Hidden within Brisbane’s rather unassuming industrial suburb of Wacol is a secret. Half of this secret is grown-over bushland, with the only hint of its past some concrete foundations out by the side of the road that leads to the local prison. The other half is a collection of army buildings at the former Wacol […]
For a long time, artistic practice (think performing, composing, panting, etc.) was not considered research. Research, traditionally, has always been in written form. We might even think of the scientific methods: hypotheses and experiments and results and the write-up of these results as the most traditional research, and it’s something most people are exposed to […]
When people ask me what my favourite movie is, I usually go for Whiplash (2014). It’s an oddball choice for sure — and it’s definitely not one because it’s a feel-good movie. Indeed, I think it gets to the heart of what a favourite film is: this is undoubtedly the film that I think is […]
I’m currently working on the creative work for my thesis. It’s a theatrical work, with both a script and music which accompanies this script. It’s my first time scriptwriting, and it’s something I’m really enjoying. The problem is, I’m adapting a sequence of real-life events – a “based on a true story” type script. And […]
I’ll be honest: no-one reads this blog. Maybe you are, right now, reading these words. But I have access to the numbers, and I can tell you: no-one is reading this blog. Or at least, that’s how it feels. Because of course, some people read this blog: just not many, not many at all. Less […]
Since the start of this year, I’ve been tracking my time. The way I do this is in my journal, which has a weekly section, with 30-minute intervals running in boxed-paper down the pages. These columns start at 5am, and while some people use them to plan their week, I’ve been using my digital calendar […]
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about music education. This has something to do with my university, ANU, choosing to save money by integrating the school of music into a broader school combined with the art and design school and the centre for museum and heritage practice and making several staff redundant, but it’s also […]
Last week, I had the pleasure of assisting with a wayang gamelan performance for the 60th anniversary of the Indonesia Project at ANU. If you’ve never seen wayang before, a form of Indonesian (mainly Javanese and Balinese) theatre. It uses shadow puppets, which has a big screen with a light projected onto it, with the […]
One of the big takeaways from me from this year’s IASPM Conference, the biggest meeting of the top academics in popular music studies, was that Spotify sucks. The really interesting thing about Spotify, is that almost everyone who uses it seems to dislike it in some way. I’ve seen numerous complaints about their renumeration to […]
Last Saturday, I was blessed with a free ticket at the Canberra Theatre Centre. I was umming and ahhing about going to this production: tickets for under 30s were $60, plus a fee which brought it up to almost $70. I had never seen this opera before, but I thought the tickets were quite steep […]