Wait Long By The River Wait Long By The River

A new episode

James Kenyon hails from the Australia's Other Other Great City, Adelaide. In the intervening years he's done a pretty thorough job of dismantling it through art and story, including an art exhibition at MARS gallery in which he tortured city maps, twisted local sounds, and did his best to pretend that a millennium of erosion had cleaned up the city.

But before he destroyed his hometown with his art, he worked in a factory for a year, and bought a Bedford Van with two double beds in it and took to the highway. He travelled the country, got a degree in fine art, moved to Melbourne, and recorded an album. It was called The North Pole, and his next has to be out before September. Why? Listen to the show!

Tom McLean is a jokes guy. And a programmer. And a game designer. And a documentary videographer. It's not an easy life being so many things, but he makes it look easy with a charming smile and jokes about the Pope, among countless other things. He's form Melbourne, and he came in to the comforot of our podcasting library to talk about his many works.

In this episode Tom and I discuss starting out as a comedian, how to structure a comedy night so as to avoid death lulls, Foxconn and the Fair Phone, his new podcast Two Wizards, thingsfittingperfectlyintootherthings.tumblr.com, his enormously successful board game Story War, ASMR, page names, becoming a Christian at a late age and then un-a Christian later even than that, visiting charities in Africa and India, the romance of phone metadata, and how he stole the title of his latest show from a work by Ai Wei Wei.

Make sure you get tickets to his show, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival!

Hailing from the south of Melbourne, Erik Parker is a genuinely unique performer. You couldn't pin his influences down if you tried. Lucky we had a chance to ask him!

He has quite a palette - a variety of ukeleles and related instruments, guitar, versatile vocals, and an assortment of gadgets that would put the European space program to shame. 

In this show, in between great renditions of his and other people's tracks (keep an ear out for his Teardrop cover!) Erik talks growing up down south, making a full-time living as a musician, the vagaries of running open mic nights, and what makes Wide Open Spaces the greatest festival in Australia.

A new episode

"I came to the realisation a couple of years ago that everything I do for work is music related, plus everything I do socially is music related, plus I realised I was reading things that were music-related, and reading things that were music-related, and listening to music and watching documentaries... so I've been learning a little French?"

Brooke Russell is a WA native who moved to Melbourne and fell in with the right crowd. Her sweet, deep, country style found a perfect habitat in the Inner North's Americana revival.

Brooke casually reeled off quite a list of great musicians to listen to, so we're going to be posting tracks from them, and her, on our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/waitlongbytheriver