Tone Deaf and Amrap are continuing in 2024 to ask music directors or presenters at some of the finest community stations around Australia to share their best Australian music finds discovered on amrap.org.au.
If you haven’t got your music on Amrap, what are you waiting for? Community radio uses Amrap to source Australian music for airplay.
Anyone can discover all the great Australian music championed by community radio on the Community Radio Plus App, featuring the diverse range of community radio stations nationwide in one handy spot.
This week, 2SER’s Lachlan Holland contributes with a list of Australian music from community radio you should be listening to right now.
Yirinda are Butchulla Songman Fred Leone and multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Samuel Pankhurst, and their debut album under their Yirinda guise blew us away at 2SER. It’s a brilliant fusion of Leone’s powerful vocal performance across avante-garde arrangements that combine elements of freeform jazz, IDM, and ambient.
Released on Chapter Music, it’s a stunning and evocative record of impeccable production and otherworldly soundscapes interlaced with story, language and culture.
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Another debut record that arrived over summer, Lord Esme dropped their debut record and it was a real winner here with its self-described and ever-so-self-effacing “Cardigan Rock”.
Released on Half A Cow records, A Nice Sit Down is an endlessly fun album that mixes rock and folk influences with relatable humour and heart. Bedroom recorded local DIY goodness, with a whimsical attitude to their songwriting that covers everything from succulent plants, karaoke and misdirected mail from long-gone housemates (Alison Rhodes, if you’re reading this, you missed a dental appointment).
The debut EP from the North Coast NSW based producer, this was a really captivating four-tracker from an artist we had no knowledge of previously, and found on the weekly scan through Amrap.
Sonder is a elegantly constructed bedroom pop/rnb crossover EP that bubbles along on trippy electronic beats and abstracted, alluring vocals. Anyone namechecking both Carl Craig and Billie Holiday as influences is worth a listen, and this is a real gem of a debut from an intriguing new artist following their own logic.
One of our favourite bands to back-announce on air, ARSE pulled no punches with Kaputt., which represents their first main release in six years and was produced, mixed and mastered by bassist Jonathan Boulet at the band’s own Marrickville studio.
At barely 20 mins, it packs a lot in with raw, searing and direct hardcore from the Eora outfit, who belt out a series of relentless, enraged takedowns of everything from climate change denialism, Rio Tinto destroying indigenous sites and crooked law enforcement.
Sachet – The Seeing Machine EP
A band that are prodigiously talented at finding just the right hooks, the lead single off the new Sachet EP, “Crushing Whims” got stuck in our ears all through summer with its angular guitar work and endearingly distressed lyrics about new love and nighttime bike rides. The full EP brings more of the same quality of melodic garage-pop power as the vehicle for the charismatic vocals and songwriting of Lani Crooks.
They’ve also got the twin companion of this EP (via Tenth Court) coming later in the year on cassette, so definitely ones to watch in every sense.
The debut solo release (at least officially) from the Eora-based producer and instrumentalist Heartholder (aka John Troughton) was a blast of fresh air. Initial trepidation at possibly having being sent a Zip file soon passed, and we were all able to enjoy what is in fact a masterful combination of electronic production and live instrumentation. On Zip uses the featured lyrics from collaborator C$ as an aesthetic, a crucial presence but one that is as subject to being tweaked, reverbed and chopped as the breaks, sax and horns.
J McFarlane’s Reality Guest – Whoopee
Dropping right in the heat of mid-january, the second solo album from producer and ex-member of The Twerps’ Julia McFarlane was an easy winner, with her effortlessly cool take on trip-hop and jazzy lo-fi goodness.
Whoopee is a georgeously rendered record of sublime watery electronica, blunted soundscapes interspersed with quirky sampling and vocal collages. It was a real salve to the summer heat here and well worth chasing down on Felt Sense Records.
