in the middle of the second world war,

my great-grandfather shut the kitchen door

on his wife’s voice.

Her threats sliced the air with each

trudging step he took up the hill,

until he knocked on the door

of his own house to evict the tenants.

He had put this off for weeks.

But he could no longer stomach

his wife’s back like a garden wall

in bed, the bills stacked like a deck

of cards, his in-laws’ opinions

elbowing him at the dinner table.

He knocked on the door of his own house

and the loose laughter of the men inside

drummed against the frosted windowpanes.

Calloused hands spread over the cards:

bleeding red hearts, black-night-diamonds.

The tenant swung open the door,

and his drunken breath met my

great-grandfather’s practised speech.

Their words mixed like ice and steam

in the bitter November night. At the piano,

someone tinkered a Gershwin tune;

the men’s laughter and the lamplight sparkled.

The tenant’s calloused fist struck jaw.

A shot like a block of ice cracking

rang out.

And my great-grandfather stumbled,

tipped backwards,

and fell the six feet

to take his last breaths

while staring up at the stars sparkling

so clear, so bitterly bright,

a stranger playing Gershwin,

and there he left this earth,

knocked down at the foot of the porch

of his own house.

First published in Italian Americana (Winter, 2012)

Vanessa Blakeslee is an award-winning U.S. writer of short fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Her prose story, ‘Ask Jesus’, is available in our current print/audio edition, Going Down Swinging No. 33.

Photo by Marlon Bunday

But I’m at that point where even though I work and things get drawn and it’s evolving – I feel like it isn’t going anywhere.

Perhaps this is the danger of focusing all of my time on just one artwork. Maybe this is why I (usually) work on many artworks at once. Because if there is just one work then I think about that work. I think about it while I’m working on it; I think about it when I am packing up from working on it; I think about it at dinner time; I think about it while I’m showering, spending time with loved ones, changing a nappy. I think about it on trains and in cafés and I think about it while I am trying to sleep. Which is the worst because with no other outside influence I think about it in a hyperrealistic state. I note the textures, the way the ink takes hold of the paper, the layers – I feel myself drawing it.

So then I am doing all of this thinking and feeling and it’s taken up so much of me it almost feels like it is going to implode. There’s too much and when there’s so much information and feelings it’s almost like I’ve experienced this artwork completely and then I think, well, I don’t have to finish it. Because I’m kind of lost to it and what’s the point anyway.

So this is the point I photograph and upload it onto my blog to say, ‘Look, I’m making things and something is happening – even if my tired brain, eyes and hands tell me otherwise.’

Lily Mae Martin is Melbourne-based visual artist and writer with work featuring in Going Down Swinging‘s all-digital multimedia edition #34 and the print/audio edition #33.

First posted @ lilymaemartin.com

The Blue Corner wonders this for you.

Today we say hello to:

EMILY ANDERSEN, GENERAL MANAGER

Q: What is your full name (middle names and nicknames and twitter names included)?

Emily Elizabeth Andersen AKA Emmy, Em, Emmygrrl, Emmy Lou.

Q: Where do you come from?

I’m a Melbourne kid. I grew up in the maybe-unfairly-maligned-maybe-not Greensborough, in the north eastern suburbs.

Q: What do you do at Going Down Swinging?

I am General Manager, so I work alongside GDS Editor Geoff and the rest of the team with a focus on the operational businessness stuff, like admin, finances, planning, fundraising, staffing, sales, as well as communications and events. I also hope to get involved in creative stuff where possible as words are my first love.

Q: When did you join the team and why?

I joined the team in April this year after the lovely first Emily, Em Hollosy, left the GM post to complete her masters. I’ve recently returned to Melbourne after living in London for a couple of years and was super keen to get back involved in the literature sector here (I used to be GM of Express Media before I left Melbourne). At the same time, GDS were looking for someone to be GM, so the match was made! I am very excited to be part of the brilliant GDS gang.

BONUS QUESTION #1: What do you want to be when you grow up? (if you could be anything without the need for residency/citizenship/qualifications/clean police-check/money)

I want to be a poet who lives between London and Melbourne (and why not chuck New York in there too), writing and performing words about my favourite things in the world: Britpop music, Morrissey, Fitzroy Football Club, ex-boyfriends and heartbreaks, left politics, and cities. I also want to keep working in literature development, and create opportunities for artists, people and communities to develop as writers and tell the world their stories. I have a few tricky visa issues that need ironing out to live the dream, so if anyone can help me out with this…

Q: What is your favourite thing in the Going Down Swinging office?

The GDS stamp. It means I don’t have to write out the GDS return address on the back of envelopes, and it also means I get to stamp things, which I enjoy.

Q: What is important to you about Going Down Swinging?

I love that GDS wants to push boundaries and genres and innovate the world of words. It publishes work that may not yet have a home elsewhere, and that’s exciting.

Q: What writers/spoken wordsters/artists are you excited about at the moment?

I’m looking forward to getting reacquainted with the Australian spoken word landscape through GDS so I can give a more informed opinion on this! But in the meantime, I urge you all to check out the work of some of my favourite UK spoken word artists that excite and inspire me: Kate Tempest, Ben Mellor, Richard Tyrone Jones and Rob Auton.

Q: What’s the biggest arts-related issue on your mind right now?

I think it is always arts funding and whether there’s enough of it, which is such a reflection of how the arts and culture is valued in our society. I think about arts funding in Australia, where funding is split sometimes weirdly across federal and state governments and where perhaps there has never been enough to go around, and I think about arts funding in the UK, where the Tory government has slashed art funding as part of austerity cuts. (The good news is UK artists and arts administrators and supporters are fighting back, making the case for the importance of arts and culture in a modern society. I think Australia can learn from this experience.) I am so interested and excited by the possibilities of crowd-funding and the power of the grassroots to collectively support projects, but I think this should never, ever replace the duty of the state to fund a healthy, diverse arts sector that entertains, provokes, reflects, empowers and questions.

Q: When you’re reading through the submissions inbox what are you looking for?

I’m looking forward to assisting the crew to read submissions when they need extra eyes and minds. I like work that tells me stories about a person’s experience and gives different perspectives on the everyday. I like work that is passionate; I like work that is funny and clever, but I also quite like work that is depressing (blame Morrissey for make me this way).

BONUS QUESTION #2: What is your preferred method of transportation and why?

I love train travel. I think it is the most romantic form of travel because there are so many opportunities for staring out windows and reading and scribbling words and thinking about LIFE.  You also never know who you will meet, and the snack carriages are super inconsistent so you always get surprise meals. I have seen awesome sights out train windows travelling through different countries which just wouldn’t have been the same on other forms of transport. I also have a rather bad fear of flying, so any opportunity to avoid getting on a plane and I’m there!

Q: What are your words to writers who want to keep writing?

Just do it! If you love writing, you should make sure you give yourself time and space to write what you want. If you keep reading and seeing other peoples’ work, it will help develop and improve your own work and ideas. But keep writing whatever you want, and don’t worry about trends or if what you’re doing is different to what others are doing. I truly believe everyone can find an audience for their work.

Q: What is your best GDS moment?  

I have only just started here, but so far I’d say the GDS warehouse party to launch #34, where lots of excitable kids danced and chatted and enjoyed Joelistics till the wee hours. Well done to my GDS colleagues who organised a brilliant night!

Q: So what else do you do?

I am a poet who is trying so hard to take my own advice to writers! I write as much as I can during the week and on weekends while balancing my other commitments and passions. I’m currently developing my one-woman spoken word show, Love in the Key of Britpop, for Melbourne Fringe and Sydney Fringe later in 2013 (I’ve previously toured it to Edinburgh Fringe, Adelaide Fringe and Fringe World in Perth), while working on other projects and ideas for future shows and poems. I work four-and-a-half days a week in a data entry job, which I enjoy because I work with interesting people, the work doesn’t sap me of my creative energy and I get time to come up with ideas and words while I’m plugging numbers into databases. I volunteer in the communications department at my beloved Fitzroy Football Club, so most Saturdays I’ll be found at the Brunswick St Oval or some footy ground in a far-flung suburb of Melbourne, typing scores and comments into Facebook and Twitter. I also have just become involved on the ground in Melbourne in an exciting Australian and New Zealand literature/storytelling project that’s happening in London and the UK – I will have more news about this to tell the GDS community soon!

Q: How do you stay cool?

I am not, and have never been, cool. But to try construct an illusion of cool, I pretend I’m younger than I am, I talk a lot about the music genres I’m really into at the moment (y’know, nu gaze, neo-psychedelia, whatever silly name the music journos pen for the baggy revival *insert disinterested hair flick*), and I drop the fact that I used to live in Shoreditch, the Fitzroy of London, into most of my conversations.  I don’t think I’m getting away with this charade.

So here we go again. Last year’s Going Down Swinging warehouse party was of such epic biblical proportions they’re still searching for the roof somewhere in East Brunswick, so it’s easy to approach this one with some trepidation. Will it be as big? Will wine be spilt all over my turntables again (my slipmat still bears the stains). Will I get so overserved I forget how it ends? Will something happen? Well, der, of course.

I always get a little nervous before any gig, be it as a poet or as a DJ. And this is no exception. My junior football coach called it the Best Befores. As in, better before a game than during. And he was right. When I arrive to set up my gear I initially put myself up against the wall where I think the dance floor will be, but Grand Poobah Geoff Lemon suggests that maybe I should have a little protection this time (see wine-stained slipmats). So instead I am placed in this strange little pit between the front of the stage and the sound system. I kinda feel like Captain Kirk at the bridge of the Enterprise; boldly going where no DJ has gone before. I play one of my favourite tunes of the year to get things going in the form of Solange’s ‘Losing You’ (Beyonce’s sister). Madonna never sounded so good.

The proceedings open with the spoken word talents of Zoe Norton Lodge. It’s not an easy gig to read a story to a warehouse full of punters jonesing to get their dance on but Zoe easily commands their attention right from the start. Soundscape and foley are supplied by digital editor Vanessa Hughes as she temporarily occupies my DJ den. It’s a freaking brilliant and hilarious story by ZNL detailing her time with the Sydney 2000 Olympic Marching Band, comprising of 2000 musicians! You can hear it in full with Vanessa’s accompaniment on the digital version of GDS #34. Which of course you already own, don’t you?

After Zoe I play a couple of old favourites by New Order and Echo & the Bunnymen. This is only supposed to be filler music between sets but people are already starting to dance – a promising indicator of the night ahead.

Florelie Escano and her smoking hot band grace the stage next with a thumping set of soul/funk numbers. The hips of the room are getting well and truly oiled. These literart kids sure know how to have good time. (‘Literart’ was a typo from ‘literary’ but hey it works! Did I just coin a phrase? I’m sure the stupid internet will tell me I haven’t so I’m not looking it up.)

I follow Florelie with Death in Vegas’s ‘Hands Around My Throat’, with some old skool chasers by The Clash and Kim Wilde. And suddenly it’s getting hot in here.

After playing for a bit I get the tap on the shoulder from Joelistics that they’re ready to start and I slip out of the pit again to get a little loose with the punters.

Joel and Soup have just driven two hours from a previous all-ages gig but you certainly wouldn’t know it as they are bang out the gate and another roof goes missing from a GDS warehouse gig. Joel gets a little frustrated with the gap between the stage and the audience and decides to leap onto the stage system and address the audience from high on the pulpit. I watch a little anxiously as this causes my needle to jump across the deck, which I later discover does actually damage it. (Joel you owe me a new stylus punk! But hey, it’s all in the game yo.)

Joelistics.

Knowing I was to write this previously I was taking notes on what tracks I was playing but with all that Bulmers and Buckley’s Beer flowing so freely this kind of goes by the wayside. The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur as to what I actually play but I do remember highlights in the form of M.I.A.’s ‘Bad Girls’, Montell Jordan’s ‘This Is How We Do It’ and Azealia Banks’s scorching banger 212. “Ima ruin you c***.” I’m a DJ who is definitely a little guilty of getting high on their own supply and I’m a little embarrassed by my dancing antics behind the decks, but I just can’t seem to help myself. Monkey’s amazing solar powered sound system is so banging that, whenever somebody places a drink down, they start jumping around so violently that it isn’t very long until I have some new stains to add to my slipmats from last year. In the future I imagine myself chronicling different GDS events from these assorted booze-coloured patches.

At one stage I get a tap on the shoulder from DJ Lazer Ferrari AKA Tom Tom asking if I need a break. There’s not a lot of DJs I would allow to play through but this man is definitely one of them and his capable hands take us all the way home, gratefully giving me a chance to dance with the literartsy and not just to them.

After lights go up I discover a handwritten note that somebody had flung onto my desk just saying, “Womack & Womack or Hall & Oates.” Damn, I definitely would have played those! Next time, just ask. I’m one of the most accommodating DJs you will ever meet. I aim to please. Thanks Going Down Swinging for another epic night to remember, or at least vaguely recall depending on your cider consumption. Can’t wait to do it all again next year.

X

Sean M Whelan AKA DJ Border Lion

Photography by Damian Stephens at DDT

Get No. 34 here

Find more photos of the night here

I’ve lost words.

Eighteen months ago I had them; neatly lined up in a vast internal storehouse. I love words – always have – and after finishing my thesis, a yearlong traipse through psychoanalytic criticism and its poetics, I found myself working with them professionally. I spent my days transcribing and editing articles for an interview magazine, and my nights reading submissions for Going Down Swinging. Three thousand submissions, give or take, in two months or so; I loved words a little less for a while, but they were still there, all of them, waiting to be called at will. And then things changed. I had a baby.

Within a few weeks of meeting my husband, we were already talking about starting a family. “There’s no rush,” people told me, over and over again, as though I were barrelling down a Cosmo-approved checklist (get married, have babies, spice up your sex life). We weren’t in a rush. We just felt as though our small family, however loving, was incomplete without a child. I longed for one, physically, with the kind of urgency and hunger usually associated with sad thirtysomething sitcom stereotypes. So after two editions of Going Down Swinging, four quarterly journals, countless discarded poems, I fell pregnant. And while I was prepared for a sudden blossoming – pregnancy is generative, after all – what I wasn’t prepared for was to pay for that blossoming in the coin of my own store of language.

As it turns out, it’s not unusual for pregnancy to steal whole chunks of vocabulary from you. It’s a temporary aphasia that people refer to as ‘pregnancy brain’ or ‘placenta brain’; catchall terms to excuse your new clumsiness, your inability to remember where you put your keys, your trouble finding the word for ‘yoghurt’. “The sour milk that’s not butter or cream,” I would say to my husband while he jotted down a shopping list. Or; “the word that means pedagogical but also bossy.” The things that you push to open elevators. The place you get coffee in the morning. The itch you can’t scratch.

I felt language leeching out of me with every developmental milestone the baby hit. I became deficient in iron (felicitations, feckless, fetish) and vitamin D (diagnosis, Dictaphone, drumsticks). I began to substitute words so seamlessly that I didn’t realise I was doing it; ‘sympathy’ for ‘symphony’, ‘monastery’ for ‘monetary’. My editor at work became adept at bending his brain towards my spoonerisms. My control over words felt like a monkey of barrels.

As I wound up my magazine work in preparation for maternity leave, I soothed myself with the notion that it was only temporary. Women give birth every day, I told myself, and most of them seem able to chew gum and walk at the same time. I had plans for freelancing, for finally dusting off my verse novel – for the writing that had been put on the backburner, quite deliberately, after I wrenched too much poetry out of myself during my degree and left a little shallow hole where metaphor and symbolism usually lived.

When I got home, though, I was tired. I bathed in silence on the couch, and watched my belly in quiet fascination as the baby turned, kicked, and jammed his little elbows beneath my skin. The baby didn’t need words; we were one, and happy to be one, biding our time in hibernation from the world until it was time to remember the phrase for ‘Caesarian section’.

I thought I would get my words back.

When the time came, though, I didn’t. It got worse. I sat in silence as people cooed over our little boy, feeling shell-shocked from the operation (breech, intervention, haemorrhage) and barely able to dredge up a cliché or pat aphorism. Things took a bit of a decline, and I stopped being able to read. And months go easily if you can’t remember which day is Tuesday and which day is Sunday.

When I turned up at the emergency room, ostensibly for a second round of post-infection antibiotics, I was barely able to speak. Words lodged in my throat, those basic short ones I could remember, but couldn’t find a way out. The doctor read a short list of questions, and wrote a scrip. Escitalopram oxalate (Esipram, Esitalo, Lexapro). And slowly the fog began to lift.

I was drawn, when writing my thesis, to psychoanalytic criticism, because of the way in which it built the world through language. Lacan and Kristeva and their gang all argued that our experience is mediated through thought, which is channelled through language, and thus reality is really a complex web of meanings, puns, and connotations. Lacan in particular enraptured me, with his tripartite order of the world: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real.

In the Imaginary world, preverbal, meaning is fluid, and the self has no boundaries, merging interior with exterior without the constraint of self-awareness. It’s where my son resides, as he stumbles towards the Symbolic realm, a place where concepts solidify, words create boundaries, and babies become independent of their parents. It’s an order that is surprisingly sympathetic towards parenthood, though to the best of my knowledge, Lacan never dealt with the ontological fallout of childbirth.

Nine months after his birth, I am finally able to read again. The innate poetic impulse, the sing-song lullaby urge, I think has something to do with it. It’s impossible to talk to a baby without resorting to rhyme – I don’t know why, but it’s always there. Together we are cobbling meaning out of fragments, a skill I thought I’d lost along with my ability to find my own keys. And as my little boy yodels and shrieks his way towards language, I find myself more and more open to it myself, more able to grasp nuance and symbolism and ekphrasis and verse. There are things still frustratingly out of reach, but I’m more at ease with leaving them behind, because I am learning a new vocabulary.

It’s an aphorism, a pat cliché.

It’s enough.

Jessica Friedmann edited Going Down Swinging’s first digital multimedia edition, #31, and print/audio edition #32.

We were there, posing as model university students, to record the whole thing for your listening pleasure.

Read the original piece here.

‘A Small Boy’

April 29, 2013

Photo of Kevin Brophy by Nicholas Walton-Healey (forming part of the ‘Land Before Lines’ series on contemporary Victorian poetry, to be released by Meanjin in September)

THE OFFICIAL BIO

Emilie Zoey Baker is a published award winning poet and slam champion. She has performed poetry all around the world, and is the winner of the 2010 Berlin International Literature Festival’s Slam!Review. She teaches poetry in both primary and high schools and co-founded OutLoud, the first Australian teen team slam as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. She is also a coordinator of Liner Notes, a spoken word tribute to a classic album now in its seventh year performed also as part of the MWF.

MY VIEW

I fell in love with Emilie Zoey Baker an eternity ago* when I saw her perform with her twirly perfect flame hair and her punch in the womb wild words. Originally from Sydney, this spoken wordster quickly and firmly wooed Melbourne and has been a mainstay on the scene ever since. I’ve always admired her boldness and rawness in her work. Whether she is talking pop culture or the loveliness of love or the intricacies of Glee, she is effervescent, commanding, honest and is always thoroughly watchable. Her stamina is enviable too. She writes, she slams, she teaches, she performs, she wins prizes…

* Emilie is a very close friend, so I frame this passionate plea to read her/see her with absolutely no bias at all…

HER VIEW

I started falling in love with words when…

It was 1985, I was 10, Madonna was on my tape player and a poster of David Bowie was on my ceiling. The Thin White Duke was the first thing I’d see when I woke up. I was hopelessly in love with everything. It was also the year the movie Mask came out. It’s about a boy with a skull deformity which makes it look like he’s wearing a mask. He falls in love with a blind girl (a super hot, young Laura Dern) who loves him for who he is. I get weird and teary just thinking about it (Cher plays his tough biker mom too – I still have a crush on her for that). Anyway, there’s this scene where he’s teaching Laura Dern colours by putting various objects into her hand – cotton balls for white, ice for blue, a hot meatball for red –  and it was the most poetic thing I’d ever seen, and I thought, “I wanna teach colours to blind girls!”. That was when I knew I was was hooked on the art of life, soon to become poetry.

Poetry (or spoken word) means:

To be able to provide words in situations where other people say, “I have no words”.

Other poets I adore are…

My favourites are the accidental poets. I was recently in Mexico where I met a local girl whose English was limited. She described a time when she and her friends walked into a parking area where teens were “making out”. It was apparently pretty hot and heavy and she described it by saying, “Everywhere you looked was like the end of the movie”.

I love the sounds of…

Things clicking into place.

If I could tell you one thing…

Say yes.

emiliezoeybaker.com

Alicia Sometimes is an Australian writer, poet, broadcaster, musician and has toured nationally and internationally with her poetry. She’s also a past editor and long-standing contributor to Going Down Swinging.

This month, Sydney poet joanne burns, whose most recent collection of poems is amphora (Giramondo Publishing 2011) responded thusly:

pits
[or why do you write poetry?]

In the last couple of years I have from time to time succumbed to ‘poetry fatigue’ [not to be confused with writer's block]. After nearly five decades it seemed time to stop writing. This has not been an intense feeling, more a weariness that comes from skeptical boredom. Doesn’t one seem to write the same poem over and over – too much familiar rhetoric, too many personal poetic tics – as if one is writing a DIY cliché handbook? Poems pile up like old receipts. You can’t remember the titles of your poems, or if you’ve used that title before.

This condition would come upon me like a creeping breeze, a lassitude. It was as if I were hovering in a long corridor wondering ‘will I won’t I’ – like a Mary Mary, quite contrary. To be truthful I have been writing poems during the last couple of years, but it didn’t feel as if I had. I have a number of poems stacked in a drawer, some typed into the computer, some still in barely legible, handwritten form in an ungainly sort of sleep. For months at a time I didn’t submit any poems for publication.

At present (March 2013) the poems I like to write are ones that entertain and surprise me. The making of a poem, its poesis, can be a quietly thrilling experience, a glint of tinsel somewhere between the ears. These may be poems that riff, or springboard, from dream fragments; from word play, word particles, phrases that flash inside my head; from the trope-like language of the financial pages of newspapers. Right now I think of poetry writing as playing in the sandpit, rearranging the toys of language (not the deckchairs of the Titanic).

This process I see as more Janus, than Jungian. I do have a prose poem waiting to be written. Little notes have been jotted down about a dream; about two words and their genealogies/connotations; and the image of a pumpkin seed seems to have fallen onto the scrap of paper. I have been super-busy with some other literary business – reading hundreds and hundreds of other poets’ poems. But this prose poem’s notes wait patiently on the desk in their plastic sleeve. I haven’t had to dust it yet!

Tune in next month for more poets and more answers. In the meantime, if YOU want to offer up your own answers for consideration and inevitable publication, you can send them to me at adamatsya@gmail.com.

Adam Ford was co-editor of Going Down Swinging issues #18-#22, and is author of poetry collections The Third Fruit is a Bird, Not Quite the Man for the Job, the novel Man Bites Dog and  Heroes and Civilians (short stories).

You can find his website here.

Photo by Wiertz Sébastien

Thanks all our volunteers for your support and party efforts on the night. Special thanks to our friends at Bulmers and Radburger and Buckleys Brews for watering and feeding y’all, and the amazing Monkey Marc and DIY Hi-Fi for the truly epic wood-panelled solar-powered sound set-up.

GDS No. 34 is now firmly and officially launched, and available to buy in a browser version or an Apple app.

Photos below courtesy of Emma Battaglene.

Get your copy of No. 34 here

We chat to the Elefant Traks signed, TZU frontman about all the good stuff: travelling, poetry, politics and change.

TBC: Hi Joel! We’re excited you’re coming to the launch on Friday.

I’m excited to be playing at the launch. I haven’t played gigs with Joelistics for a while.

TBC: What have you been doing?

I put out a record with TZU at the end of last year [Millions of Moments] and since then I’ve just been touring that record and writing new Joelistics material.

TBC: What made you decide to start this round of touring again (as Joelistics)?

It’s just time. I’ve got a bunch of new songs for another record kicking around, and I wanted to try some new stuff – like try new production techniques, work with a band, stretch my creative wings – on this record.

TBC: Have you been in Australia much over the last two years? Because I know you’ve been travelling a ton…

I’ve been splitting my time between Berlin, Melbourne, and a little bit in other parts of Europe. My sister just moved to Belgium and she’s just had twins, so I’m an uncle for the first time.

TBC: Congrats.

[Laughs] Yeah, it’s awesome. I didn’t have to do anything so it was very easy for me. Not so easy for her…

Yeah, so there’s this sort of link to Europe. I’ve been going over there quite a bit, and working with another band called The B-Town Rockers, which is partially based in Berlin, partially based in Australia.

TBC: How do you know Geoff and Going Down Swinging?

I did a spoken word gig that Geoff used to run called WordPlay and then we became really good friends, and he has done some guest spots on a Joelistics tour [and] a TZU tour. We’ve spent a number of evenings drinking and rambling together and just generally keeping up to date with what each other’s doing. He asked me to do this gig and I was all too happy to say yes.

TBC: With music and your poetry, how do they work together and which came first?

Music always came first. I’ve played music since I was twelve-years-old (I’ve played drums in a punk band, played guitar in reggae bands) and the poetry is I guess an offshoot of writing rap and being obsessed with words. Now it’s also developed also into writing for writing’s sake, like writing short stories, but the poetry is very much linked to my love for hip hop and rap music.

TBC: What strikes me about your lyrics is how political they are – is this unusual for hip hop? (I’m asking this as a complete novice, by the way).

Hip hop as a movement worldwide was always political music, and in Australia it used to be a lot more. Maybe recently it’s become a lot more a kind of party style, and now, with the threat of the ultra-conservative Australian government that we’ll probably be cursed with in September, I think you’ll find hip hop’s going to get a lot more political again.

TBC: Is there a link between hip hop and poetry slam?

I don’t think so. I think there’s definitely links and bridges between the two scenes and between people who work in both camps – people like Omar Musa and Geoff Lemon to a degree really understand both forms – but I think they’re quite different. Most of the rappers and MCs I know wouldn’t call themselves poets, and probably a lot of stand up poets wouldn’t go to a hip hop open mic night, or run with a crew. But there are also so many common threads and connections in the form and the creativity, so, yeah they are close, but a lot of the time they’re also really far away from each other.

TBC: What initially attracted you to hip hop?

Probably the politics second and the music first. I always loved synthesizers and drums and nerdy audio gear, and also I like the idea of taking a James Brown sample and then mixing that with Dutch drinking songs and then recording the sound of birds in Eltham and putting that all together and making it all work as a cohesive piece. But musically I like how collagey it is, and, probably from a lyrical perspective, I always just like flow and vivid word pictures.

TBC: Is travel still such an important part of your music?

Yeah, that’s a big part of me. What I’ve spent a lot of my time doing is travelling and moving around the world and exploring new stuff, and that inevitably comes out in the music.

TBC: That’s what I like about your music. Do you have to come back to Australia to record or do you have studios overseas?

I’ve started to build quite a few connections overseas through studios in Berlin and in Paris and even in China, but mostly I have to come back to Australia to finish my work because I’ve just got a lot more connections and networks here. But, it’s funny, I used to come back to Australia because it was cheaper to mix, master and finish a record here, but now it’s becoming way more expensive than everywhere in the world.

TBC: Where’s the best place to record now?

Depends who you know, but I guess Berlin’s a pretty creative town, and it has a lot of studios and people working and they are probably one of the cheapest places to make music in Europe. You can also record in Thailand or in Bali and get some really cheap rates. But the thing is I know lots of people to collaborate with in Australia, so it’s good to come back. And the Joelistics music comes out on Elefant Traks, and that label’s based out in Sydney, so it’s good for me to come back and work with those guys.

TBC: What are you working on at the moment?

At the moment I’m working on the next Joelistics record.

TBC: Do you know when that will come out, or can you tell me a bit about it?

[Laughs] Oh, that’s a cursed question…

TBC: I know, I’m sorry!

I have no idea. I really hope it comes out around August this year, but everything I ever plan to do with timelines and dates inevitably gets hijacked or doesn’t turn out the way I hoped so we’ll see.

I’m excited to try some new stuff in a time of change.

TBC: For you, or for the world? Or both?

For me as much as the world. I think the world’s always in a state of flux and I’m just trying to keep up with it.

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