Melbourne International Arts Festival

BOREDOMS
Japan

For more than two decades, Japan’s iconoclastic experimental music unit, Boredoms, has redefined words like ‘fringe’ and ‘frontier’. Formed in 1986 in Osaka by EYE, the band has become known around the world for their noise, chaos, tribal experimentation, remixing, trance-inducing feats of rhythmic intensity, line-up changes, collaborations, and doing whatever they want regardless of trends and fashion. For the Festival the latest Boredoms incarnation brings intense and otherworldly drumming sounds with this special Melbourne version of their legendary Boadrum performance.

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KES BAND
Australia

Supporting Boredoms is the ever-changing, cerebral all-instrumental art-rock indie outfit Kes Band. Former Bird Blobs bassist and a contributor to the Melbourne quartet Mum Smokes, Karl Scullin, has carved himself a handsome niche as Kes, a clearing house for his varied musical pursuits. The latest Kes Band line up features a high-energy, aggressive sound with prominent instrumental interludes and will be a one‑off special show for the Festival.

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BUM CREEK
Australia

Relocated Canberra freakoids Bum Creek have been making amazing musical weirdness for the last five years. They now live in Melbourne and turn every live show into a triumphant lurching mess of synth squiggles, kraut percussion and vocal gibberish.

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DEAD MEADOW
USA

Darlings of both the stoner rock and modern psychedelia worlds, guitar driven US band Dead Meadow transcend both. Since coming together in 1998 the group has grown to encompass everything from ambient guitar drones to surging psych-funk sludge, blues-folk tunes to barbiturate space rock.  They've reacted to the swelling conservatism in the US with a particularly escapist, surreal, lovely and deafening sound of their own, and their live shows have become famous for their intensity – which Festival audiences can discover for themselves.

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STIGMATA
Sri Lanka

Extreme metal ensemble Stigmata are set to become the first ever Sri Lankan band to tour Australia. Until the late 1990s Sri Lankan popular music consisted of film music, Hindi pop and imitations of western pop. That is until Stigmata and their provocative, powerful sound burst onto the scene in 2003. Growing up in Colombo after years of civil war, sourcing instruments and rehearsal space was a difficult and expensive task. With few live music venues in the city, Stigmata single-handedly built a scene that now produces some of south-east Asia's most promising young metal bands.

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BLARKE BAYER/BLACK WIDOW
Australia

Blarke Bayer is Ben Andrews (My Disco) and Robert MacManus (Grey Daturas, Monarch) is Black Widow. Ascending from this sacred earth under a full moon on 31 October 2006, the gods gave birth to these experimental psych lords, an instrumental drum and guitar duo who re‑create the genius hypnosis of Pink Floyd's Live at Pompeii.

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SAGE FRANCIS
with special guest B. Dolan
USA

Adored by many, reviled by a few, but never ignored and always essential, US rapper Sage Francis has emerged as the reigning agent provocateur of hip hop. Inspired at a young age by the revolutionary sounds of Public Enemy, Francis first caused a stir in 1996 with his self‑circulated mix tapes and has since developed into a fearless social critic. His extraordinary rhyming skills are used to explore such unconventional and wide ranging topics as sexual identity, death, mental illness, corporate greed and most recently religion.

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DEXTER
Australia

For the past decade four-time DMC Australian champ Dexter has constantly challenged the perception of DJing and turntablism. His love of raw sound and dance, alongside his collection of samples of Caribbean folk, Indigenous Asian‑Pacific music, Middle Eastern jazz and North African rhythms, ensures he creates unprecedented sounds. His party sets drop the old with the new, the classics with the obscure, with each record seamlessly bleeding into the next, building up into an atmosphere of joy and madness.

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HORRORSHOW
Australia

Horrorshow are two 21-year-old inner west Sydneysiders: Adit produces the music and Solo handles vocals. Together they bring the energetic optimism and anxiousness of post-school pre-mortgage times to life, with truly vivid poetics. Their lush and evocative samples and flowing rhymes have ensured they’ve built up a loyal and expanding fan base in a very short time.

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DENGUE FEVER
USA/Cambodia

Dengue Fever's psychedelic take on the Cambodian pop sounds of the ‘60s makes them a unique rock'n'roll success story and has left critics rummaging through the thesaurus looking for new superlatives to describe their sound. Started by two American brothers in 2001, the addition of Cambodian songstress Chhom Nimol ensures a pop fusion that retains its Cambodian roots while forging its own psychedelic sound. The band’s experimental surf sounds and spaghetti western twang have seen them featured in a number of film and television shows including City of Ghosts, Broken Flowers, True Blood and Weeds.

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THE BREAK
Australia

In a union to delight music fans, Midnight Oil's Rob Hirst, Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey have joined with bass player Brian Ritchie of US group Violent Femmes to form the new surf rock outfit The Break. With rolling toms and reverb on full throttle, The Break are set to take music lovers on a trip to the outer limits of surf, beyond the break, in a high octane performance that is powerful, dynamic and a whole lot of fun.

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JOHNNIE AND THE JOHNNIE JOHNNIES
Australia

With wild go-go, surf and experimental beatnik beats direct to you from Vegas via California and Collingwood, Johnnie and the Johnnie Johnnies kick off this Festival surfing safari. Lead by Pope Johnnie Paul II on electric guitar and layered with Hammond organ played in hot pants, these cosmic surf riders will transport you to an exotic rock’n’roll dance party.

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LOW
USA

Since 1994, US band Low have released a steady stream of critically acclaimed albums that blend minimalist soundscapes and the subtle beauty of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker's vocal harmonies. Described as a soundtrack for post-traumatic shock, the band's live performances have induced a variety of responses from triumphant applause to silent religious adulation. Returning to Australia for a special one-off performance, these stalwarts of the American independent music scene will drench the Forum with their trademark perpetual reverb.

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PIKELET
Australia

Starting out as a hardcore kid and a drummer with serious chops in local bands such as Baseball and True Radical Miracle, Evelyn Morris’ debut album Pikelet was decidedly un-hardcore, made with accordion, a floor tom and loop pedals. Performing as Pikelet, her second album Stem was recorded with producer Casey Rice (Tortoise, Sea And Cake, Liz Phair) and is an incredible expansion of vision. Now a dynamic four-piece live band, Pikelet brings a cosmic space-prog edge that infiltrates Morris' wide-eyed style with mind-expanding results.

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PONZU ISLAND
Australia

Inspired by utopian visions of an exotic technopolis, composer/producer Bradley Elias created tropical synth-pop project Ponzu Island. Elias and his cohort of eight technologically diverse instrumentalists meld exotica with oriental pop melodies, lush chords and live electronics for a sound to send audiences on a FantAsian voyage into the future.

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THE DRONES
Australia

With a sound all their own, The Drones deliver an aural assault like few bands can. Inspired by a multitude of artists and musical genres including Hank Williams, Townes van Zandt, Black Flag and Suicide, The Drones have evolved into something that at times sounds like alt‑country, dirge riddled blues, garage punk or straight-ahead rock‘n'roll.

Live, The Drones create a melancholy wrestle between violent guitars and front man Gareth Liddiard’s incendiary voice as it lights up his angular poetry.

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P.K.14
China

Making their Australian debut is one of the most influential bands on the Chinese indie scene. P.K.14 occupies a space in Chinese music that might be analogous to that of Talking Heads or Television in the New York of the 1970s. In their native Mandarin they sing of disaffected Chinese youth, but their pared down sounds, explosive energy and passion certainly need no translation. As Time Magazine put it after their sell-out 2009 US tour: “Loud, raw and searching – theirs is the sound of modern China.”

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THE TWERPS
Australia

Loveable Melbourne scallywags The Twerps make incredibly warm-hearted pop music, low on flash but high on feeling. They hark back to ‘50s rock’n’roll, ‘90s lo-fi, and ‘80s New Zealand pop, but the big beautiful mess they make of their influences is all their own.

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MARIACHI EL BRONX
USA

LA-based punk band The Bronx, bring their alter ego, Mariachi El Bronx to Melbourne. Embracing the other enduring soundtrack of southern Californian life, the band touches on many facets of traditional Mexican mariachi music, including trumpet, multiple guitars and silver studded charro outfits. While Mariachi El Bronx started as a means of turning the electric goes acoustic performance garbage on its head, the band soon realised they had enough material for a full length album. Known for their blistering live shows their latest incarnation, while not quite as chaotic, is still punk at heart.

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EAGLE & THE WORM
Australia

Eagle & the Worm is the brain child of Jarrad Brown, who has spent the last ten years collaborating with a number of bands including the Incredible Dead Goons, Custom Kings, Joe Neptune, Jordie Lane Band, Your Animal and The Hondas. The group recently recorded its debut album with Aria nominee Steven Schram. Their live show as an eight-piece band has received rave reviews including being described as "refined and chaotic with flashes of ‘70s pop orchestra arrangements and dreamy summerdelica".

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THE UKELADIES
Australia

The Ukeladies, crooners, swooners, musical gold miners, and back-up singers de jour for many a Melbourne artist, expand from their delicate two-piece into a six-piece cocktail outfit especially for the Festival. The group specialise in long forgotten Hawaiian inspired tunes from the 1940s and ‘50s, so expect the gentle lapping of waves, swaying palm trees, suns setting and moons rising as you settle back with a drink or two into this charming musical hammock.

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HOLY-GRAMS
tin&ed

As part of the Beck’s Festival Bar series, tin&ed will apply their unique brand of careful yet chaotic installation and sculpture to the many nooks, crannies, archways and windows of the Forum Theatre. This new exhibition Holy-Grams reveals the many facets of holiness and worship in pop culture, underground musical heroes and iconic artists through a series of shrines.

The Melbourne-based design duo of Tin Nguyen and Edward Cutting has a seemingly endless thirst for experimentation with new mediums that has taken them on playful adventures through illustration, collage, photography, motion, installation and sculpture. Winners of the Qantas Spirit of Youth Awards, the duo has worked on many large‑scale commissioned projects as well as self‑initiated works. They recently had their first solo show, A Relative Distance, at Lamington Drive in Melbourne.

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