Damon Mudge on lugging a piano to every gig: ‘Any piano player would know why you wouldn’t just play a keyboard’
At no point does he tell this story like it’s unusual. It isn’t, to him. That’s just what making something he’s proud of requires. It started, as these things often do, with something to prove.
Mudge had just come out of a band project, one with no shortage of creative voices, and found himself wondering what he actually sounded like on his own. So when his partner Lily, a painter, suggested a residency abroad, he said yes.
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He bought a guitar off a stranger on a street in Italy, moved into a house with an old janky piano in it, and started writing. Every morning at 5:30 he’d put on a pot of coffee, sit in the garden, and see what came. Then he’d have lunch, drink some wine, smoke some cigarettes, and do it all again.
“I acknowledge how lucky I was to have that experience,” he says. “You obviously don’t have to go all the way to Italy to achieve it. You just have to make the effort to spend time with yourself, spend time away.”
That particular blend of gratitude and groundedness is all over Country Living City Benefits, his debut solo album.
What came out of those two weeks was a record about coping with a touch of existential dread. Friends, bad decisions, imagination, community, presence. The album’s title lifts from the actual slogan of Queanbeyan, the town outside Canberra where Mudge grew up, a place he describes, affectionately, as somewhere “everyone considers a bit of a shithole.”
“I think that sense of existential dread is quite common,” he says. “What I wanted to comment on is: here’s all these things we can do.”
The first song is essentially advice from his mother. Whenever he complained of boredom as a kid, she’d say, ‘Use your imagination’. The rest fans out from there: songs about turning to your friends, making poor decisions together, substance use, capitalism, fake news.
Heavy material, but Mudge carries it lightly. He wanted listeners to be able to put the record on and switch off for 40 minutes. He pressed it to vinyl so they actually would.
Back in Melbourne after Italy, he wheeled his piano into a workers’ shack on his partner’s parents’ farm and spent two more weeks locked inside demoing the whole thing. The solo process, it turned out, was exactly what the songs needed.
“It enabled me to really make something that was what I wanted to make,” he says. “I’d been toying with the idea of writing something more piano-centric for a while. It forced me to write in a different way. They’re composed and arranged really differently to a guitar-centred arrangement.”
Then he called Louis Montgomery, an old Canberra friend and producer now based in Melbourne, and asked him directly: is this good enough to put out?
Montgomery thought so, but they recorded it again anyway. Mudge doesn’t regret it. The piano is central to all of it, and has been Mudge’s point of difference for years.
“There are so many great people making cool stuff,” he says, “but I’m really interested in this instrument. All you need is a well-oiled band and a van to bring it along with you. It’s not that much of a pain.” He pauses and laughs. “People have said ‘You’re making it hard for yourself.’ But there’s something important to me about it. It’s not really worth doing if I don’t take it that far.”
He tried a keyboard once, played one show, walked offstage and gave it away. “Any piano player would know why you wouldn’t just play a keyboard. There’s no feel behind it.”
The real instrument, he says, has to hit. To find out what that meant for him, he built a playlist spanning 60 years of piano in rock contexts, starting with a childhood obsession with Elton John and spiralling outward.
“I discovered all these artists I’d never really given much thought to. Nina Simone, Carole King, and I was like, ‘how have I never listened to this before?'”
Then further still, into the White Stripes’ third album, where the piano is purely rhythmic, just that and drums, hitting hard. “I can do this retro ’70s rock thing right through to a very rhythmic, on-the-beat sound. I needed the piano to really hit.”
Live, he’s bringing five people onstage, including long-time collaborator Oscar Erbus on bass, and drummer Sylvie Gunn opening the full tour with her own set. He’s planning to paint the gigging piano yellow. The album art was painted by his partner. A friend did the photography, another did the screen printing for merch.
“I’d done a lot of it by myself,” he says, “so I was really keen to engage my friends on the backend.” He pauses. “It made it feel like it wasn’t just mine.”
Country Living City Benefits is out now. Find it here.
‘You only do your debut album once’: Steph Strings on growth, belonging and coming home
Long enough to go from a 16-year-old uploading an EP for fun to a full-time musician with her debut album Feel Alive and a world tour locked in.
I meet Steph Strings at Hope St Radio, her favourite bar in Melbourne, the one she says she’ll probably be buried in one day. It feels like the right place to talk about a record that’s fundamentally about belonging, to yourself, to a city, to the life you’ve chosen over the one that was handed to you.
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I ask her how it feels, the gap between then and now.
“I think 2017, I was just doing it for fun. I was almost just like, here world, here’s an EP,” she says. “But now I’m a full-time musician, this is my job, this means so much more than it did 10 years ago. Even just so much more money and time and more riding on this one.” She pauses. “You only do your debut album once. So there’s a lot of emotions tied to it.”
The most obvious difference between then and now? She didn’t sing at all back then. Steph built her reputation as a fingerpicker of uncommon dexterity, the kind of guitarist people talked about in reverent, slightly disbelieving tones. Touring with Kim Churchill, Ziggy Alberts, and Pierce Brothers only added to that.
“I was watching them perform thinking, they all sing,” she explains. “Instrumental stuff is wonderful, but for where I wanted to go, I don’t think I could’ve done it just remaining a guitarist.”
I tell her it’s nice to have those timestamps, past versions of yourself preserved in amber. She nods. “It’s a time capsule for sure.”
The album was described as a celebration of growth, movement, trusting instinct. I push her on that. Where does fearlessness actually come from when you’re packaging your life into 12 songs?
“Rockstar Gypsy is all about confidence,” she says. “Me being in America and performing and going, ‘Should I be this clean, perfect popstar?’ But no, I’m a bit of a gypsy and a rockstar, so it took confidence to stay true to yourself.”
There’s no performance in the way she says it. “Big themes of growth and dreams and following those. That’s all just come from where I’m at in life now. I still feel like a kid at heart, but in the last few years I’ve just matured a bit. Grief, loving. I think about it in a different way and express it in a different way.”
The writing process, she tells me, is non-negotiable in its simplicity. There’s no sitting down to manufacture a record.
“The only way the song works is if I’m like, ‘I’m going to play my guitar right now because I really want to and I feel really free and I want to get into flow state.'”
It’s only later, in the studio, that she starts thinking about sequencing, cohesion, the bigger shape of the thing.
“The start is not thinking about an album,” she says. “I just want to play because I bloody love it.”
One track stands apart. A Storm in April is built on piano, an instrument Steph admits she barely plays. “I know how to play two songs on piano, and they’re both on the album,” she deadpans. She wrote it in April 2017, a month she describes as horrible, as a kind of purging. Years later, on tour with Kim Churchill, she played it to him one night.
“He looked at me and said, when you do an album one day, put that on the album.” So she did.
Melbourne bleeds through the whole record. She wrote Melbourne Blue about the strange vertigo of coming home from tour to find everything exactly as you left it. “I come back to my old childhood bedroom and the same tramline, and it’s exactly how it was 20 years ago, which has made me feel strange at times.”
Hope St Radio gets a namecheck in the song, and Three Wishes was recorded in Northcote with Alice Ivy, the city’s industrial hum folded into the production itself. The Workers’ Club, where she played her first headline shows, has its own chapter in this story too.
“This place will always be my home,” she told me, though she’s about to leave it behind for a while.
North America first, then Europe and the UK, then home for Australian shows, then back to the States for festival season. Bonnaroo is on the list. She says the name with appropriate reverence. Noah Kahan, Kesha and Role Model are playing the same day.
I finish by asking what makes her feel alive. She doesn’t hesitate.
“Laughing my head off. When I’m laughing so hard I’m bawling and telling the other person to stop.” Then her expression shifts slightly. “But also when something horrible happens, or a song plays that reminds me of someone, stepping back and going, I need to feel grateful for feeling this.”
A few years back she told a friend she wished she didn’t have to feel so much. The friend’s response stopped her cold. “She said, how dare you say that. That’s your body telling you you’re alive.”
Steph Strings plays 170 Russell, Melbourne on May 15. Tickets here.
Sun, salsa and award-winning cinema: HSBC Spanish & Latin American Film Festival is back
Kicking off 10 June, the 2026 HSBC Spanish & Latin American Film Festival spans everything from sweeping historical epics to frothy romantic comedies, with a few crowd-pleasing family films thrown in for good measure.
This year’s centrepiece is Sundays (Los domingos), a quietly devastating Spanish drama from writer/director Alauda Ruiz de Azúa about a family thrown into crisis when their 17-year-old daughter announces she wants to become a cloistered nun.
HSBC Spanish & Latin American Film Festival
- Canberra: 10 June – 5 July, Palace Electric Cinema
- Adelaide: 10 June – 5 July, Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas and Palace Nova Prospect Cinemas
- Brisbane: 11 June – 5 July, Palace James Street and Palace Barracks
- Perth: 11 June – 1 July, Palace Raine Square, Luna Leederville and Luna on SX
- Melbourne: 12 June – 5 July, The Astor Theatre, Palace Cinema Como, Palace Brighton Bay, Palace Church St, Palace Penny Lane, Palace Westgarth, The Kino, Palace Balwyn and Pentridge Cinema
- Ballarat: 12 June – 5 July, Palace Regent Cinema
- Sydney: 18 June – 12 July, Palace Norton Street, Palace Moore Park and Palace Central
- Byron Bay/Ballina: 18 June – 12 July, Palace Byron Bay and Ballina Fair Cinemas
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It cleaned up at the 2025 San Sebastián Film Festival, taking home the Golden Shell for Best Film, plus five Goya Awards and five Feroz Awards.
The Captive (El cautivo) is the Festival Special Presentation from acclaimed director Alejandro Amenábar. Starring Julio Peña (Through My Window) and Alessandro Borghi (The Eight Mountains), it follows a young Miguel de Cervantes (yes, the Don Quixote guy) finding solace in storytelling while imprisoned in 16th century Algiers.
Then there’s Nothing Between Us (Nada entre los dos), a breezy Argentine-Uruguayan rom-com set at a Mexican beach resort, marking the first ever on-screen pairing of two of Latin America’s most beloved actors, Gael García Bernal and Natalia Oreiro.
The two play colleagues attending a work conference, navigating the tension between personal freedom and social expectations, all with the beach as a backdrop. Beyond the headliners, the lineup runs deep.
Brazilian film Isabel arrives fresh from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, following a talented sommelier, played by Marina Person, who also co-wrote the script, navigating São Paulo’s cutthroat fine-dining world while chasing her dream of opening her own wine bar away from a controlling boss.
La Salsa Vive is a vivid Colombian-American documentary tracing salsa from its New York City origins in the 1970s through to Cali, Colombia, the self-proclaimed world capital of the genre, drawing comparisons to the beloved 1990s doco Buena Vista Social Club. Another League (Pioneras: solo querían jugar) tells the true story of a group of girls in early-1970s Spain who took on an entire football establishment just to play the game they loved, eventually finding an unlikely ally in an ambitious promoter determined to rewrite the history of women’s football in the country.
Families aren’t left out either. My Amazing Grandma (Abuela Tremenda) is a Spanish box office hit pitting overprotective parents against a wildly carefree grandmother across three generations of hilariously bad decisions on a rural farm.
Bear Claw Camp (Campamento Garra de Oso) blends live action and animation in a race-against-time adventure about two nine-year-olds trying to save their summer camp; a genuinely fun one for kids and the adults dragged along with them.
Opening the festival is the Australian premiere of Mistura, a delicious Peruvian drama starring Bárbara Mori as a woman whose life unravels after her husband leaves, prompting a transformative culinary journey through Peru’s rich gastronomy and culture in the 1950s. The film is celebrated for its mouth-watering visuals and elegant portrayal of food and identity.
The second Festival Special Presentation is The Tigers (Los Tigres), a critically acclaimed maritime thriller from Alberto Rodríguez starring Antonio de la Torre and Bárbara Lennie as professional diver siblings who discover crime proceeds and face a major moral dilemma.
Closing the festival is a new restoration of Carlos Saura’s landmark 1966 classic The Hunt (La Caza), which won the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin. This tense psychological drama set over one scorching day during a rabbit hunt serves as a powerful allegory for the scars of the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship.
Also screening is Ladies’ Hunting Party (Día de caza), a contemporary all-female reimagining featuring Blanca Portillo, Carmen Machi and Rossy de Palma.
Further highlights include Carla Simón’s Romería, following an 18-year-old uncovering buried family secrets on a trip to Vigo; the 100% Rotten Tomatoes-rated Brazilian fable The Blue Trail; Emilio Estevez’s The Way, starring Martin Sheen on the Camino de Santiago (with a special Q&A); and a strong thriller slate featuring Luger, A Loose End, Sofia’s Suspicion and the true-story survival drama Balandrau, Where the Fierce Wind Blew.
Additional dramas include Narciso, The Talent starring Ester Expósito, and Karmele, while music-themed gems Band Together and the restored classics The Devil’s Backbone, The Exterminating Angel and The Spirit of the Beehive offer further depth. Comedy fans can enjoy Always Winter, Breaking Walls, My Friend Eva, Homo Sapiens? and Welcome to Lapland.
For more information, head here.
This article was made in partnership with Palace Cinemas.
There’s an underground dance party coming to Melbourne offering 100 free drinks
Presented in association with local favourites South Ave, the event promises a proper party, complete with 100 free South Ave Seltzers being given away from 10pm in the courtyard.
Born at Amsterdam Dance Event in 2022, Sassafrass has rapidly become an exciting name, championing a fresh wave of “trance-inspired house.”
Sassafrass Lineup
- DJ Luv You
- Jo Christy
- Charles-Eddy
- xla
- Hugo Brown
- Lord Roberts
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For the Melbourne launch, Sassafrass has assembled a high-quality local lineup featuring DJ Luv You, Jo Christy, Charles-Eddy, xla, Hugo Brown and Lord Roberts, who will take over the Glamorama Courtyard on 30 May.
Since its explosive debut, Sassafrass has hosted events at Glastonbury’s Glade Dome, Manchester’s Eastern Bloc, Perth, and Western Australia’s Blazing Swan.
The sound has found a particularly strong home in Australia, especially within Melbourne’s progressive and trance-leaning underground. Local allies include Jennifer Loveless, Bertie, Solar Suite, DJ Life, Guy Contact, suki, IN2STELLAR, Reflex Blue, Command D and many more.
The event arrives at the perfect time, feeding Melbourne’s hunger for emotionally charged, melodic yet driving dance music that sits between house and trance. With strong connections already built through previous Australian appearances, the Melbourne edition feels like a natural and long-awaited homecoming.
Sassafrass Melbourne will take place on Saturday 30 May at Glamorama Courtyard. Entry is free. For more information, head here.