i Live Musical Festival
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i Live Musical Festival

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The inaugural i Live Music Festival, which takes place at the Brunswick Hotel on Saturday March 1, is a different sort of festival on at least two counts. Firstly, there are no commercial household name acts here – all the acts are Melbourne indie performers. Secondly, there are no big profit-driven promoters.

i Live is the brainchild of the Taste of Indie Collective, a not-for-profit, artist run collective that supports new  emerging and established Melbourne original music Acts and Artists. The Collective has been putting indie bands on Melbourne stages for over a year, and the i Live Music Festival is its biggest event to date.

Sixteen acts will be appearing at i Live on indoor and outdoor stages. The acts include Acoustic Foxx, Lazybones, Man City Sirens, Gondola Kid, One and the Same, Chambers, Priestessa and Dash, The VAS, M Y Band, Kill TV, Waterline, Dear Stalker, Ashbury Medicine Show, The Moops, Sarah Eida and Sierra Leone.

There’s a wide variety of styles on offer among all these acts, including rock, folk, punk and roots. But style doesn’t matter – the thing that unites these musicians is their commitment to original indie music and their commitment to work together in an industry increasingly driven by the demand for a quick return.

Taste of Indie Collective founder Bob Crain puts it this way, “While there’s more venues than ever in Melbourne today, it’s still hard work for unknown original acts to get their foot in the door. The Taste of Indie Collective is musos working together collectively, and in the current band eat band environment this Collective is truly unique. I’d love to see people turning out in droves to support grassroots indie music, and I tell you, some of these acts will just blow you away!”

The event is presented by Beat and has some sponsoring partners in AMR.FM internet radio broadcasting from Australia and the US who are “intense supporters of local music” according to local station manager Gareth McDowell, along with supporters John Ryan Design, Incubator Studios, Record Paradise and Plakkit.

BY ALISTAIR KING