As Australia navigates a second year of lockdowns, the way we experience our city - sounds included - has ebbed and flowed along the way, from heightened bird song in the suburbs, to changes in air traffic patterns.
No two Australian cities sound the same. Every corner of the country is home to its own music scene, be it bold club music born out of local nightspots, or bubbling regional enclaves of jazz or punk. But each city also has a unique soundtrack of a different kind – think the echo of boat horns on the Brisbane River, passing trams in Melbourne, or the robotic drawl of train announcements in Sydney. Together, these sounds and styles make up the sonic identity of a place.
So what exactly are the sounds of three major Australian cities? To find out, we spoke to artists Hatchie, The Presets and Gretta Ray about how their home towns have influenced their music, and the strengths of their local scenes.
Sounds of Melbourne: Gretta Ray
Gretta Ray adores her home town so much she wrote a song about it. Her 2018 track When We’re in Fitzroy is a love letter to both the relationship she was in at the time and the city she’s from.
“I think that I’m the number one Melbourne poster girl,” she laughs. “I wrote that song a few years ago and I just was very much in love with all of the little places that I would go to in the mornings – walking through Edinburgh Gardens, and particular coffee shops that I would [visit].”
Working Melbourne references into her lyrics – something Ray has done more of on her forthcoming debut album, out this August – is a way to tip her hat to both the city and the artists who’ve come before her.
“There are a few local musicians that I can think of that have celebrated places in Melbourne in their songs,” she says. “Someone who I listened to a lot when I was growing up was Clare Bowditch and she has a song called Divorcee by 23, which has a lyric in there about Brunswick Street. So I guess I just wanted to emulate that same kind of appreciation for Melbourne as a place in my own music.”
Melbourne’s famously vibrant music scene spans from the politically piercing punk exemplified by Camp Cope to the laid-back guitar strums of Courtney Barnett. What unites the city is its love of live music: any night of the week, pandemic allowing, you can find a great gig somewhere around town. For Ray, that’s the best thing about Melbourne.
“There’s a really special energy to Melbourne gigs,” she says. “I know that I’m biased because I am from here, but it’s always a joy to play in Melbourne.”
Sounds of Brisbane: Hatchie
For Harriette Pilbeam, AKA Hatchie, the strength of Brisbane’s music scene is in its intimacy.
“One of the reasons I like living here, and one of the reasons the music scene works so well, is there’s a really small radius where people are doing things,” she says. “In Melbourne or Sydney you often have to drive to the other side of the city to go to two different gigs in one night but in Brisbane it’s pretty likely that they’re all happening a block away from each other in the Valley or West End.”
That cosiness makes it easy to discover the city’s different musical bubbles – such as its strong punk scene, or the emerging jazz scene led by artists such as First Beige, Great Sage and Pink Matter. “It’s definitely part of the reason why I’ve stumbled upon new bands,” Pilbeam says.
Despite finding national success as Hatchie, the name under which she releases dreamy indie-pop music, Pilbeam has opted to stay put in her home town. Part of the reason is how close-knit the music community there is.
“When I was starting to play in bands 10 years ago, there were so many young people starting new bands. You couldn’t even keep up with them and everyone was playing in each other’s bands and everyone was really supportive of each other, going to each other’s shows. There were shows on four nights a week.”
As Pilbeam describes it, Brisbane’s “not really a city, it’s more like an overgrown town”, soundtracked by birds, nature and the flow of the river. She likes it that way.
Sounds of Sydney: The Presets
The Presets are an act woven into the fabric of Sydney’s nightlife history.
When duo Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes first met as students at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in the 1990s, they were spending their nights at raves and parties such as Frigid, Sub Bass Snarl and Kooky – something that “ushered us from just being music fans into music creators and performers”, Hamilton says.
When Hamilton and Moyes began releasing music of their own in the 2000s, they found themselves part of a now-iconic electronic music scene shared by club nights such as Bang Gang and Mad Racket. “These parties were a really close-knit network of artists, promoters and DJs, all hustling and also really supporting and championing each other’s music,” Hamilton says.
The Presets’ music exemplified the big, brash and loud stylings of a city that isn’t afraid to show off. Songs such as My People still conjure images of the sweaty, packed Kings Cross clubs of yesteryear.
But even as they’ve grown older – and raves have stopped being a fixture of their weekends – Sydney has remained an indelible part of their music. The Presets’ later albums, 2012’s Pacifica and 2018’s Hi Viz, contain lyrics that take aim at the city’s restrictive lockout laws and reference the dark parts of Surry Hills history.
Outside clubs, Hamilton says the sound of Sydney can be anything from flocks of rainbow lorikeets in the front yard to the sound of planes flying overhead in the Inner West.
“I don’t know if any of those sounds are uniquely Sydney, but they’re certainly my Sydney,” he says.
Take incredible sound everywhere with the Sonos Roam. Enjoy music, voice control, and multi-room listening at home on wifi, plus Bluetooth® streaming, all-day battery life, and waterproof durability on the go.
