Day: Negative One
Wednesday 9th September 2009
Brisbane

Let’s back track a few hours. It’s Tuesday night and I’ve started to regret certain decisions I’ve made. I’m sitting in my living room, only a week home from a long tour playing experimental music in Europe. Six weeks of sleeping on floors, playing in ‘spaces’ (a peach farm, a half-finished Italian villa and the basements and lofts of various cafes and microbars) and I’ve had enough of music. I don’t want it or need it right now. What I want and need is money. In haste, I send some emails and it’s all arranged and where I’m headed barely crosses my mind for a few days.

Til Tuesday night, when I separate my Big Sound conference pack into two piles: one pile – the bigger one – goes straight in the bin. I can’t remember what exactly was in the big pile, I tried not to give it much attention. What’s left is a program, two pamphlets, a copy of J Mag (‘Jesus this is boring’ says my girlfriend reading it as I sort) and a note pad. I want to bin the complimentary embroided Big Sound sachet immediately but it seems somehow wasteful. I’ll no doubt wait a month or two, find it under a pile of books in the office and throw it out then. Looking at the program is when I really start to feel the fear. I’m a cynical, disinterested, thirty-something-and-past-it indie-pop artist and every ghost from those days of ambition is represented here at Big Sound; in the times and schedules there are people I know and worked with, ideas I held close to heart and old desires. Why did I think this was a good idea?

Day: One

Big Sound is staged in a multi-story art space called the Judith Wright Centre in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley district. With the Institute of Modern Art in the basement, the ‘Judy’ acts as a hub of sorts for the city’s more respectable arts community. At the building’s heart is a cavernous black performance space with tiered seating and it is here that the conference begins.

It’s reportedly a sold out crowd and most have turned up to this first session to hear Courier Mail music writer Noel Mengel interview producer Van Dyke Parks. The two chat a little, Van warms up, there are questions about his life and highlights from his work. He’s met Bob Dylan, lunched with Walt Disney, struggled with Brian Wilson and Mengel largely stays out of the way. It’s hard not to like Van, a guy that can quip ‘I was there so I really shouldn’t be called upon to remember’ when asked a tricky one. But he talks happily, almost to the point of rambling. Old enough to know he says without a hint of irony, ‘It’s a struggle, there’s no shelter in the arts.’

With the following session we all get down to business. This is the first of many, many panels all about the same thing: success. Collected to discuss ‘The Hit’ and how to manufacture one are a group of music boffins (Eskimo Joe’s manager, a radio guy, a producer, a label guy – no artists, of course). They come up with the same answers, detours and dead-ends as expected, mainly because the question is not really worth asking. Of course a collision of timing, location and talent/appeal maketh the money. I’m not sure that has ever changed or will.

The highlight of that panel and the focus of the next one is Steve Pavlovic, owner of Modular Records and home to The Presets, Wolfmother and a gold toilet, no doubt. I’ve always liked Pav. There are two reasons: (1) He put out the first Budd records in the 90s. (2) Back in the day - 2007, I think, my failure is relatively fresh – I submitted my band’s work to Modular. Pav emailed me back and said he’d listened to it but didn’t like it and thus couldn’t release it but that he had bought one of my band’s older records and did like that one. You pretty much can’t fuck with a person that honest. Triple J’s Dan Buhagiar led him through the history of the label and its strategies and it all seemed a unique, not all-together smooth story. The geek in me who likes to know how things are made quietly applauded.

And then lunch was served.

“I write about myself because no one else will. And I write about music because it’s what I like and because it’s more interesting to other people than writing about babies” and so Everett True, former Golden God of the British Press and present Brisbane resident introduced himself to the afternoon’s delegates. The panel was about digital publishing and contained a puzzlingly configuration of quiet bloggers (“Uhm, I just like getting the free records”) and industry boffins – one preconscious, one loud and angry. And Everett. Mr True acquitted himself well post-introduction, happily making whatever comment occurred to him – more often than not correct as I read it – as the industry folks shifted around in their seats wondering, ‘Who the fuck is this weird old guy?’.

The final panel was called ‘Record Labels: The Model of the Past or the Future’ and revealed some interesting moments, I’m sure, but I live in the present and in the present I couldn’t take any more so I ditched out.

Nightfalls on the City of Brisbane. Drinks are poured.

Industry show cases are pure pain, they’re kind of like a regular show except – to use the parlay of  one show casing artist – everyone has ‘sand in their vagina.’ The rooms are too big and too clean and too full of middle aged music execs and the bands are frightened, either scared of the execs or the weird vibe. (Tip: Scaring musicians is pretty easy. The average musician is scared of a different brand of amplifier. I am.) And thus the shows are inevitably pretty boring. You’d think fear would motivate but in music, it rarely does.

Local two-piece rock band DZ are normally a force to be reckoned with. A band that happily employs the Dick Smith’s smoke machine, black lights and a friend holding a strobe to help the audience up on lightning. Tonight, they’re two guys on a big stage wondering how much is enough.  No one’s at the front. No one cheers loudly. It’s a business meeting. They could have caught fire and it’d have left the mood unaltered. That said they played well, are a great live band and will hopefully blossom further in the post-Violent Soho Brisbane rock explosion if we explode and even if we don’t. They’re the ones to catch and I catch them as often as possible.

Romy is on down the road. Formerly and maybe once again known as Macromantics, tonight she showcases some melodic pop smarts. I don’t get it but that doesn’t mean much. With melodic/pop music, I can often be a late adopter. As always, she’s in fine voice, looking smart and is an imposing presence on stage. The room temperature isn’t at all better than what DZ suffer through but Romy gives better than she gets. She also receives bonus points here for her keyboard player, a woman who dances well with her instrument – no mean feat.

Minutes later, Brisbane’s Rational Academy are making a horrifying broken washing machine styled racket in a small club called The Troubadour. Out of the noise, they play a series of short, strange little numbers that mix alternatively tuned blow outs with almost garage-rock-esque pop smarts. I don’t know where they get this stuff but tonight it clicks. I holler a bit, I had to.

Earlier that day I met Sydney’s Dead Sea in the tea line and they seemed nice enough to drink in front of. A guitar/bass/drums trio, they show no fear of technology and tonight they lay out an epic foundation of tricky looped and processed instrumental music, somewhat hemmed in by the tight time frames at work. Still, they find things in post-rock (I’m not afraid to use that term) that other people haven’t found. They’re not big exciting things yet but they look as though they’ve only just started digging and thus, I like it.

From here, things get personal. I meet friends from interstate and take them places. I stay out later than I should and get drunker than I need to. Early in the still-dark morning I squint into the conference program and think, damn these are long days.

DAY 2 | DAY 3