ED KUEPPER

In an exclusive performance, Australian master musician Ed Kuepper is joined by members of the Sydney Chamber Orchestra as he revisits and reinvents selections from his vast and storied repertoire.

Co-founder of seminal proto-punk band The Saints, frontman of the jazz-inflected, post-punk outfit Laughing Clowns and a prolific solo artist in his own right, Kuepper’s influential 40-year career has seen him rise from a groundbreaking young punk to a revered musical legend.

Performing live with a string section for the very first time, Kuepper completely rearranges songs spanning his entire catalogue, from The Saints, Laughing Clowns and his illustrious solo career. The interplay between the strings and unexpected electronic elements blurs the line between the acoustic and the electric, and breathes new life into familiar classics.

XYLOURIS WHITE

It’s intense, joyous, rugged music – Ben Ratcliff New York Times  October 2014

Xylouris White, the new outfit for Dirty Three drummer Jim White and Cretan lute player George Xylouris, makes its Australian debut this summer after tours in the US and Europe. They will be performing in the Sydney Festival, Hobart’s MONA / FOMA Festival and a one-off Melbourne headline show.

Both Xylouris and White are setting out on a rare adventure in music. Each continues to be pre-eminent in his field, but both have decided to bring together the best of their very disparate traditions into a new kind of universal music.

Emerging from Australia’s fertile post-punk scene, Jim White has become one of the most beloved and instantly recognizable drummers of today. Best known for his long-running role in Dirty Three, Jim is a powerful and original player who has flourished in many settings, having collaborated, toured and recorded with a wide array of brilliant artists over the years, including  Bill Callahan, Cat Power, Will Oldham and PJ Harvey .

George Xylouris is Crete’s most loved and inventive lutenist, having taken his instrument from a mainly rhythmic role to an excitingly melodic one. He and Jim met through mutual friends on the Melbourne music scene when Xylouris was living in Australia in the early ‘90s. George sat in with Dirty Three on occasion. Later White and Xylouris accompanied Cretan lyra master Psarandonis on a couple of tours before forming Xylouris White. Through a series of live performances and recording sessions in Greece, Australia, and New York City, the duo forged a new sound.

Xylouris makes the lute a lead instrument—a trait he has in common with White, whose drumming often takes a collaborative, participatory role in his work with other musicians.  New Yorker  Sept 4 2014

Both are extraordinary musicians. From a distance, in market terms, one is a traditional artist and the other a nontraditional one. . Onstage… they look and play like brothers.…the two men have created a hybrid form that they both seem born to…Their music starts with old Cretan forms … and spreads outward into loose, sympathetic improvisations of uncertain length, the kind of thing that has been at the center of each man’s music for a long time.

New York Times  October 2014

GOATS the debut album for Xylouris White completes the picture. Produced by Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, it brings together these varied and inspired personalities to create something undeniably fresh and impossible to categorise.

Xylouris’ playing is a sombrely beautiful thing… White, is such a presence on the kit that his percussion has the sense of a lead instrument. Guy Picciotto produces, flatly and cleanly in a way that plays to the music’s strengths. UNCUT October 2014

Video: Psarandonis Syrto

Tickets for all Australian shows are on sale now.

The interplay between these two unparalleled musicians makes for an exhilarating, barrier-smashing live show unlike anything you have ever seen – Sydney Festival Programme

MOGWAI

Six years after their last headline tour of Australia and five years since their Harvest Festival appearances sonic-architects Mogwai finally return to Australia for an all headline tour.

As befits their wide-screen nature the six-piece Glaswegian outfit won’t be doing things by halves either, taking in a two-night stand at Perth International Arts Festival (with special guest: Dinosaur J frontman J Mascis), a headline spot at Adelaide Festival‘s Thebarton Theatre, debut performances at both the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall and Melbourne’s famed Hamer Hall, a return slot at the Tivoli in Brisbane PLUS the band’s first ever visit to New Zealand – how’s that for stamping your authority!

Almost 20 years since their inception Mogwai have carved out a niche entirely their own – often copied but never bettered – that has seen the band release eight (largely) instrumental and hugely influential studio albums (including this years UK top ten debut Rave Tapes), live albums, compilations, film soundtracks (including Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait and The Fountain) while most recently Mogwai were commissioned to provide the score for SBS TV series The Returned a/k/a Les Revenant.

“It concerns a group of dead individuals who return – not as archetypal zombies, but seemingly exactly as they were – to live in their former communities. Gradually, though, things start to unravel, the creeping unease bolstered brilliantly by this sinister Mogwai score.” – The Guardian July 2013

Live, Mogwai‘s shows are legendary taking the audience from a whisper to a scream, from darkness to light as wave after wave of sound comes crashing around them taking the listener on the most epic of journeys.

Just getting better and better the band incorporate so many sounds and textures into their music that it would take for ever to describe. There is a serious imagination at play here with songs sometimes hooking around a fierce almost Stooges style riff and then descending into a spooked neo silence before exploding with a genuine danger or twisting around some electronic loop. – Louder Than War June 2014

No better example of the above than Mogwai’s performance of their 1997 track Mogwai Fear Satan captured live @ Royal Concert Hall in January this year.

Mogwai Fear Satan

Tickets for this most anticipated of tours are on sale Friday November 7th (except where noted).

THE POP GROUP

“It’s one of those moments when the cogs of your mind shift and your life is going to irreversibly change forever” Nick Cave on hearing The Pop Group for the first time.

Post-punk originals The Pop Group make their Australian debut this February performing at Adelaide Festival and for headline shows in Sydney & Melbourne.

Formed as teenagers in 1977, The Pop Group fused black funk, free jazz, dub, political protest and punk rock energy into a heady cocktail neatly coined as post-punk or in the bands own words “end-of-the-world-music”. Their debut album Y produced by dub-reggae legend Denis Bovell and featuring the the classics ‘She is Beyond Good & Evil’ and ‘We Are Time’ is rightly considered a masterpiece and proved massively influential, not the least on Nick Cave and the early work of The Birthday Party.

The anthemic ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ would follow along with 2nd album For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder and early works compilation We Are Time, before, in 1980, the band would implode – such intensity not meant to last.

“The Pop Group…blazed a trail that few, if any, have had the imagination or the bravado to follow.” – The Guardian (UK)

In the years that followed the respective members went on their own respective career paths: singer Mark Stewart with his band The Mafia embarked on a lengthy solo career producing further ground breaking work for Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound label and Mute records, as he would with drummer Bruce Smith in the New Age Steppers. Smith would remain constantly active joining The Slits for their second album Return Of The Giant Slits  before reconvening with guitarist Gareth Sager (and Neneh Cherry) in creating the legendary Rip Rig and Panic. Most recently Smith has become a permanent member of John Lydon’s Public Image Limited.

In 2010 though, thirty years after their demise, the call went out and The Pop Group found themselves reforming for the All Tomorrows Parties series of festivals followed by Primavera, Summer Sonic, Off, and Celtic Connections. Then, earlier this year the band announced a reissue campaign that included the first ever digital release for We Are Time and a new compilation, Cabinet Of Curiosities plus the band’s first ever UK headline tour since 1980.

It’s been more than 30 years since The Pop Group last played in Glasgow, but they were worth the wait. We Are All Prostitutes’ harsh, abrasive funk made for the best opening ever, while the Thief of Fire’s fusion of dub, post-punk racket and No Wave skronk was topped by Mark Stewart’s righteous fury. The gig of the year crown might be taken already. Unbelievable. 5/5 Daily Record.

In 2015 The Pop Group will finally make it to Australia. Mark Stewart, Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith are joined by bassist Dan Catsis for shows you cannot miss. Tickets for Sydney and Melbourne are on sale October 20th. Adelaide Festival is on sale now.

Cabinet Of Curiosities and We Are Time are both released October 24th via Shock.

Where There’s A Will
We Are All Prostitues

NENEH CHERRY & ROCKETNUMBERNINE+

Neneh Cherry has achieved a lot in her 25+ years in the music industry and is widely considered as a true music icon. It’s hard to believe then that Neneh Cherry has never performed in Australia… That’s all set to change with the announcement of Cherry’s first ever Australian/NZ tour next year – and she couldn’t be more excited: “This is a deeply meaningful moment for me. I have a strong and lengthy attachment to many folks from your part of the World, so does my whole family. Whenever I have been through doing promo (in Australasia), there has never quite been enough time to do some shows too, so this series of upcoming shows is LONG overdue!!!  Should be a LOT of fun”

Venues include the Festival Gardens in Perth, the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne’s Hamer Hall with tickets for all shows on-sale 9.00am November 10^th.

After a hiatus of 18 years Neneh Cherry released her 4th solo album ‘Blank Project’ in February 2014 to a chorus of praise for her creative reinvention. Blank Project’ was produced by UK electronic wonderkid Four Tet, and features Neneh’s voice backed by just two instruments, the skeletal drums and synth duo of RocketNumberNine AKA Ben and Tom Page. The result is a brooding backdrop that nods to anarchic free jazz, post-punk, sound system culture and the trip hop Neneh was so instrumental in incubating.

‘Cherry at her fierce best’ – Sydney Morning Herald
4.5/5 Album of the Week – The Music
Album of the week – 3RRR Radio
Feature Album – 2SER Radio
Feature Album – RTR FM
4/5 – The Australia

On the eve of her debut tour down under the label has also announced the release of a Deluxe Edition of Blank Project featuring the album proper on one CD with all the best re-mixes from electronic artists Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, Ricardo Villalobos, Cooly G and Loco Dice to name a few, on the other, Its’ easy to see why Neneh Cherry 2014 and beyond is such an exciting prospect…

Don’t miss the first ever Australian tour by Neneh Cherry with rocketnumbernine+ February / March 2015