Tone Deaf and Amrap are back in 2025, bringing you the best Australian music finds from community radio music directors and presenters.
Got music? Get it on Amrap – it’s how community stations find and play local artists. You can also hear the freshest tracks championed by community radio on the Community Radio Plus App, bringing stations from across the country into one place.
Amrap’s airplay tracking just got an upgrade. Airplay (formerly Airplay Search) is now in your Amrap artist account, giving artists who’ve uploaded music since November 1st, 2024, real-time airplay data powered by Music Recognition Technology (MRT) across the entire community radio network.
This week, FBi Radio’s Tommy Bourtos selects their must-listen local tunes playing on community radio right now.
FBi Radio’s Tommy Bourtos Amrap Picks
A stunning debut from Adelaide-based Iranian artist Maryam Rahmani, released through the ever-brilliant Music in Exile. KAMAND flows like a tide between worlds. There is something ever so grounding about the traditional instrumentation, heralded by the Santoor. But it is where tradition melts into experiment, where this album gets me. Both grounded and untamed, it reflects on transformation, on the beauty and tension that carve new shapes of belonging.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of metal, rock, indie, pop, and everything else in between.
Bumpy’s debut album; Kanana, translates to “land where the sun sets” in Noongar language. The offering is a skilful blend of music and traditional sounds, journeying through ten tracks that touch a spectrum of emotions and textures, each with its own subtle colour. Kanana includes several tracks originally created during Bumpy’s work as First Nations Artist in Residence with the Melbourne International Jazz Festival and Australian Art Orchestra. “Untangling”, the last track on the release, was added to FBi’s rotation this week!
Gamelan DanAnda and Firetail – Anglayang
Anglayang brings together Bali based Gamelan DanAnda and Naarm based Firetail in a meeting of flare and texture. Released on vinyl through Komunitas Records, it’s a grounded and generous work, tracing the quiet beauty that emerges when traditions listen to one another.
Captured and crafted by ARIA-winning producer Myles Mumford, both in the studio and from a sold-out live night at Melbourne Recital Centre’s Primrose Potter Salon, the project blends the subtle patterns of Balinese gamelan with the smooth flow of Firetail’s jazz fusion. A sound as conceptual as can be, this is a must listen!
HAZTET – “Naima [Live at The Vanguard]”
HAZTET is forging a distinctive place in Eora’s jazz-doof scene. They’ve been subtly opening new paths for improvised music on Gadigal land. In “Naima”, the band finds a soft, meditative space, where spiritual jazz becomes a conversation. Echoes of ’70s masters linger, but it’s the intimate interplay between the musicians that gives the piece its subtle power. HAZTET distills the delicate, powerful magic that arises when musicians improvise together.
At the heart of Zodiac’s new album, From, is a question second-generation immigrants carry with them: “Where are you from?” It’s a question with no single answer, one that ripples through the music and emotions of the album, tracing the spaces between belonging and identity. A question all too easy to relate to, and often inciting a duality of dissonance. The band instead chose to embrace the balance between worlds, paying tribute to both their ancestral home and the land they call home today.
Infused with the currents of his homeland, Ashkan Shafiei’s music evokes the dreamlike, psychedelic pulse of pre-revolution Iran. “Hunter” carries an ethereal presence. Through Ashkan’s rubab and sinuously sung Farsi, voice and instrument merge, transforming song into a vessel that carries the past into the present. The second release from the ever-growing and boundary pushing Music in Exile on this list, a label you must dig into!
