Horror My Friend – ‘Leave Me Alone’

(mp3)

The Sunshine State may have earnt its fair share of cultural schtick in the international music press as the place for scuzz and house parties courtesy of DZ and Bleeding Knees Club, but don’t count on these guys from Adelaide to keep suburbia quiet for too long. This track has enough hooks for havoc potential and the right dose of vocal precociousness to make the kids go crazy. A heads up if you dig DZ or Children Collide’s earlier material.

The band’s EP Shivers and Spines is available on bandcamp.

horrormyfriend.bandcamp.com

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You don’t really need to find much beyond ‘Crave You’ and ‘Foreign Language’ to hear that production pair Flight Facilities have bestowed some unforgivingly catchy tracks on us all.

Here’s the brand new clip for their track ‘With You’ which features Grovesnor aka. former Hot Chip member Rob Smoughton.

This clip took animator Ben Drake and his team four months to complete. I’m frankly over watching band vids with pretty chicks running through forests, so these Daft Punk/Astroboy vibes are so up on my radar right now.

Producer: Samuel Beck
Production Manager: Ben Huxter
Character Designs, Story and Directed: Benjamin Drake
Guest Animators: Alexis Dean-Jones & Xin Li
Compositors: Steven Smith & Xue Sen Wong
Special thanks: Liam Hockins & Seera Rytkölä

www.flightfacilities.com

www.facebook.com/flightfacilities

Better…two months late than never. I’ve been absent from these parts because I’ve been busy doing important stuff, like eating beans for 60 days and getting mugged in rural Central America. Prior to dieting on mariachi and Mexican opera for a few months, I got along to the annual SXSW conference/festival in Austin, Texas.

I arrived at SXSW for the first time without an itinerary or a wristband for a week of music and merriment. College orientation shit really. I mean, all I had to do was dodge the kids in Goodwill sweaters handing out sample mixtapes and stomp through to the free kebabs and gigs right? Turns out 6th St was as easy as striding through a trojan warzone, with the addition of Willie Nelson clones riding over my feet with their god damn pedal tuks every two meters.

Everything is bigger in Texas, but Austin is just whack. Any fleeting hobby interest you might have had in people watching gets amplified here; everywhere is teeming with street performers, artists and their convoys, people in neon suits, morph suits, birthday suits, and unabashed locals flaunting rainbow tie dye tshirts with ‘KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD’ emblazoned across their chests. Finding some new obscure band that blows your brains isn’t difficult, as live music happens everywhere from 10am until the early hours of the morning.

While SXSW has a rep for being a goldmine for unsigned acts, I learnt that it WILL quickly turn into a wasteland of terrible free prog-rock gigs if you scribble down 3 out of the 48 free events you’ve RSVP-ed to on a piece of scrap paper that’s covered in boob-sweat. Yes, SXSW is do-able without a $750 pass, and yes, you still can bask in the glory of plenty of new bands, have lots of fun and consume superfluous amounts of free Doritos to your hearts content (see here), but stuff gets tricky when you queue for three hours, then end up climbing iron bars for a scenic view of the back of Doug Martsch’s head.

After a few days of plodding, I was welcomed into the arms of Maggie Mae’s on Saturday for the annual Aussie BBQ. Highlights included free food, familiar accents, chummy people in green attire (it was St Patrick’s Day) and resident Peter Pan aka Nick ‘Paisley Adams’ Allbrook of POND catapulting into the crowd and nearly taking out Brit TV host Alexa Chung’s glory box with his pan flute. Go ‘straya.

Here’s some photos from the Aussie BBQ:

Alpine

Voltaire Twins

Pond

(click below for more photos)

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The once humble music video is never so these days.  You might recall Phondupe two producers out of Sydney whose track ‘Aviary West’ we featured last year. They’ve teamed up with local director/producer Benjamin Zadig, who’s made a pretty spectacular clip, featuring a few colonial dudes getting terrorized by the resident forest ‘bunyip’.

The guys put out their latest release, Dinner Melts yesterday and it’s been on rotation here all day. The four track release is teeming with some interesting ideas, cut and paste beats and all the downtempo quirks you’d find in a Tokyo backalley bar.  It’s available as a free download on their bandcamp, so you’ll probably get to that faster than you can attempt to count the syllables in track four: ‘Hideyoshi’s Seven Skillful Spearmen of Shizugatake’. Yeah, that.

phondupe.bandcamp.com

facebook.com/phondupe