There’s a diagram that does the rounds online that neatly sums up the difference between the quality of equipment used in the studio to produce music, and the quality of the listening equipment used by…
John Zorn’s appearance at the Adelaide Festival last week spread across four evenings – totalling over 12 hours. The cost of bringing Zorn and more than 20 musicians from New York to play at the Adelaide…
In 1981, MTV was launched with a woman in a tinsel wig being beamed to Earth (well, she actually slid awkwardly down a plastic tube) to join men in shiny suits playing wood-grained synthesisers. The Buggles…
The world’s largest annual music conference South by South West (SXSW), continues this week in Austin, the capital of Texas; and the dynamism behind creative music cities such as Austin, Melbourne and…
The inaugural Festival of Live Art (FOLA), which begins today in Melbourne, celebrates some of the most exciting artists working in performance today and yet, the exact meaning of the term “live art” is…
Think of your favourite piece of music. Do you get shivers when the music swells or the chorus kicks in? Or are the opening few bars enough to make you feel tingly? Despite having no obvious survival value…
When it was announced recently that Burt Bacharach would be headlining this year’s Wilderness Festival, The Guardian were quick to point out the age of the veteran composer turned performer: The 85-year-old…
Research published today in the journal Cell Biology describes a new condition, musical anhedonia – the inability to experience pleasure from music. Specifically the researchers were able to identify a…
As I think of the recently deceased guitarist Paco de Lucía, there is one thought that immediately comes to mind: he has arguably brought about the most thorough transformation of flamenco in the second…
The Conversation is running a series, Class in Australia, to identify, illuminate and debate its many manifestations. Here, Katrina McFerran discusses how access to music education can reaffirm social…
One Direction got lucky this year, taking two awards away from the Brits. One of these was in the new Best British video category, judged by the British public via a live vote over Twitter. And this was…
A number of my friends have a fervour for Bruce Springsteen I have never been able to understand. I have always thought of his work as prosaic and literal. His songs teeter on the edge of despair at the…
David Bowie, the Arctic Monkeys, and Ellie Goulding were among the winners at Wednesday night’s Brit Awards. In theory, these were awarded because they were the cream of last year’s music crop. To qualify…
The latest shocking footage from Sochi shows members of the Pussy Riot collective being whipped, apparently for protesting at the Olympics. The incident occurred yesterday, Wednesday February 19, as they…
There’s no shortage of professional critical opinion about music – a wealth of blogs and websites, plenty of column inches in the weekend newspapers. We’re bound to see a plethora of articles around the…
What role does music play in your life? Music surrounds us, in shops, at work, on television, and at the movies. We program our own personal soundtracks effortlessly via iPods and similar devices. With…
Maybe the ads ruined it for me. Certainly, INXS: Never Tear Us Apart was thoroughly cross-promoted on Channel Seven. I think Kochie may have even mentioned it once or twice. The ads, though, pointed to…
Fifty years after the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, the band is still the benchmark for Anglo-American relations. With their swift rise to fame in the US, they started the so-called British…
Thirty years ago, a new name joined popular music’s aristocracy with an album and movie that catapulted him, almost overnight, from cult celebrity to the higher tiers of rock’s pantheon. Since then, the…