Rocknerd

Photo: Tim Lambert and Mushroom Creative House It’s nice to see local kids who have received some international acclaim return to their home ground, even if they do so with some regularity.

Photo Credit: MCH – Mushroom Creative House Following Basement Jaxx, the following evening Leftield, another of the great electronica bands from the UK in the 90s and 00s, performed just down the road from Jaxx, this time at the “Live at the Gardens” fest…

photo Gabi Rankine Creative/Austalian Musician Heralding from the house scene of the UK in the 1990s, Basement Jaxx became of the largest names with a music style that would cross traditional house and UK garage electronica, with a string of successful hi…

For the past 15 years Rüfüs Du Sol have been Australia’s most successful alternative dance and electronica bands, with their debut album “Atlas” (2013) reaching number 1 on the ARIA charts, an achievement also reached by their second album, “Bloom” (2016),

Backrooms is a movie based on someone finding a photograph disquieting.

Formed in 1981, The March Violets, like fellow post-punk band Joy Division and New Order, made use of a Nazi-related name in a hostile and ironic manner, in this case, referring to “late bloomers”, those opportunists who joined the Nazi Party in Germany a…

I just flew in from seeing Iron Lung, and boy are my lungs tired.

I’ve been reluctant to even mention the really obviously fraudulent chart performances of fake AI music lately.

SCISSORGUN: Scream If You Wanna Go Faster (Dimple Discs) — industrial rock in the ’90s style, where it’s not sure if it’s going rock’n’roll or nascent techno.

In the ancient days of 1992, when dinosaurs still ruled the Earth, young (17) Guy Blackman formed Chapter Music, which would go on to become one of Australia’s longest-running independent music labels, winning the 2019 AIR Award for Best Independent Label…

Redgum were an essential Australian band for some fifteen years performing from 1975 to 1990.

In many ways, Bleak Squad can be described as a 1980-2000s Australian alternative supergroup, consisting of Adalita (Magic Dirt), Mick Turner (Dirty Three), Mick Harvey (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, The Birthday Party), and Marty Brown (Art of Fi…

Last month, Dave Allen, former bassist of the Gang of Four, Shriekback, King Swamp, Low Pop Suicide, The Elastic Purejoy, and finally Faux Hoax passed away aged 69 after living with early-onset dementia for several years.

Buddhadatta at The Gem Bar, photo by photo by Jules Dazzle.

Ryuichi Sakamoto’s professional musical career spanned almost five decades, starting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in the mid-1970s where he completed his master’s degree and then in experimental electronic music both as a co-fou…

It must be said that I am a bit of a fan of New Order and Peter Hook and, of course, their immediate precursor Joy Division.

I must start this review with identifying the source of my ticket; the Isla Bell Charitable Fund.

VARIOUS ARTISTS: ANS Electronic Music (Cold Spring) — this is a remastered reissue of a super-rare LP from 1969 of compositions recorded with the ANS, a Soviet-era synthesizer.

These are some of my favorite songs of 2024, presented in no particular order: APT., Rosé and Bruno Mars: The title is a play on a Korean drinking game.

The first thing one must know about “The Garbage and The Flowers” is that we’re talking about a single group here, rather a tour by Garbage and the earliest version of Icehouse, although that would be a pretty awesome in its own right.

Dead Boys vocalist Stiv Bators died in 1990, but the rest of the band has reunited several times since.

In October last year, Duolingo announced it was adding a music course to its suite of languages to learn.

For the better part of thirty years, the Swedish duo operating under the name of Carbon Based Lifeforms have produced some of the most rhythmic ambient music of our time, starting with Hydroponic Garden (2003) and World of Sleepers (2006), adding to their…

All hail!

If you like music even a bit, you might boggle at the idea that people would be happy with a stream of anonymous machine-generated slop.

SACRED COWBOYS: Cowboy Logic (Kasumuen) — Garry Gray and Mark Ferrie are getting the Sacred Cowboys back together and doing new stuff, so this is one disc of old studio recordings and one disc of live desk tapes from 1994 and 2006, with Spencer Jones.

The last time I saw Placebo was the Kerrang Big Day Out at the Milton Keynes Bowl in 1999, when Metallica headlined.

I’m playing the Welcome to the Pleasuredome album again after thirty-nine years and it hasn’t stood up so well.

The fucking [REDACTED].

NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE: World Record (Reprise) — Young recorded this in 2022 with Crazy Horse and Rick Rubin.

Gabi Delgado from Neue Deutsche Welle stars and EBM inventors Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft died in March 2020.

HOUSE OF ALL: House Of All — Collecting old ex-members of the Fall into a band sounds like a good idea.

The first really good video codec was MPEG-4 H.264.

Epic Games, the maker of hits such as Fortnite, just laid off 16% of staff, or 830 people — and it’s sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, a music licensing company.

MQA, perpetrators of the lossy “hi-res” audio format of the same name, went into receivership in April 2023.

Your cyberpunk future is facial fishnets, Japanese text as decoration, 8-bit MSX computers and pseudo-BASIC program listing sleeve notes.

I saw Battlefield Earth at the movies when it came out.

BEDLESS BONES: Sublime Malaise (Metropolis) — An extended reissue of the 2019 first album of bleepy female singer-songwriter Kadri Sammel.

This was going to be just a basic review of Lana Del Rey’s new record Did You Know There’s a Tunnel under Ocean Boulevard?

“It’s like an evil genius cloned Stock, Aitken & Waterman by dark magic and animated them with bitterness and despair” — Rayner Lucas.

Back in 1986, when I was nineteen and just embarking on making my youth suitably dissolute, Australian indie rock’n’roller Stuart “Stu Spasm” Gray came to stay in Perth for a holiday and hang out with his old mate Brett Ford and Brett’s wife Melanie, in t…

MQA Ltd., a spin-off from audiophile equipment manufacturer Meridian Audio, is the purveyor of the “high resolution” audio format MQA — an audacious move to sell a lossy codec purporting to contain audio signals not perceptible to any human ear tested in…

I haven’t listened to the radio regularly since I lived in Melbourne.

This is quite a thing: a YouTube playlist of all twenty-four Peel Sessions by the Fall, from 1978 to 2004.

MASSENHYSTERIE: Hausfrauengelüste — second album (“housewife desires”) from Jo Hysteria’s Vienna electropunk outfit.

BRADDOCK STATION GARRISON: American Radio — been thinking lately about the late 1980s in Perth, when every band was playing power pop and nothing else, as was the alternative eighties fashion.

SCHKEUDITZER KREUZ: Isolated and Alone (Dorfpunk) — what happens when punk rocker Kieren Hills, decades on and struck with inspiration during the pandemic lockdown, does punk rock in early hardcore style through industrial electronics.

JUSTINE Ó GADHRA-SHARP: Sídhe EP (UTM) — A nicely varied EP from a veteran of the New Zealand goth scene.

DELERIUM: Signs (Metropolis) — There’s a new Delerium album, Signs, out on 10 March!

IMAAD WASIF: So Long Mr.