Streaming Playlists

Community Spotlight: Music of Canberra

Picked by Brendan Keller-Tuberg

Having spent the vast majority of my formative years in ‘the Midwest of Australia’, my relationship with (and love for) Canberra has survived countless peaks and valleys. Despite being the nation’s capital, Canberra is one of Australia’s smallest (but most liveable!!) cities, maybe known best for roundabouts, public servants, and the Skywhale more than anything else. In Australia, it has a (mostly undeserved) reputation for being the sleepier younger sibling of Sydney and Melbourne. In recent times, my love for the nation’s capital and its music scene has steadily grown as I reconnected with the community since moving back due to COVID (almost a year to the day) – and it seemed a good a time as any to introduce some of you to a small taste of our best musical output!

What I believe sets the Canberra scene apart is the diversity of expression, and individuality found in our musicians. Despite the unparalleled sense of community in Canberra’s scene, I am constantly inspired by the breadth of musical voices within that family. Because everyone moves in a different musical lane, there is little sense of competition between artists – I love how we uplift the voices of those around us whilst daring to be different from one another and finding our distinct musical personalities. It was incredibly hard to narrow down choices for this playlist so consider this volume one!

Ben Marston/Hugh Barrett

Ben Marston’s ambient, electro-acoustic soundplay and jazz-inflected trumpet improvisation is an immediately recognisable sound within the Canberra landscape. Having recently studied with Norwegian ‘live-remix’ pioneer Jan Bang, Ben’s mastery of improvisation on laptop, sampling his fellow band members as well as his own trumpet, is second-to-none. His duo project alongside pianist/keyboardist Hugh Barrett has seen multiple notable releases in recent years, including an extended work reflecting on Australia’s devastating and internationally notorious bushfire season from 2019-2020. This is atmospheric and patient music to immerse and live within – and its melding of European and American influences is telling of the open-mindedness and diverse influences typical of Australia’s wider improvised music scene.

Paint Store

Having burst onto the Canberra scene in 2019, Paint Store has been steadily making a name for themselves as one of the more off-the-wall indie rock outfits locally on tap. Already one album deep into their career, ‘Maybe’ (released in August last year) was a beguiling and beautifully off-kilter collection of post-punk and experimental rock songs that show off a diverse range of influences – from Can and Captain Beefheart to Weyes Blood and Björk. Disjointed lyrics delivered in spoken-word drawls, accompanied by strange harmonies and atypical song structures may seem uninviting on paper, but maybe their most disarming victory is how playful and even tounge-in-cheek it all is (especially when experienced live)! Making the avant-garde and unknown inviting and accessible is one of the most difficult and laudable achievements in art, and IMO maybe one of the most important ones. Watching Paint Store achieve it so effortlessly was easily a highlight of my recent post-COVID gig experiences.

Moaning Lisa

In my head at least, Moaning Lisa’s brand of 90s grunge revivalism and shoegaze is one of Canberra’s best and most iconic musical exports of the past few years (but perhaps I’m biased – Hayden plays drums for them). Having formed in 2016, Moaning Lisa cut their teeth on the Canberra gig circuit, releasing EPs both in 2017 and 2018. Extensive interstate touring and support slots for Mitski, Camp Cope and more lead to their relocation to Melbourne, where they are hard at work on a debut album. More than just making great music though, they continue to be ambassadors for change in the Australian gigging community – having spoken out in the media about toxic, unsafe (masculine) behavior at gigs, and penning LGBT+ anthems that have recently broken 1 million streams on Spotify. Their new single ‘Something’ came out last week and I can’t wait to hear what comes next.

Ashleigh Hazel

The freshest face on this list, Ashleigh Hazel shared their debut single ‘Gemini’ with the world just last month – but they are no newcomer to the Canberra music scene. Perhaps best known as the bassist in experimental folk-punk-emo outfit Helena Pop, Ashleigh (real name Benjamin Drury) has also recently completed an honors’ year in composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, and takes particular interest in interactive sound-art instillations and site-specific performances, among lots of other things. It should be no surprise then that Gemini is a masterfully produced, singularly atmospheric and immersive piece of work which (I’m told) features hundreds of layers of guitars and field recordings, among innumerable layers of untraceable electro-acoustic sounds. In Ashleigh Hazel’s world, sound and its treatment is the primary key to the music’s emotional core, and their music is all the more intimate and touching as a result. Listen to ‘Gemini’, and notice how the world around you melts away as it is replaced by theirs – and what a gloriously inviting one it is.

Genesis Owusu

There’s hardly anything that makes me more proud to be a Canberran right now than Genesis Owusu. The 22-year-old, Ghanaian born, Canberra bred musician is currently hot off the heels of the release of his debut album ‘Smiling With No Teeth’, one of the most open-eared, genre-melding releases I’ve heard from this country. This courageous and dizzyingly ambitious record combines the sounds of hip-hop, neo-soul, funk, psychedelia, post-punk, synth-pop, industrial and folk into a linear journey charting Owusu’s ongoing relationship with two proverbial ‘black dogs’ – one representing depression, and the other embodying racism in all its forms. It’s unbelievably bold, earnest, vivid, and above all confident in itself, despite its almost aggressive non-conformity to any one sound or state of being. These are some of the things I value most in music and this is an album I would recommend to pretty much anyone without qualification, especially if you’re not from Canberra. This thing deserves to be heard – and with glowing reviews from publications and blogs across the world, including NME and the Needle Drop, if you haven’t heard Genesis Owusu yet, it’s only a matter of time.

We so hope you enjoy these selections! We are fortunate to live in an era with immediate, cheap access to virtually all of the music ever recorded. Unfortunately, streaming is not a sustainable form of income for most artists. If you find music you enjoy please consider supporting the artist directly or purchasing their music through a service like Bandcamp. We’ll see you next week. Happy listening!