Darwin Muso Series is a string of an indeterminate number of mini to medium to mega interviews with Darwin-based musicians and performing artists. Starting in September 2019, and we’ll see how many we can cover over the next weeks/months/years.
Airlie Beach Festival of Music is held in November, however, in the lead-up, the organisers stage what is arguably* Australia’s biggest battle of the bands competition.
* If you can find a bigger one, I want it stuffed and mounted on display at ARIA or APRA headquarters, please.
Opening the batting for muso chats on the night (and for this series of interviews) was Josh Tarca of Ben Evolent.
(Just a quick Overheard At Passport To Airlie from my notes here. My mate leaned over as the third act came on and said, “I think the announcer said this band is from the Netherlands”.
Me: “No, the band’s name is ‘Ben Evolent’!)
Ben Evolent performing in Passport To Airlie – Darwin at Darwin Railway Club
Airlie Beach Festival of Music is held in November, however, in the lead-up, the organisers stage what is arguably Australia’s biggest battle of the bands competition.
And you’d have to argue very convincingly to beat this: regional finals in (take a deep breath): Darwin, Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Nimbin, Newcastle, Sydney, Illawarra, Melbourne and Adelaide.
It’s huge.
And budding musos are all vying for the chance to participate in the final at Airlie Beach in November.
As well as the performance opportunity in 2019, the overall winner gets to return to play the main stage the following year, receiving four nights’ accommodation, VIP main tent passes, a $1000 performance fee, and a spot on Music View TV (Cairns).
If you’re a regional muso aiming to get your music to a wider audience, it’s well worth a shot.
Mensch Monique!: Interview at Cobargo Folk Festival
Mensch, Monique! were in Australia earlier in 2019, playing gigs, house concerts and festivals. I caught up with Jule and Georg at Cobargo Folk Festival to find out how musical and family life had been treating them since the days of The Beez.
We spoke under a blazing sun, with welcome shade from the café marquee, perched
precariously on milk crates, sipping on ginger and lemongrass over cubed
ice (just brilliant on a baking hot day).
Cobargo Folk Festival 2019
Bill Quinn: How long has Mensch, Monique! been going? What are you doing? How is it going?
Jule Schroder: Well, actually, Georg and me, we have been playing since 2007.
BQ: And how about music?
JS: Exactly! Playing music! (And we’ve been playing together longer than that!) But I was in a band called ‘The Beez’; for such a long time.
BQ: The Beez? Can you spell that? I’m not familiar with this band.
[If you can’t pick up the irony in that sentence, go to https://overheardproductions.com/?s=The+beez where you can read just one or two articles about this band by the authour over the past decade.]
JS: Tee Hahr Eeh Bee Double Eeh Zsedh. We were one Australian, one American, and two Germans.
BQ: And one of the Deutshes is now Australierin!
JS: That’s right. Deta got married to Rob a long time ago and now she’s got her spouse visa.
So, anyway, I was playing with The Beez, being busy. And there was just no point [after the birth of first child]. We couldn’t play gigs. Or we could, but it was just too hard.
So when I left The Beez in 2014, we said, “Let’s write some songs together”. And why not in German? And that’s what we did!
And it just takes a long time. You know, we’ve got two kids now. But we do it in our own tempo. Our own speed, you know? And we love it!
BQ: That’s very interesting that you do your songs in German, with English being the lingua franca for the world, the language that the majority of the planet understands. Tell me about when you perform in Germany. Is it 100% in German? Or do you mix it up a bit?
JS: We mix it up, but it’s really interesting because I talk to a lot of musician friends from Germany, and we came to the… schluss? … conclusion that we just HAVE to write songs in German because it’s our language.
It just doesn’t make sense that we only write songs in English, because that’s not our language.
And it’s a bit hard to sing in German, I must say. And what is really interesting for me is, because I write most of the melodies, I don’t think in German when I write the melodies. I can’t do that. It’s really interesting.
Back in early February 2018, I interviewed Jenny Thomas from Melbourne-based folk band Bush Gothic, at a time when both of us were looking forward to attending the National Folk Festival in Canberra at Easter.
One of us got there. It wasn’t me.
It was to have been my first National since 2013, a year when I barely felt like I was there. Some nights I was tucked up in the tent by 10.30pm. It happens sometimes.
But of course, your worst day at a festival beats your best day doing many other things, so…
Events transpired that at the 2018 festival, instead of running around with various recording devices, filing copy for a small coterie of publications, I was roughly 400kms north on Lake Macquarie, providing various gardening and handyman services for a friend.
If you want to give your (or any) god a good laugh, make some plans!
Back to the subject at hand.
Image courtesy of Bush Gothic
It’s been an absolute delight and pleasure to not only see Jenny Thomas and Jenny M. Thomas and Jenny Thomas and the System and the current incarnation of Bush Gothic perform, but also to interview Jenny several times, both here on the blog and also on radio in Canberra.
It’ll be great to see Bush Gothic perform again, down one of many dusty roads, but for now, here’s the interview we did in February. You’ll just have to put your headspace into some sort of cerebral TARDIS and pretend we are looking forward to another five or six days of magic at an upcoming National Folk Festival.
*** Sound file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
*** Sound file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
Karen Green first came to our attention via her art on display at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre.
Karen came into the studio with fellow artist Gosia Orzechowska one morning for a chat, and Overheard Productions has been interested in her works ever since.
*** Audio file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
*** Audio file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
In more recent times, Karen Green has been very active on Twitter, sharing thoughts, links and events about social justice. It was this interest that led to a chain of events that saw her enter a portrait of Kon Karapanagiotidis of the Melbourne-based Asylum Seekers Resource Centre in the 2016 Archibald Prize.
Kon Karapanagiotidis by Karen Green.
Entry in 2016 Archibald Prize. Image courtesy of Karen Green. Continue reading →
To tell the story of Harry Manx would take several lifetimes, and hopefully a progression of life-form hierarchies over those lives to tell the story, because the story is so mesmerising and complex that we would not be very present and in the moment of most of those lives, and that could put the telling of the tale at risk as we would not be making gradual and continuous improvement as…
Moving on…
Harry Manx performs at the 2012 National Folk Festival
Harry Manx has already begun his 2016 Australian tour which will take him from Sydney down to Victoria (where he is on stage tonight, Friday 23 September in Frankston) then around to Queensland, South Australia, Perth and up to Broome and Darwin, ending in the beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, I-may-be-a-little-hereditarily-biased New South Wales locales of Katoomba.
Ah, Katoomba. If there’s a more intimate, special venue than Clarendon Guest House, I want it stuffed, mounted, and hung above my fireplace – or I at least want an invite to your venue if it can go close to kicking the Clarendon into a cocked hat. Or any poultry millinery for that matter.
So it’s a very eclectic path Harry treads, and look, I’d draw you a picture if I had a free hand, but imagine a much-twisted paper clip that’s been sitting on your desk all day on a slow Friday when you’ve been watching the clock since 9:36am – now you’re in the ballpark.
OR picture a moose that somehow wandered into your yard, found your sippin’ liquor in the shed, and is now making a bedraggled, loquacious, and somewhat winding stagger back to the forest by a circuitous route, two-thirds of it sideways.
I’ve said it before and will keep saying it: you just cannot make this shit up!
Three days after the Friday night police incident where a whole passenger train was detained for ten minutes while members of the QPS swarmed around me at the Lota train station, and after many phone calls, I’m still in the dark.
I’ll give you the Wednesday updates later, but for now, here is where Ankerss Ahrr-Whey tracks down a neighbour of mine to find out what the heck is going on.
Garry briefs us for a short while until his meal starts to go cold and his accent ships off from north England to…. we’re not quite sure where.
And for those of you who saw the teaser, you know want some more of this:
(A little tip for amateur video-ers, Youtubers: if you’re recording a live performance, be sure to include even just a little of the applause at the end. Otherwise, it’s a bit like a door slamming shut in your face when you stop talking with a friend. I was going to go with a butt cheeks analogy; aren’t you glad I didn’t?)
And now that we’ve gone there, let’s go here. Muggins is there, front and centre at about 0:10. A time of my life when song just took me somewhere I’d never been before.
Matt Barker hails from Southend in Essex UK, which is a shame since most of the taxis won’t go further than Basildon.
(That gag was an entry in the Morris Men-tal Institute Joke Competition of August 1936 and told repeatedly until a cease and desist order from the Greater London Department of Public Transport and Sun Beds in February 1937.)
Where were we? Talking about Matt Barker and his two fabulous radio shows.
The Matt Barker Radio Show is two hours of finely-organised chaos, going out to the world on Fridays at 6pm UK time, available on podcast from Mixcloud.
While the Deuce Radio Show is a tight little package (careful!) of the best new independent music to tumble onto Matt’s desk.
In this interview, Matt talks with Bill Quinn of Overheard Productions about the mechanics and motivations behind these shows, plus his future plans for well-funded world domination.
Based in Lexington, Kentucky and the brain child of Michael Johnathon, singer-songwriter, performer, producer, tour organiser, and 36 other roles, it’s spreading its tendrils across the USA and the world.
I’ll not steal any WFPA thunder by block copying and pasting here, but please follow the links and your rewards shall be many and bountiful.
The Cliff Notes, as MJ would say: it’s a cheap-as-chips member association which opens everyone up to a world of musical information, resources and networking, opens its arms, and invites the world of art and artists in to share, share, share.
On Friday 23 and Saturday 24 September 2016, the WFPA is holding its second annual Gathering in Shaker Village, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky – see main picture for all the salient details of the ‘wheres’ and ‘whens’.
It’s the ‘how much’ that’s the real news story here. And it’s a good, good news story at a time when good news stories are pretty gosh-darned thin on the ground.
Choose your preference: click on a hyperlink or click on the audio file link below, and listen in as Michael explains WFPA and the Gathering in his signature succinct, clear, resonantly-voiced vocal stylings (even over the tech equivalent of two cans and a 9063 mile piece of string).
*** Audio file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
*** Audio file will be removed by the end of March 2020 ***
Some basic notes for the interview… which I never referred to.
Welcome to Episode 2 of Cooking At #36 with Billgella Lawsoote.
Our legal people have been combing through our initial agreement with M/s Lawsoote and it does indeed appear that a clerical error DID spin the series out from the original 3.6 episodes to an eye-watering 36 episodes.
With the caveat of ‘ne’er the same kitchen twice’.
Feck.
So.
We present to you, the uninformed swill at the bottom of a glass of a really gritty Bordeaux, the sort you want to finish off with a knife and fork, the second in our (slap me now for using this hackneyed term) journey — pronounced with four Js: jjjjourney around the kitchens of Australia.
Today for your information, edification and inebriation, we have ‘White Whine Fillet Surprise’.
Short on the whine, long on the wine.
Warning: Billgella works a little blue in this edition beamed live (and by live, we mean recorded three weeks ago) from Paddington, NSW.
Here’s what some food pundits are saying about Episode 2.
‘I kept falling off my chair’. – Matt from Basildon, Essex.
Surely faulty office furniture is an office services issue, not the kitchen’s.
“Where’s the bacon?” – Johnny RT from Sydney via Liverpool UK.
Have you ever crossed a Basa with a pig, JRT? We tried once, and the pig thrashed around in the shallows for half an hour. It took us twice that long just to get the smile off his face.
DISCLAIMER: Again, please note this edition is not safe for work (NSFW). We did road-test it on a pre-school group at the Sorbonne School For The Gifted Culinary Toddler and the feedback was unanimous: “We’re including you in our mandatory reporting to the relevant authorities.”
Billgella Lawsoote returns in the new year with a multicultural melting pot Episode 3 from the heart of Kebabland, Sydney.
Overheard Productions 