Paul Curtis - Notes from Pig City

Australian musicians band together to invest in solar

Environment, Music / June 7, 2019 / 5 minutes of reading

In the spring of 2017, immediately after the release of the Australian band Cloud Control’s third album, Zone, the band’s keyboard player, Heidi Lenffer, was contemplating what the their upcoming tour would cost. But this time she wasn’t just thinking about the money; she was thinking about emissions. Independent bands are used to running on a shoestring budget – a carbon-conscious Lenffer wanted Cloud Control to run a more environmentally efficient operation, too.

She began asking climate scientists in the field, and connected with Dr Chris Dey from Areté Sustainability. Dey crunched the numbers for Cloud Control’s two-week tour, playing 15 clubs and theatres from Byron Bay to Perth.

He found that it would produce about 28 tonnes of emissions – roughly equivalent to what an average household produces in a year. And that was just the national leg of an album tour that would take the band to the US three times.

“I had suspected that all of this flying, and all of the energy that goes into tours, can’t be very good for the environment – but there was no solution that existed beyond carbon offsetting,” Lenffer says.

Offsetting is essentially an attempt at equalisation: when you offset your flights, you try to compensate for your carbon footprint by donating to a program to suck it out of the atmosphere, via tree planting or sequestration somewhere else.… Read more..

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Regurgitator get their roxx off

Regurgitator’s Quan Yeomans is, in his own words, doing the dad thing. “Your grandmother will be here in a second! Do you mind?” he scolds his one-year-old son Bowie, mid-conversation. He also has a four-year-old, Cassius.

Ben Ely, the band’s co-founder and bassist, is also a father to young children for the second time, with a new partner. After what Yeomans describes as their “midlife crisis record” Dirty Pop Fantasy, released in 2013, their ninth, Headroxx, finds them in a far more settled place.

“We were both in very weird headspaces, not as confident in our lives, and not in love,” Yeomans says of Dirty Pop Fantasy. “This record, we’re both married now, we both have young kids – again, for Ben – so it’s got that vibe about it.”

The exception is drummer Peter Kostic. “Got my kids once a week, sometimes for sleepovers … Take them to the zoo, maintenance not an issue,” he sings on Weird Kind Of Hard, before the song dissolves into a long, absurd scat section, the whole band cracking up laughing.

It’s typical Regurgitator, to make a joke of a serious situation. And Kostic’s personal circumstances aside, Headroxx is a joy to listen to, a concise blast of electro-pop, rock, hip hop and noise that often sounds like a return to the feel of the band’s early work.… Read more..