Mastering in the studio right now with Adam Dempsey at Deluxe – sounding sweet!
Ainslie Wills
Saw a great gig last Thursday, Ainslie Wills at the Toff, and thought I’d tell you about it. So here goes.
Ainslie Wills is awesome. She always has been, and she’s only getting better. Her new material is more accessible, more groovy, while still maintaining her classic style. And of course her old stuff has always been great, an alt-pop-jazz exploration of what can happen when someone with a musical imagination is allowed free reign on instruments and sensibilities usually reserved for mainstream music.
Her band is phenomenal – tight, warm and classy, with a hint of electronica thrown across a melange of acoustic virtuosity.
I hope they get very big indeed.
Now to the supports.
Richard In Your Mind
These guys are fantastic. Whole buncha sitar, psychedelic grooves, and trippy vocal duets. They’ve won the award for lets-get-crazy. Lead singer is a little guy with a big vibe, wispy beard and professor glasses. Standing next to a big hippy bassplayer with dreads. Crazy short-haired depeche-mode look-alike plays the harmonium. Dyed-in-the-wool 70s long-haired muppety guitar player. Gyrating lolling grinning tub-thumper pumps out hypnotic trippy grooves.
In a word – that’s entertainment.
Jamal
Jamal was fun. Trippy electronic grooves, solo carni-style doof-dancing, lush instrumentation and great swathes of intriguing live computer-triggered tones. I dig where he’s coming from.
Went and saw Ben Salter at the Retreat last night. Amazeballs.
This guy can sing. And play. And move you to tears.
He’s just got that poet gentleman ruffian thing down pat. But he doesn’t try and force it down your throat.
His tunes are an interesting stylistic mix of trad Irish song, contemporary folk and melancholy heart-wrench. And they grip you from the moment he opens his mouth. Along with his layered effects and sophisticated guitar-playing, he presents a compelling solo act.
The effects were an interesting touch for someone of his genre mix – along with the loop pedal which he used to layer up swathes of random bird-like guitar tid-bits, he also employed a harmoniser pedal to create 3-part harmonies from his voice. And he used them to great effect, sometimes continuing the random guitar over an entire section of he song, switching the vocal harmoniser in and out to give emphasis to certain words, and building the sound to massive crescendos before allowing it drop back to just his voice.
All in all a stellar performance, as his album due out in a week and a half will attest – “The Stars My Destination”. You can check him out here.
A lot to be inspired by there. I hope you enjoyed reading about his performance as much as I did describing it to you!
Love Simon
It was all very surprising.
I’ve always thought that the festival of White Night a bit of a waste of time. Not to mention bad for the environment, with all that power used, and for what?
That was until I went there.
My friends and I showed up at Melbourne Museum, expecting a bunch of drunken teenagers and barrier control. Instead we witnessed a beautifully calm and serene expression of visual bliss, accompanied by haunting music and a peaceful, respectful audience.
My bad.
I’m sure there were other sites that were a lot more crowded and chaotic, but this was magnificent. I’m happy to say we probably got the best of it.
I’m glad I was wrong about this festival.
Once we had finished dancing and singing and laughing and drinking and twirling and running and gazing and filming and smiling, there was nothing left to do but head into the city to find more. Kate, Travis, my partner Anita and I had long since lost the rest of our friends, but as we set off on foot to discover more of this delicious feast for the senses, we knew we had discovered something that had wowed us all – and that brought us together. No amount of cheap beer in a sports bar, the only pub we could find nearby, could put a dampener on that.
When Anita and I returned home, we found all our digital clocks had been reset by a power failure.
Perhaps too much current from White Night?