Author results: Wilfred Brandt
Xiu Xiu interview
Jamie Stewart's band Xiu Xiu are intense. Actively experimental yet equally rock, they juxtapose noise and industrial sounds with hooks and riffs making music that's disorienting, heavy, intoxicating, and beautiful. With lyric matter pulled from real life events - in the band member's lives, or people close to them - their songs alternate between creepy, sad, cryptic, poignant, and funny.
Beer & Brewer
Ah, Beer magazine. The place where geeky and blokey meet. And get drunk.
You can't get much geekier than proudly proclaiming "191 beers inside". Other geeky topics in the Spring issue of this quarterly mag: 'frontier' (experimental or unusual) beers, Melbourne bar Biero's patented 'Beervault', Italian craft beers, and a Melbournian sustainability consultant who caters events on a pushbike loaded with kegs of his own craft beer.
Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box
Let's play 'I spy'. Ready? Look around you. I spy something that in ten years will be obsolete.
Portable Grindhouse is a tributary 'don't know what you've got 'til it's gone' love letter to the awesomeness that was the '80s videotape box. The focus here is on lowbrow films, from obscure Ilsa flicks to Charles Bronson cheese.
Mixtape by Kim Salmon
To delineate the career trajectory, milestones and landmarks of Perth-born Kim Salmon - who has been making music for 34 years - would eat the entirety of this page and then some. Plus, the essence of this post-punk icon and Aussie grunge forefather (alongside his seminal work with The Scientists and The Surrealists) can't be contained behind a glowing computer screen.
Seagull, 'Council Tree'
Do you love depressing music? I do!
Chris Bolton writes moody, sparse songs that intertwine folk, drone, minimalism and restrained indie rock. Perfect for listening to late at night, alone, it's an album that keeps you guessing and doesn't grow predictable; a treasure for fans of slow, beautiful bummer music, like labelmate Ned Collette, Thom Yorke on Quaaludes, or a less pretty Bon Iver.
Iconoclast Editions
That question where you pick famous people to have over for dinner is as exciting in fantasy (Terry Richardson! Larry Clark! David Shrigley!) as it is depressing in reality (your loser friends, who turn up two hours late, without bringing even a cheap fifth of whiskey*).
If you can't get Neckface, Spike Jonze, Cheryl Dunn and the aforementioned over for pizza and pot brownies, you can at least get them in art form via Iconoclast.
Hijacked 2: Australia & Germany
In 2008, Western Australia's Mark McPherson magically transformed his small B&W photo zine into a full-color coffee table book (and accompanying international exhibition) - with its charm and beauty still intact. ACP director Alasdair Foster even called Hijacked 1, "the most important photographic book that's come out of Australia in at least five years".
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