31/12/2011

Beach Road Hotel, Bondi

Playing this gig has totally upstaged New Year's Eve for me. The afternoon and evening spent with Telafonicans and making new friends was it's own celebration of the end of 2011.
The room in which we set up was huge and only a small part of the whole complex. Melissa (room manager) and Jimmy (excellent excellent sound guy) were friendly, professional and efficient.
One of our bits of electronic stuff had a hissy fit so we dropped it from the band for the evening. We're flexible like that.
After sound check we had over four hours to explore the glories of Bondi beach so we toddled off down to the esplanade. Dinner on the imported sands of Bondi beach whilst watching camera crews descend on a misguided swimmer caught outside the flags was excellent. The salt spray was wonderful. I edited out all the concrete and the steel railings and watched the sea, the glorious sea! Blake disappeared down a Hobbit hole. Apparently Adrian, Cherry and Jenna were accosted by some unavoidably prominent anatomical architecture that waltzed passed their field of vision. When we had finished our picnic, we discovered that the water was much warmer than the breeze.
With our wet little feet, we walked a small portion of the superfine Grade A sand up off the beach and became one with the migration of pink English tourists on the street. There were so many exhibits to see - the bikinis on the beach, the tattoo parlour, the boutique pubs - walls and walls of glass so that everything and everyone could be on display!
We went back to the Beach Road and took advantage of their coffee machine and their TVs to catch the 20-20 Cricket while we waited for our turn to display. The Beach Road was packed full of fashionably tanned people and, pleasant to discover, some of them had migrated upstairs!
DJ Soup was really great. I think he's about my age because I knew a lot of what he was playing. Even more, I had sentimental connections with much of the repertoire.
It was great to have some friends along as well.
Our actual performance was pure fun. We had some dancers; we had many polite, still bodies with open ears and, apparently, one lady booing! Well, there's a first time for everything!
The sound was excellent. None of us had to go fishing for our voices in a blur of noise. We bounced our way through the set:

The Quest for Love Aboard the Belafonte
The Unravelling Man
Heartbeatings for those with Heartbeats
I Can Hear there's a Peace in the Dark
There's Something About Your Face
Your Hands
Sister Zephyr
Well Well Well (John Lennon)
To Me
The Separation Prepared this for Another Marriage

After we played, it was very lovely to speak to David, a Clan Analogue connection who came with some other electronicas and enjoyed the show. You kind of live for these conversations where some kindred spirit emerges from the darkness on the other side of the lights and says, "I like what you did there!" and compares notes.
The evening finished and the morning began as it always does on a gig night. Telafonica and friends (tonight included Ben and Jenna - thanks guys!) lug our toys to the Spacia and stand in the car park for a last chat and a reluctant goodbye. This time it was a "See you next year" kind of affair.

28/12/2011

gotta get down on friday

on friday, we need to have our setup/soundcheck finished by 6, so we'll probably need to head in fairly early. does everyone want to come in the spacia? our set is from 10:30-11:30 so we need to prepare an hour set (duh!). also means we'll have time to see the sights and have dinner etc.

rehearsal is on thursday - any particular times good for everybody. we're free anytime, so a daytime rehearsal might be good if it's ok with everyone else. or the usual evening. let us know.

entry for the gig is free, so spam lots of people. facebook event info is at https://www.facebook.com/events/293718860669149/

27/12/2011

Glory To God In The Lowest

Glory To God In The Lowest is available for free download. Click here.



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Released December 9, 2011

The 2011 edition of 4-4-2 Music's Christmas cheer is ready for the holiday season. Starting out with St Jambience using the old Reich-ian phasing technique to get you into the mood - Rudolph on repeat in the shopping mall this ain't!!!! From here, Telafonica's various members head off to their own bedrooms and loungerooms to make contributions that range from intimate folk, to expansive pop, doo-wop to Lowrey organ kiddie-funk, moody atmosphere to electronic minimalism.

Download the album for free (or pay something if you like), burn it to disc and print up some artwork to hand out to friends for Christmas. Then go and download the previous 3 editions as well. You'll never need to listen to Mariah Carey again.

1. St. Jambience - Jingle Phase
2. the onestarband - Glory To God In The Lowest
3. The Bells - Mary's Boy Child
4. Eliza Magill - Go Tell It On The Mountain
5. Lessons In Time - O, Come All Ye Faithless
6. Goldberry - The Friendly Beasts
7. StephenFox - In The Bleak Midwinter
8. The Flying Go-Go Girls - Good King Wenceslas

24/12/2011

sleeping with the fishermen review on 4zzz

i found this on the web today - the first review of the album that i'm aware of. i'm always surprised when people call our music eclectic, because it all feels like it's come from the same place to me! but this review seems to pinpoint everything very (scarily) accurately! they've clearly listened well and got it. :)

http://www.4zzzfm.org.au/reviews/albums/telafonica-sleeping-fishermen

"Telefonica's roiling, boiling little collective of talent: audio, visiual and otherwise (I hear they make a mean paella) leads to quite unexpected things when a new album proper rolls out the door of their little workshop, or you're otherwise blindsided by a stray INXS cover or Christmas album. Indeed, what was once a duo, many years ago, has expanded to such voluminous, even global proportions that their latest release is less of an album and more of a small multimedia library. Don't believe me? The 7 tracks and 49 minutes of music is accompanied by 7 freely downloadable remix EPs, 7 art films and a collection of fan mixes, the sources of which can still be downloaded freely from the band's website. Jebus! What are you waiting for? Join the collective. For those of you who want to know what you're going to become apart of, I can at least give you an idea of what this album is about. Up till now the group have been engaged in a variety of electronic noodlings that, over the course of several albums have been becoming increasingly supplemented with percussive and live elements that have taken what started as 'tronic experimentation and subtly but surely rolled ever further into those territorries inhabited by bands. You've got to go through several minutes of warm, bass drone, an enigmatic shuddering of tribal drums and maracas and a seductive, slightly processed female vocal assuring us that 'my heart is your viceroy' over the album's fifteen opening minutes, which is quite pleasant, really but not at all indicative of the pop warmth that is about to leap out and embrace you on the blink-and-you-miss-it The Unravelling Man. With it's punchy rhythm, fuzzy synth and cute girl, stacatto vocal fronting I thought I was listening to Deerhoof, and that is rarely a bad thing, especially in small doses. That's all you get too, because although Heartbeatings For Those With Heartbeats is still definitely in the realm of art-pop, it's a much more of a lyrical and fully-voiced song. Urrg, everbody says Bjork when they hear something like this, but listen to those very mannered vocal inflections and I think you'll find the comparison is good in this case. Then it's an 8 minute epic of electronic rock in the longing, driving duet I Can Hear There's A Peace In The Dark. The variety continues with the deceptively energetic whirl of dance beats that accompanies the world-weary repetition of the line "Can We Leave It At That?" on There's Something About Your Face. It's difficult to pick a single for Sleeping With Fishermen - it'd be The Unravelling Man, but at 1:19 it's a little short. The return of the fuzzy synth and the pop euphoria of To Me has to run a close second. Then it's off to an epic, dancey finish on The Tail End of Winter, which juxtaposes a pumping house beat with a cold, obscured male vocal and an occasional saxaphone hidden in the ethereal production - the end result of this combination of elements being something at the dancier end of kraut-rock. I hope this wide-ranging collective are having fun, because it sure sounds like they are. For an experimental, electronic bunch of folks they are suprisingly in touch with their pop roots and in a way that leverages both their pop and their experimentality. I've just got to imagine this is going to be a lot of fun for anyone involved."

- Submitted by Chris on Thu, Dec 15, 2011 - 10:58am

07/12/2011

hinterlandt - through the motions



Free download remix album from Hinterlandt. Available from Bandcamp.



Jochen Gutsch, often known as Hinterlandt, asked a while back if we'd like to do a remix for a project he had underway. The idea was that he'd give us a few short samples and we'd make a track out of it. The samples all came from a track called 'Motion' though nobody other than Jochen had heard it or knew how it sounded. All artists were given the same set of samples. The Telafonica remix went into krautrock territory, with an 303 line thrown in for good measure. The drum sounds all came straight from Blake's trusty Yamaha PSR-150 keyboard. Then some of the synth samples were plastered with liberal distortion. And so they went kosmiche.

06/12/2011

the bendy bus goes to ryde

well, the spacia doesn't actually bend, but i always liked the alliteration of 'bendy bus' so i thought i'd put that in the title. our set-up time on friday evening is 5:30 and our sound check is at 6. so the spacia will probably leave our place at about 4:45ish, i would imagine. if anyone needs a lift, be here then. ellie - i told joe you probably won't be there for set up, but maybe for soundcheck. however, it' not a huge problem if you can't do any. what times are you likely to be able to do (the gate being at ryde)?

01/12/2011

Sleeping With The Fishermen


purchase 'SLEEPING WITH THE FISHERMEN' by clicking the link in the Bandcamp player below.



_______________________
released december 1, 2011

Telafonica's 'Sleeping With The Fishermen' is a sprawling project with this album as its centrepiece. Over 7 tracks and 49 minutes, the Sydney based 5-piece continues their electronic and acoustic explorations, meshing traditional songs with wide-screen production, improvisation and experimentalism. The tracks draw inspiration from the overground, underground and all points in between, from Sufjan Stevens to Animal Collective, Feist to LCD Soundsystem, My Cat Is An Alien to Tamaru. Thrown into the Telafonica blender, those sounds emerge at the other end as abstract pop. They range from the 15 minute album bookends, 'Viceroy' and 'The Tail End Of Winter' which explore building atmospheres and groove based soundscapes, to 'The Unravelling Man's 90 second blast of electro squawl; the massed harmonies of 'I Can Hear There's A Piece In The Dark' and 'There's Something About Your Face'; and 'Heartbeatings For Those With Heartbeats' and 'To Me' with their mixes of noise, melody and groove.

The 'Sleeping With The Fishermen' project also includes 7 individual, free-download, commissioned remix EPs (so far, these have included mixes by Jonathan Boulet, Sounds Like Sunset, Sleepyhands, Actual Russian Brides, Dave McCormack (Custard) and St Jambience amongst many others, with more to come), 7 art films and a free download collection of fan mixes, created via the original stems which are being made public for anyone to download and manipulate. Released monthly, these have been finding their way into the world since September 2011 and will continue into 2012. Keep updated via the band's website.

'Sleeping With The Fishermen' is released internationally by 4-4-2 Music and is now available via Telafonica's Bandcamp page. There are 3 formats – a regular CD version housed in a custom made Agarto pack from Stumptown Printers with artwork, including fold out, hand screen printed poster, designed by Telafonica founder, the now London-based designer David Hughes; a deluxe Box Set Limited Edition which includes the album, all the remixes, all the films, extra outtakes and B-sides and custom hand crafted artwork; and digital download. Bandcamp links can be found on the 4-4-2 Music website, or at telafonica.bandcamp.com, with digital downloads from Bandcamp or any internationally recognised download site including iTunes, Amazon, etc etc.

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1. viceroy
2. the unravelling man
3. heartbeatings for those with heartbeats
4. i can hear there's a peace in the dark
5. there's something about your face
6. to me
7. the tail end of winter