Mel From Melbourne - Music & Words

  Sound   It was a wild upbringing As most would share   And for all the horror Which goes beyond forensics Because it was life Tragedy & Ecstasy Not some “etherised patient” Like TS Eliot’s Anglo-Saxon implosion   The Irish were explosive “The Blacks of Europe” Though I think our Eastern cousins might know and then some   For all the horror I heard sounds   Sounds   Sounds   Sounds I’ve never heard on record Never Colonised   Unable to be written Only witnessed   I heard the beginning of time   The drum   The Voice   The song   The Drum     Ancient…   It took marrying an African Mauritian To learn some facts Add to what I feared when I clenched Was only Irish trauma & sounds… dreams   We have the same slave roots   Language banned Education banned Marriage banned Property Stolen L...

  The Town Hall Hotel, North Melbourne   Sorry Jonny, I write better than this, but I got on the piss when I saw your website. The Townie, what it means to me. I started going there immediately after my ex-wife walked out. I went each night to the Townie straight after work, walking from the CBD for a period of 90 days. 20 more than 70 if you like. It was magically half way home. It was back at the start of the century And Jonny was playing live music concert DVDs I particularly remember the Motley Crue video for some reason Somehow Vince Neil suits Jonny’s drollness Like some Viennese Rococo Count Stumbled forward a couple of hundred years. The Townie was also the site of my band’s first gig 10 years after I quit music for poetry. Divorce will do that. You need to make some %^$in noise. The Townie took me into rock and punk and post-punk and punk-blues and rock. The staff were always RocknRoll. I remember seeing Conway Savage in the b...

The Melbourne Artist   Dear Darryl Thompson-Turner,   I’ve been thinking about McLuhan and his belief that the medium a message is received through is the most important question. I think you mentioned something about Baudrillard too. When I first started Mel From Melbourne, which has morphed into Earth To Malachi, the important thing was that where possible I would make my work using free software and as cheap hardware as I could. Hence I use my phone for the microphone and the free software Audacity for my sound engineering/production. I use my phone to photograph my cover art, which is usually hand-drawn or -painted using cheap art supplies usually found in supermarkets or bargain shops. The rationale is that I as a minority worlder have so many extreme advantages in my life I should not also have better audioed-videoed art than artists working in majority world countries. The artwork should boil down to the imagination, skills and work rather than the technologies ...

Watching an ABC (Australia) 'One + One' interview with Ai Weiwei, I had a directional thought: that if he can have risked his life on a daily basis under a brutally repressive Chinese Communist regime to present to the world a forum for truth telling, then I, in my relative comfort & liberty have a responsibility to tell the truth from this 'miggle miggle' class Aussie bloke's angles, which are more manifold than our current ideologies might like to admit. Some will argue that we've heard it all before, but I'm not so sure -- else I wouldn't be doing this. The truth is always difficult to tell, regardless of one's social positioning. Some may say that I am a victor in History and you could see it that way. But I am also a fragment of the human whole, and so while suffering exists I am implicated. I am not here to cry for me, but to cry for all 'Argentina' . I consider my role in all of this, and my position in the world allows me to shed...