In the greying margins of pop-based indie and new-age rock, many bands find it hard to remain afloat among the masses of like-minded, similar-sounding music-makers from across the globe. Luckily, post-pop aficionados Fandy Ruzak, Khairyl Hashim, Magdelene Han and Saiful Idris of The Great Spy Experiment do not fall into this category. Harnessing elements of pop sensibility and an integrated […]

The longstanding gap between Chinese and Australian musicians will soon be bridged with the announcement that established Chinese indie acts Carsick Cars and Bone will be touring the eastern capitals of Australia this month. Stemming from the Sino Australian Music Exchange initiative (S.A.M.E, which began as a collaboration between DIY music specialists Tenzenmen and Sydney’s ‘Chalk Horse’ Gallery in 2010), […]

  There’s “walking the walk” and “talking the talk,” but now the bigwigs at Hewlett Packard have begun a more personal campaign of schmoozing in order to attract the biggest online Music clients in the industry. Launched last year as a means of spreading the latest news on HP products through Cyberspace, HP’s Music Influencer program is designed to integrate […]

Famed writer Alice Walker once said; “In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, but they are still beautiful.” And, who can argue with that? Nature is all encompassing, and does not adhere to the rules of colour, mood and structure – much like the raw sounds of Taipei three-piece Orange […]

Whoever thought of the fabled slogan “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” must be cashed up to the teeth these days, with many of the world’s top online streaming portals joining forces as a rapid pace. Yesterday’s revelation that established electronica/beatmaking portal Beatport was to join hands with the incredibly popular streaming site Spotify marked a huge step in […]

Where much of the South-East Asian indie music scene is dominated by guitar-driven pop riffs, looping vocals and weird amalgamations of indefinable noises, it is refreshing to encounter a band whose sound relies on more than simply blasting listeners off the backs of their chairs. Silverbus, hailing from Taiwan and dabbling in every style from rock and acoustic, to moody, […]

Like fashion, musical trends also go in and out of popularity. In the 90’s, it was all about commercial pop, Nirvana and the occasional boy band. The 80’s gave us synthesizers and bad hair. The 70’s however, spawned the birth of punk and gritty, high-charged, low-fi rock – and this is where The White Eyes draw their limitless reams of […]

If you happen to be in a state where you can picture yourself doing a psychedelic moonwalk through the fabric of time, clutching a bunch of 60’s rock records in one hand and a glitter bomb in the other, then you will likely have some idea of what it is to listen to the Cambodian Space Project. Hailing from various […]

Japanese alt-rockers the Universal Moment are a rising force on the local and international scene; comprised from well-travelled, American-raised brothers Yu and Sebastian, along with drummer and keyboardist Shihori and Shigeo, the group have surrendered their surnames and enjoyed increasing success since the release of their first record, “The Reminder” in 2009. After growing through a series of transitions stemming […]

The poor folks over at Apple must be shaking in their boots. Yesterday’s somewhat embarrassing unveiling of the iPhone4S (instead the iPhone5, as promised) has sparked a renewed interest in the progress of iCloud; Apple’s largest online music and data storage space, conceptualized as a means of keeping information in the same place, aka. Not localized to a particular phone, […]

How do you define ‘cool?’ It’s not a question that is often asked, but it is one that should surely have an answer. By definition, being in band is cool. Music, generally, can be cool too. But, how do you define the sound of a band that, by definition, are the antithesis of anything to do with coolness at all? […]

If you’ve been to any awkward job interviews, practiced any Shamanic rituals or seen a therapist lately, there’s a chance that you have been asked the question: “If you could be an animal, what would you be?” While this may not be the most relevant starting point for a band interview, you have to keep in mind the origin of […]

If my mother taught me nothing else, it’s that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Music is no exception; since the dawn of Napster (and all the other trendy downloading and torrent-based sites that have justifiably been closed down), greedy music-mongers have been desperately searching for an alternative method of gaining access to their favorite tunes, without the […]

In an age devoid of simplicity and overrun with technology, the global music industry is perpetually faced with an audience of diminished attention spans. Everyone is switched on, logged in and doing fifty things at once; music, it seems, must be incredibly concise, or run the risk of being lost in the mess. As artists try fruitlessly to cram as […]