With a strong focus on the Australian music scene, Australian Guitar is a rich source of information on playing techniques, styles, the wide range of instruments available and all the technology that guitarists have to consider in the 21st Century.
Christone 'Kingfish' Ingram talks about his new blues la bel Red Zero Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram has announced he’s launching a new label specifically for blues and blues-influenced artists. Red Zero is named after two of the earliest places Ingram played in Clarksdale, Mississippi – Red’s Lounge and the Ground Zero Blues Club and it’s first release was Ingram’s own third album Hard Road, issued at the end of September. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Ingram explained that his aim for the label is to help younger blues musicians from being ripped off. “I just figured I was at a time in my career where I could start helping other young blues musicians and singers to be shown more in the spotlight. “A lot of artists have been shot down…
SINCE 2012, STU Mackenzie’s band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard has dropped a whopping 27 albums, classified by many as psych-rock. It doesn’t bug him now. “I used to care about this stuff,” he says. “But people can call it whatever they want.” On latest release Phantom Island, Mackenzie continues to run a gamut of jazz, rock, guitars and loads of strings. “Everything that you do is all kind of joined,” he says. “Sometimes you think you’re doing something really fresh, new and exciting. But you’re always tied to what you’ve done in the past.” Should we expect to wait long for King Gizzard’s next album? “I feel a bit of a duty to keep working, and keep on the tools,” he reports. “Having a job in this business…
MANY ARTISTS STRUGGLE with the experience of success being a double-edged sword. We Lost the Sea have to deal with the challenge of their success being tied up with the death of singer Chris Torphy. Following his suicide in 2013, they elected to continue as an instrumental band. They channeled their grief into a cathartic, conceptual set of songs about failure and sacrifice that became 2015 breakthrough album Departure Songs. They found near-instant acclaim and generated a passionate cult following. But they became conflicted about feeling typecast by the album, which was, after all, a profound but traumatic document of a specific time in their lives. They’d moved on, personally and creatively, but worried about the reception their new material would get. That tension drove the intense, confrontational energy of…
IMET BRENT Hinds a few years ago at a Mastodon gig. For some reason, he was standing next to me at the public bar, waiting in line to buy a drink, rather than staying out of sight backstage, so I introduced myself as a writer for Australian Guitar’s sister magazine, Total Guitar, and bought him a beer and a shot. We talked briefly before he headed backstage, but I couldn’t quite figure him out. My impression was that he was a bit of an introvert, perhaps not that good with new people — someone who saved his flamboyance for the stage. In his personality, Hinds — who died August 20 in a traffic collision in Atlanta at age 51 — was rather like the music of Mastodon. Their eight studio…
The reason you smash [a guitar] is because you’re having problems with it and it’s your way of fixing it, really. You’ve already sent it to the luthier, you’ve already put the new nut on there. You’ve worked with this guitar for years, and it does that one fuckin’ thing one time too many, and you go, ‘You know what? You’re going out tonight, buddy.’ It’s a great show when that happens, too, but I hate losing an awesome guitar. Also you can hurt yourself. In St. Louis, we did this really awesome show, and I did a Babe Ruth up against a wall. It smashed into a million pieces, but I tore my rotator cuff. — Holiday 2010 I was 12 or 13 when I first heard [Metallica’s] Master…
THE TRAPPINGS OF rock stardom have changed a great deal since the 1970s. The money and record sales ain’t what they used to be, the drugfueled parties in Laurel Canyon have died out, and being on the cover of the Rolling Stone doesn’t have the cachet it once did. But even if having a wall full of platinum records is a thing of the past, there remains one irrefutable sign of having made it — a signature instrument. Bonus points if said instrument is made by one of the most famous guitar makers of all time. So, even if the good old days remain the old days, psychedelic rockers Khruangbin have irrefutably hit the bigs, as guitarist Mark Speer and bassist Laura Lee Ochoa became the first members of a…
