At First Sight returns to Sydney’s Carriageworks this month for a day of pop up record stalls, live music and more, and to gee us all up for the, no doubt killer day of tunes and vinyl-hunting we got the artists to tell us what album they’d take with them, on a one-way mission to Mars. Grab the full lineup and ticket deets below!
My Disco (Ben Andrews)
Birds Of Fire, Mahavishnu Orchestra. Obviously the most alien sounding extreme prog rock / jazz rock fusion record I ever heard. Ridiculous guitar work. It would make the alien surfaces of Mars seem like a beach holiday whilst on repeat.
Broadway Sounds
Nino Ferrer Metronomie – Amazing record. There is a countdown and a rocket launch in one song. Possibly the perfect album to listen to whilst watching Matt Damon trying to grow crops…. Or watching Total Recall.
Donny Benet
If I was led to being trapped on Mars, with only one record, I would take Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s Ambient 2/The Plateaux of Mirror. I imagine I’d be a tiny bit stressed about being trapped on a foreign planet and this is the perfect record to get some namaste action.
A few years back I did an extremely high pressure tour in Japan and I’d play this album every night when I got back to the hotel. A quick visit to the vending machine for a few cans of Kirin, this album, and an hour of people watching from the 21st floor of the Shibuya Hotel Excel took me to the chill zone every night.
Andras
Waak Waak Jungi’s album Crow Fire Music. Or a cassette by the Lajamanu Teenage Band. Both these albums have a super strong sense of belonging and communion with land. I reckon there’s a good chance I’d be homesick. And if anyone knows how to sing about red sand already, it’s the Warlpiri.
The Royal Sitars
The Royal Sitars recommend Ravi Shankar’s Sounds of India as a great companion for study to a life trapped in the peaceful environs of Mars. The solitude will bring much time for contemplation of this majestic record.
Los Tones
Would have to be Desert Island by Mystic Braves, or Jay Reatard’s Blood Visions. Just to get the mood right for chillin on the red planet.
Total Giovanni
Incase we encounter any extra terrestrials, it’d be important to have a document of what humans were into circa 1977. The original is hard to come by as it went out on the Voyager I space craft (currently somewhere beyond Pluto). Luckily we’ve got a pretty rare 180 gram re-issue in bronze that hangs on the wall at our rehearsal studio.
Highlights of the record include the sounds of surf, wind, thunder and animals. Also attached in the liner notes is a picture of a woman in a supermarket and some adult men creepily eating ice cream. Enjoy aliens, enjoy. I hope you are advanced enough to have invented the record player.
Jonathan Toubin
If I was trapped on Mars I and could only bring one record with me it’d be Eddie Kirk’s The Hawg. Its in my estimation the best record of all time and one of the only songs I can turn regularly and not get sick of. I’ve been known to call The Hawg “the ‘Warm Leatherette’ of the blues” because of its noisy robotic syncopation. Like a lot of the best modern art, looked to both the distant past and the future and transcended the tyrannical banality of the present.
Raw, honest, and emotive as the most ancient railroad blues, The Hawg’s minimalism, electricity, and rhythmic geometry fits this wild boar into the aesthetics of our own time. While all-time blues hero Eddie Kirk and his wild harp are the stars of the show, Booker T and the MG’s/Stax session man Al Jackson’s brutal pounding is the not-so-secret weapon that propels this beast to the heavens.
And yes, those are the six strings of the one and only Steve Cropper boogying down in the background! Kirk, whose career spanned from medicine shows in the 1930s to Jon Lee Hooker collaborations in the 1950s to Foghat in the 1970s, passed on only a couple of years ago when a Greyhound bus smashed into his car on tour. On an interesting side note, Eddie Kirk was playing in Otis Redding’s band and review in 1963 when the Big O took him to Stax Studios to lay down this track. A lone copy of The Hawg would no doubt seed some supremely wild martian rock’n’roll in a generation or two.
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At First Sight 2015 First Line-Up
Acid Baby Jesus (EL)
Andras
Blank Realm
Broadway Sounds
DJ Jonathan Toubin’s Soul Clap & Dance Off (USA)
Donny Benet Presents: The Songs Of Nile Rogers
Los Tones
Lost Animal
Lucy Cliché
My Disco
Nicholas Allbrook
No Zu
Nun
Oscar Key Sung
Palms
Rolling Blackouts
Tees
Total Giovanni
Saturday, 14th November
Tickets: Carriageworks
