Sand Pebbles are up for a number of The Age 2011 EG Awards including Best Group, Best Album [Dark Magic], Best Song [Occupied Europe (Take Me Across the Water)] and Best Victorian/Local Group.

To vote on-line for us, or others, hit: https://surveys.fairfax.com.au/opinio/s?s=48313

To read more:

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/get-your-votes-in-20111006-1la40.html

Making magic, grain by grain

Jo Roberts

September 23, 2011

Sand Pebbles are, from left, Ben Michael X, Andrew Tanner, Tor Larsen, Christmas Hollow and Wes Holland.

A wishlist of musical heroes became happy collaborators for Melbourne psych rockers Sand Pebbles.

STRINGS, smoke and mirrors, eye of newt? What sort of conjuring and mysticism did Melbourne five-piece Sand Pebbles employ in luring some of their favourite artists to join them in concocting their fifth album, Dark Magic?

Email, as it happens.

Singer-guitarist Andrew Tanner marvels at the ease with which people the band members considered ”influences and heroes” on their own alluring psychedelic rock - Will Carruthers (Spacemen 3, Spiritualized), Tim Holmes (Death in Vegas) and Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips (Galaxie 500/Luna) - took part in Dark Magic.

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”It’s quite amazing,” he says. ”Our drummer [Wes Holland] just sent [Tim Holmes] an email, he was just on a ridiculous wishlist of people we’d like to work with. He just emailed the guy and he said ‘send me some songs’. The songs went over as audio files, they came back as mixes. We made comments, he remixed and sent them again. It’s quite lovely when people who you admire from afar become involved in your process.”

Similarly, Sand Pebbles bass player and longtime Galaxie 500 and Luna fan Chris Hollow sent emails to Wareham and Phillips, asking them to be involved. ”We sent [Phillips] over a mix of Long, Long Ago and asked her if she’d be up for some string-synth-type arrangement on that, which she lovingly did,” says Tanner. ”Then on Dark Magic, a song with which we were struggling lyrically, Chris sent some half-formed lyrics over to Dean, who came back with some of his ideas.

”It makes me think next time I’m just going to email James Murphy [formerly of LCD Soundsystem] and go ‘hey, how about mixing our album? And if you could drop the five grand per track that’d be fantastic’.”

The stellar presences on Dark Magic can consider themselves in esteemed company. Since its release in August, the album - arguably Sand Pebbles’ finest to date - has been receiving four-star reviews minimum (four-and-a-half in this publication), with the stunning first single, Occupied Europe [Take Me Across the Water], one of the songs of the year.

The first Sand Pebbles song to appear on most people’s radar was the almost 12-minute psych-rock epic, lava-like Black Sun Ensemble from their 2004 Ghost Transmissions album. Since then, they had earned a reputation for being a band that liked to jam songs out. On Dark Magic - apart from the six-minute opener Spring Time - it sounds as if they have reined in their expansive inclinations.

”Yeah definitely,” says Tanner. ”We did a lot of jamming, but a lot of the editing happened kind of post-production with this. If nothing else we were certain we didn’t want to do an album like the last one. So we were going ‘what would it be like if we shortened this’ and kind of created more impact with the changes through a three-minute song rather than stretching it out across a six-minute song.”

Despite the differences in musical tastes among the five members - Tanner, Hollow, Holland, altar-boy-voiced singer-guitarist Tor Larsen and guitarist Ben Michael X - Dark Magic boasts a cohesion that was initially elusive.

”This one was a more complicated sonofabitch really,” says Tanner. ”It took three years - certainly there were points there when we wondered if it was ever going to happen. I think there was a fair lack of focus at some points.”

Tanner says the album’s producer (and the band’s live mixer) Malcolm McDowell - ”not the Caligula actor” - was crucial to the album’s focus. ”He’s kind of like an insider. He can often tell us what we need to do before we know it.”

Somehow the five very different members - who range in age from their 50s (Tanner) to their 20s (Holland and Larsen) - make it work.

”It’s kind of ironic,” says Tanner with a chuckle. ”Wes and Tor are the two youngest, but Tor’s bringing a lot of that ’60s San Fran vibe and Wes is a big fan of the Who/Brit rock and mod scene, whereas I’m usually the guy writing the pop melodies.

”The one common ground is - and it’s impossible to talk about this stuff without sounding like a wanker - that desire for some kind of transcendent sound, you’re looking for something that’s going to take someone on a journey. If nothing else, you can start with that.”

Sand Pebbles launch Dark Magic at the Northcote Social Club tomorrow, with supports Lost Animal and Amaya Laucirica.

Dark Magic is out now through Remote Control.

The band also plays Friday, September 23 at Basement Discs, Block Place, city, at 12.45pm.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/making-magic-grain-by-grain-20110922-1klql.html#ixzz1YjKEXsxn

Bands unite for The Ghost

Jo Roberts, January 28, 2011

Skull it: Bands including the Dirty Three are celebrating 30 years on air for Stephen Walker, with a fund-raiser for the 3RRR stalwart.

Photo: Simon Schluter

Stephen Walker is a Melbourne radio institution but the time has come for listeners to give back.

TO HEAR Stephen Walker on air each week, you’d never suspect it. His voice is as clear, distinctive and authoritative as ever. The depth of knowledge and passion in the music he plays is as unwavering as the night 30 years ago when he nervously drove down from his home in the Dandenongs to Fitzroy to do his first graveyard shift on Melbourne community radio station 3RRR.

He still remembers the records with which he bookended that show. “I started off with Cabaret Voltaire’s Voice of America album and I finished off with Pere Ubu’s Modern Dance album and all the journey that it took in between,” he says. “So that was the way the twig was already bent back then.”

It’s that particular bent towards music beyond the commercial grid that has kept music lovers in Walker’s thrall for most of 3RRR’s existence, as “the Ghost”, as he is known, has invited listeners to tune in and turn on to sounds as seductive as they are subversive. From Pere Ubu to Sigur Ros, from Om to Can, from the Stooges to the Sugarcubes, any artist who’s pushed any boundary, or flickered a synapse you never knew you had, you’ve most likely first heard on the radio thanks to Walker.

From the listener’s side of the speakers, you’d think nothing has changed, just his timeslots and program names over the years — his latest and best-known being his long-running 4-7pm Friday show The Skull Cave. But for the past 20 years, Walker’s body has been breaking. He calls it “the bitter irony” of his surname — “being the thing I can’t do”.

For the past two years, the Ghost has been in a wheelchair. He has multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks the nervous system. For Walker, the damage has so far been restricted to his spine, so his upper body, including his cognitive skills and speech, have remained intact.

MS, as it is commonly called, presently has no known cause or cure. But there is a glimmer of hope in the form of a treatment at a facility in Cologne, Germany, that has promising success rates — 60 per cent — in either halting the disease or actually reversing some of its damage. The treatment, which uses stem cells to help repair the spine’s protective myelin sheath, is still only on trial in Australia but has a huge waiting list.

Walker mentioned the treatment to the group of long-time friends who gathered for his birthday last April. Among them was Big Day Out promoter Vivian Lees.

“Given that Steve is a pretty modest fellow himself, we felt there should be more Stephen Walker, not less, so we thought about various ways we could help him in some way,” Lees says.

All up, the travel and treatment will cost about $30,000. Given Walker’s dedication to music, a benefit gig, combined with a celebration of the Ghost’s 30 years on radio, was the obvious fund-raising option. Lees approached the bands, including the Dirty Three, members of the Drones, Dave Graney, Ron S Peno, David Bridie, the Sand Pebbles and, of course, the Skull Cave All-Stars, comprising the musical talents of various 3RRR presenters.

“Look, when it’s someone like Steve Walker, it’s not very hard,” Lees says. “Steve is such an integral part of Melbourne’s music scene and he’s been so supportive of cutting-edge artists who are working week in, week out in this city … I could have asked 20 more bands and got 20 more to agree. Every one I asked said yes straight away.

“And Steve being who he is as well, you can’t just produce a lame-arse old line-up.”

One of the tragedies of Walker’s illness is that he can now rarely see live music. But, typically, he has found an up side to that.

“The dovetail of that is to really explore the dimensions of recorded music,” he says.

“When I play a record I treat it like foreground, not background, listening.

“I know Max always says, ‘Gee, I listen to music but you really, really listen to music.’ “

“Max” is his long-time friend and 3RRR colleague Max Crawdaddy, who hosts the Thursday-night roots, rhythm and blues show Son of Crawdaddy. Crawdaddy, who was given his first show by Walker in the mid-’80s during the Ghost’s 14-year tenure as program manager, says Walker has “ears of gold”. He jokes that, were there such an institution, they should be donated to “the Australian Smithsonian”.

“He has the ability to weed out the shite and give listeners the shining gems,” he says. “Anyone who has heard the man on air, he happily gives us that every second he’s behind the mic — all killer, no filler.”

To Walker, music is a spiritual experience and it’s the good stuff that makes the spirit fly. He’s never shied away from that side of life, or music; after all, he is the man who encourages you to “trust the energy” at the close of each show. “I just like free music,” Walker says. “That’s one of the things I like about the Dirty Three. They get into the ether, they make a connection with each other at a very, very high level, and play that.”

As the home of the “platters and chatter that matter”, Walker loves his show’s name and what it represents — the space inside the cranium where the brain, and infinite possibilities, exist and feed each other.

“I used to think of ‘the skull cave’, and still do, as almost like a Jungian thing,” Walker says. “That’s kind of how I saw myself on the radio, that I was a brain with a voice doing this show, and I like the ephemeral nature of being a ghost in the speaker.”

In that sense, nothing has changed: the brain, the voice, the spirit in the speaker are all still there. Only now, Walker’s wife Linda drives him in to 3RRR’s Brunswick studio from their Yarra Valley home (if she is away, 3RRR organises a roster of eager Ghost volunteers).

Walker is optimistic about the Cologne treatment. He’s tried just about everything else: “Being pummelled and beaten, diet, different painful things,” he says.

“Who knows, maybe all those things put together have made me like I am now, as opposed to how I could have been. So when people ask me how I am, I say, ‘Not as good as I should be, not as bad as I could be.’ Sums it up.”

30 Years of Skull Cave, at the Forum on Monday. Tickets $73 on 1300 111 011. Those unable to attend can make direct donations via Stephen Walker, BSB: 063 002, Account: 10009630, or cheque or money order posted to Stephen Walker, 3RRR, PO Box 2145, Brunswick East, 3057, by Monday.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/bands-unite-for-the-ghost-20110127-1a5xp.html#ixzz1Rfnm3Fkw

Every Thursday is Australia Day for radio doyen

Neil Rogers prepares his musical selections for tonight’s show on Triple R, which will celebrate 25 years of playing solely Australian music.

Patrick Donovan
January 31, 2008

EVERY Thursday night, music fans, musicians and music industry workers tune in their radios to The Australian Mood show to keep their fingers on the pulse of the best and latest Australian releases.

According to the industry code of practice, 30% of music played by commercial rock radio stations has to come from Australian acts.

But the Melbourne radio DJ who has been happily spinning Australian music on community station 3 Triple R for a quarter of a century, Neil Rogers, is not affected by quotas. He just loves the stuff. And he does it free.

Bands that went on to much bigger things such as Midnight Oil, Hunters & Collectors, Augie March, the Waifs and the John Butler Trio, got their first break on shows such as Rogers’.

He says he is not being parochial, he just prefers local music.

“It may sound trite, but the fact that I am still doing this after 25 years is a testament to the great music that continues to come out of this country,” Rogers says. “There’s always great new stuff to play.”

Rogers knows the industry inside out, having played in his own band, the Bo-Weevils, managed acts including the Cosmic Psychos, toured acts and staged events. He recently received the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia award for contribution to local music.

“There’s never enough Australian music on the airwaves and they should shift his show to drivetime,” says musician Dave Graney.

Chris Hollow, from local band the Sand Pebbles, was raised on Rogers’ show.

“The thing that really hooked us in was the opening theme music,” he says. “It’s a wild, one-chord exploration that goes on forever. We were like, ‘what the hell is this?’ It was everything we wanted our band to be like. It took a long time to find out it was actually Neil’s own band, the Bo-Weevils.”

Hollow remembers that when he finally met Rogers, he wasn’t disappointed when the broadcaster arrived in paisley shirt and black suede winklepicker boots.

“While his heart is with bands like Radio Birdman, the Scientists and Died Pretty, he always afforded us the same cool enthusiasm,” he says.

Some of Rogers’ favourite acts, including Liz Stringer, the Darling Downs and Harem Scarem, will perform live on the three-hour Neil Rogers Anniversary Special at 7pm tonight on 102.7FM.

Patrick Donovan is a regular guest on The Australian Mood.

http://www.rrr.org.au