This Friday afternoon I’m jumping behind the decks at La La La’s for Afternoon Delight. It’s a spot that let’s DJ’s bring their own flavours to the set, for this week, given that Budd are playing upstairs later that evening, I’ll be leaning heavily into 90’s Australian indie sounds, but I’ll also be mixing it up with some recent finds from the US trip, and other discoveries I’ve come across this year that I haven’t got to play out yet. If you want to hear my more typical party anthem DJ sounds, I’ll be at Howlin Wolf both nights this weekend as well.
Speaking of Australian indie sounds, there has been several great reissues dropping at the moment, in most cases for the first time on vinyl. You can get across recent releases such as Sidewinder’s Atlantis, Bluebottle Kiss with Revenge Is Slow and Big Heavy Stuff’s classic Maximum Sincere. Next week sees the release of Beasts Of Bourbon’s classic The Low Road while in a few weeks’ time, we’ll get a long overdue reissue of Died Pretty’s Doughboy Hollow.
While I was in the USA, I attended New Colossus conference/festival in New York. The curation and boutique size of New Colossus is where it differs from most other similar events like SXSW and Great Escape. While the lineup is diverse, guitar music is at its heart and the shoegaze, dream pop, post punk and like-minded sounds are prevalent. The fact there is only three or four bands on at the same time, means the bands play to decent crowds. I saw a lot of bands over four days so it’s hard to pick highlights but definitely keep a lookout for Makara from Thialand, Lucid Express from Hong Kong, UK bands Winter Garden and Magda, Hause Plants from Portugal, Sundayclub from Canada and a special shout out to Winter McQuinn who was representing Australia and is signed out fellow local label Third Eye Stimuli. The panels/conference side of this happened during the first three days in daylight hours, all in the one location so there was no competing events. I managed to catch and interesting panel talk on the UK live music scene and then a great talk on indie labels and where things are at in the indie label world with representatives from Domino, Secretly Group, Kanine Records and more. A highly recommended event for emerging artists and people in the industry.
