Industrial Strength: Inside Track – August 29, 2013

Machine Translations opens a new door 

Spunk will release Melbourne artist Machine Translations’ (aka J. Walker) new record The Bright Door on October 11 – his first in seven years. In that time, he raised a family, performed with Paul Kelly and produced records for the likes of Kelly, Claire Bowditch, Tiny Ruins and CW Stoneking. Walker says “Eight albums in and I didn’t want to repeat myself. I went down a spectral electro alley, explored a loopy hyno basement and a power-tool inspired noise rock culvert, but I kept coming back to a more acoustic approach that seemed to point the way forward.

The songs that stuck mainly concern big themes – being and death – I didn’t want to make some grandiose statement but I had to keep following where the path led. I got sick, got better. Then a dear friend passed away leaving a gaping hole in my world. I found solace in other’s music, not my own.” He took a break fixing a house and “helped two beautiful children get to know the world, but eventually I came back to this record and the things it was trying to say. I didn’t even know I was doing it but the words ’belief’, ’hand’, ’arrow’ and ’apple core’ kept cropping up in the lyrics of different songs.”

He tried to find new sounds to match the lyrics. “Pianos, pianos and more pianos. Old pianos, broken pianos struck and bowed, piano sustain as a glimpse of eternity. Dulcimers, detuned violins and guitars, more and more instruments pushed towards atonality.” Stream new single Broken Arrows here.

Eminem announces Marshall Mathers LP 2 

Eminem’s next album is titled MMPL2, which suggests it is a sequel to 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP which is his best selling record and includes some of his best work as Stan, The Way I Am and The Real Slim Shady. Em made the announcement during last weekend’s MTV Video Music Awards, during a new ad for Beats By Dre. The ad is up on his official site. Before its airing, he’d tweeted, Guess who’s REALLY back? #VMAs.” The album, executive produced by Rick Rubin and Dr. Dre, has a November 5 release date. First single Berzerk became available on Tuesday on iTunes in Australia.

How Emma Louise took a sticky bath 

For the video of her new single Pontoon, Brisbane singer songwriter Emma Louise envisaged a white, claw-footed bathtub full of milk and rose petals (through which she would emerge) shot in the red desert. The idea was that it would be the portal through which she took a dream journey through surreal Australian landscapes. The desert idea was dropped. “It took 900kms between 10 locations, moving a 120kg claw foot bath up a mountain and 200 steps and I was drenched in stinky milk for 3 days in the middle of winter but it was so worth it!” Louise recalls. To make it work, she called on director Dylan Wiehahn, a self-confessed “nature guy” with a penchant for captivating imagery and who’d done videos for Active Child and Young Magic.

Wiehahn found Louise brimming with visual ideas and easy to work with. “The outfit, bathtub, jewellery, hair, makeup and eventually the ’hair girl’ were all Emma’s creations. It was quite refreshing to just be able to focus on the cinematic elements of the clip and let her bring the style.” The first day of the shoot began in Lennox Head then north to Canungra and eventually the Glasshouse Mountains on the Sunshine Coast. Day 2 they drove north to Noosa, then a further two hours to Rainbow Beach. Day 3 was in Brisbane, across the road from Suncorp Stadium for the exquisite final ’tree scene’.

“We used a hell of a lot of milk,” Wiehahn chuckles. “Our producer had the brilliant idea of using powdered milk which saved us a lot of money, I think the final cost was around $200. We filled the 200L tub three times so I suppose it was around 600L of milk! It was pretty stinky and sticky, I felt sorry for Emma but it was all worth it in the end.” Check it out here. Louise embarks on the Pontoon theatre show behind her Vs Head Vs Heart album. The use of the song 1000 Sundowns in a funeral scene in Channel Ten drama Offspring has seen Louise’s debut EP (Full Hearts and Empty Rooms) re-enter the ARIA charts.

Julian Assange channels John Farnham’s mullet

Wikileaks founder and political activist Julian Assange donned a mullet and channeled John Farnham as part of his campaign to be elected to the Australian Senate as part of the September 7 Federal elections. He’s done a version of John Farnham’s You’re The Voice (sung by Geisha frontman Chris Doheny) with lyrics including “We’ve got to make things leak, so we can get much bolder”, “Oh, we’re all wire-tapped now, we’re all being fed lies” and “You’re the light that the world’s demanding!” The satirical video, created by Juice Rap News, sends up Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Opposition leader Tony Abbott and deposed PM Julia Gillard. Queensland-born Assange was filmed in the Ecuadorean embassy in London where he has taken refuge from being shipped off to Sweden to face sex crime charges. In the video, the “interviewer” suggests he don a green and gold singlet to be more appealing to Australian voters.

Green Day’s Broadway Idiot heads to cinema in North America 

Green Day’s documentary Broadway Idiot will be released in cinemas in the US and Canada in mid-October. It looks at the problems and challenged they faced adapting the Grammy winning multi-platinum American Idiot album to the Broadway production of 2010. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, who co-wrote the stage adaption with Michael Mayer, said in the doco, “My fear was that it was just going to be sort of absurd, not relatable and corny.” .