A blast from the present. Nashville, Tennesse like you’ve never heard it before. The sound of pure youthful energy. The soundtrack to Alicia Bognanno’s life; breakups, brainfreezes, throwing up in cars, how someone’s sheets smelled.

Check it out.

Bully formed when Bognanno moved from Minnesota to pursue studies in audio engineering. Having already completed an internship with Steve Albini at his iconic Electrical Audio studio, the band already had their own in-house producer. Bully returned to Chicago and she produced their debut “Feels Like”.

Blasting off third-on, Friday.

A veritable institution at Meredith and beyond, The City of Ballarat Municipal Brass Band have had a great year. They have let us know that: “We placed 2nd at State Championships with first place beating us by 1 point. We have just recently had our band hall renovated and are very excited to move back into that space.”

We are honoured to have these magnificent men and women in their flying machine going up diddly up up and around and around on Saturday morning in The Sup’. Stirring stuff.

Closing it all up Sunday.

Drug Sweat were a product of the revived ‘little band’ concept. ‘Little band’ was a late ’70s movement in the Melbourne inner city; a musical philosophy based around the idea of improvised, short-lived bands.

Drug Sweat is an all-star starting five from the garage rock illuminati of Melbourne. There’s an Onya, Ooga Booga and Ausmuteant, some Cobbwebbs and Galaxy Folk.

It’s demented disco, punk rock, a disco powerhouse that delivers a low voltage dance party with high voltage dance bangers.

Way to go out.

When you’re smiling and astride me
I can hardly believe I’ve found you and I’m terrified by that

That’s how you live free, Truly see and be seen

There will be a convergence of forces when Father John Misty takes the stage at The 25th Meredith around Sunset on Saturday Night, and I’m going to momentarily resist adjectives: There’s the man himself, there’s his music, and his band. Then there’s his popularity, and there will be anticipation, and excitement. And there’s Sunset, on the second night, in the Supernatural Amphitheatre: the sweet spot.

“If anyone knows what to do with a sweet spot, it’s Father John Misty”.

Expectation, convention be damned. Father John Misty has ascended. He’s not working from a script, there’s no blueprint. His lucid looseness undoes custom’s blouse. He deals in true fun and freedom, flourishing almost perversely from a deep bedrock of brutal raw honesty and enlightened directness. He can also be filthy, and hilarious. His live shows are beyond everything. He’s wilfully out of bounds, and you’re coming too.

“a rock star wired to a lie detector”

The myth and mystique of the man are magnetic, but for me his ultimate gifts are his love songs.  This one completely kills me. It’s about (I think) absurd fickle chance, the tiny tenuous link that turns nothing into everything, and the nebulous dimensions of that diabolical deal.

Sunset, Saturday, at the Silver Jubilee Meredith. Mass.

Full crazy rave about FJM here.

In amongst some all-time legends, oddball unreachables and current day dons, Floating Points has hovered high on our Wish-they-would-come-and-play-for-us-List. Now we are beyond pleased and proud to be crossing this Special One off that list and allowing our minds to skip ahead to the reality of Late Late Saturday Night when the energy spreads far and wide but the focus narrows to sonic adventure and happy travels. The satisfying precision with which Floating Points drops in here totally tickles the perfectionist in me.

Floating Points’ DJ sets as the former resident at London’s most legendary night “Plastic People” defined and enhanced the eclecticism that went down at that Shoreditch club, whether it was all night back-to-back with Kieran Hebden, or just riding solo.

He’s a fanatical record collector, and his sets have evolved to consider “soul, jazz, disco and techno as a lineage that’s ok to mix together”. Resident Advisor described his production discography as “flawless”, but we get the feeling something even betterer is gonna arrive with his new album.

Floating Points. Wishlist fulfilment. Drift off, late late Saturday night.

Watch this, and get ready to Do The Bus Stop.

Listen to this and start Backstrokin’.

They played live in the burning crucible of NYC’s hottest discos in the 70s, they made future soul before it had a name, they released the world’s first hip-hop record, they’re one of the original and best big funk soul boogie machines ever assembled, and they are coming to play live for the epic Dance-a-thon that is this year’s Saturday Latenite in The Sup’.

The Fatback Band is pure New York street music. Founded by Bill “Fatback” Curtis in 1970, their discography comes off like an anthology of a decade in dance records.

(Are You Ready?) Do The Bus Stop, Spanish Hustle, The Girl Is Fine, Wicky Wacky, Backstrokin’, Yum Yum, Party Time, I Found Lovin’, Got To Learn How To Dance, Girls On My Mind, Put The Funk On, I Like The Girls, Is This The Future? There isn’t a disco DJ who doesn’t have some Fatback in their bag.

From Wiki: “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” is a 1979 song by the Fatback Band from the disco album XII. Released on March 25, 1979, a few months before “Rapper’s Delight” (which is widely regarded as the first commercially released hip hop song), this song is often cited as the beginning of recorded hip hop.

If someone told me this slice of heaven was a Detroit house record made last year…I’d believe ’em. But it’s from 1973!

The Fatback Band is a name that has long been synonymous with good time party music. Pure, uncut funk. One of the first to play live at the discos, one of the first to make “disco music” a force to contend with. The basis of Fatback is rhythm. Rhythm that starts your head moving and your hips swaying. Take the throbbing bass line, couple it with a drum beat that just won’t quit and a horn section that hits you with instant hooks – that’s the Fatback Band.

Come on and Do The Boogie Woogie, Do The Bus Stop, Do The Spanish Hustle and the Wicky Wacky too with the Fatback Band, Part Two of Saturday Night’s Dance-a-thon.

Saturday mid-afternoon is a wonderful time for some of this confident, dreamy excellence.

The most prolific Australian vocalist of the year, Ella Thompson joins Graeme Pogson in Melbourne duo GL.

“Cruising on glowing synths, gritty drum-machines and stratospheric vocals, GL’s music is a cosmic dream-sequence not unlike a lost reel from the mid-80s.”

LUX.

“Psychedelia is music that is free”

For the first time in Oz, all the way from Korpilombolo, Norrbotten County, Sweden, the most exotic psychedelic band around.

I can’t tell you how many times in the last few years, at random times of day or night, I have received this kind of communique from friends (and strangers):

“I am in (insert foreign country/city) watching this insane band GOAT… you HAVE to get them to The Sup’ – they are MADE for it…” Often followed in an hour or so by unintelligible nonsense. (“!! ??? weeeeeeeeeee”) etc.

How to even try to describe their music? It has parts picked from sounds the World over and made into their own cosmic gumbo. But this is not mere montage, or homage; Goat are too sure-footed for that slippery slope. This is evolution, and creation on a grand scale.

“…when we play together we don’t play songs – we make music – and every time we play is a new time”.

It is only fitting that in a year we have the humble mighty SHEEP as our mascot that we have its close Caprinae relative GOAT to Take Us There, Primetime, Friday night.

It’s become a tradition of sorts for late night Friday to be about the live dance music. For the first time it will be back-to-back locals, beginning with analog synthesist Harvey Sutherland.

Sutherland’s improvisational live show – equal parts 808 rattle and double disco clap – is an evolving, synthetic boogie exploration. Manning the controls of the mighty Juno 60 synthesiser, Harvey sweats it out with the crowd, looping new phrases and modulations, and pitch-bent solos.

He began with local crew This Thing, going international with fellow funkateer Motor City Drum Ensemble releasing his Bermuda tune to the world on his MCDE label.

His rep is growing and glowing. Late Friday night.

The Interstitial Soundtrack will be provided by Ollee Palmer, Joey Lightbulb, DJ People, DJ Fee B2, Manchild, and an Art Wilson DJ set.

When collating the best Australian albums of 2015, ‘Kill It Yourself’ will be right up there. Jess Ribeiro has been hanging in the shadows for a few years but this album is making her a name to remember.

Whilst preparing to record the album, she wrote a letter to Mick Harvey. The former Bad Seed has been selective about which projects he gets involved with – mostly only with friends like PJ Harvey or Rowland Howard – but he said yes to working with the then little-known Jess.

Prior to that, she’d been based in the Northern Territory for about six years, teaching kids and playing music. She was initially raised in country NSW but now calls Melbourne home.

Most of the songs on ‘Kill It Yourself’ were written during her Saturn Return (an astrological transit that occurs when the planet Saturn returns to the same place in the sky that it occupied at the moment of a person’s birth).

Sunday 11am. Out the other side.

Jessica Pratt is an artist who never dreamed of a career in music. She didn’t think about going on tour or releasing records. After picking up a cheap nylon string as a teenager, she began to write songs without “evaluating why”. White Fence main man Tim Presley heard some old recordings she had made, loving them so much he founded a record label just to release them.

“I didn’t even care if it sold 100 copies, I loved it that much. I had this future death-bed moment,  I could either pay rent comfortably for three months or put this record into the world.”

With just an acoustic guitar and her voice, this is way more than folk, it’s subtly hallucinatory psychedelia. Her voice is unique, it’s unclear what time it is from. And she’s a virtuoso guitar player, setting up the songs with circular peaks and troughs of sound.

“It’s really just about being at the mercy of those waves,” she says.

Submit. Saturday.

Julia Holter is pretty phenomenal. Frankly, she’s my current musical hero.

She’s an L.A. born and based composer, and one of the most adventurous, experimental, ambitious artists working today.

Her music is almost without roots. How she gets it from her head to our ears without it catching on accepted conventions along the way is a minor miracle, but by the time it arrives – it sounds like pure imagination. How does she make this stuff?

Holter began studying composition, fusing elements of twentieth-century classical, jazz and baroque pop and her music has evolved to combine avant garde and pop ideas, with the human voice as arguably her primary instrument. It has a late night, cinematic quality, and can be both cat-hair soft and strident.

She leads a hypnotic, spiritual, guitar-less band comprised of cello, piano, sax, violin and drums, with layered vocals, and finds a heavenly and sincere new way of expressing the inexpressible.

Levins is a DJ, a chef, a writer and a dad. He works well with others. He started the music charity Heaps Decent with Nina Las Vegas and Diplo, started the rap party Halfway Crooks with Captain Franco and ran a restaurant called The Dip with his wife Bianca. He has a close affinity with Sydney’s legendary Goodgod Small Club, home to both Halfway Crooks and his 90s dance party The Rhythm of the Night. Levins has been DJing since he was a teenager, and while he still looks the same as when he started DJing, his musical repertoire has expanded to a level that reflects a decade’s worth of musical obsession. If you’re hoping to hear a set that jumps from genre to genre without ever entering the dangerous realm of “mash-up”, Levins is your guy.

Late Saturnite.

A longstanding figure in Sydney’s DIY underground, Lucy Phelan has moved between punk, no wave, noise and drone. Over a decade of work behind her – the Lucy Cliche project is her most literal move towards the dancefloor. Lucy once described her music as a “techno purist’s nightmare” which is probably why we dig it so much.

Late late Friday night.

And I don’t think Trevor is good for you, Carol
I don’t wanna be a Christmas ham
Carol you’re my spade, I’m your bucket

The Peep Tempel have a well-earned reputation as a powerhouse live act, brimming with character, energy and intensity. Last year they released their second album Tales which dipped into a part of the national psyche our creative cultures rarely reach. The band’s assessment of their live show is straightforward: “it’s just a rock ’n’ roll show, something you are able to move and dance to, it’s that sort of music.”

I don’t think Trevor is good for you, Carol.

Late afternoon Saturday, right in the crux of it, of course.

Did you know one of the finest sitar players in the world lives in Melbourne? How he came to be here is even more remarkable.

Ustad Khalil Gudaz was 13, playing ball outside the family home in a village near Kabul, Afghanistan, when a sound came through the window from a radio. He rushed inside and determined he must learn this instrument that makes the strange new sound.

From The Age, May 17, 2003, written by James Button:

What moved him so much that day? Gudaz smiles, struggling not only with English but, as anyone does, with words to express music. “How can I say this? The sound was very clear, very bright … like a perfume. It attacked my heart.”

How good is that description?!? From there, he manages to get hold of a broken old sitar and repair it, as his family can’t afford a new one. He practises literally all day, skipping meals, lost in the music.

The boy grows up. His playing becomes known across the country. In 1983, when he is 20, he is Afghanistan’s musician of the year. But the sitar is not an Afghan instrument and people tell him he must go to India. They make him promise to come home one day, to be a great musician for Afghanistan.

In Delhi, Gudaz studies under Amjad Ali Khan, the celebrated Indian master of the sarod. They share the ancient bond of guru and disciple. Ali Khan instructs Gudaz in a technique and the pupil leaves to practise it for the rest of the day. Gudaz’s skill grows; he is chosen to play on All India Radio, a rare honour.

…by 1996 the Taliban is in power in Kabul. They are cutting off the hands of musicians, the tongues of singers. Gudaz can’t go home. He has a brother in Melbourne. It is an agonising prospect: to leave India is to banish himself from the roots of his music, and Ali Khan urges him not to go. “You will be a great musician,” he says. But what counts most, he and his wife Sabera decide, is the future of the children.

And so the family moves from Delhi to Mulgrave, to public housing and the lonely obscurity of the suburbs. “Take us back to India; it is so boring here,” the children beg. Gudaz struggles to find work. A pub offers him a spot performing as people eat dinner, but the sitar demands an attentive audience. Poor as he is, Gudaz says no.

Let his music, like a perfume, attack your heart. Sundeity.

Sunday morning at 9am, the Amphitheatre becomes a giant Tai Chi class. Patrons and workers alike down tools and enjoy a demonstration by world-renowned Tai Chi expert Master Jin Song Han. Master Song first graced the Meredith stage back in 2001, when we picked the first name out of the phone book under “Tai Chi” and gave him a call. Turned out he was the former National Coach of China. Yes, he should bring his ceremonial weapons and give a demonstration. Yes, playing his music would be possible. No, he didn’t need to bring a tape player.

Carlton was an epicentre of creativity in Australia in the 70s. Jane Clifton was right in amongst it.

A 1972 BA graduate from Monash Uni’s halcyon days of sex and demos (protests) and rock ‘n roll, she was distracted from a career as an English teacher by Melbourne’s burgeoning, alternative theatre and music scene.

Jane was the inspiration for the character ‘Angela’ in Helen Garner’s seminal book/film ‘Monkey Grip’. She fronted the ground-breaking ‘feminists-on-Countdown’ Stiletto. She had two Top Ten singles – Girl On The Wall (solo) and Taxi Mary (with Jo Jo Zep), and acted in numerous early Australian TV shows like Division 4, Homicide and Holiday Island, and later, stage-shows Mum’s The Word and Menopause. She has published three crime novels and sings with her jazz trio on Mondays. She’s also well-remembered for a role from 35 years ago: Margo in Prisoner.

One of my nephews saw Jane at Claypots last year, and apart from being staggered by how good she and her band are, had an instinctive hunch that she’d be great to MC the Sunday and help host The Gift.

You gotta act on those hunches, they’re often the best.

The Sky Show doesn’t happen every year – there needs to be a good idea, or a good reason.

The Silver Jubilee Meredith? A very good reason.

For the first time, the Sky Show will take place on the Friday night. The idea? Lasers. Big lasers. Lots of lasers.

Mighty Duke and The Lords never fail to bring their tropical cyclone of mad calypso rhythm and rum-soaked tomfoolery to the dancefloor. Crisp Linen Suits and sharp-witted lyrics meet junk percussion and double entendre. Whether on land, or on the open seas, Mighty Duke and The Lords keep the party shaking until the fish have gone to sleep!

Part One of Saturday night’s Dance-a-thon.

Shepparton’s greatest rapper of all-time.

Briggs is a student of hip hop. His love of rap started late one night when he saw Ice Cube’s It Was A Good Day on RAGE. From that point all he wanted was to become the rapper he is today.

No doubt he would have been pleased with what Ghostface had to say about him: “he got a strong voice, remind me of Ice Cube a bit, he hard.”

This doco on him is terrific – it shows the character of the man and his commitment to his art. He says he is ‘an introvert with an extrovert’s career’. There’s a lot to dig about what he’s got to say, how he says it, how he goes about it.

This track is almost indescribably moving and wonderful. It’s called The Children Came Back, and it features Gurrumul & Dewayne Everettsmith.

Last year we had one Shepparton artist on the lineup. This year there are two. 3630’s going off. Maybe three next year.

M25 will be Briggs first live outing with a band.

The best American psych band yet to hit The Sup’. Formed by Mr Wooden Shjip Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada, and actually a live trio with ‘Canadian steam train’ John Jeffrey dropping in on drums, their modal groove is an extra heavy freak out, with Ripley and Sanae reaching new shred dimensions.

They build to the apex and maintain; their magic is to leave a prolonged hit lasting well beyond the moment.

Their bio says they ‘fuse the futuristic pylon hum and transistor reverb…with the heat-haze fuzz of American rock ‘n’ roll to create tracks of blistering, 12-cylinder space rock’. It also quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay, Circles, centring on something unattainable: “the flying Perfect”.

Moon Duo fly pretty perfect.

Waxing crescent, waning gibbous, Saturday afternoon.

Listening to Neon Indian = instant good times.

A “chillwave” pioneer, giving Saturday afternoon a cruisey bounce.

Alan Palomo was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and later moved to Texas. He cites his father as a musical influence, “he had a brief stint in the late 70s and early 80s as a Mexican pop star.” Alan had already been writing and performing music through high school, and soon enough gave millions of people a soundtrack to their lives.

Polish Girl has over ten million YT views. More got lost in a Psychic Chasm. He made a bizzaro collaborative EP with Flaming Lips. New single Annie is from his first album in 4 years, out now.

Neon Indian makes some of the sunniest sounds around. Atmospheric conditions will be perfect.

Our mutual love affair continues. The MSA on Mount Mercer Road Meredith and Optimo on Jamaica Street, Glasgow: sister sub-cities. Optimo have previously created two adored epics in the Supernatural Amphitheatre, and now the very special ones return to mix every genre under the sun – starting under the moon – late late late Saturday night-into-Sunday-morning.

They closed out The Second Golden Plains, a gig which they rated in The Guardian UK newspaper as a ‘magical moment’.

“Last year, we did our first Australian tour. Driving back from the Golden Plains Festival to Melbourne, watching the sunrise, I felt really emotional because we’d taken what we do far from home and been warmly received. It’s a privilege to be able to travel the world, seeing first hand that music is a universal language.”

One of the alltime great Amphi Dancefloor Faves.

Love is the message.

Glam-our rock.

How’s this for for an update on the Bolan boogie?

The sugar meets the grit.

“If Twin Peaks’ Bobby Briggs and James Hurley put aside all of their differences and started a band (inspired by the love, loss, and life of Laura), they’d sound exactly like broody three-piece Pearls”  – Nylon

Signed to renowned music-connoisseur house Remote Control.

Cause I got no fun and I got no money

Melbourne’s own. Friday arvo. Kicking the whole thing along.

These guys just f*@k!ng GO FOR IT.

No frills rock ‘n’ roll. Nothing but the bare essentials.

Kicking the whole thing off Friday arvo.

RATATAT and The Sup’. Time and place. Tension and release. Evan Mast and Mike Stroud. Sound and vision.

Ratatat make musique magnifique, often starting the journey with a single footstep, building momentum from unlikely places, weaving in a little hypnosis here, or an oddball throwback there, like someone tuning in music from an alternate world, sometimes going from grimy lo fi to ultra hi fi, then elevating via wave after wave or exploding triumphantly, enjoying the view from the plateau, and luxuriating in the aftermath.

All you have to do is let it hit you.

From Brooklyn, New York. A constant for a decade.

Started with this. Classics. Loud Pipes. The creem. Killer remixes. This one …and this one …and this one.

Live shows are a famously complete audio visual experience “… like a twisted Disneyland finale”.

Crowning Saturday Night.

A decade-long quest finally comes together for the 25th. We tried again and again to make this happen. And now it has.

Steve Albini, Bob Weston, Todd Trainer. Shellac of North America.

In their 23rd year together, Shellac are as vital and intense as ever. Last year’s “Dude, Incredible” is as high quality as anything else they’ve previously done. They’ve not lost one scrap of what’s great about them – in fact they have never dropped below the peak where they started – you can’t say that about many things. Shellac are extreme, un-compromising and build an intense groove. Shellac are unusual. Their history is all about how ‘non’ they are.

They don’t play often, and festivals even less. They’ve only been to Australia twice in twenty years. The band members all work for a living (Steve Albini being probably the most revered studio engineer of modern times) and the band is their pastime, so they don’t tour often or for long. Concerts and touring have no correlation with album releases, but they tour when they have the time and inclination. They love playing music together.

We love that they’ll finally be playing their music on Friday night at The 25th Meredith.

The unmissable sleeper-hit of the summer back for an encore performance.

Rising above the cries of “It’s too loud!” and “You’re ruining everything!”, the Steve Miller Band have persevered against all odds. Manhandling old classics like you’ve never heard them before, the trio are making jaws hit the floor like plates at a Greek wedding. Handsome Steve, born the year Elvis was drafted for the U.S. Army, is never to be seen without his brylcreem and comb in hand. Lured back to the stage by first time drummer the Shewolf, and Lady Bo enthusiast The Duchess, Handsome has never looked better. He has a new message for the youth… “Repent! Repent! Repent!” At their best with the lights low, amidst a backdrop of Fender Twins, the Steve Miller Band are pushing the big beat into places it should never, ever go. It makes you wonder, what sort of mind would do that?

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth founder, counter-cultural legend.

“It’s hard to imagine where we would be without Sonic Youth” – Jessica Hopper in her piece coinciding with SPIN rating Moore and Ranaldo as the great guitar combo of all time.

Sonic Youth turned on an entire generation to the value of experimentation in rock ‘n’ roll.

You should know that Thurston’s new album and new band are firing. The album is called The Best Day, and the band is Deb Googe (bassist of fellow noise rock heroes My Bloody Valentine), Steve Shelley on drums (old Sonic Youth mate) and guitarist James Sedwards (whom John Peel dubbed “the first person who’s not a footballer that I’ve been jealous of”).

It’s an honour to be hosting Thurston and his cohorts in Meredith.

Watch some masters at work, Friday Night.

Meredith will be Tkay’s last weekend as a teenager.

Tkay Maidza is a fearless force, a certified rapper owing as much to modern club and pop records as rap’s rich history. Raised across South and Western Australia, she’s a high energy performer who has drawn praise from basically everywhere. An undeniable shooting star.

Damn, she’s good – (FIVE STARS) – The Guardian

Friday night.

Unique, exquisite, delicious, beautifully designed superb pop. This took me a while. Might take a few listens, but once you understand the Totally Mild World, it’s incredible. The arrangements, the sounds, so many different moving parts all knowingly travelling together so perfectly, with balance and swerve; it’s tasty, classy, groovy, with just so many cool rhythm beds, so many primo guitar lines, so many vocal melodies… the sax bed on Nights…

Was it planned or just instinctive?

“everything was done with confidence, everything was done by heart”

Melbourne really never ceases to amaze.

Once again, The Town Bikes are thrilled to oversee delivery of the illustrious Meredith Gift.

The Bikes have undertaken a training regime of Pistol Squats, Donkey Kicks and Inchworms in preparation for the big race.

False starters be warned!

I mean, just an awesome hard rock/doom band. One of the best you could hope to see and hear.

“the original Alice Cooper band jamming in a cell with early Black Sabbath and the Stooges”.

“a groovy, evil delight”.

Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats are from Cambridge, England. They let their music do the talking.

First class riffery. Satdee evening.

Of the billions of people making trillions of musics in their bedrooms, Ruban Nielson rose above and became the chosen one. There were no tricks or short-cuts – no heavyweight connections – it was just pure genius output of the very ultra maximum highest quality: it was the cream rising to the top. The People dug it.

It all started with this one track, originally by an untitled artist on bandcamp, later to get tagged UMO.

The early UMO tracks were originally solo experiments. Nielson’s favoured ‘breakbeat’ percussion use came from an inability to record live drums in his home studio while his household slept. He sampled some old funk drums instead and UMO’s signature sound was found.

As part of his constant need for exploration, the evolution from solo experiments to full band has seen UMO flash from lo-fi indie to full blown guitar heroics and more recently a huge lean into heavy soul and R&B.

Ruban Nielson is one interesting dude. Part of his motivation for making music is catharsis:

“I’m glad I had this opportunity, and if I made someone’s life easier with the album, that’s the closest reason that exists for making art that I’ve been able to find.”

UMO; like a ffriendly UFO in the Friday night sky.