has gone on “a huge racial journey over the last few years, because racism would have slowly and surely killed me. Australia has been what I’ve called home for so, so many years. I had accepted or ignored the racism in this country for quite a while. When people look to you to talk about it and know about it, or to provide a solution to it, that’s a big burden. Racism is still here, it’s still strong and it’s tiring.” As exhausting as her experience has been, Lubulwa sees hope for the future. “The conversations that are getting louder, the murmurs that are getting stronger, the fact people – not just black people anymore, people everywhere – are saying no, shows we are willing to have a discussion,” she points out. “The problem with racism is that it affects the minority and the minority are required to find the solution, so it’s vital now that people come to the table and have the conversation when racism doesn’t affect them.”

Lubulwa is a music lover, obviously. I try to contain her to five artists she recommends Audiofemme readers check out.

“Recho Rey is a hip hop and rap artist from Ugandan rap with dancehall, reggae vibes.”

“Winnie Nwagi, she’s a Ugandan singer/songwriter/badass. They call her Firestarter because she dances like a genius, right? She has this deep soulful voice. She’s also done a song with Recho Rey.”

“F Wavey from the UK has just released a really great dance track, ‘Figure 8.'”

“There’s a whole bunch of really talented dudes from Perth – Jordan Dennis, thatkidmaz and Denzel have just released a song called ‘Doc Marty.'”

“JessB, a rap artist from Sydney, has just released a song called ‘Pon It.’ Absolutely divine, I’m completely obsessed!”

Eva Lubulwa presents Highly Melanated on 3RRR weekly. The show can be streamed from anywhere in the world or heard back as a podcast, with playlists also available.

Tag: Melbourne