Think you know First Nations music? This block party will blow your mind
'When it comes to blackfellas, we grew up listening to everything. We grew up to blues, Motown jazz, but then heavy metal, rock, rap, hip-hop. Some people like folk music, some people get into more electronic music as well.'
But, she says, music by First Nations artists is often 'pigeonholed into either a very specific rock sound or hip-hop R&B'.
Soju Gang – real name Sky Thomas – hopes to shift that perspective. She's producing the Uncle Archie Roach Block Party at this year's YIRRAMBOI festival of First Nations artists.
The block party will take place on May 10 across three CBD venues and feature more than 30 musicians and DJs, with acts ranging from neo-soul punk (DANCINGWATER) and glittery indie pop (Jem Cassar-Daley) to bad girl rapper Miss Kaninna.
Then there are the international artists such as Kwakwaka'wakw/Cree vocalist Nimkish and her trashy bedroom pop, Canadian duo PIQSIQ, whose elaborate live looping of Inuit throat singing defies written description, and up-and-coming Kiwi DJ sensations Katayanagi Twins.
Thomas travelled to last year's International Indigenous Music Summit in Toronto as part of the YIRRAMBOI team. 'We were there to showcase who we are and what we do, but it was also a way for me to properly interact with other First Nations artists across the waters.'
It was a chance to learn more about the practices of other artists and see them perform, she says, but just as important were the stories behind the music. 'It's not just like, 'Oh, I like their sound, that's it.' It's about who people are and what they offer. When it comes to First Nations people globally, we are not a monolith. Everybody has their own specific story to tell.'
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Sydney Morning Herald
5 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
His album was finished. Then he scrapped it and made a new one in 12 days
Mac DeMarco has been digging a well. This is not some poetic metaphor, like Mac's own Chamber of Reflection. Before jumping on our interview, the Canadian indie rocker was out on his new property, a farmhouse on an island off British Columbia that he shares with his partner Kiera McNally, digging a literal well. Or, to be specific, he was building a well? A house for his well? Look, I'm not a carpenter. 'It's a well enclosure. It looks like an outhouse, but it's made of cedar and it's beautiful,' DeMarco, 35, explains, appearing on Zoom like a gap-toothed storm cloud: grey shirt, grey hat, scraggly beard. 'My uncle and cousin came over and were like, 'You know you have to be able to lift it off if they have to pull the deep well out?' So my day has consisted of taking off the siding and finding where the fastener bolts are to the foundation and removing them. It's good because the stress of 'If my well explodes, will we be able to get it out?' was a lot, but I'm also dismantling the nicest looking thing I've ever built so it's been tough.' I don't understand a word he's saying but Mac DeMarco, DIY tradesman, isn't an odd image to conjure. He's been DIYing, in a musical sense, since his 2012 debut, 2, the album that first launched DeMarco's persona as the ' loveable laid-back prince of indie-rock '. His new album, Guitar, was DIYed to a freakish degree – songs, cover art, even videos – and written and recorded in 12 days. 'I'd wake up in the morning and get a song going, or maybe I'd write it the night before,' he says. 'It was quick and easy, and it feels good. When I leave something for too long and try to come back to it, it doesn't feel right, like I'm already onto something else.' Guitar, an album title so bland it feels like a troll, is DeMarco's first proper album since 2019's Here Comes the Cowboy, which debuted in the top 10 on the Billboard 200, an unlikely scenario for such a stridently independent artist. In 2023, years after the album's release, the track Heart to Heart went viral on TikTok and became DeMarco's first song to break into the Billboard Hot 100. After years watching his cult of personality grow, this was tangible evidence of his pop star reach. But DeMarco's not buying it. 'I don't think Here Comes the Cowboy was that big and the top 10 thing, I don't think it was based off some kind of top of the mountain sales,' he says. 'There's ways to pump that stuff up. We had a big tour around then too, so you sell concert tickets and then if you give a vinyl for each concert ticket, it counts as a sale.' It sounds like he doesn't quite trust his own album's success. 'I like that record, but… yeah, maybe I don't trust the success of it,' DeMarco laughs. 'I just think it's funny that the music industry heralds things like that. They're like, you charted. And it's like, so? 'It's like the metrics on Spotify: these artists can have a bajillion listeners, and then nobody comes to the show,' he continues. 'When Heart to Heart charted in the Hot 100, it didn't even get high – it went to 80-something – but everyone was like, 'Oh my god!'. [Distributors] were telling me we should advertise more to keep it going.' He mocks disgust. 'This album came out five years ago and we didn't even do anything to make the song go crazy, so why not just leave it alone, you know?' It's fair to posit that DeMarco – who has run his own indie, Mac's Record Label, since 2018 – has little sympathy for major labels scrambling amid the music industry's new world order. 'TikTok is confusing for a lot of them. But, at the same time, a lot of the big record labels have figured out how to squeeze the lemon. They want to make it seem like they don't know, but they know.' He chuckles at his own cynicism. 'Maybe I'm just a music industry conspiracy theorist. Whatever. It's cute. You chart on this thing, it's cute. I have these gold records now, they're all in my basement. I don't know what to do with them, but it's cool. Amazing.' I've never had an artist work so hard to dissuade me against their own sales triumphs, but such is DeMarco's mission. Numbers? These things don't interest him. So little that he followed his biggest pop success with an album made entirely of instrumental compositions (2023's Five Easy Hot Dogs) and then a monumental 199-track data dump named for Canadian legend Wayne Gretzky (One Wayne G). You ask DeMarco why, he answers why not. 'I know with One Wayne G, some music journalists were like, 'Is this a middle finger? What's he doing?' but it was nothing like that. I just wanted to share music. I wasn't saying 'Listen to the whole thing!'. I don't care if people listen to none of it. It's there if you want it,' says DeMarco. As an oddity – inspired by his Japanese avant-pop idols Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, and partly a comment on how we consume music – he's proud of it. 'It's so long that it won't fit on a CD. You could put it out on a 15-record box set, but that's ridiculous. The only medium it'd work on is a Blu-Ray, but I don't even have a way to play a Blu-Ray. I think One Wayne G might be the coolest thing I ever do. The whole thing was just an experiment in, why?' 'I have these gold records now, they're all in my basement. I don't know what to do with them.' Before he recorded Guitar, DeMarco had completed another album titled Hear the Music, which he scrapped. 'I liked the songs, but that was me turning on the faucet or cleaning out the songwriting pipes,' he says. 'I had maybe 14 songs, I demoed them, tried to do master recordings, but I got lost in the sauce. I started trying to change the drum sound every day. I was building isolation tents in the studio. I built a hut out of PVC pipe. I did vocal takes over and over. I went completely nuts.' He's had this problem before, ever since he stopped recording onto tape with 2015's Another One. He'll go into 'an OCD zone', he says, recording and re-recording demos trying to recapture what he loved best about the original take. 'You're just chasing perfection in something that is inherently imperfect. You might as well just take the original, that has that life force in it, and run with that,' he says. 'The cool thing about Guitar is that all these songs are the first time they were recorded. They're the demos, essentially. Even just saying that is soothing for me.' Does he plan to release Hear the Music? 'I don't know. I like the idea of having an album just in the vault. Prince-style, you know?' he laughs. 'I think it'll simmer for some time, long enough where I can listen to it again and be like, 'Hmm, that's cool.'' The songs on Guitar are sparse, unbothered. The pace is hazy, guitars warbly, and DeMarco's cracked falsetto leads each track. Thematically, it's heavy. On lead single Home, he's severing ties to his past. On the jagged Nothing At All, he's contending with his sobriety. DeMarco quit alcohol during the pandemic, and nicotine just after. 'It's been an interesting journey,' he says of his sobriety. 'The first couple of years, I was the kind of sober guy where it was like, 'Everything's fine, I can go to the party, do the show, go to the bar. I can do everything the same, and it's not a big deal.' But as you progress, things get amplified and emotions get more intense. Whatever dulling substance abuse does, it takes longer than I thought for it to completely leave your zone. Sometimes you feel fragile, but other times I'm fine.' Sobriety, a farmhouse, wells. It's a wild shift for someone whose dirtbag antics were once as much part of his lore as the music (just Google 'Mac DeMarco drumstick incident'). Social media is filled with threads from distressed fans at shows five or six years ago, worried that DeMarco was sozzled onstage or burning himself with cigarettes mid-song. 'Absolutely, I was a headcase,' he says. Loading Later this year, he'll embark on his first tour since getting sober. Is he concerned about reviving ghosts of the past? 'We'll see,' he says. 'I think that energy was usually present because I felt the music or the show was lacking; it was a way to subsidise like, 'Uh-oh, that song didn't go well.' If we do the songs in a way that's satisfying to me, I'll probably be okay. But who knows? Could crash and burn. Come and see!' he adds with a gap-toothed grin, a salesman in him yet.
The Age
5 hours ago
- The Age
His album was finished. Then he scrapped it and made a new one in 12 days
Mac DeMarco has been digging a well. This is not some poetic metaphor, like Mac's own Chamber of Reflection. Before jumping on our interview, the Canadian indie rocker was out on his new property, a farmhouse on an island off British Columbia that he shares with his partner Kiera McNally, digging a literal well. Or, to be specific, he was building a well? A house for his well? Look, I'm not a carpenter. 'It's a well enclosure. It looks like an outhouse, but it's made of cedar and it's beautiful,' DeMarco, 35, explains, appearing on Zoom like a gap-toothed storm cloud: grey shirt, grey hat, scraggly beard. 'My uncle and cousin came over and were like, 'You know you have to be able to lift it off if they have to pull the deep well out?' So my day has consisted of taking off the siding and finding where the fastener bolts are to the foundation and removing them. It's good because the stress of 'If my well explodes, will we be able to get it out?' was a lot, but I'm also dismantling the nicest looking thing I've ever built so it's been tough.' I don't understand a word he's saying but Mac DeMarco, DIY tradesman, isn't an odd image to conjure. He's been DIYing, in a musical sense, since his 2012 debut, 2, the album that first launched DeMarco's persona as the ' loveable laid-back prince of indie-rock '. His new album, Guitar, was DIYed to a freakish degree – songs, cover art, even videos – and written and recorded in 12 days. 'I'd wake up in the morning and get a song going, or maybe I'd write it the night before,' he says. 'It was quick and easy, and it feels good. When I leave something for too long and try to come back to it, it doesn't feel right, like I'm already onto something else.' Guitar, an album title so bland it feels like a troll, is DeMarco's first proper album since 2019's Here Comes the Cowboy, which debuted in the top 10 on the Billboard 200, an unlikely scenario for such a stridently independent artist. In 2023, years after the album's release, the track Heart to Heart went viral on TikTok and became DeMarco's first song to break into the Billboard Hot 100. After years watching his cult of personality grow, this was tangible evidence of his pop star reach. But DeMarco's not buying it. 'I don't think Here Comes the Cowboy was that big and the top 10 thing, I don't think it was based off some kind of top of the mountain sales,' he says. 'There's ways to pump that stuff up. We had a big tour around then too, so you sell concert tickets and then if you give a vinyl for each concert ticket, it counts as a sale.' It sounds like he doesn't quite trust his own album's success. 'I like that record, but… yeah, maybe I don't trust the success of it,' DeMarco laughs. 'I just think it's funny that the music industry heralds things like that. They're like, you charted. And it's like, so? 'It's like the metrics on Spotify: these artists can have a bajillion listeners, and then nobody comes to the show,' he continues. 'When Heart to Heart charted in the Hot 100, it didn't even get high – it went to 80-something – but everyone was like, 'Oh my god!'. [Distributors] were telling me we should advertise more to keep it going.' He mocks disgust. 'This album came out five years ago and we didn't even do anything to make the song go crazy, so why not just leave it alone, you know?' It's fair to posit that DeMarco – who has run his own indie, Mac's Record Label, since 2018 – has little sympathy for major labels scrambling amid the music industry's new world order. 'TikTok is confusing for a lot of them. But, at the same time, a lot of the big record labels have figured out how to squeeze the lemon. They want to make it seem like they don't know, but they know.' He chuckles at his own cynicism. 'Maybe I'm just a music industry conspiracy theorist. Whatever. It's cute. You chart on this thing, it's cute. I have these gold records now, they're all in my basement. I don't know what to do with them, but it's cool. Amazing.' I've never had an artist work so hard to dissuade me against their own sales triumphs, but such is DeMarco's mission. Numbers? These things don't interest him. So little that he followed his biggest pop success with an album made entirely of instrumental compositions (2023's Five Easy Hot Dogs) and then a monumental 199-track data dump named for Canadian legend Wayne Gretzky (One Wayne G). You ask DeMarco why, he answers why not. 'I know with One Wayne G, some music journalists were like, 'Is this a middle finger? What's he doing?' but it was nothing like that. I just wanted to share music. I wasn't saying 'Listen to the whole thing!'. I don't care if people listen to none of it. It's there if you want it,' says DeMarco. As an oddity – inspired by his Japanese avant-pop idols Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, and partly a comment on how we consume music – he's proud of it. 'It's so long that it won't fit on a CD. You could put it out on a 15-record box set, but that's ridiculous. The only medium it'd work on is a Blu-Ray, but I don't even have a way to play a Blu-Ray. I think One Wayne G might be the coolest thing I ever do. The whole thing was just an experiment in, why?' 'I have these gold records now, they're all in my basement. I don't know what to do with them.' Before he recorded Guitar, DeMarco had completed another album titled Hear the Music, which he scrapped. 'I liked the songs, but that was me turning on the faucet or cleaning out the songwriting pipes,' he says. 'I had maybe 14 songs, I demoed them, tried to do master recordings, but I got lost in the sauce. I started trying to change the drum sound every day. I was building isolation tents in the studio. I built a hut out of PVC pipe. I did vocal takes over and over. I went completely nuts.' He's had this problem before, ever since he stopped recording onto tape with 2015's Another One. He'll go into 'an OCD zone', he says, recording and re-recording demos trying to recapture what he loved best about the original take. 'You're just chasing perfection in something that is inherently imperfect. You might as well just take the original, that has that life force in it, and run with that,' he says. 'The cool thing about Guitar is that all these songs are the first time they were recorded. They're the demos, essentially. Even just saying that is soothing for me.' Does he plan to release Hear the Music? 'I don't know. I like the idea of having an album just in the vault. Prince-style, you know?' he laughs. 'I think it'll simmer for some time, long enough where I can listen to it again and be like, 'Hmm, that's cool.'' The songs on Guitar are sparse, unbothered. The pace is hazy, guitars warbly, and DeMarco's cracked falsetto leads each track. Thematically, it's heavy. On lead single Home, he's severing ties to his past. On the jagged Nothing At All, he's contending with his sobriety. DeMarco quit alcohol during the pandemic, and nicotine just after. 'It's been an interesting journey,' he says of his sobriety. 'The first couple of years, I was the kind of sober guy where it was like, 'Everything's fine, I can go to the party, do the show, go to the bar. I can do everything the same, and it's not a big deal.' But as you progress, things get amplified and emotions get more intense. Whatever dulling substance abuse does, it takes longer than I thought for it to completely leave your zone. Sometimes you feel fragile, but other times I'm fine.' Sobriety, a farmhouse, wells. It's a wild shift for someone whose dirtbag antics were once as much part of his lore as the music (just Google 'Mac DeMarco drumstick incident'). Social media is filled with threads from distressed fans at shows five or six years ago, worried that DeMarco was sozzled onstage or burning himself with cigarettes mid-song. 'Absolutely, I was a headcase,' he says. Loading Later this year, he'll embark on his first tour since getting sober. Is he concerned about reviving ghosts of the past? 'We'll see,' he says. 'I think that energy was usually present because I felt the music or the show was lacking; it was a way to subsidise like, 'Uh-oh, that song didn't go well.' If we do the songs in a way that's satisfying to me, I'll probably be okay. But who knows? Could crash and burn. Come and see!' he adds with a gap-toothed grin, a salesman in him yet.
Perth Now
10 hours ago
- Perth Now
Former netball and ruck star behind latest Indigenous design
Inaugural Fremantle ruck and former West Coast Fever star Alicia Janz has inspired Fremantle's latest design as the club unveiled its 2025 AFLW Indigenous jumper. Janz was part of Dockers' inaugural AFLW squad, having transitioned out of a career in netball with the West Coast Fever, playing 14 games before moving to be part of West Coast's first team. Having represented three of WA's major teams, and inaugural First Nations Erub Islander there were plenty of threads for Janz to choose from to help pull together her design with an overarching message on resiliance, wellbeing and connection. 'Its embedded in connection - connection to all things, whether it's people, land, animals, or the skies,' Janz said. 'That's more the First Nations side of it. Then, through the footy side, there's a connection between the players, the staff, the members, and the community. 'With the jumper's meaning of being resilient, mindful, and well-being, a lot of it is about being in flow, being present and in the moment. 'The background of the jumper is of the sunset and island life. You are ever-present, you are there in the moment, and it's very calming. The Dockes classic white chevrons have been replaced by Janz's family totems, a shark and a crocodile meeting around three Dharri a traditional head piece worn in times of celebration by Torres Strait Islanders. 'It's a huge part of our identity, culture, and connection with people,' Janz said. 'Flowing through the front of the jumper, we have the coral. That was originally designed by my sister, who was actually going to be the artist, then handed the reins over to me.' If you'd like to view this content, please adjust your . To find out more about how we use cookies, please see our Cookie Guide. 'It kind of gives me Finding Nemo vibes - underwater, the peacefulness, beauty, and nature.' The top of the jumper features the hibiscus flower, which has been a staple of Fremantle Indigenous designs as a symbol of both the Stolen Generation and National Sorry Day. The back of the jumper features turtle shells, associated with wisdom and woven coconut leaves, often used in Torres Strait Islander culture, symbolising resourcefulness. Walyalup will wear Janz's Indigenous designed jumper over both Rounds 3 and 4 of the AFLW Indigenous Rounds, with the first being a clash with reigning premier North Melbourne at Fremantle Oval.
