Pet Cemetery, our weekly night held on Thursdays in the gallery bar, is having A BOB DYLAN ADVENTURE! on Thursday April 3. The evening will feature Pet Cemetery regulars and special guests performing Bob Dylan covers all night.
Melbourne band The Temper Trap are playing the Oxford Art Factory on Friday 11th April, with support from Bird Automatic and The Holidays.
They have recently been busy in the studio, writing and recording a bunch of new material, and while they warm up for their coming tour, they're posting previews of their new demos on their MySpace for four days at a time.
Get in quick if you want a preview of the album-to-be, due out in May.
Rising Sydney artist Loveariel presents a group show full of talent and diversity. "cause we can" @ Somedays Gallery - 72b Fitzroy street, Surry Hills, 2nd April 08.
Come together "Cause we can" is an opportunity for all ages of all stages to show together cause we really are all brilliant.
The philosophy behind this collective is not only to create a visual wonderment for all walks of life but to support our future generation of talent. With an array of familiar names mixed with some special unknowns to introduce, Loveariel & Caroline Wels are excited to launch a tradition of such events.
The show will be a smear of graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, painters, graphers, writers and um..... instillationers. including live folk/country and blues performances by Kalamazoo, Eye of the Spider and more!
Spnsored by Maven Wines, Bohemia Pilsner, Alize, Throw Shapes, Brag, and Oyster.
Please join us for a night of art, friendship and celebration of life. Garden party style!
Sydney darlings Bird Automatic are supporting The Temper Trap at The Oxford Art Factory on Friday 11th April.
In the mean time they have a bunch of new tracks up on their MySpace, including 'Suburbs' which you can listen to above. You should go be their friend, because they are pretty darn great.
Just when you thought that street art was starting to get a bit stale, along comes something that reconnects you with the reasons you fell in love with street art in the first place.
Prolific bloggers Wooster Collective have posted about an artist in NYC who has been making animals out of discarded plastic bags. They tie them to the ventilation grates above the subway lines so that when the subway trains rush through underneath, the animal jumps up and springs to life. Awesome.
So, sure, we say that we're excited to see most of the acts who we talk about on our news page, but we're reeeaaalllllyy excited to announce that Eli Escobar is playing at the Oxford Art Factory on Saturday 3rd May.
He's well known and loved for resisting terrible fads and just dropping bombs, and we absolutely can't wait to see what he's got in his record bag when he plays here.
He has an awesome blog where he posts a bunch of stuff - remixes, YouTube videos and talk about various bits and pieces called Outside Broadcast that's well worth a visit.
We really like The Temper Trap, and we're pretty psyched that they're playing here on Friday 11 April, with solid local support from The Holidays and Bird Automatic.
Tickets are on sale now at Moshtix.com, and in the meantime you can check out the film clip to My Sun.
The Raveonettes return to Australia for live shows in support of their new album LUST LUST LUST.
Following up on their 2005 release, Pretty In Black, the Danish distortion duo have hit back with an album more rebellious, more sinister and most importantly – more original. Lust Lust Lust explores the devil in us all but the devil has all the best tunes.
The Raveonettes released their first EP, Whip It On, in 2002 which was recorded entirely in the key of B-flat minor, and the 2003 full-length debut, Chain Gang of Love, stuck to B-flat major-making their mark on the emerging new garage-rock scene with a flair for the dramatic. Their image was pure '50s retro-cool: lanky, dark-haired Sune Rose Wagner and six-foot blonde glamazon Sharin Foo wore black leather and sat astride motorbikes. The Danish duo doused their stripped-down songs about sex, suicide, and prostitution with noisy, fuzzed-out guitar, sweet boy-girl harmonies, and sleazy surf-punk twang.
With sonic comparisons to The Velvet Underground and The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Raveonettes bubble-gum '50s pop and nostalgic kitsch has only amplified their credibility as one of indie rock's most innovative bands.
The Raveonettes play the Oxford Art Factory on Thursday 17th April, 2008, with support from Black Ryder.
Jonathan Zawada, Sydney's king of design, had a rather beautiful exhibition at Monster Children Gallery in February and March this year, titled Boolean Values. For those of you who missed it, he's selling an edition of 200 copies of his catalogue from his website - with reproductions of all the drawings in the exhibition and a few extra works created just for the book.
After duetting with Dave Grohl on the new Foo Fighters album, contributing music to Sean Penn’s new film “Into the Wild” and touring Australia three times in 2007… gKaki King presents her new album, “Dreaming of Revenge”. Produced by Malcolm Burn (Dylan, Midnight Oil, Etc…) Dreaming of Revenge sees confidant vocals blended with her trademarked guitar genius to create an album that Time Out NYC says “ Should appeal to fans of both Steve Reich and Jack Johnson alike”.
Kaki King will be touring with the Foo Fighters as support act and a duet with Dave Grohl nationally across Australia & NZ. She plays her only Sydney show at the Oxford Art Factory on Thursday May 1.
My Disco - You Came To Me Like A Cancer Lain Dormant Until It Blossomed Like A Rose
Melbourne trio My Disco are celebrating the release of their second album Paradise with a national tour.Recorded in Chicago at Electrical Audio Studio, sound engineer extraordinaire Steve Albini (Pixies, Mono, PJ Harvey, The Stooges) has captured My Disco's minimal, yet intricate sound perfectly.
Come see the boys on the Sydney leg of their tour on Friday 25 April – tickets available now at Moshtix.com.
Amid the data mountains of hideous quality live footage on YouTube, we found a rather nice video of Robyn singing 'Be Mine' at the Oxford Art Factory, that has reminded us of how keen we are to see her at V Festival.
Until the end of March, you can catch an exhibition of Kiwi-born Erin Forsyth's illustrations titled HEX, at Sydney's Black and Blue gallery.
Using her signature blend of hyperstylized characters, hip-hop slogans and sometimes callous symbollism; in this new body of work Erin questions the black magic and little white lies of todays visual communication. Comic, select representations of pop and religious iconography, superstitions and folklore feature throughout the works with equal weight. Clear on the descriptive level but elusive on the narrative; the result is a parody that serves to question rather than mock, a debaucherous astheticism that is seemingly familiar.
Purveyors of the iciest disco this side of a slush puppy on ice skates, torchbearers of the neu-Italo sound and the prize horse of NYC label Italians Do It Better, Glass Candy are coming to Australia to play at the V Festival and do a couple of perfectly decadent sideshows. Glass Candy will play headline shows in Sydney on Friday March 28 at the Oxford Art Factory and on Thursday March 3 at The Toff in Melbourne.
Glass Candy have been the subject of so much internet buzz over the last 6 months that they had to get earplugs to keep the noise out, though thankfully they have some certified stone cold jams to justify the expense of custom hearing protection. The music of producer Johnny Jewel and siren Ida No echoes of 80’s synth pop, late 70’s Italo disco and the synth-futurism of the likes of Jean Michel-Jarre and Jan Hammer, with a hint of creepy David Lynch-ian feeling.
Glass Candy have been at the forefront of the sound that has become synonymous with Mike Simonetti’s New York-based Italians Do It Better label, largely due to the fact that Johnny Jewel moonlights as a producer for many of the labels acts.
Glass Candy and the label have carved out a distinctive niche that sounds like one may have thought 2008 might have sounded like back in 1972, with it’s vintage synthesizers and elegantly vacant, entrancing vocals.
Glass Candy’s atmosphere heavy, super crisp disco act is set to be one of the more interesting and progressive V Festival sideshows and one well worth your lobster.
They have a bunch of MP3s available to download at their MySpace, so what are you waiting for?
Dave Nada’s touring Australia in April! For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Dave Nada is resident at America’s #1 destination for Baltimore club music – Taxlo in Baltimore city, and regularly plays with the likes of Tittsworth, Diplo and ScottieB. He will arrive in Oz fresh off a national Mad Decent US tour with hot new talent Blaqstarr.
Nada plays the Oxford Art Factory on Saturday 12th April, and you can download his recent Discobelle mix here to get you by until you can see the real thing.
Some of our favourite young artists – both local and international, will be exhibiting in the Kids Today exhibition being held in conjunction with the Semi-Permanent conference this year.
There’s a website with more info up at Stupid Krap.
The Red Bull Art of Can competition is currently open for submissions of work inspired by Red Bull or crafted from the iconic blue and silver cans. The pick of the submissions are exhibited in Houston Texas this year, and the first prize is an all-expense paid trip for two to Art Basel Switzerland—the world’s premier modern and contemporary art fair.
Submissions are due by April 6, so get to cutting!
Melbourne street artist Two has been doing his bit for the planet and it looks good. Taking inspiration from Sadako Sasaki's 1000 cranes tale the Japanese born artist has recycled 1000 spray paint cans and turned them all into separate pieces of art that are displayed in chronological order charting the progression of the 18 month project. The exhibition is being held at Global galleries, 5 Comber St, Paddingtom, from April 4-13.
Our very talented friend Ben Frost has been involved in all sorts of things at the Oxford Art Factory, most recently a spoken word performance at our weekly Thursday night, Pet Cemetery.
Check of the video above, and if you’re still hungry for more, you can find out the latest on Ben Frost at his website.
Melbourne based artist Reka One has a show at China Heights, opening on Saturday 29th March.His blog is also well worth a visit – it’s currently sporting some great shots of Sydney street art, including the current wall at The Record Store, a business that certainly does its bit to make Sydney a better looking place.
