Editor’s Note
The opening weekend of Melbourne Music Week enveloped this fine city with a vibrancy and magic seldom explored. Kicking things off, the Heaps Gay Reverie filled the previously musically-bereft expanse of the ACMI Hub with absorbing pop and electronic music alongside kaleidoscopic theatre. Saturday welcomed techno don Jeff Mills to the house, whose expressionist performance The Trip twisted brains without abolishing the dancefloor fervour.
You Am I combated Melbourne Town Hall’s Grand Organ on Sunday and came out a more brazen unit; if that was ever possible for Tim Rogers and his merry men. Monday gave us Ainslie Wills, Gretta Ray and Angie McMahon live in the one establishment and that’s just the first scoop of the MMW creme brulee. Tomorrow night, the town is decorated by the Live Music Safari, one of Australia’s foremost music discovery extravaganzas. It’s all free so get the hell out there Beat couch potato.
As Melbourne Music Week winds down this weekend, the adored Queenscliff Music Festival winds up. The historic celebration of music from home and abroad is welcoming the likes of Courtney Barnett, Donavon Frankenreiter and Japan’s Osaka Monaurail to its beachside residence. We chat to Frankenreiter, Fraser A. Gorman and Forever Son ahead of the fest. That’s Beat 1653 friends, tuck in.
