PERTH muso Mark Turner was a hard man to catch up with last week. He was in the middle of a whirlwind educational tour of the south west. When we finally spoke on the blower, he was racing between classrooms with mate Adam Hall from the Velvet Playboys. “We travel all around Australia and have…

UNIVERSITY of WA art student Elham Eshraghian has won this year’s $40,000 Schenberg Art Fellowship. The lucrative prize is handed out to an up-and-coming artist who makes it into PICA’s Hatched exhibition and catches the Schenberg judges’ eyes. Eshraghian’s digital work Bohran was selected from a field of 30 finalists and the folk at PICA…

Legendary Melbourne rockers in town 1 June British India are thrilled to announce they’ll be returning to The Newport Hotel, Fremantle on the Midnight Homie Tour. With raging guitars, seriously provocative lyrics and a palpable energy that confidently struts through the track’s entirety, there is little wonder Midnight Homie has quickly become a fan favourite on the band’s new…

PLAYWRIGHT Ray Lawler changed the face of Australia theatre in 1953 with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. For the first time in mainstream theatre we had a warts-and-all portrayal of working class life in Melbourne. “A  play so superbly true to Australian thought and the Australian scene…” read the review in The Argus following the…

International vocal sensation, Richard Jackson (USA) and ‘Trombone Powerhouse’ Q Sound (USA) come to Perth for a one-off show at the Astor Theatre on 1 June, 2018. Teaming up with local favourites Adam Hall and the Soul Playboys, the show will coincide with the launch of Satisfied – the long awaited CD by this international…

A SILVER garden fork is dragged down a huge brass gong as Louise Devenish brings Tone Being to a harmonious close. The piece is one of three new compositions that Devenish, head of percussion at UWA, will play in her first solo show, Music for Percussion and Electronics. She commissioned three WA composers Cat Hope, Kate…

AS a teenager Ruby Boots didn’t run away, but she did walk at a brisk pace to distance herself from her “conflicted” Girrawheen home. “I left home early,” she tells the Voice, but refuses to elaborate, as she sips coffee in Melbourne airport. The 36-year-old singer-songwriter—aka Bex Chilcot—now lives in the US and is back…

WHEN the Eastwinds blow, strum and pluck they whip up a storm of world music The band is truly global and features musicians from Estonia, Iran, Japan and Australia. They’ll be be in town next week for the launch of their second album Confluence, which fuses Persian and Balkan music to “create something new and…

Riley Lee performs on Shakuhachi in Freo! Internationally renowned shakuhachi player (bamboo flute) Riley Lee will perform in Fremantle at St John’s Anglican Church on 31 May. During his tours throughout the world, Riley has introduced the shakuhachi to diverse audiences as both a soloist and with other performers across all musical genres. His performances…

BUSHFIRES have loomed large in the Australian psyche since colonisation, but while a blackened, desolate landscape is the enduring image, Perth artist Nigel Hewitt has been finding a new beauty among the ashes. Hewitt has used ash from bushfires in WA and Tasmania to create monochromatic portraits of contemporary Australia that he says shows the…