Projects

Wasp Summer is near-enough to a full-time job but I like being busy, so I want to introduce you to my other projects.

Sofa Salon

This one is my personal baby. Mick Thomas told me a story about the talented Susannah Espie, that she’d booked a couple of gigs in Western Australia and wanted to fill in the intervening dates rather than fly back to Melbourne, and how she had then whipped up enough house shows to make the week a raging success.

Upon moving to Berlin in 2009, I decided to run monthly living room concerts for the amazing singer-songwriter community, both the resident and the itinerant, and multilingual. It was a ploy to bring superb performance to me so I could watch it up close, an educational opportunity and also a gift to a city that had helped my own creativity blossom.

With the gracious assistance of my housemate, we hosted three days of Wohnzimmer Konzerte for the Moabiter Kulturtage 2010, my suburb’s kiezfest. Each day, we had three musical acts and a poet with around 20-45 people in attendance. I ran it on an email invite basis, so that only people who had applied could get the address. This was both a safety and logistical issue.

Some 30+ shows and several living rooms later, I receive several emails a week from musicians from all over the world asking if they can play. Our word-of-mouth from performers and audience is amazing and the feeling at each show is warm, respectful and interactive. Often, my favourite part of a Salon is the conversation afterwards when the performers mingle with the audience and connections are made, jokes shared, cigarettes bummed and all around is bonhomie.

Find out about Sofa Salon here.

Sofa Salon Podcast

After production and presentation stints on Melbourne community radio stations Southern FM and SYN-FM and a radio production course with the legendary station 3RRR, I fell in love with making radio, so each month I produce a new half hour podcast featuring the Sofa Salon performers for the month plus other music and spoken work I’m digging from Berlin, Germany and around the world. I host each episode on Soundcloud for you to download or stream. Have a listen.

A Headful Of Bees

A Headful of Bees is an artist collective devoted to Do It Yourself and Do It Together principles, that encompasses music, poetry, photography, video, web design, events and our own record label, basically whatever skills, interests and needs the participating Buzzyheads have.

Sofa Salon gigs and the A Month Of Sundays and Flavour of the Month singer-songwriter showcases are run under the Headful banner. Ken Burke, Eric Eckhart and I will release our albums through A Headful of Bees in 2012, and the collective is planning some ambitious and educational projects for the future. We’re also linking up with groups like Berlin Music Week and all2gethernow to run workshops at music industry conferences and events in Berlin. We want to be smart, flexible and independent, using new technology and word-of-mouth to promote our heartfelt art.

We are hosting several events for Berlin Music Week in September 2012. Check out our workshop program here. Check out the Sofa Salon house concert showcases and label showcase at Lovelite here.

Get more information on us here.