This blog has not received a lot of love, because the last six months have been a downhill tear of terrifying velocity. Just when SydneyMusic was getting to a point of near-stability, we got told that we needed to move on from our home of two years — making our fourth house move in 6 years — for the third occasion of a landlord wanting to sell their property. This city man. After easily the most disheartening house hunt I've ever been involved in, we found a place 36 hours before we had to move. To say it's been a stressful time is an understatement.
There is a massive backlog of articles I want to write for this blog, and it really just comes down to time. In the meantime I've been dropping little bits of commentary around the traps, sometimes via our weekly segment on ABC Radio Sydney, sometimes on a social network that I think I can get some quick reacts to get a fast read on the sentiment in the community.
So — hopefully soon at the very least I'll get a chance to write my three-part series on Ausify (spoiler alert), but I'm going to really need to spend some time deeply working on that as there's a lot to say and it's a complex topic.
In the meantime, here's some absolutely incredible news from inside of of Sydney. Please excuse the janky tone of voice, the piece originally appeared on LinkedIn as most of the people that need to hear the message inexplicably spend a lot of time on that platform. But the story deserves to live somewhere with more permanence.
So, let me tell you about Summer Break ...
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Last week four first-time music festival organisers, all in their early 20s, put on Summer Break: a love letter to our unbelievably potent local “skramz” DIY scene — a heady and diverse spectrum of emo, hardcore, shoegaze, post-punk, and so much more — that is brimming with some of the most exciting homegrown music happening at the moment.
They sold the festival out 2 weeks before the event: 280 tickets, zero industry backing, and with a lineup made of acts that have received no radio airplay and no profile in music media. There was no press release, no boosting from any channels — just a community that is absolutely heaving with some of the most exciting energy and enthusiasm I’ve ever seen.
Tom, Chloe, Eva and Sonny curated the hell out of this lineup. The best term I can use to describe it is ‘bottled lightning”, capturing a moment in time that I’m running out of adjectives trying to describe the significance of: I yelped when I saw the bill for the first time (literally).
This is a lineup that reflects an ecosystem that has been building in recent years almost entirely in DIY spaces — clothing shops, warehouses, community halls, public parks and backyards — and has been building a core following according to their own community values and principles.
Some of my favourite local acts were on this bill — half request, Banjo Ulysses, the victorious Monkey Dot (playing a special reunion show, hopefully not the last), juno eclipse, Fear of Horses (playing their last show), the divine blue diner., Sun Run, Our Mutual Friend… I could go on.
We were honoured to be asked to DJ at the event. Mindblowingly, the organisers also subsequently decided to donate all proceeds to fbi.radio and SydneyMusic.net.
Credit must be given to the team at the mighty Lord Gladstone, who were happy to give four 20-23 year olds the run of the pub, who build genuine relationships with these communities and continuously show their support to the scenes that consider the pub a home.
The crazy thing is that there are so many more of these subcommunities — just in Sydney alone, let alone across the rest of Australia — that are building scenes equally as potent. I’ve shared some of these stories on here before — and there are so many more to be documented.
If you’re expecting to read about what is truly taking flight in any of our traditional music media channels, you’re looking in the wrong place. Just look at how it took our local industry years to catch up with SPEED, well after they'd already gained acclaim all over the planet after years of building a scene in spite of a lack infrastructure and visibility. The Australian industry is consistently skating in the opposite direction of the puck.
But thanks to this generation of music lovers that really know how to throw a party, the future looks bright — and I can’t see them ever doing it in any way other than on their own terms.
All photos by me, except for the B&W shot of Caitlin and me DJing by Darshil Shah
