Community radio music directors often have an encyclopedic knowledge of local music and an insatiable thirst to keep their ears ahead of the curve. So in this Tone Deaf series, the Australian Music Radio Airplay Project (Amrap) invites music directors to highlight new Aussie tunes that you might have missed.
In this edition, Firas Massouh – Music Director at 3PBS FM in Melbourne – contributes with a selection of tracks currently making their way to community radio through Amrap’s music distribution service ‘AirIt’.
Check out Firas’ selections below and if you’re a musician you can apply here to have your music distributed for free to community radio on Amrap’s AirIt.
This week’s 7 best Australian artists
A. Swayze & The Ghosts – ‘Smooth Sailing’
I remember a time when this fierce foursome played a slower version of this song. This would probably have been during one of their performances at The Brisbane Hotel, Hobart’s iconic venue that’s home to the stickiest floor in the world, where A. Swayze & The Ghosts played their first ever gig.
These gentle share-house punksters have come a long way since then, both in their writing and their stage dynamic. But their raw and generous energy is still the same. It’s why they’ll trash the stage and then, in good faith, clean up afterwards.
They’ll then shout you a beer and tell you a yarn about how The Brisbane Hotel is haunted. Spending time with these boys is truly electrifying, in all the good ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVDGkiom4Dk
Retiree – ‘Magic Eye’ (feat. Sui Zhen)
Sometimes the best thing about a relationship is the breakup because it resolves a seemingly unresolvable creative tension. And this is precisely what ‘Magic Eye’ represents.
Completed after a breakup, this is a song of poetic proportions that sees Retiree team up with pop artist Sui Zhen to produce a soundscape that is at once lush and austere, organic and synthetic.
Much like the rest of Retiree’s new offering House Or Home, this gem of a song initially appears to be cold and distant, but the more you immerse yourself in it, the more you are surprised by its capacity to warm your heart.
Nothing short of anthemic, ‘Native Tongue’ speaks truth to power about how difference is excluded but made visible at the same time. Mojo Juju’s response to this modern predicament is to no longer shy away from politicising her music.
Instead she confronts things head on, finds strength in her identity as a queer woman, and looks for answers in her family history.
By paying homage to her Filipino and Wiradjuri roots, she invites us to think about what it means to be Australian and how that relates to indigeneity, to migration, to ideas of home and displacement.
To invoke her words, we may not know where we belong but we will not apologise for taking this space.
Two chords, a riff, and a melodic refrain are the basic ingredients to this song from 19-year-old Perth superstar Carla Geneve. But there is so much more to this seemingly unruffled track. It’s short, simple and straight to the point, but more importantly, it’s an honest ode to standing up for oneself.
This is a rocking song with a lot of heart that stands out from so much Australian alt-country. No put-on American accent here, only a refreshingly honest, unpretentious desire to communicate sage advice to a friend.
I think that watching electronic artists perform live induces a particular kind of pleasure: the pleasure of mystery. In the case of Planète, the audience is faced with the silhouette of an enigmatic figure operating analogue machinery in a haze of smoke, swaying gently back and forth, patching up leads and twisting knobs as he drives the spaceship.
Planète’s music is always an odyssey through space and time, and space and time are absolutely mysterious. ‘Invisible Cities’ is no exception. You won’t necessarily find answers here, but perhaps it is on this journey that you are able to ask the right questions.
So much of today’s music speaks to the human experience of disempowerment and the need to gain power back. I actually think that this is what what music has always aspired to do, both on a political and social level.
But there is something about the contemporary synth pop idiom that allows us to explore the dark crevices of human relationships in a way that other musical approaches don’t.
Two People do this beautifully in a minimal soundscape, sad R&B kind of way. ‘In The Garden’ is a song where the lyricism of both the voice and the groove details the tension between submitting to love and breaking free from its constraints.
The result is a space that allows for interplay between ambivalence and self-determination.
If one of music’s roles is to enable us to confront then another is to allow us to escape. First Beige is apparently what happens when you avoid doing important daily things, so you make funky uplifting disco instead.
Perhaps we can therefore think of ‘Vivid’ as an anthem for procrastinating and shirking your responsibilities? Is that necessarily a bad thing? I don’t think so. There is a time and place for everything. Sometimes you need to use your head, sometimes your heart, and other times your feet.
So dance to this in earnest if you can, fling yourself into the air, defy the spirit of gravity, and remember that life is neither a test nor a burden but a joy.
