An album consisting entirely of birdsong has debuted towards the top of Australia’s ARIA chart, beating Mariah Carey, Michael Buble and Abba to get to No. 5 one week after its release. Songs Of Disappearance, a collaboration between multimedia duo Bowerbird Collective and David Stewart, who has been recording the sounds of Australian birds for over four […]
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Neil Murray had been labouring in the Indigenous community of Papunya – a bone-jarring four-hour ride north-west of Alice Springs – for about a week when he met Sammy Butcher in 1980. “He must have heard that I had a guitar, and he came around to have a look,” Murray says. “I showed him the guitar,
At the beginning of 2020, while her home country burned and the rest of the world was waking up to a global pandemic, Courtney Barnett was in Los Angeles. She’d just completed an American tour; her plan was to find herself an apartment and stick around a little longer to work on songs. Then – after
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It is a truism of popular music’s album-oriented era that great double albums are rare. In Australian indie rock – at least since the waning of the compact disc’s market dominance and vinyl’s revival among collectors – they have become close to non-existent. So Ashley Naylor, leader of Melbourne stalwarts Even and a rock &
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In 1999, Nina Simone gave her final performance in London. It was at the Meltdown Festival, which that year was curated by Nick Cave. In an introduction to a new book by his bandmate and collaborator Warren Ellis, Nina Simone’s Gum, Cave recalls being summoned backstage by the legendary singer, who demanded he introduce her as follows:
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For the last several months, I’ve kept a slightly uneasy vigil on a pair of breeding Powerful Owls in inner Brisbane, just a couple of kilometres from home. In that time they’ve seen off crowds of curious onlookers, and a determined eviction attempt by Sulphur-crested Cockatoos, to raise one confident and healthy-looking chick, which will
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