Check Check

“Bluetile Lounge appeared fully formed to me in a vision at the UWA Refectory sometime around mid 1993,” writes @guyblackman . “I was a 19 year old stripling in Perth, occasionally waking up in time to attend uni lectures, when this friendly guy from my English Lit class told me he was playing in a Battle Of the Bands at the Ref at lunch. “I went along with no expectations, but then Bluetile Lounge took the stage, playing just two songs in their allotted 20 minutes. They were unassuming in dark flannel shirts and murmured vocals, but possessed a magical twin guitar interplay and performed the most languorous, slowed down country-rock ever heard.” @bluetileloungeband will play their first show in a quarter century, and their first ever show outside Perth, at Melbourne’s Brunswick Ballroom on Thursday 2 April. Read Guy’s chat with guitarist and singer Dan Erickson and guitarist Gabrielle Stokes via the link in bio.

No need to feel so lonely, everyone’s addicted to bass. Lovely pics from @pitchmusicandarts shot on film by @spicy_aquafaba More of this percipience on the site - link in bio

A beautiful time at Golden Plains. Link in bio for the review. Pics by Luke @backyard_permaculture except the pic of me, mid-comedown, with KT from Upchuck.

POiSON GiRL FRiEND is coming to Melbourne for a performance at NTS Naarm on Saturday 28 February. It’s the Japanese electronic musician’s only show on her debut visit to Australia.   POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s 1992 mini album, Melting Moment, has become a cult favourite in recent years, particularly as the definition of trip hop has expanded beyond a handful of acts from Bristol.   POiSON GiRL FRiEND followed Melting Moment with the albums Shyness (1993) and Love Me (1994). Across the three releases, PGF’s Noriko Sekiguchi enacts an ambitious and deeply evocative exploration of love, longing, eroticism and shared humanity.   POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s dialogic lyrics work in tandem with a broad sweep of songwriting and production styles. Melting Moment draws on UK acid house and industrial but also features gorgeous string arrangements and covers of Jane Birkin’s “Quoi” and “Those Were the Days” by late-60s Welsh singer Mary Hopkins.   Love Is places the Balearic chugger “Slave to the Computer” next to the SAW-style ambient techno of “Histoire d’O”, the baggy beat optimism of “Communication Breakdown”, and a gliding, downtempo cover of “Love Me, Please Love Me” by 1960s French singer-songwriter Michel Polnareff.    Read more via the link in bio, and catch POiSON GiRL FRiEND perform her first ever Australian show exclusively at NTS Naarm this Saturday.

My favourite album of 2025: Maria Somerville’s Luster.   A collaborative record about home, heartbreak and memory. Dream pop, ambient folk, post-rock, shoegaze. Auto-Tune and lazy break beats.   Some songs point to a yearning to leave, others a yearning to return.   “I know I have to go away,” Somerville sings in “Corrib,” a track that shares its name with the lake that neighboured her home studio. “Waves of time / Watching it roll away,” she sings in “Spring”. “Bright sky / Somewhere new.”   I spoke to Maria Somerville about the album. Read it via the link in bio.

Featuring Robert Goodge on electric guitar and David Chesworth on Wurlitzer piano, Essendon Airport's debut EP, Sonic Investigations (Of the Trivial), is a work of homespun and slyly complex minimalism. The 7" came out in 1979 on Innocent Records, a label run by Chesworth and Philip Brophy of → ↑ → . Essendon Airport would later evolve into a five-piece band, and their rhythm-heavy 1982 LP Palimpsest was more aligned with the prevailing post-punk and no wave scenes. But Sonic Investigations (Of the Trivial) has never faded away. More than a decade after its release, Chapter Music’s Guy Blackman found a copy of the EP in a record shop bargain bin for $8. He included track two, “How Low Can You Go…?”, on Chapter’s essential Australian post-punk retrospective, Can’t Stop It. Essendon Airport have performed intermittently over the last decade, with Chesworth and Goodge joined onstage by their early-80s bandmates, percussionist Paul Fletcher and bassist Barbara Hogarth, plus pedal steel guitarist Graham Lee. The fivesome recently re-recorded the songs from Sonic Investigations (Of the Trivial) to showcase the updated full-band arrangements. The recordings can be found on Essendon Airport’s new album MOR, which features one new piece of minimalism titled “Malibu”. I spoke to Chesworth and Goodge about their formative influences, the scene at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre in the late 1970s, and how limitations informed the unique sound of Sonic Investigations (Of the Trivial). Read it via the link in bio

Meredith 2025. Mostly trees. Some artists and people. Did anyone else notice the big pine tree to the left of the sound desk looked really unwell? Hoping it’s just slow to wake up from winter. Most pics taken by @backyard_permaculture , who likes trees. The not very good photos taken by me. Link in bio for my review

Maggie Tra is prolific.   The electronic music producer released her debut album, Kingdom of Her, just three years ago. Last month, Tra – an Australian-born, Khmer-Vietnamese DJ and producer – released her fourth album, Cyclo Theory, a record that combines techno, house and ambient music with traditional sounds of Southeast Asia.   The tracks are decorated with field recordings depicting the three years Tra spent living in the northern Vietnamese city of Hanoi: a salt coffee in a crowded café; a night on the dance floor at BirdCage; a ride home on the back of a Grab bike through Hanoi’s perpetual heavy traffic.   “The field recordings I use in my music are a way of showcasing and highlighting the spaces and the moods that I am in,” Tra told me recently.   Electronic production has played a central role in Tra’s journey of self-actualisation. Born in Sydney to a Cambodian mother and a Vietnam-born father, Tra moved to Hanoi eight years ago, initially on a whim. She ended up staying there for three years.   “It was an emotional time for me, seeing how a country that I neglected due to abandonment received me with very open arms,” Tra said.   Tra started DJing at a few clubs around the city. She was eventually drawn to production as a way of telling her story – a story she knew many people would relate to.   “I [understood] that I was not alone in my journey of discovering my roots and being an Asian diaspora who moves back to their parent’s home country,” she said   Learn more about the journey of personal and artistic growth that informed @mtra ’s new album, Cyclo Theory, via the link in bio.

A rant of sorts about music and context and politics and the Australian Music Prize.

“Australia’s cultural neglect of its own musical history […] didn’t have anything to do with the quality of the music,” says @chaptermusic 's Guy Blackman. “It’s just the in-built cultural cringe.” Blackman is specifically referring to the Australian post-punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which, he says, was just as adventurous and exciting as the better-chronicled scenes in London and New York. Between 1978 and 1982, bands such as Sydney’s Voigt/465, Melbourne’s The Take and Brisbane’s Xero were writing and recording music that showed complete disdain for old-fashioned concepts like melody, harmony and a reliable drumbeat. Expression and roll-of-the-dice experimentation were the orders of the day, giving rise to a stylistically vast pool of music, from the DIY post-modernism of Essendon Airport’s “How Low Can You Go…?” to the quirky jangle-punk of The Particles‘ “Apricot’s Dream” and the abominable messiness of Slugfuckers‘ “Cacophony.” “It was more these female-driven bands or these kind of chaotic, lo-fi, cacophonous bands,” says Blackman. The aforementioned acts all feature on Chapter Music's Can't Stop It! compilation, the defining document of Australian post-punk, originally released in 2001. “When Can’t Stop It! came out, there was a slight idea that we were rewriting history,” says Blackman, who compiled the record with David Nichols of The Cannanes. “You probably have heard of one or two bands from that era in Australia, but these are the ones that really deserve your attention.” Learn more via the link in bio. (Pics of Voigt/465, Xero, Slugfuckers)

Musicians, Traditional Custodians and environmentalists gathered on Adelaide’s Pakapakanthi wetland last weekend for a native tree-planting activity. The event, part of @harvestrockfest , and organised by music industry climate solutions agency @feat.artists , connected artists such as @oneruel , @cloudcontrol_band and @limecordiale with the local environment and the conservationists rebuilding the biodiversity of Adelaide’s threatened natural landscape. “Hope you’re feeling deadly today,” said Robert Taylor, a descendant of the Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri, Narungga, and Nganguraku nations, as he commenced the Welcome to Country. “This city that we’re standing in, I think it’s been called Adelaide for about 45 seconds. But for thousands of years, to Kaurna people and neighbouring groups, it’s been known as Tarntanya.” “When the colonisers came," said Taylor, "they wiped out our hunting grounds, our vegetation stopped growing. That wrecked our food sources.” Adelaide, he said, is now “a cement world. But we’re still here, our language is still here, and our people are still here.” Founded by Cloud Control’s @heidilenffer , FEAT works to implement carbon reduction measures and nature conservation via a sustainability ticketing surcharge called the Solar Slice. The funds raised from this year’s Harvest Rock will go towards regenerating the feeding habitat of the endangered regent parrot, a bird native to southeastern Australia. “They’re yellow with flushes of blue, pink, and green on their wings,” said Vicki-Jo Russell, revegetation services manager at Trees For Life. The musicians, who showed up dressed in distressed denim and bedazzled baseball caps, were offered a mix of native species to plant across the wetland. Gloves went on, shovels and rakes were in hand. Russell, beaming, said to everyone who got their hands dirty, “We’re really pleased that you will leave a part of you here today.” Words by @eepywilson Group photo by @notyourleftovers

In the months following Daniel Ek’s latest cash splash in military tech company Helsing, I became obsessed with Spotify. A Spotify user since 2014, I ditched my subscription and, in a classic display of red pill zealotry, began side-eyeing anyone still using it – including artists participating in Spotify’s art-washing marketing campaigns. But crankiness is no solution to injustice. And although it’d be nice if comeuppance were meted out based on objective facts, we’re unlikely to see a substantial shift away from the big streamers until people are shown a better alternative – and not just ethically better, but culturally too. So, in the midst of my ramblings about Spotify’s pernicious flattening of culture and dog shit royalty payments, someone pointed me in the direction of @ninaprotocol . Nina is a US-based digital music store, streaming app, and music recommendation platform. It has been described as like the baby of Bandcamp and SoundCloud, but it also has a scrappy approachability reminiscent of the early blog era. Artists have been keeping 100% of their sales since Nina’s launch in 2021, but the company has just announced its new economic model, the Community Revenue Share. “As we turn on fees, we’re going to be sharing them with the people that use Nina, which I think is pretty different than how other streamers currently work,” Nina co-founder Eric Farber told me recently. The Community Revenue Share (CRS) adds a $1 fee to all releases on the platform. Artists still effectively keep 100%, but the extra dollar is split between Nina and everyone else who plays a role in circulating the music. The goal, says Farber, is not to make music fans and advocates rich, but to decentralise music discovery by giving the power back to the community and rewarding the people who care. Read more via the link in bio