Showing all posts about music
Charli XCX: Alone Together, by Bradley Bell and Pablo Jones-Soler
13 May 2022
Charli XCX: Alone Together, trailer, a documentary by Los Angeles based director duo Bradley Bell and Pablo Jones-Soler, follows British singer and songwriter Charli XCX, as she goes about recording her fourth studio album How I’m Feeling Now, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s early 2020 and the world is thrust into lockdown, grinding everything to a halt – including pop superstar Charli XCX’s North American stadium tour. Stuck at home in LA and not working for the first time in her adult life, instead of bingeing both Netflix and junk food, Charli decides to push herself to her creative and physical limits by recording and releasing an entirely new record in just 40 days.
Armed with a producer sending her beats remotely, speedy Amazon deliveries of recording and filming equipment, a reluctant and utterly charming boyfriend and her legions of fans offering suggestions, video clips and adoration, Charli XCX embarks on both an introspective and deeply collaborative journey into the creation her widely celebrated album How I’m Feeling Now.
Charli XCX: Alone Together will screen in selected Australian cinemas, for a few days only, over the first weekend of June 2022.
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Bradley Bell, Charli XCX, film, music, Pablo Jones-Soler, trailer
Paul Kelly’s song How to Make Gravy to become a movie
9 May 2022
I don’t know how many songs end up being adapted to film, but Australian musician Paul Kelly’s 1996 composition How to Make Gravy, looks like it’ll join their ranks, after Australian film production company Speech & Drama Pictures acquired the song’s film rights.
Written from the perspective of a prisoner named Joe writing home to his brother Dan at Christmas time, the song has gathered momentum year on year as more people discover the plainspoken but emotionally profound work.
But will it be a case of the song is better than the movie? Let’s hope not…
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disassociated rides again
8 May 2022
Wowser, you guys are good. How ever did you figure out I was bringing dis back?
As a reward, go listen to Alive by Sydney based electronica act RÜFÜS DU SOL. They won a grammy with it this year, and it’s been the soundtrack of disassociated’s re-boot. I posted thousands of links here between 2007 and 2017, a great quantity of which were dead, so instead of trying to edit all those posts, I decided to start over.
I’ve been trying to read more books these last few years — contemporary Australian fiction where possible — so there’s a definite bookish bent here at the moment. Anyway there’s a few kinks to iron out here, and what not, so I’ll be back later.
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Australian music, electronica, music
FutureNever, new music from Daniel Johns
26 April 2022
Reclaim Your Heart is a track on FutureNever, the new solo album from Daniel Johns, former guitarist and songwriter of defunct Australian indie rock act Silverchair.
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Australian music, Daniel Johns, music
What becomes of rock stars when they’re no longer stars?
26 April 2022
What’s the worst thing that could happen to a rock star? It might be waking up one day and discovering they’re no longer as famous as they once were. For some, the awakening can be rude, as was the case for American musician Suzanne Vega.
Accustomed to her record company supplying a limousine to convey her between airport and home, Vega was forced to hail a taxi on returning from an ill-fated tour in 1990, after realising she no longer qualified for the perk.
Similar fates, it seems, have befallen other who were once household names, such as Kevin Rowland, of Dexys Midnight Runners, Terence Trent D’Arby, now known as Sananda Maitreya, and Bill Drummond of The KLF.
What’s interesting though, encouraging even, is most of these musicians, and likely many others who fell out of the limelight decades ago, are still recording and performing. Carrying on, sans the hype.
If being a musician is in someone’s DNA, what need is there for mass adulation? It’s all about the music, isn’t it?
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Vale Ken West, Big Day Out co-founder
9 April 2022
Ken West, co-founder of Australian music festival, the Big Day Out, died on Thurday 7 April 2022, aged 64. West established the festival in 1992 with Vivian Lees. The first event was a one show only affair, held at the iconic Hordern Pavilion in inner Sydney, and included Nirvana on the lineup. The event went onto play in other Australian capital cities, and Auckland, New Zealand, becoming an annual summer fixture.
The last Big Day Out took place in 2014. Soon after, American concert promoter and events management company C3 Presents took full ownership of the event, and cancelled the scheduled 2015 shows. While they intended to bring the Big Day Out back at some point, so far there has been no word as to when this might happen.
Update: Yeah, actually I put the bloody thing on… former Triple J host, writer, and TV producer, Marieke Hardy recounts a meeting with Ken West after one of the Melbourne Big Day Out shows in the late-nineties.
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RÜFÜS DU SOL win at the 2022 Grammy Awards
5 April 2022
Sydney based dance/electronic act RÜFÜS DU SOL won the Best Dance/Electronic Recording award for their track Alive at the 2022 Grammy Awards, held yesterday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vagas.
Other Australian musicians, and their work, nominated this year were The Kid LAROI for Best New Artist, Shot In The Dark by AC/DC for Best Rock Performance, Power Up by AC/DC for Best Rock Album, Mood Valiant by Hiatus Kaiyote for Best Progressive R&B Album, and Shot In the Dark by AC/DC for Best Music Video. Good to see AC/DC, who have been working for nearly fifty years, feature so prominently.
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Regurgitator, The Fauves, Phil Jamieson, in Lismore flood fundraiser
11 March 2022
Nine bands including Brisbane based act Regurgitator, and The Fauves from Melbourne, perform this evening, Friday 11 March, at The Brightside to help raise funds for flood relief efforts for the north-eastern NSW town of Lismore.
Regurgitator, Phil Jamieson, and The Fauves are among the artists banding together for a special fundraiser show in Brisbane this Friday night, raising money for the city of Lismore which has been so badly impacted by recent floods.
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Heardle, the musical version of Wordle
9 March 2022
Heardle takes the Wordle experience, and translates it to music. You have six attempts to guess the title of a snippet of music, which you can hear anywhere from five to thirty seconds of, to help you figure it out.
Heardle is one of several variations of Josh Wardle’s word game (I’m not talking about outright duplicates here), that have spawned since October 2021.
It’s the latest in a string of Wordle-inspired online games to have popped up recently, including Worldle, which tests users’ geography knowledge, Dungleon, featuring fantasy characters over words, and the battle royale version, Squabble, where up to 99 players can race to figure out the word correctly, losing health points if they guess wrong.
If you’re familiar with music released in the last ten years, then you should have little difficulty winning Heardle. But will it be the next big thing, behind Wordle? Possibly. According to its creators “Heardle was made for a small group of friends, then somehow gained millions of players overnight.”
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Studio 666, a film by BJ McDonnell
19 February 2022
Dave Grohl and the Foo fighters move into a nice old house in the country to record their tenth album, in Studio 666 (trailer), a film directed by BJ McDonnell. But things don’t quite go to plan. Grohl begins to lose his mind, and it turns out the house is a conduit, allowing maligned spiritual entities to cross from their world into ours. Ah, the trials and tribulations of the difficult tenth album…
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