Brisbane Blog

Photo by Leonard John Matthews - licenced under Creative Commons

This beautiful church in South Brisbane, St Andrew’s Anglican, is having a free Heritage Festival Day on Saturday May 12, 2012, from 9am to 4pm.

Photo by Leonard John Matthews - licenced under Creative Commons

The day includes organ recitals on the 1884 JW Walker & Sons organ, discussions of local Murri history, heritage displays, guided tours of the church, and food and drink stalls.

Photo by Rae Allen - Licenced under Creative Commons

There’s a Facebook event for the Heritage Festival Day here. The day is part of the 4MBS-FM Festival of Classics, which runs from May 6 to May 27, where you can hear live fine music all over Brisbane. St Andrews is at 160 Vulture St, South Brisbane, about 400 metres away from the South Bank train and bus stations. Click here for a map showing exactly where it is.

Photograph by Sherbet Birdie.

Brisbane singer Bec Laughton is singing at the 2high Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse this Saturday, October 29 2011.  She’s in the Graffiti Room from 1pm – and it’s all free.

This is the clip for her song “Loop de Loop” from Bec Laughton’s own YouTube channel.

And this is her singing “Sensation” at the X&Y bar earlier this year. You can buy her CD on CDbaby and like her Facebook page, too. You can also follow the 2high Festival on Twitter or on their Facebook page.

For a map showing how to get to the Brisbane Powerhouse by public transport, click here.

Photographer Max Doyle has a free exhibition opening on at Nine Lives Gallery this Thursday at 6pm. The exhibition, called Drums, features drum solo work from Nick Norton, Alex Gilles from No Anchor and Susan Patten.

No Anchor playing the Judith Wright Centre in April 2010

Nine Lives Gallery is at 5F Winn St, Fortitude Valley, just around the corner of Ann St from the Zoo. Click here for a Google Map with public transport info.

If you like using Facebook to keep track of your events, the opening is on Facebook here.

The Music By The Sea festival is on today, Friday January 7 and tomorrow, Saturday January 8 at Einbunpin Lagoon Park in Sandgate.

Saturday’s events cost money to get into, but the Friday night opening ceremony and dance party with Bagadijay is FREE.

For a Google Map showing where Einbunpin Lagoon Park is, and with public transport information, click here.

The choir of the Australian Catholic University, together with students from Earnshaw State College, are performing at the Chapel at Australian Catholic University’s Banyo campus at 7pm this Wednesday, November 10. Admission is by gold coin donation.

I saw a performance of the ACU choir earlier this year, and they have beautiful, clear voices – it’s well worth making the trip out to Banyo.

The Banyo campus of the ACU is at 1100 Nudgee Rd, Banyo – click here for a Google Map showing the campus close-up, or click here for a Google Map showing the campus and Northgate station.

Fortitude Valley music venue The Troubadour announced yesterday it will closing as of November 21 2010. This has sparked online discussion about the closure of venues, because the Lofly Hangar in Red Hill has also recently announced that it will close. The discussion also includes speculation that the Globe Theatre, also in Fortitude Valley will close soon. While the Globe is facing large problems, I spoke to the Globe’s venue manager Ash Skilton yesterday, and he confirmed there are NO plans yet for the Globe to close.

In a statement yesterday, Skilton did say the Globe needs to raise money for a “new…large security deposit” for the venue. However the statement called for public support to raise the money required, rather than announcing closure. The statement encouraged people to attend gigs at the Globe in the next month or to become members of Odyssey Creative Productions, the organisation that runs the venue. The Globe’s website is also asking for donations.

The Globe is on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace

I just went down to Fort Arts Hub on the spur of the moment earlier tonight, because I’d seen something called Enter The Terrordrome was on there. It sounded OK, and it was only a gold coin donation, so I went along to see something new. Live art installations and turntablism were promised; since I don’t know much about DJ-style music I thought I’d go and learn something about it.

Well, I’m damn glad I did! When I got there I saw a DJ mucking around with turntables and computers…nothing out of the ordinary. But then I noticed the keyboard…an audience member was playing with it. It was facing out, towards the audience, and since I like meddling with things I know nothing about, I decided to have a play.

There was a computer set up, and I know just enough about sound engineering to realise I could adjust the sounds coming out of the keyboard if I mucked around with the settings. So I did. Before long, DJ Nikk C introduced himself; it was his event and he had set up the gear to show the audience the sort of things he’s experimenting with.

The computer had four channels, so when you pressed a key four different things would happen to it. You could adjust the type of sound each key produced, and also what happened to the volume of each note as you held it down. You could make it start loud and go soft, start soft and go loud, start loud, get louder, get really soft, get a little louder, a little softer and then VERY LOUD. You could make all that happen in the space of half a second or ten seconds. And you could even muck around with the notes made by each key. Say you wanted to abandon the usual Western musical octave, and make the musical distance between each note much bigger or smaller than we are used to in the West – you could do that simply by dragging a mouse across the right part of the screen. You could quickly and simply reverse the sound of the keys, or you could have low notes at the top and bottom of the keyboard and high notes in the middle.

There were also two turntables, a fader machine (which could generate thousands of different notes and drumbeats and sounds if you mucked around with the knobs, sliders and switches). And there was also the DJ tablet you can see in the video above. All these things were open and ready for the audience to play around with. This was great; it was a hands-on musical playground.

DJ Nikk C also explained some stuff to me about how he’s using digital vinyl recording live on stage to create new effects. This video explains the sort of thing he’s up to:

The video caption says:

This is a rendition of "Gymnopedie" #1, By Erik Satie, performed by NIKK C, using turntables, guitar and software.

I have devised a setup where I can pipe various audio material through Ableton live and into Traktor scratch using a single computer and soundcard. This allows me to spontaneously record material onto digital vinyl for further manipulation and re-recording. I am using Ableton live with an APC40 and a foot switch to trigger playback.

This is my second study using this setup. The composition was largely improvised. The purpose of this video is to demonstrate the possible uses for digital vinyl in a live recording situation. Stay tuned for more studies!

and

For this setup, I used a Native instruments Audio8 soundcard. the output of traktor was piped back into the soundcard and into ableton. it seems the 2 softwares wil run without crashing as long as you dont map ins and outs to the same channels. Have fun trying this out!

DJ Nikk C doesn’t have a website yet, but stay tuned to his YouTube channel, where I got these videos from.

The Fort Arts Hub is on Brunswick St (West) in Fortitude Valley, on the corner of Water St, a little to the west of the Valley Fiveways where the Den is. Click here for a Google Map.

I went to The Music Kafe in West End last night, and it seems it was blues with a rock-vibe night, which suited me just fine. I caught the full set of Blind Dog Donnie, and thought I’d share the band with you.

The YouTube vid above gives you a taste of what Blind Dog Donnie’s band is like. There’s more YouTube vids if you click here, plus the band’s Facebook page and MySpace page. Apparently they play a regular Friday night gig at the Boundary Hotel in West End.

I also saw a two-hand band called Blue Honey, one woman on guitar and vocals and one guy on blowsy harp. Can’t find them online though but keep your eye out if you like that sort of thing.