Daniel Romano’s Outfit (CA), Guest: Adrian T. Bell (UK/CZ), Support Carson McHone (US), 26.6.2022, Cross Club Open Air. More info and tickets HERE.
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RHYECE O’NEILL is a songwriter, poet & novelist born in South Gippsland, Victoria, Australia. Solo or with his band he has played pubs and bars in the outback and cities all over the Australia and toured and performed with The Beasts of Bourbon, The Ape, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Spencer P. Jones and more. Steeped in the desert blues, garage rock & roll and outlaw country O’Neill’s influences range from Iggy Pop, Rowland S Howard, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Bad Seeds, Stanford Clarke, W.H. Auden, Arthur Rimbaud, PJ Harvey, Sylvia Plath, Patti Smith, Henry Miller, Townes Van Zandt, Dostoyevsky, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker & Dylan.
O’Neill’s trade is the written word. In 2017 he collected his poetry and songs into his first album “Übermensch Blues”. A prolific poet, novelist and songwriter he has completed several novels from which “Run To The Dust” is based on his experiences as a union delegate leading an industrial dispute working on a huge construction project in the desert. Around the time also large parts of his second album “Death of a Gringo” was written. He also finished his first collection of poems, “The Condition Report 45”.
2018 saw the him and his former band The Narodniks release the “Death of a Gringo” album on Beast Records in France. Following this release the band embarked on their European tour playing over 41 dates across the continent including 3 shows at the legendary Binic Blues festival in France. While in the Czech Republic they recorded at Sono Records studios with legendary engineer and producer Milan Cimfe who has worked with David Bowie, Lou Reed and Kris Kristofferson. This collaboration resulted in 2019 in a prophetic album “Los Diablos”, while in between at home Australia he recorded an acoustic album “Junk In The Valley” with Hannah Jane.
In July 2019 in Melbourne’s Cactus Room he paid homage to the Australian cult classic film “Wake in Fright”. With his band he presented a live, original soundtrack which both shocked and thrilled the sold out auditorium. The gothic blues guitar, driving bass and boogie near psychotic drums provided a truly stunning context for the film’s dialogues and subject matter.
In 2021 upon receiving a vision in a dream O’Neill packed his life in his car and headed out of his native Victoria the night the state was locked down amidst the pandemic. Since then he has traversed the entire east coast of Australia from his home in South Gippsland to the windy shores of Cooktown in far North Queensland. Upon returning to Brisbane he formed a new band as his band mates were stranded in Melbourne.
On the begining of 2022 he released EP Road To Damascus (Journey to Bunya), which will be followed by a new full album.
PRESS
“Think Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds meets the old school sounds of The Veils meets Mark Lanegan… Filled with tension and drunken swagger with a deliciously complementing haunting violin: Australian singer songwriter Rhyece O’Neill impresses us with “The Fire in You.” Gobsmag.nl
“Ubermensch Blues” grabs you first time and you’ll be returning over and over. It’s a sound investment, if not essential. i94bar.com
Christmas, Jesus, and modern visions of hell: we chat with Rhyece O’Neill, Happy Mag
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After passing the bless on latest album, in 2019 Darla Smoking presened their new album “Extinct”, dedicated to all the wanishing live on our planet. “Extinct” will try to awake and remind again that the battles against extinction from some decades ago are still there and haven’t been getting any attention and help in solving the situations. We still have Native Americans without their prairie, Tibetian people being forced to become Chinese, Maori and Aborigini tribes drowning in the big city’s slums, massacre in Amazonia and the last sheppard in Bulgaria who is being sucked into globalisation. It goes all the way to the plastic soundscape under the Arctic sea. All in all the new album will spit out the dying screams and helpless anger while we all quietly watch the world blow in our faces. Extinct is the new dead.
Darla Smoking is a Slovenian duo of crazed cats, Brgs and Nac, who seriously shook the Slovenian grounds with the release of “Big Bug” on Kapa Records in 2017. Darla mixes various influences and sounds, including field recordings from various parts of the world, which Nac then carefully electronically processes. Brgs on the other hand provides a constant drum drive, combined with extensive use of modular synthesizers. Their sound is therefore extremely multifaceted, with the most dominant elements of world or ethno music, dub and psychedelia, but their music reaches and goes far beyond just these genres. Album Extinct is supported with live visuals on concerts by Atlas Skull who is part of Darla’s visual message from the beginning.
“A post-everything cacophony of brilliance that barges into your brain and forces your limbs to dance. It’s dub music for rockers, punk music for the electro generation, world music for the outcasts and night owls. Few bands ever get close to creating such a hedonistic, seductive racket, but that’s because few bands are like Darla Smoking.” Europavox.com
“Incredibly interesting, unusual, challenging and fresh album” Rockline.si
“The Big Bug album is proof that people who rush through life often overlook the unique moments which make this world so beautiful” RockOnNet webzine
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With their original, hot mix of alternative rock, psychedelic, electronica and country the Nylon Jail were shining supernova of Czech music scene between 2012-2014 and like supernova with explosion disappeared in 2015. Luckily for all of us the core of the band has survived and now is back with new videos which announce a new album in the spring 2018 + beginning of live concert activity.
We are proud Nylon Jail to be a new member of our artist family and open booking for 2018.
New videos:
Website: www.nylonjail.org
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Sometimes you listen to a band and say to yourself – that would be great to work with such amazing artist… yep, as you wish, here you go! We are happy to announce ORKESTA MENDOZA, hot and intriguing band from Tucson, USA, is a new member of our family. Check out the band’s profile HERE.
[/trim]“Orkesta Mendoza is one of the best live bands out there. Their music delves into a myriad of directions, rhythms and moods, big band orchestrations mixed with lo fi electronica, vocals en Español together with moving instrumentals.” — Joey Burns, Calexico
Something is stirring in downtown Tucson. That’s no great surprise perhaps: Calexico have been sending out missives from the desert for 20 years now, Giant Sand for even longer than that, and the Green on Red revival is surely overdue. These three giants of American popular music ask questions of the form, chiefly because of where they are situated. Let us remind ourselves that this isn’t a big city in the American sense (it’s the country’s 33rd largest), but that its hinterland is indeed as big as it gets. For an hour south, Mexico starts. And this is where things get interesting.
Born in Nogales, Arizona, raised in Nogales, Sonora, multi-instrumentalist and band-leader Sergio Mendoza grew up listening to the Mexican regional styles jostling for headspace in a young, music- mad mind – cumbia mainly, but mambo, rancheras and mariachi too. The border is always a fierce arena of exchange, both commercial and cultural, and so there was American music too. At one point ‘rock and roll, the classics’, as Mendoza himself deadpans, seemed to win out and he stopped playing those ‘Latin styles’ for a good decade and a half.
The return to those sounds was a strong one in 2012’s Mambo Mexicano, co-produced by Mendoza and Joey Burns of Calexico – a band for which Mendoza has become an increasingly integral touring and recording member. While that record had a studied air, tentative in parts (as befits the renewal of an old love affair), ¡Vamos A Guarachar!, released on 7 October 2016 by prestigious Glitterbeat Rec., is another beast entirely: by turns raucous (‘Cumbia Volcadora’, featuring Mexican electronic pioneer Camilo Lara), tender (‘Misterio’, surely Salvador Duran’s finest moment with the band so far) and plain serious fun, as in ‘Contra La Marea’ and ‘Mapache’, it also bears a robust electronic edge, a keen pop sensibility and all the hallmarks of Mendoza’s love of 60s rock, with the closing track, ‘Shadows of the Mind’, sure to be included if anyone decides to update the Nuggets collection for the 21st century. This is roundabout way of saying that it appears to have everything, but never too much of anything. Focused, fierce and beautifully executed by a superbly drilled set of musicians, it is a record that fully matches the band’s explosive live performances.
Nogales, Sonora, Nogales, Arizona: this is what the border looks like here – for now. To talk about borders and the diasporas they create, is to be pitched headlong into our era’s most urgent debate, marked by Trump’s lurid obscenities and the lines being hastily reinstated across Europe. Orkesta Mendoza’s contribution to that debate is to show us what the border sounds like and what masterpieces can be achieved by honest cultural exchange. What we decide to do with that information is up to us. With this record, however, we’ll have an awful lot of fun deciding.
You could, of course, take the trip to Tucson yourself, to the home of this essential set of field recordings. The scene hangs out together, so … if the stars align and their frantic tour schedules permit, you might see any number of folks from Calexico, Giant Sand or up-and-coming cumbia rockers XIXA deep in conversation somewhere in town with a quiet young man in black. That’s Sergio. Right now, in this endless game of Tucson tag, Orkesta Mendoza are IT.
PRESS
“Mixing 60s rock styles with traditional Latin stompers, the US-Mexicanband are both experimental and rousing.” – The Guardian
“A sunny-side-up mix of cumbia, mambo, indie and electronica… If you think Latin American music tends towards the formula, try this out for size.” — fRoots
“Sergio Mendoza is probably my favourite musician of this time. He has the cumbia and mambo in his DNA, but he has the power to make it sound like today. His Orkesta is as punk as the Sex Pistols and as violent as Perez Prado” — Camilo Lara, Mexican Institute of Sound
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“My favourite Australian band, they have a raw Australian bush sound.” – Brian Ritchie, Violent Femmes
Graveyard Train are a six piece collective from Melbourne, Australia. The initial idea was for six men to sing in baritone about Werewolves, Vampires, Ghosts and the like over frenetic foot stomping country music. A wacky idea that worked and instantly collected fans across the globe.
In a song writing sense Graveyard Train are storytellers who revel in the dark or macabre. Like a virus, Graveyard Train’s music evolved into something much richer, forceful and potent. Banjos, dobros as well as their untraditional hammer and chain have carried the intensity of their notorious live shows through the US, Canada, UK, Europe and of course all over Australia.
Graveyard Train are not a country band; they are not a folk band; they are not punk band; they are not a vocal harmony band they are not a psychedelic band. They are all of those things and more; genuinely a band like no other that you have seen.
Over a few short years the band had morphed from a bunch of mates getting drunk and playing small dive bars to a band trying to maintain some semblance of the professionalism needed to play international festivals and headline major theatres. Their 2nd album Hollow swiftly pulled 5 stars from several big Australian media, filled a space in PBSFM’s Top 10 and Mess+Noise’s Top 20 Albums Of The Year and the lead single I’m Gone was the #1 most played song on Australian Community Radio. After headlining the Forum and selling out consecutive Hi Fi shows in Melbourne, getting the coveted audience-approved Golden Boot at Meredith Music Festival, playing to inmates in a prison, seducing 25,000 punters on the main stage at West Coast Blues N Roots, touring the world and then having some redneck write a song about how they ruined Tamworth, in a lot of ways the band felt they accomplished more than they set out to do.
Then someone wrote a song. The band reconvened to inhabit a studio space. More songs came quickly and they walked away from the desk with a new record and realisation that when they were writing, recording and putting on some of the finest live shows around, they were unstoppable. That reinforcement is tattooed on record opener, lead single and title track, Takes One To Know One. It encaspsulates both a childish insult and a driving sound of classic Graveyard Train. Repeated listens of the entire LP reveals gems and oddities buried in a sublime, sometimes tortured marriage of country music, stoner rock, classic Graveyard gang vocals, haunting storytelling and the stellar musicianship that dyed-in-the-wool fans of the band have come to expect. With their new record under their arm, and their own label, Black Hat Rackets, GT have paired up with revered European label Cargo Records to release the new record to a worldwide audience.
PRESS
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