Embracism – Kirin J Callinan
Electro rock provocateur Kirin J Callinan claims he has never been deliberately confrontational. Yet his performances have been known to cause controversy (at the 2013 Sugar Mountain festival he and film-maker Kris Moyes revealed thwarted performance plans to include a strobe light that would induce seizures in a planted audience member suffering from epilepsy). The Australian artist makes dark, poetic, clangy rock that is confessional and abrasive. He flirts with the fringes of good taste, and revels in the grey zone dividing genders, sometimes performing semi-nude. Embracism (2013) was Callinan’s first solo release since playing “noise-guitar” with Sydney indie rock band Mercy Arms, penned after finding himself single for the first time in his adult life. He defines the album title and its broader themes as “the antithesis of escapism”. In a song of the same name, he half-sings, half-yells: “and when a boy grows up he’s still the same / but he’s a man / and a man is physical / and a man has to put his physical body to the test / against another man / do you measure up?” Callinan was also a guest guitarist on Mark Ronson’s last album; the pair met when Ronson saw him play at a wedding in France. Catch him at the festival on October 11.
Short Movie – Laura Marling
Laura Marling called it her “gap year” though it stretched for just over two: she played a ton of small venue gigs to a mainly “indifferent America”, applied for a New York poetry course and read books over coffee in Los Angeles. When she was rejected for the course it triggered a period of soul-searching, at the end point of which she “got all the childish wonder back again” as she says in a Guardian interview. Now the 25-year-old British darling of indie folk, playing the festival on 19 October, has released her fifth album, Short Movie and in it shows her tough, yet vulnerable side. Marling’s vocals have more than a hint of Joni Mitchell about them, and her lyrics are rousing and unpretentious such as in the album’s title track: “I pay for my mistakes / that’s okay / I don’t mind a little pain / It’s a short fucking movie, man.” Her music seems to cut straight through to the heart. The song reaches a crescendo with a whine of strings and furious hammering on the guitar, as she sings: “They know that I loved you / but they’ll never know why”.
Bád Bán – Colm Mac Con Iomaire
Colm Mac Con Iomaire, a long time member of Dublin bands the Frames and the Swell Season, is bringing his solo show to the festival on 16 and 17 October. On his second solo album, And Now the Weather (Agus Anois An Aimsir), Mac Con Iomaire has made a record of rare, almost orchestral, beauty. So it seems incongruous he is sometimes categorised by the music industry as country and folk. “It could be worse. If there is a divide between country and folk I probably lean more towards the acoustic than the heavily electric,” he told the Irish Echo. Mac Con Iomaire is aware epic, sweeping albums such as And Now the Weather are becoming rarities. “It’s definitely counter to what the prevailing wind is, with streaming and downloading for nothing. But the music needs to be what it is. It needs to wear the sleeves that it’s wearing,” he says. “The music business model is a tabula rasa (blank slate) really. All models are being smashed in a vacuum of what’s going to happen next. The artist won the argument over the business man in this case.”
Two Weeks and Counting – Clint Mansell
When composing film scores for American director Darren Aronofsky, Clint Mansell favours traditional sweeping strings and orchestral sounds, interrupted with noisy washes of electronica and industrial sounds – as seen in Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and Black Swan. Among his influences are instrumental post-rockers Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, as well as Philip Glass whom he calls, “the world’s greatest composer”. But when British film-maker Duncan Jones (incidentally, also son of David Bowie), brought him on board to compose the soundtrack for sci-fi drama Moon, Mansell toned down the prominence of the string section, and did away with the complex and rushing crescendos he is renowned for. The result is an album that is musically stripped back, but still brimming with desolation and tension. In Moon song Two Weeks and Counting he reveals even without sonic crash-and-booms, the world Mansell creates is no less harrowing. Catch him perform with a nine-piece band on 10 and 11 October at the festival.
Clair de Lune – Flight Facilities
Electronic production duo Flight Facilities had their first breakout hit in 2010 with Crave You. With just enough soft keys and girly, feathery vocals courtesy of Giselle Rosselli, the song became a chillout cafe staple. Having established a winning template, the Sydney pair continued with a string of disco-pop and funky house dancefloor winners, including Foreign Language and With You. But the 2012 release of their track Clair de Lune marked a shift in sound. The song opened with the crackling of scratchy tape and an almost cinematic, sustained note before moving into its see-sawing riff and the enigmatic vocals of Christine Hoberg. There was something much darker and plaintive about the track; the wintery maturity to their summer youth. Sealing their musical credibility is a gig with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the festival on 17 October. The pair said playing alongside an orchestra was “almost inconceivable” when they started Flight Facilities. But think again if you consider this pairing to be a bolt from the blue. “Long before making Clair de Lune, we’ve both shared a love for classical music,” the pair said.
