Music For Small Audiences

I read once that being organised means that where things are suits what those things mean, so that each thing takes as little psychic energy as possible to find when it is needed, while not being in the way. With spring arriving to Melbourne, the days are getting longer and the weather more variable. As such it feels like a great time to get a bit more organised, and to make sure everything at hom...

We recently returned from a very special overseas trip that included a weekend stop in Toronto. For a trip full of highlights, one of the absolute standout evenings of the entire adventure was a Friday evening spent downtown in the Toronto Fashion District. It was a pleasantly warm summer evening, with great music, great food, great company, a splash of suspiciously good champagne and a particular...

For the four years we lived in Richmond, we lived in the shadow of the London Tavern, an old school pub full of character and charm. Great beers, decent food, a lovely beer garden, and just a few steps down the street from where we lived. We got to know it very well. Settling in to South Yarra, we have yet to settle on a place that we can call our own to such an extent. There are plenty to choose...

It is the winter solstice here in Australia as I write this, which means short, cold days and a lot less sunshine than one might like. Cold weather often leads to contemplation, and having moved into a new home earlier this year, we are now assessing how to balance heating levels, taking into account comfort on one hand and the cost of energy on the other. With modern electricity providers able to...

I have many fond memories of road trips over the years. Some were with family, some were with friends, and some by myself. Whether flying solo or with a copilot alongside, a journey by road can be a transformative experience. For every road trip I can remember, music was a big part of the experience. There is nothing like a big chunk of seat time with good tunes and good scenery to stimulate conve...

Funny how the future keeps showing up. There are a handful of books I buy and shove into the hands of anyone who will take a copy. One of these is by Daniel Gilbert, and it is called Stumbling On Happiness. One of the key themes throughout the book is how we imperfectly perceive the future, and by extension how we imperfectly relate to our future selves. As Gilbert sees it, we tend to believe that...

The weather can change quickly in Melbourne, particularly when a cool change comes through. So it was on the day this mix was recorded. It was a Friday evening in early January 2019, after a day spent at the beach (Jan Juc). The mix itself was recorded live in the hours after an obscenely hot summer day quickly transposed into a mild evening, thanks to a typically Melburnian temperature drop of fi...

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be invited to play some house music for a housewarming party celebrating the newly expanded home of two very good friends. Located in the inner west, this groovy pad was once two separate residences, which through some creative design work now works as a beautiful single home. The party was fantastic, and the setup superlative, from the lamb on a spit through to...

Finding a place to call home is never easy. Putting roots down means taking a chance, joining a community, and committing to the transition from transient to resident. With that in mind, I am exceptionally excited to be moving back to South Yarra in 2019, to call our new house our new home. As a suburb South Yarra has a bit of everything, close to the city but with plenty of parks and quiet pocket...

We measure progress in increments. Major life events stand as demarcations, with time able to be divided into before and after. As a recreational long distance runner, I know that it sometimes takes everything we have to make it around the next bend. Other times, the distance seems to fly by in the background, while mind and body are at peace and at ease. Either way, a kilometre is a kilometre, an...

We spent a recent weekend in the town of Castlemaine, ninety minutes outside of Melbourne. It was a lovely, rustic weekend with a bit of fresh air and a bit of adventure, and it was a fitting way to cap off the transition from winter to spring. My mother has long espoused travel as a catalyst for personal growth. While we were not away long and were not especially far from home, the distance and e...

I read somewhere that our memories change every time we recall them. Each time we remember something it seems we are reassembling the story anew, distorting and reshaping the past through the influence of present day emotions and values. English philosopher John Locke posited that our identity only persists as far back as we can remember. But basing our idea of who we are on a foundation of distan...

As an experiment in delayed gratification, the marshmallow test pitted the willpower of young children against the tasty appeal of one or more marshmallows, with a stopwatch in between. Sometimes the children won, and sometimes the marshmallows won. Follow up studies suggested that the kids who were better able to control their desires were more likely to succeed in life. Sounds reasonable enough,...

Before I was born, my father was a smoker. Giving up was not easy, and at one point during his effort to quit he was awoken in the middle of the night by a particularly vivid dream. The vision was of a radio plugged into the wall. The radio itself was struggling, trying to break free of the electric cord that both powered it and held it in place. If the distinction between habit and addiction is t...

There is a certain sense of permanence and seriousness associated with putting things in writing for others to see. An expectation, too, that what we write will be read and understood. But things do not always turn out as we had hoped. From illegible handwriting to errant postal workers to the odd unscheduled rainstorm, what gets put down in writing does not always get picked up by the other side....

It is nice to have options. Paralysis by analysis is a real thing, and sometimes less is more when it comes to trying to make a decision. The more wide open the future appears, the more fearful we can become about what it all means and what we should do about it. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard suggests that freedom and possibility are the precursors of dread and fear, and in a lot of ways he i...

It is halfway between the southern summer solstice and Christmas Day as I write this, with just a few days left in 2017. As such it feels natural to reflect on the year that has just passed. Years are curious units of measure. In some ways they seem to tick by quickly and blur together. Yet in recollection they stand as distinct layers, around which our character, worldview and sense of purpose ar...

An awful lot has been said about the power of ideas. The visionaries, the dreamers, the entrepreneurs, the strategy setters, the creatives, and the big picture thinkers, all have brilliant ideas on how to change the world for the better. Ideas can be contagious, seductive, compelling and inspiring. The creation and sharing of ideas can sometimes even give off the feeling of real work being done. B...

While Stanley Milgram is best known for his experiments in convincing strangers to electrocute one another in the 1960s, he has also played a critical role in helping make sense of urban anonymity. In the early 1970s, through a series of surveys and experiments in public places such as train stations and university campuses, Milgram explored and refined the concept of the familiar stranger. If you...

Home is a difficult subject. Are we from where we started? Or are we from where we have ended up? Can we really set ourselves up as locals whenever we come across a place and it grabs us, if we choose to stick around for a while? For some, there is comfort in familiarity. For others, there is comfort in discomfort. While it is both a blessing and curse, I think I have a bit of both elements in me....

As the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius noted many years ago, the world itself is nothing but change, and our life is really just what our thoughts make it to be. Insofar as we have control over our thoughts, we have control over our lives. We may not always be able to control the stimulus, but from the perspective of the Stoic we should seek to control the response. This is not...

I had an interesting conversation recently with a musician friend about the relationship between creative process and creative output. We had just spent some time getting hands on with a vintage synth collection, and were reflecting on the extraordinary effort and patience required to get good sound and tight sync out of old analog hardware, compared to the ease with which software can do it all w...

I find a lot of value in lists, sticky notes, and scribbles on paper, in order to keep my headspace as free as possible from having to remember things that can instead be written down and recalled. David Allen, a productivity guru whose work I came across many years ago, has had a profound impact on my life, not least of which because of his aspirational state of mind, called Mind Like Water. As t...

Events can at times unfold in an unexpected manner. There is surprise and novelty to be found in the gap between expectations and reality. Truth is indeed often stranger than fiction, if only because the bar for plausibility is so much lower in real life than it is in storytelling. At least in my experience, things that are hard to believe happen all the time, and usually when least expected. Do w...

Funny things, memories. Sometimes seeing a photo, hearing a song, or even reading the name of someone from another period of time can bring back recollections that otherwise remain buried. Funny too how important context can be. We may only remember something in detail when a specific sequence of reminding events lines up, like returning to a special place at sunset, or hearing a piece of music in...