New Aerial Maps video clip

A new video clip to the Aerial Maps’ tune ‘Some Other Dream’. This song was on the first album ‘In the Blinding Sunlight’, but this is a different version to the album track. The video clip was shot in Shanghai. A Shanghai … surprise.

Aerial Maps gigs: ‘February’s Fortune’

As the new year grinds into the reality of February, as the cogs of Australia start to lock into action, as the coastal caravan parks empty out, the holiday houses are locked, the kids head back to school and as the populace in general returns to Real Life, so too will the Aerial Maps be moving into action.

Yes, it’s been a considerable while, but the Maps are gearing up for a run of shows that will herald the start of, hopefully, a busy year of gigs. We’re tweaking things a little, gonna play old stuff and new stuff, with a stripped-back lineup, and generally mix things around. There will however, of course, still be stories of coastal drives, of barefeet and bindi-eyes, of London in the night, of the Great Dividing Range, of the search for the greatest neenish tart and of loves long lost and of those recently found, and more… Some ‘February Fortune’…

So we invite you to join us for one or more of these occasions. The first is a Sydney show supporting Mick Thomas and the Roving Commission at the Coogee Diggers on Friday, February 15; a show we would attend even if not playing, so to play is an absolute pleasure and a bonus. Mick has always been a great supporter of the Maps and we’re very happy to be playing this show.

Following that, it’s off the Melbourne the next weekend, where we are honoured to have been asked to support the fabulous Livingstone Daisies, a group consisting of the likes of Van Walker, Liz Stringer, Cal Walker and Michael Barclay. It’s their album launch and with such personnel onboard, the music is truly rather special indeed. That show is at the Northcote Social Club, a damn fine place for a band and a beer.

The following day, Saturday, February 23, we are doing an afternoon show at the iconic and downright wonderful Pure Pop Records in St Kilda. We’ve played there on our first tour of Melbourne a few years ago and it was one of the highlights of our year.

There’s another show on the drawing board for the Sunday arvo or evening at the Post Office Hotel, but details of that aren’t finalised yet. Also not finalised yet are a long-prophesized Brisbane run of shows. We’re still working on that, but will announce the details if/when they come to hand.

So, anyway … please join us on the ‘February’s Fortune’ tour and come along to any or all of the shows you can.

Precis of the details …

Friday, February 15, at the Coogee Diggers Club, Coogee, Sydney, supporting Mick Thomas and the Roving Commission, 8pm.

Friday, February 22, at the Northcote Social Club, Northcote, Melbourne, supporting the Livingstone Daisies, 8pm.

Saturday, February 23, at Pure Pop Records, St Kilda, Melbourne, headline show, 3pm.

Sunday, February 24, at Post Office Hotel, Melbourne, before Mike Noga, afternoon set, 4pm.

More specific details soon…

30 Days of Summer*

In winter I did a project which signified the beginning of winter … it was called “30 Days of Winter”. Whilst I have slightly missed the boat with the start of summer a few days ago, I am going to start a new summer-specific project now.

The idea is to do one “finished/complete/tied-up-nicely” piece of “artwork” a day. The winter effort threw up some interesting things, some pretty shit, some ok, and some that I felt were good and that have formed part of ongoing work.

So I tried to do a summer version … the first instalment is here, Saigon Teapot

* But due to various circumstances, this project was not completed.  Summer is about ennui, and it sure hit me. Thus, non-completion. Oh well.

‘Call and Response’

30 Days of Summer

#9, ‘Call and Response’

Following on from the ‘Australian Signs’ instalment of yesterday, I bring ‘Call and Response’. This is how a community works, how things exist below the level of the headline news, below the official history and the verified narrative of the days. On the same street pole, days apart.

Two sides of the coin, and I hope they connected (click on the photos).

‘Australian Signs’

30 Days of Summer

#8, ‘Australian Signs’

The story of a nation can, in part (or in whole?), be told in the signs its people write and put up for display, I believe. The petty, the pedantic, the misspelt, the misguided, the genuine and the juvenile … read the arc of a nation’s psyche in the signs upon a wall, upon a street.

‘Abandoned Woolshed’

30 Days of Summer

#7, ‘Abandoned Woolshed’

Vast areas of inland Australia, which once echoed with the shouts and sounds of thousands of people, now stand empty, abandoned and deserted. The factories are full of ghosts, the sheds and fields sitting desolate under the silver sun. A woolshed in Fowler’s Gap, in the arid zone a few hours north of Broken Hill, is one such place.

‘The Abandoned Woolshed’ from Adam Gibson on Vimeo.

‘Green Ghost Woman’

30 Days of Summer

#6, ‘Green Ghost Woman’

Acrylic on canvas.

‘Idea of a watercourse’

30 Days of Summer

#5, ‘Idea of a watercourse – one-minute sketches’

A potential sub-genre of 30 Days of Summer … the one-minute sketch.

I am thinking about Australian watercourses and the flow of water across the landscape. Working on a larger painting in that regard but for now these are some (less than) one-minute sketches with soft pastels around the idea.

‘The Three Albums…”

30 Days of Summer

#4, ‘The Three Albums … (that changed my life)’

Place Without a Postcard, Midnight Oil:

As a boy growing up in Bondi, Sydney, my life consisted of surfing and playing or watching rugby league, of roaring around on the rubbish-strewn seaside streets of Bondi, of (watching) fights in the schoolyard at Dover Heights Boys High…

But in the early ’80s something else crept into my world. A few of the older guys started to paint a strange “hand” symbol on their surfboards and talk about this band called Midnight Oil. Soon afterwards I was lent a cassette by my mate Fordy, one side of which was Midnight Oil’s second album Head Injuries and on the other, their third, Place Without a postcard. I began to play both of those sides every single day.  And I mean that … EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Whilst I loved a lot of the songs on Head Injuries, it was Place… that really struck a chord with me. The fact that the band were singing about “Australian” things in an Australian accent was a complete revelation to me. They were talking about backyards, barbecues and eucalyptus smells and clotheslines … I couldn’t believe it: here was someone actually talking about our world, about MY world, and after that, my life was never the same.

That album gave me a vision about what I wanted to try to do with my life: that is, to try to articulate similar Australian stories, Australian lives … to give due credence to our histories and not shy away from celebrating matters Australian.

Not in a way of glib patriotism, but in a way that underlines the value of our own experience. So, i say thanks to Midnight Oil for giving me that.

Born Sandy Devotional, The Triffids:

Slightly later than Place Without a Postcard, I remember hearing vague things about The Triffids. They hadn’t really entered my world however. They were from Perth and whilst my Dad was born there, seemed to be from so far away that I didn’t really notice them.

However, like a brewing thunderstorm cloud that first appears as a small smudge of grey on the horizon, the band would soon engulf me. And that first small smudge came when I heard ‘Wide Open Road’ on Triple J, then Sydney’s only alternative radio station.

I think I must have heard it again and felt … something … because then I went up to Bondi Junction and bought the album. Again, life changed.

Here was a band which spoke of a particularly Australian distance and space and light. Here was the first band that I had heard which captured that sense of space that I felt had been lodged in my psyche since I was a child, a band that articulated, somehow, that sense of distance that even the most city-dwelling Australian feels lies out behind our world.

It was as if the Triffids had somehow captured actual rays of sunlight and put them in between the chords of the songs. And equally, behind those rays of sun, there were the necessary shadows to give the whole thing true and incredible power.

Coupled with Place Without a Postcard, which spoke of more of a coastal world, Born Sandy Devotional (best album title ever, by the way), in it’s widescope vision of Australia’s Outback and heat and empty desert roads, made me feel like there was something about Australia that was very important to believe in and revere.

Talking to the Taxman About Poetry, Billy Bragg:

In Bondi, from the late ’70s and through the ’80s, The Clash ruled. Punk in general had a reasonable impact on the surfing community, but while the Pistols were appreciated and various other punk bands celebrated, it was the Clash who were loved.

London and her grimy streets and train stations may have been a world away from our life on the beach in Sydney, but in a metaphoric sense, growing up in Bondi, we really could see a connection. Bondi was (and is) an intensely urbanised world and whilst not a “big city” like that which spawned punk in London, we did genuinely connect with the disaffection the punks were expressing. Maybe that was because at that time, surfing was still regarded as a marginal activity and hence we related to the world as “outiders” …? Possibly.

Anyway, so the Clash had a big impact, and then later The Jam did as well. And my brother and I, by then eagerly soaking up a variety of music from around the world, but most of it heavy on guitars and attitude, were aficionados.

And so it came to pass that in, well it must have been maybe 1984, read a review of Billy Bragg’s album “Talking to the Taxman…” in Tracks surfing magazine. There was one line in that review that got us hook, line and sinker.  The review could have said the album was the worst thing ever produced (it didn’t), but we didn’t care. The line “Bragg is the acoustic Clash” sold us. We went and bought the album the very next day, and we were sold. Billy’s wonky voice, weirdly metallic guitar, wild and seemingly discordant strumming … it was all there; and so was, we quickly realised, a batch of songs that made us think and laugh and honestly see the world in a different way.

Billy spoke of “ideologies clashing” and there being “power in a union”. He spoke of the worker and worker’s rights and, although we lived in a fairly middle class house in a fairly middle class area, we saw something very important in that. Add to that a widescreen view of anti-imperialism/Americanism, and you have an album that, ideologically, lyrically and sonically changed the way I thought, both about music and also life.

And it also began an intense passion for Billy’s music that has continued ever since … one of the greatest performers I have ever seen and a huge influence.

‘Luckiest Country’

30 Days of Summer

#3, ‘Luckiest Country – There’s a Feeling I Get When I Look to the Sun’

A re-working of the Oils.

luckiest from Adam Gibson on Vimeo.