Mistletone

ETRAN DE L’AÏR TOUR DATES:
MARCH 9 + 10: WOMADELAIDE. Tickets on sale here.
+ more to be announced

“I love having a special evening with my brothers/
A moment when we’re all happy, smiling and drinking tea together”
– Etran de L’Aïr, “Erkimidiwane”

Mistletone proudly presents the debut Australian tour by Etran de L’Aïr, the STARS OF THE AÏR, the longest running wedding band in AGADEZ, capital of Tuareg guitar. With a new album of sun-schlazed desert sound, 100% SAHARA GUITAR, Etran de L’Aïr are ready to take on the world, with those swinging melodies, like a sandstorm blowing in from across the sea.

Etran de L’Aïr are 100% SAHARA, and that goes same for the band, all sons of AGADEZ, including brothers Moussa, Abdoulaye, and Abdourahamane, and their dear friend, the youngest of the group, Alghabid. All the brothers write and play guitar, swapping out instruments while Alghabid keeps the FOUR ON THE FLOOR.

Their first album, No.1, brought their music to critics and fans. Their second album, Agadez, sent them into the international touring circuit. And now they’re back to claim the throne, with their first studio album, 100% SAHARA GUITAR. And what a sound it is. Recorded in sunny studios on the WEST COAST, the brothers take that old Agadez sound to new levels, adding even more guitars into the mix, weaving layers of reverb-laden melodies and shimmering harmonies into a tapestry of sound. How much guitar can they fit into one record? The answer is 100%.

“It feels somehow wrong though to refer to the particularly vibrant brand of Tuareg rock played by Etran de L’Aïr as blues, desert or otherwise. There’s an exuberance in their adrenaline-fueled anthems and frenzied jams that resists the term. The band has its roots as a touring wedding band in central Niger, and the group’s songs more often than not feel buoyed by the ecstasy of celebration, conjuring scenes of late nights dancing beneath the desert stars. 100% Sahara Guitar is the clearest vision we’ve had yet of Etran de L’Aïr’s ability to evoke such experiences” – Aquarium Drunkard.

Etran de L’Aïr (or “stars of the Aïr region”) welcomes you to Agadez, the capital city of Saharan rock. Playing for over 25 years, Etran has emerged as stars of the local wedding circuit. Beloved for their dynamic repertoire of hypnotic solos and sun schlazed melodies, Etran stakes out a place for Agadez guitar music. Playing a sound that invokes the desert metropolis, “Agadez” celebrates the sounds of all the dynamism of a hometown wedding.

Etran is a family band composed of brothers and cousins, all born and raised in the small neighborhood of Abalane, just in the shadow of the grand mosque. Sons of nomadic families that settled here in the 1970s fleeing the droughts, they all grew up in Agadez. The band was formed in 1995 when current band leader Moussa “Abindi” Ibra was only 9 years old. “We only had one acoustic guitar,” he explains, “and for percussion, we hit a calabash with a sandal.” Over the decades, the band painstakingly pieced together gear to form their band and built an audience by playing everywhere, for everyone. “It was difficult. We would walk to gigs by foot, lugging all our equipment, carrying a small PA and guitars on our backs, 25 kilometers into the bush, to play for free…there’s nowhere in Agadez we haven’t played.”

From the days of the Trans-Saharan caravan in the 14th century to a modern-day stopover for Europe-bound migrants, Agadez is a city that stands at the crossroads, where people and ideas come together. Understandably, it’s here where one of the most ambitious Tuareg guitar has taken hold. Agadez’s style is the fastest, with frenetic electric guitar solos, staccato crash of full drum kits, and flamboyant dancing guitarists. Agadez is the place where artists come to cut their teeth in a lucrative and competitive winner-take-all scene. Guitar bands are an integral part of the social fabric, playing in weddings, baptisms, and political rallies, as well as the occasional concert.

Whereas other Tuareg guitarists look to Western rock, Etran de L’Aïr play in a pan-African style that is emblematic of their hometown, citing a myriad of cultural influences, from Northern Malian blues, Hausa bar bands, to Congolese Soukous. It’s perhaps this quality that makes them so beloved in Agadez. “We play for the Tuareg, the Toubou, the Zarma, the Hausa,” Abindi explains. “When you invite us, we come and play.” Their music is rooted in celebration, and invokes the exuberance of an Agadez wedding, with an overwhelming abundance of guitars, as simultaneous solos playfully pass over one another with a restrained precision, forceful yet never overindulgent.

Recorded at home in Agadez with a mobile studio, their eponymous album stays close to the band’s roots. Over a handful of takes, in a rapid-fire recording session, “Agadez” retains all the energy of a party. Their message too is always close to home. Tchingolene (“Tradition”) recalls the nomad camps, with a modern take on traditional takamba rhythms transposed to guitars. The dreamy ballad Toubouk Ine Chihoussay (“The Flower of Beauty”) dives into call and response lyrics, and solos that dance effortlessly over the frets. On other tracks like Imouwizla (“Migrants”), Etran addresses immigration with the driving march parallels the nomads’ plight with travelers crossing the desert for Europe. Yet even at its most serious, Etran’s music is engaged and dynamic, reminding us that music can transmit a message while lighting up a celebration. This is music for dancing, after all.

JOHN GRANT TOUR DATES:
MARCH 8 + 9: WOMADELAIDE. Tickets on sale here.
+ more to be announced

John Grant is an American singer, musician, and songwriter who holds both American and Icelandic citizenship. He first became known as the co-founder, lead singer, pianist, and primary songwriter for The Czars, and has collaborated with musical and artistic acts from Elton John and Tracey Thorn to the BBC’s Philharmonic Orchestra. John Grant is the recipient of many awards and accolades, most recently a 5 star live review in The Guardian, who wrote: “John Grant’s songwriting feeds on radical contrasts. He anatomises the ugliest depressive episodes and the bitterest break-ups with exquisite melodies and a chocolatey baritone. He likes his beauty to have jagged edges”. John Grant likens most recent album, The Art of The Lie, to the sumptuous Vangelis soundtrack for Bladerunner, or The Carpenters if John Carpenter were also a member. While undeniably a John Grant record, nestling humour into tragedy, bleeding anger into compassion, there is a musical ambition and nerve to The Art of the Lie which offsets its most political and personal moments. 

“Heartbreak; self-hatred; addiction; homophobia; religion: nothing was off the table. Fourteen years and a slew of high-profile collaborations later (Elton John, Kylie Minogue, and the late Sinead O’Connor among them), his new LP The Art of the Lie still hews to this same confessional ethos” – THE INDEPENDENT 

John Grant began thinking about The Art of The Lie, his sixth album, in the autumn of 2022. Earlier that year, John had been introduced to Ivor Guest, producer and composer at Grace Jones’ Southbank show, the finale of her Meltdown Festival. They began talking about two records Guest had worked on, Hurricane for Jones, Prohibition for Brigitte Fontaine. “Grace and Brigitte are two very big artists for me,” says Grant. “I love the albums he did for them. Hurricane is an indispensable piece of Grace’s catalogue.” An idea was sparked. “I said, I really think you should do this next record with me. He said, I think you’re right.”

The result is John Grant’s most opulent, cinematic, luxurious album yet: The Art of The Lie. As the title suggests, the lyrical ingenuity counterweighted under all this considered musical largesse is as dark as its production is epic and bold. Ivor Guest and his cast-list of storied musicians have brought the drama, flecks of intrigue as beguiling as Laurie Anderson or The Art of Noise. John Grant has earthed it in deeply felt humanity and pitch-black realism. “The clothing that it’s dressed up in makes it more palatable,” he says. “It helps the bitter pill go down. Music and humour are how I’ve always dealt with the dark side of life. Come to think of it, it’s how I deal with the good side too.”

The hard juxtaposition of beauty and cruelty makes for compelling listening on a record that ties childhood trauma to hardened adult after-effects, twinning both to the political malaise of America 2024, a country being drawn to the precipice of its own destruction. “We were allowed to feel like we belonged for a couple of seconds,” says Grant. “Not anymore.”

The Art of the Lie is a considered title, taken from the song ‘Meek AF’, itself a lyrical inversion of the biblical edict that the meek shall inherit the earth. Against a lubricated groove, some Zapp-esque talk box and a spidery keyboard figure, Grant sets out his understanding of the new ethics of America. “Trump’s book The Art of the Deal is now seen by MAGA disciples as just another book of the Bible and Trump himself as a messiah sent from heaven. Because, God wants you to be rich.”

“This album is in part about the lies people espouse and the brokenness it breeds and how we are warped and deformed by these lies”, he says. “For example, the Christian Nationalist movement has formed an alliance with White Supremacist groups and together they have taken over the Republican party and see LGBTQ+ people and non-whites as genetically and even mentally inferior and believe all undesirables must be forced either to convert to Christianity and adhere to the teachings of the Bible as interpreted by them or they must be removed in order that purity be restored to ‘their’ nation. They now believe Democracy is not the way to achieve these goals. Any sort of pretence of tolerance that may have seemed to develop over the past several decades has all but vanished. It feels like the U.S. in is free-fall mode.”

Another abiding theme for the record is parenthood. Three songs, ‘Father’ (“one of the best I’ve ever written”), with its redolent echoes of the stab and haunt of Pale Green Ghosts, ‘Mother and Son’ and the hymnal ‘Daddy’, which explodes from a mordant chrysalis verse to its colourful butterfly chorus, make up the spine of the record. “Father contains both the adult and the child. Daddy is from the perspective of the child. I’m talking about the way that I relate to men as I go out into the world, because of the confusion I was brought up in about what it means to be a man.”

This bleak confusion underpins a particularly emotional new chapter in the novelistic solo life of John Grant. The artist is building a world, with new episodes augmented by new textures. In this respect, the presence of Ivor Guest is almost like a typesetter’s art. How best to convey the sad overview that the meek will not just be denied the world, but will be made its optimum scapegoat?  

“We could often only work for two weeks at a time, it was so intense,” says Grant, before recalling one episode in the studio. “Ivor assembled a team of incredible musicians. Dave Okumu [from The Invisible] is such an incredible guitar player. He came into the room when we were playing the demo of ‘Father’ and just immediately started doing what you hear on the record. Robin Mullarkey played fretless bass and blew my mind, and the very talented Seb Rochford was on drum detail. There were a lot of moments of magic from everyone.” 

The album also features a guest appearance from Scottish singer Rachel Sermanni who provides the beautiful and moving backing vocals on ‘Mother And Son’. Among its unsettling political charge, a record of sometimes spectral beauty, sometimes elegant funk, like opener ‘All That School For Nothing’ and irresistible first single, ‘It’s a Bitch’, emerges. 

“Father is a pretty simple track, musically speaking,” he explains. “It’s not a complicated composition. But it still feels very rich and layered because we took our time with it. We had to. It couldn’t be done quickly. To me, it’s always about distilling things down to their essential components.”

Grant had been thinking of records that had a profound effect on him while making The Art Of The Lie. “The first time I heard ‘Time Its Time’, the last song on The Colour Of Spring by Talk Talk; or The Night of the Swallow by Kate Bush, on The Dreaming; or some of Jane Siberry’s material on The Speckless Sky or anything by Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance; those were important moments for me in music. And of course there is a bit of the Devo spirit in everything I do in some way or another. There’s a lot of amazing humour in their music but they were also serious as a heart attack. I guess this is one of the important themes in my life; it’s about moments and being able to recognize them and be in them while they are happening in spite of whatever else is going on. It’s being in a taxi, the most normal situation in the world and seeing the grandeur, the sheer weight and majesty of a big city passing by, staring in awe. The absurdity of the world on the outside juxtaposed with the world taking place on the inside. That fascinates me, the ability to capture what it really feels like to be a human.”

A. SAVAGE TOUR DATES:

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 15: MELBOURNE @ HOWLER with special guests Eggy. Tickets on sale here. * full band
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 16: CASTLEMAINE @ TOWN FOLK FESTIVAL. Tickets on sale here. * all ages * full band
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 19: SYDNEY @ PHOENIX CENTRAL PARK. Ballot now open. * solo
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 20: SYDNEY @ OXFORD ART FACTORY with special guests The Lewers. Tickets on sale here. * full band
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 22: BRISBANE @ WAREHOUSE 25 (venue upgrade) with special guest McKisko. Presented by Jet Black Cat Music. Tickets on sale here. * solo
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23: ANGLESEA @ The Sound Doctor with special guests Emma Russack + Lachlan Denton. Tickets on sale here. * solo
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 24: CANBERRA: GANG GANG CAFE with special guests Lily Morris + Max Sturm. Tickets on sale here.* solo

Mistletone proudly presents A. Savage (Parquet Courts), playing songs from his albums Several Songs About Fire, Thawing Dawn, and more. 

One of the singular indie-rock songwriters of our time,  Parquet Courts frontman A.Savage returns to Australia from self-imposed exile in Paris to tour his new album Several Songs About Fire, out via Rough Trade / Remote Control.

Andrew said; “I imagine myself playing these songs in a small club that is slowly burning. Fire is something you have to escape from, and in a way this album is about escaping from something. This album is a burning building, and these songs are things I’d leave behind to save myself.“

Produced by John Parish in Bristol, Several Songs About Fire features Savage’s close friends Cate Le Bon and her band mates, plus Jack Cooper (Modern Nature, Ultimate Painting). It’s a psychic odyssey, a singular irreverence stitched together by Savage’s outsize gifts as a lyricist and observer, a quality Parish calls “an emotional openness guarded by a laconic wit.” 

Worrying questions of wealth and poverty, self and other, Savage displays the poet’s gift of knowing when to narrate and when to vanish, leaving the listener to their own emotional privacy rather than instructing them how to feel.

After more than a decade in New York, Savage left the city and the United States, marking his exit with a masterpiece of maturity and a worthy corollary to his first solo venture, 2017’s Thawing Dawn. The intimacy of these tracks makes Several Songs about Fire a devotional study in tradition — and something all Savage’s own.

Several Songs About Fire stands as an act of nearly libidinal rebellion against a moment when so much of life is the blue light of screens. This is an album whose topic is no less than the sublime: the moments in which a sensory experience becomes a holiness or possession of its own, and the self floats above it.

“His voice is unmissable, iconic and, dare I say it, generational” – PASTE
“Like all his albums, it is ultimately hopeful — delicate and melancholic in some places, utopian and playful in others, poetic and affecting throughout” – THE FADER

KIM GORDON ~ THE COLLECTIVE TOUR DATES:

SYDNEY: Thursday July 18: Volume at Art Gallery of NSW with Eleanor Jawurlngali Triad. Tickets on sale here.
Friday July 19: Volume at Art Gallery of NSW with Tina Havelock Stevens and Liberty Live. * SOLD OUT
ADELAIDE: Saturday July 20: Unsound at Illuminate Adelaide, Dom Polski Centre.TICKETS
BRISBANE: Sunday July 21: Open Frame, Brisbane Powerhouse with Rusted Satellites DJs. Tickets on sale here.
MELBOURNE: Wednesday July 24: Northcote Theatre with Teether. * SOLD OUT
MELBOURNE: Thursday July 25: Northcote Theatre with The Native Cats. Tickets on sale here.

Mistletone & Triple R proudly present legendary musician and multi-disciplinary artist Kim Gordon, bringing The Collective tour to Australia.

Kim Gordon’s second solo album The Collective (out now on Matador) advances her world building with producer Justin Raisen’s (Lil Yachty, John Cale, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Charli XCX, Yves Tumor) damaged, blown out dub and trap constructions playing the foil to Gordon’s intuitive word collages and hooky mantras, conjuring communication, commercial sublimation and sensory overload.

“On this record, I wanted to express the absolute craziness I feel around me right now,” Kim Gordon said. “This is a moment when nobody really knows what truth is, when facts don’t necessarily sway people, when everyone has their own side, creating a general sense of paranoia. To soothe, to dream, escape with drugs, TV shows, shopping, the internet, everything is easy, smooth, convenient, branded. It made me want to disrupt, to follow something unknown, maybe even to fail.” 

Since co-founding the seminal Sonic Youth in the early 80s, Kim Gordon has remained at the nexus of music, art and (more recently) books and film. To quote Kathleen Hanna: “Kim Gordon is kind of like a shark, in that she needs to keep swimming. She needs to keep making art. It’s just who she is. What Kim’s doing is totally, absolutely normal. What’s not normal is when women or people who are marginalized in other ways have stopped making art for reasons having to do with ageism or sexism. We’re not witnessing a miracle, we’re witnessing what happens when the thing that’s supposed to happen is just allowed to happen.” 

Kim Gordon’s debut album No Home Record (2019) received wide-ranging critical acclaim from The New York Times (“The art star queen of New York cool”), The Guardian (***** “brilliantly weds noise textures to pop dynamics”), Sunday Times (“brutally good – Album Of The Week”), Vogue (“immediate, loose, and liberated….as ferocious as she’s ever been”) and Pitchfork (“thrilling solo debut lives at the vanguard of sound and performance – Best New Music”). Her artistic output includes her 2015 memoir Girl In A Band which debuted in the #1 spot on the NY Times Bestseller List; acting in Gus Van Sant’s film Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot; making music as one half of Body/Head alongside Bill Nace; opening multiple solo exhibitions at internationally renowned museums; and hosting a public sale of her iconic wardrobe, with all proceeds going to the Downtown Women’s Centre in Los Angeles.  

“What Gordon has proved in this past decade is that her art, her life, her cool…has never been contingent upon anyone else. With time, and through continued art-making, she has righted her own ship and pointed it once again in the direction of thrillingly uncharted waters.” – NEW YORK TIMES

“The new album’s daring beats and improvised guitar are marks of a lifelong radical still at the peak of her powers.” – NEW YORKER

“vicious and brilliant..a maelstrom of mundane thoughts and funny asides and flashes of pure rage whipped into a heavy, unnerving fog.. Few are better equipped than Gordon—who, at 70, is still cooler, smarter, and more fearless than most—to guide us through” – PITCHFORK

“This album is an act of legacy mutation. The idea is to obliterate the brand. Unless, for a hero of the counterculture like Gordon, obliterating the brand is, in fact, the brand.” – THE WASHINGTON POST

“By turns surprising and disconcerting, listening to Gordon’s radically inventive songs on this album play as an apt distillation of what it’s like to live right now” – NPR

“For decades in Sonic Youth and on her own, Gordon’s exuded her own kind of avant-garde cool, but forging her own lane through thrashing, trash-rap? We are not ready for this shaking hell.” – NPR

“Decades later, and forever, Gordon’s art is not for the faint of heart.” – ASSOCIATED PRESS

“She’s simultaneously remote and larger-than-life, a paragon of cool.” – V MAGAZINE

“A marvelously weird left-turn” – PAPER MAGAZINE

“An immersive, entrancing listen — music fit for both exhilaration and examination.”– STEREOGUM

“As rappers search to redefine rock stardom, Gordon is offering a path forward simply by reasserting her pedigree.” – FADER

“The Collective is an album that engages with the contemporary music landscape from the perspective of someone who couldn’t give less of a fuck about being accepted into it” – FADER

“perhaps the most caustic, confrontational music of her decades-long career.” – EXCLAIM!

“A potent distillation of the multifaceted nature of Gordon as a songwriter, auteur, and iconoclast.” – UPROXX

“The former Sonic Youth bassist’s concepts are intrinsic and rapturous on her second solo album, rendered in blankets of feedback and nonsense phrases that are expressionistic and accessible all the same.”  – PASTE MAGAZINE

“one thing is for certain: Kim Gordon will always be making fantastic music to lose yourself in” – PASTE MAGAZINE

“a monolith of creativity and a pivot away from pure noise rock into unique sonic territory that marks another highlight in her ever-growing legacy” – FLOOD MAGAZINE

“she’s not remaking herself to stay relevant — it’s the rest of the music and pop culture world finally catching up to her” – ALLMUSIC

“‘The Collective’ rivals that of Sonic Youth’s strongest albums” – GLIDE MAGAZINE

“Riotous” – TOWN & COUNTRY

“The indie-music icon is still making art after four decades, and she’s only gotten cooler with time” – LA MAGAZINE

The Collective:
There was a space in Kim Gordon’s No Home Record. It might not have been a home and it might not have been a record, but I seem to recall there was a space. Boulevards, bedrooms, instruments were played, recorded, the voice and its utterances, straining a way through the rhythms and the chords, threaded in some shared place, we met there, the guitar came too, there fell a peal of cymbals, driving on the music. We listened, we turned our back to the walls, slithered through the city at night. Kim Gordon’swords in our ears, her eyes, she saw, she knew, she remembered, she liked. We were moving somewhere. No home record. Moving.

Now I’m listening to The Collective. And I’m thinking, what has been done to this space, how has she treated it, it’s not here the same way, not quite. I mean, not at all. On this evidence, it splintered, glittered, crashed and burned. It’s dark here. Can I love you with my eyes open? “It’s Dark Inside.” Haunted by synthesised voices bodiless. Planes of projections. Mirrors get your gun and the echo of a well-known tune, comes in liminal, yet never not hanging around, part of the atmosphere, fading in and out, like she says – Grinding at the edges. Grinding at us all, grinding us away. Hurting, scraping. Sediments, layers, of recorded emissions, mined, twisted, refracted. That makes the music. This shimmering, airless geology, agitated, quarried, cries made in data, bounced down underground tunnels, reaching our ears. We recalled it – but not as a memory, more like how you recall a product, when it’s flawed.

She sings ‘Shelf Warmer’ so it sounds like shelf life, it sounds radioactive, inside our relationships, juddering, the beats chattering, edgy, the pain of love in the gift shop, assembled in hollow booms, in scratching claps. Non-reciprocal gift giving, there is a return policy. But – novel idea – A hand and a kiss. How about that. Disruption.

I would say that Kim Gordon is thinking about how thinking is, now. Conceptual artists do that, did that. ‘I Don’t Miss My Mind.’ The record opens with a list, but the list is under the title ‘BYE BYE.’ The list says milk thistle, dog sitter…. And much more. She’s leaving. Why is the list anxious? How divisive is mascara? It’s on the list. I am packing, listening to the list. Is it mine, or hers.

She began seeking images from behind her closed eyes. Putting them to music. But I need to keep my eyes open as I walk the streets, with noise cancelled by the airbuds rammed in my ears. quiet, aware, quiet, aware, they chant at me. What could be going through Kim’s head as she goes through mine?

– Written by English artist Josephine Pryde

BLONDE REDHEAD TOUR DATES:

FRIDAY, JUNE 14: MELBOURNE: RISING @ FORUM MELBOURNE with special guest Georgia Knight. tickets on sale here.
SATURDAY, JUNE 15: SYDNEY: CITY RECITAL HALL with special guest Georgia Lines. tickets on sale here.
TUESDAY, JUNE 18: PERTH: THE RECHABITE with special guest Artfool. Tickets on sale here.
THURSDAY, JUNE 20: BRISBANE: OPEN SEASON @ PRINCESS THEATRE with special guest Baby Cool. Tickets on sale here.

Mistletone proudly announces Blonde Redhead’s first Australian tour in over 13 years. The legendary dream-pop band of Kazu Makino and twin brothers Simone + Amedeo Pace returns with their first album in almost a decade, the sumptuously received Sit Down for Dinner. 

This moment finds Blonde Redhead returning to Australia, 30 years since their incandescent debut, and 13 years since their last visit for Laneway Festival. The band brings with them brilliant new music — as perfect an addition as any fan could wish for, to their back catalogue of heady, romantic songs.

Blonde Redhead’s lush contemporary sound – Kazu and Amedeo’s dreamlike vocals floating over a driving, cinematic soundtrack –  has crystallised their stature as “one of the most revered and inventive independent rock bands of the last decade” (Los Angeles Times).

A band who has never stopped pushing forward, Blonde Redhead are celebrated as a classic band of our time, their masterpiece 23 recently named by Pitchfork as one of the Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time.

• “On their first album in nearly a decade, and following a wave of viral resurgence, the NYC avant-rock vets return with their warmest, most welcoming music yet” – PITCHFORK
• “A record of deftly anxious songs about loss … Blonde Redhead’s finest work” – THE GUARDIAN
• MOJO – ★★★★
• THE TIMES – ★★★★
• UNCUT – 8 OUT OF 10
• “Devastatingly gorgeous” – THE LINE OF BEST FIT
• “Blonde Redhead’s first album in nearly a decade is one of their best” – BROOKLYN VEGAN ALBUM OF THE WEEK 

“Life changes fast,” Joan Didion once wrote. “Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

When Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino encountered this passage from Didion’s memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, in the early pandemic months, Makino was thinking of her own parents far away in Japan; the then-lost ritual of congregating for dinner with family; and the heavy, omnipresent feeling that life could change in the instant for any of us. She narrated these feelings on a pair of songs which helped title Blonde Redhead’s 10th full-length: “It’s sort of about death, but the music is so alive and groovy,” Makino says.  

The title Sit Down for Dinner has a separate resonance for the Italian members of Blonde Redhead, the Milan-born twin brothers Amedeo Pace (singer / multi-instrumentalist) and Simone Pace (drummer). “Culturally, dinner is important to us,” Simone says of the non-negotiable family ritual. “It’s a moment for us to sit down and have time with each other. We grew up that way. I know a lot of people eat and run, eat in front of their TV, or don’t care about it too much — and that’s OK — but we really do.” 

Dinner has long been a sacred ritual for Blonde Redhead as a band as well; when they’re on tour or rehearsing, they always share a meal, no matter what. Sit Down for Dinner is a meticulous and immersive testament to the unique internal logic Blonde Redhead have refined over their three-decade existence, characterised by that sense of persistent togetherness.

Formed in 1993, after leaving their homelands of Japan and Italy, Blonde Redhead quickly found a place in the New York indie underground. Their early releases on Smells Like (Steve Shelley’s label), Touch & Go and 4AD, traced an arc from angular indie-rock to cosmopolitan art pop. The trio might have been a quintessential ’90s band, if not for the fact that they continuously kept going, growing, never confined to any era but the present.

Sit Down for Dinner is charged with the inescapable struggles of adulthood: communication breakdown in enduring relationships, wondering which way to turn, holding onto your dreams. Fittingly, Sit Down for Dinner is a pleasure, with the ease of new conversation among familiar friends.

Crucial to that equation are Blonde Redhead’s innate harmonic sensibilities, which Kazu calls the core of the band. “We have a language we have kept,” she adds. “We try to change rhythms, concepts, and sounds. But that harmonic sensibility has stayed the same. It hits the same part of your heart.”

bar italia TOUR DATES:

JUNE 4: SYDNEY @ Oxford Art Factory with special guest Makeda * SOLD OUT
JUNE 6: BRISBANE @ Black Bear Lodge with special guest Scraps.On-sale here.
JUNE 8: MELBOURNE @ Day Tripper, RISING * SOLD OUT
JUNE 9: MELBOURNE @ Howler with special guest Acopia * SOLD OUT

Mistletone proudly presents the debut Australian tour for trio bar italia. The London based three-piece of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton bring their two full length 2023 releases The Twits and Tracey Denim (Matador / Remote Control) to RISING’s Day Tripper lineup at Melbourne Town Hall, plus club shows in Melbourne, Sydney + Brisbane.

bar italia’s economical yet evocative song craft takes raucous, mystic, unkempt, occasionally sinister, and wholly committed turns. Songs like ‘my little tony‘, with its in-the-red riff and excitable hooks, the cathartic four-on-the-floor of ‘world’s greatest emoter’ and the festival tent psychedelia of ‘Hi-fiver‘ need little in the way of exposition – these are exhilarating rock songs, if wayward and strange.

Other bar italia moments see the band’s increasingly signature, three-act mini-dramas moving into previously uncharted territory. Cristante, Fehmi and Fenton can each manifest a different melody, mood, and cadence – at times overlapping and linear, at others unexpectedly divergent – often within the space of thirty seconds, a tag team rooted in shared language and kinship. ‘Jelsy‘, for instance, plays out like a conversation between friends over wistful, buzzing country blues, the alternating voices at points comforting, wry and hopelessly yearning. The sinuous, slow-burning waltz of ‘twist‘ stands out in its bare lyricism and seems to invite each band member’s individual take on a confessional.

 bar italia’s Matador debut Tracey Denim was notable for its compact 2-3 minute compositions, horizontal and open-ended tracks like ‘Shoo‘ ebb and flow, moving from reptilian dive-bar soloing to a palpitating two-note piano coda. ‘glory-hunter’ takes playful twists and turns before ending up somewhere entirely different from where it started. ‘Real house wibes (desperate house vibes)’ and ‘que surprise‘ imply sleepless, noirish misadventure, while at the other end of the light spectrum, ‘sounds like you had to be there‘ features some of the band’s most sweetly optimistic musical gestures yet. Closer ‘bibs‘ is a rare instance where all three can be heard in unison, as a procession of ghostly chords and lacerating feedback bookends the group’s most adventurous and rich set to date.

It followed a string of word-of-mouth releases on Dean Blunt’s World Music label and received widespread attention from publications including The Guardian (“one of the albums of 2023 so far”), The Times (“excellent debut album”), The Observer(“Artist To Watch”), NME (“a lasting impression that’s all of their own making“), The Quietus (“endlessly evocative”) and Pigeons And Planes (“quickly establishing themselves as one of the most enticing upcoming bands”). Single ‘Nurse!‘ was playlisted on BBC 6 Music and received spins from BBC Radio 1, Absolute Radio and NTS. 

MEMORIALS TOUR DATES:

SATURDAY JUNE 8: RISING: Day Tripper at Melbourne Town Hall * SOLD OUT!
SUNDAY JUNE 9: DAREBIN ARTS CENTRE with special guest Hantu. Tickets on sale here.
TUESDAY JUNE 11: PHOENIX CENTRAL PARK, SYDNEY. Ballot now open.

Mistletone proudly presents the first ever AU tour by MEMORIALS ~ the new duo of Verity Susman (Electrelane) + Matthew Simms (Wire). MEMORIALS are part of the brilliant Day Tripper lineup at RISING and will also play a Melbourne headline show at Darebin Arts Centre plus a Sydney show at Phoenix Central Park.

As a duo, MEMORIALS multi-instrumentalists Verity Susman (Electrelane) and Matthew Simms (Wire, Better Corners, It Hugs Back, UUUU) cover plenty of ground on stage, juggling instruments in a set up resembling that of a 5-piece band. Their sound touches on the many points for which they are known, veering from melodic songwriting to psychedelic noise, free jazz freakouts, tape loops and drones, and then back again. Their debut double album – Music For Film: Tramps! & Women Against The Bomb – is out via The state51 Conspiracy label.

“Both films explore the liminal period when the 80s began to burst from the chrysalis of the 70s, and the exciting, unpredictable music of MEMORIALS reflects the wild creativity and ambition of the time. Technology was democratising music production, and what had once been wild ideas – gender fluidity, postmodernism, feminism – continued their long swim into the mainstream. For Women Against the Bomb, wide-eyed yet inspiring lyrics (“Just as winter comes to spring… We know that peace will come”) tumble over a sugar rush of guitars. Tramps! is less accessible but just as powerful, especially during the full-pelt title track or Feel of Time’s feral, grinding chaos. Each album is like a trove of tapes uncovered after 40 years, one in the city, the other the countryside. How Susman and Simms present these many moods on stage is a problem that should be fun to watch them fathom” – THE GUARDIAN

Mistletone is thrilled to present Julie Byrne, returning to Australia in the wake of her sublime new album, The Greater Wings.

JULIE BYRNE TOUR DATES:

JANUARY 17 + 19: SYDNEY FESTIVAL @ ACO NEILSON. Tickets on sale here.
JANUARY 20: BRISBANE POWERHOUSE @ UNDERGROUND THEATRE. Tickets on sale here.
JANUARY 21: NORTHERN RIVERS @ COORABELL HALL. Tickets on sale here.
JANUARY 24: MELBOURNE @ DAREBIN ARTS CENTRE. Tickets on sale here.
JANUARY 25: CASTLEMAINE @ THEATRE ROYAL. Tickets on sale here.

“A triumph of grace and hope against the odds” – THE GUARDIAN ★★★★★

Julie Byrne is making the most powerful, life-affirming music of her career. Her magnificent new album The Greater Wings is a universally resonant testament to the power of love and friendship to transcend grief and loss.

The follow-up to her stunning 2017 breakthrough album, Not Even Happiness, The Greater Wings became one of this year’s most rapturously reviewed albums. This deeply moving album is a celebration of friendship; Eric Littmann, Julie Byrne’s longtime creative partner and producer of her previous album Not Even Happiness, died suddenly at age 31, before the album was finished. Recording was finished in the Catskills of New York with producer Alex Somers (Sigur Rós, Julianna Barwick).

Julie Byrne has emerged from a deeply trying and generative period with the most lustrous music of her career. While they hold the plasticity of grief and trauma, the songs are universally resonant, unbridled in their devotion and joy, held up by the love and alliance of a chosen family.

With her hushed vocals, sparse instrumentation and gently plucked guitar, Julie Byrne has a way of drawing you in close. Onstage with her musical companions, Byrne is a spellbinding presence, able to transform any room into her front porch. As a performer, Julie carries an aura of warmth and vulnerability, an innate musicality connected to the natural world; there is real gravity in her ability to make that a shared feeling.

For nearly a decade, Julie Byrne has moved through the world as a characteristically private artist largely outside the public eye. Raised in New York State, now living in New York City, she has counted many places as home.

In the folk lineage of the wanderer, Byrne’s poetic, evocative songcraft pulls imagery from the road and takes its shape from the evolving impressions of friendship, love, and loss. She taught herself guitar after picking it up when her father became ill and could no longer play the instrument himself. She has stocked shelves in supermarkets, and moonlit as a seasonal urban park ranger in Manhattan. 

Most recently, Julie has made a new EP with Taryn Blake Miller and Emily Fontana under the name Laugh Cry Laugh, recorded during the winter of last year, including an original called “Velocity! What About The Inertia!?” and a cover of Jackson Browne’s “These Days.”

Julie Byrne shared her first full-length album in 2014 on the Chicago-based label Orindal. Rooms With Walls and Windows, a collection of intimate front porch psych-folk songs initially released over two separate cassettes, became a true modern-day word-of-mouth DIY success story. It was voted number 7 in MOJO Magazine’s best albums of the year, with the Huffington Post calling it “2014’s Great American Album.” She toured the album internationally, playing a handful of festivals and a host of underground house shows across America, and as her profile rose, she also found her artistic community.

Writing for her next album spread across various seasons and locations, a travelogue culminating with sessions in her childhood home with producer and creative partner Eric Littmann and later in a cabin in New Hampshire where Jake Falby added string parts. Released in 2017 on Basin Rock and Ba Da Bing Records, Not Even Happiness saw widespread acclaim, named Best New Music by Pitchfork, with universal acclaim across the board, including The New York Times, NME, and The Guardian. By year’s end, the record was a staple on best-of lists; Byrne had played an NPR Tiny Desk and began a run of world tours that continued for several years.

Julie will confess the success of Not Even Happiness was unexpected, but its hushed closing track, “I Live Now As A Singer,” did forecast an intention. She knew the open space — occupied by Littmann’s signature palette of synth tones, Falby’s strings, and Byrne’s robust, drifting voice — presented something new and thrilling, something they’d develop as a live band and what would later be understood as the catalyst for material to come.

The Greater Wings — Julie’s debut for Ghostly International and her first album in over six years — builds on this revelatory space at every turn. Navigating themes of grief, intimacy, and transformation, The Greater Wings is a testament to patience and determination, the willingness to transform through the desolation of loss, the vitality of renewal, and the courage to rise, forever changed.

Leaning further into atmospheres both expansive and intimate, the lush, evocative songcraft flows between her signature fingerpicked guitar, synthesiser, and a newly adopted piano, made wider by flourishes of harp and strings. It is the transcendent sound of resource, of friendship that was never without romance, of loyalty that burns from within like a heart on fire, and the life force summoned in unrepeatable moments — raw, gorgeous, and wild.

“My hope for The Greater Wings is that it lives as a love letter to my chosen family and as an expression of the depth of my commitment to our shared future. Being reshaped by grief also has me more aware of what death does not take from me. I commit that to heart, to words, to sound. Music is not bound to any kind of linear time, so in the capacity to record and speak to the future: this is what it felt like to me, when we were simultaneous, alive, occurring all at once. What it has felt like to go up against my edge and push, the love that has made it worth all this fight. These memories are my values, they belong with me.” – Julie Byrne

LONNIE HOLLEY, MOOR MOTHER, IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS TOUR DATES:

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 22: PERTH FESTIVAL. Tickets on sale here.
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 24: MONA FOMA, HOBART. Tickets & info here.
MONDAY FEBRUARY 26: SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE. SOLD OUT!
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 28: MELBOURNE RECITAL CENTRE. Tickets on sale here.

Mistletone proudly presents three of America’s most cosmic and visionary artists, joining forces for an incandescent collaboration. Mystic performer and visual artist Lonnie Holley and prophetic jazz poet Moor Mother both perform with revolutionary free-jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements, who will also share new material from their Impulse! Records debut, ‘Protect Your Light’.

Lonnie Holley and Moor Mother will bring their collaborative chemistry together as well as performing their own, universally acclaimed recent releases — Lonnie Holley’s “Oh Me Oh My”, which was named Best New Music on Pitchfork, and Moor Mother’s “Jazz Codes”, which The Guardian hailed as “a stunning continuum of Black music”.

The interwoven energies of the three artists add up to a magical, life-affirming brew of cosmic jazz, Afrofuturist poetry, folk, blues and uplifting anthems of resistance and triumph.

‘Lonnie Holley has held a cult status among the art cognoscenti for a long time as a visual artist and performer’ – NEW YORK TIMES

‘Moor Mother dubs her approach “Black quantum futurism”, exploring sound’s potential to evoke memories as a vehicle for navigating time.… whatever its form, Ayewa lives and breathes it’ – THE GUARDIAN ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

‘One of the most emotionally affecting delineations and reimaginings of resistant Black art you’re likely to hear. Essential listening’ – THE WIRE x IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS

For those who are yet to be acquainted with the creative chemistry and sonic provocations of poet, musician and activist Moor Mother, visual artist and musician Lonnie Holly and jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements, a spellbinding inauguration into their rapturous sound world awaits. Moor Mother’s poetic lyrics and experimental electronica interlaces harmoniously with Lonnie Holley’s rousing compositions and is complemented by the musical stylings of free-jazz radicals and Irreversible Entanglements. Discover Lonnie Holly and Moor Mother’s sound world here.

WEDNESDAY TOUR DATES:

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 25: MONA FOMA, HOBART. Tickets/info here.
TUESDAY FEBRUARY 27: PERTH FESTIVAL with MJ LENDERMAN. Tickets on sale here.
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 29: SYDNEY @ THE FACTORY THEATRE with MJ LENDERMAN. Tickets on sale here.
SATURDAY MARCH 2: SEASONAL FRUIT, BRISBANE @ FELONS BARREL HALL. Tickets on sale here.
WEDNESDAY MARCH 6: BRUNSWICK MUSIC FESTIVAL @ Estonian House with special guests Delivery. Tickets on sale now.
FRIDAY MARCH 8: THEATRE ROYAL CASTLEMAINE with special guests MJ Lenderman +Parsnip. Tickets on sale now.
SATURDAY MARCH 9: GOLDEN PLAINS FESTIVAL, Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre. 

Wednesday is a band from North Carolina led by Karly Hartzman (guitar/vocals), with MJ Lenderman (guitar), Xandy Chelmis (lap/pedal steel), Ethan Baechtold (bass) and Alan Miller (drums). Hartzman writes most of her songs from her bedroom floor in Asheville, North Carolina.

Nodding to ‘90s skuzz, shoegaze, and country, the music is gauzy and heady, a gnarled wall of sound where Hartzman’s aching voice and vivid storytelling cut through the din. Hartzman is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller; the newest and best Wednesday record, Rat Saw God, is autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic.

The band has long revered country lyricism, and the distorted lap steel innovations Chelmis unleashes are an ode to the genre; to the music and imagery of the American south, the sprawl of the forests, a black bear darting through the yard during a barbecue with friends, a muggy summer and the impossible darkness only lit by lightning bugs when it’s real late at night.

To cite Aunty Meredith: “Rat Saw God layers all those beloved Wednesday pieces into something truly sublime. That twangy underbelly uplit by a wash of countrygaze and bright-eyed melodies. A stamp collection of ragged outsider anthems built around the small town vignettes of Karly Hartzman, whose gothic world-building conjures resplendently bleak southeastern vistas dotted with Dollar Tree discount stores, never-ending nosebleeds and cough syrup black-outs.”

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners.

Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina, Rabout riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything.

Previous album Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, and a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mum hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.”

“Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority – intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness.

“Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van.

The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. 

Wednesday’s songs don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.”

But the thing about Rat Saw God – and about any Wednesday song, really – is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.