True Radical Miracle at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival

As part of this year's Melbourne International Jazz Festival, the creative minds behind the Make It Up Club and Stutter have curated a festival within a festival. Overground is a one day event held in the many nooks and crannies of the Melbourne Town Hall.

"Overground celebrates the rich diversity of the underground music culture in Melbourne in a day long event set in the many lost spaces of Melbourne Town Hall. It will be an event where new sounds can be made and heard as the outer limits of jazz and improvisation are explored, incorporating avante garde, grindcore, big band, expanded cinema, contemporary classical and performance art installation."

In what is possibly the largest stage the group will ever play, True Radical Miracle will perform a special one-off collaboration with contemporary classical/noise trio, Golden Fur. It's happening on the big stage in the main room - you know, the one where they do the Comedy Festival Gala thing.

It's happening this Sunday. Tickets are $30. Kick off is 2pm sharp. The full, ridiculous line-up is available here. It is advisable not to miss this event, it's unlikely they'll let anything like this happen again.

Sabbatical 2010

Distant Horizon / Formative Stages:
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Matthew Brown 2xCS
Cured Pink CS
Dead Boomers CS
Knife Culture: Buried Melbourne 2010 2xCD

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We have been taking a break from organising live actions since the end of our tenure at The Old Bar, but there should be some more shows within the next couple of months. These include a second attempt at launching the Dead Boomers label release (venue suggestions are more than welcome at this point), and a number of shows surrounding our Cured Pink cassette release.

That said, artists and projects with past Sabbatical label releases continue to perform live in a range of contexts: Absoluten Calfeutrail is kicking around as a two piece for the moment, Pikelet is launching a new album on Chapter/Love & Mercy across Australia, James Rushford and Joe Talia are off to Europe shortly, and True Radical Miracle is again lurching into life.

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Dead Boomers launch shut down, new show coming soon

Unfortunately, the attempted launch of Dead Boomers' Family Money got shut down by the police last Thursday. A new launch show will be announced soon.

Dead Boomers launch 'Family Money'

This Thursday, 25 February 2010, Dead Boomers launch Family Money, the latest Sababtical series release. Cut from an extended live session recorded for Paul Kidney's Ear of the Behearer show on PBS FM, Family Money is the first full length recording of the recording duo of Mark Groves and Leith Thomas.

Sabbatical will be launching this gloriously low-brow release at the new (as yet unnamed) gallery from the former operators of Gulag Projects, one of our favourite former DIY gallery spaces. The show is part of a series of No PA shows the boys are doing in the lead up to the spaces' opening.

Dead Boomers Family Money album launch
No PA Show
136 Roden Street, West Melbourne
with Snuff Budgies, Ian Wadley and Yev Kasem
Doors at 7pm, six dollars gets you in

New release: Dead Boomers 'Family Money'

The fifteenth release in the Sabbatical CD-R series is out now.

Dead Boomers is a duo comprised of Mark Groves and Leith Thomas, both members of True Radical Miracle and operators of the Sabbatical label. Conceived initially as an easy outlet for the duos interest in contemporary nasty noise and binge drinking, recent activity has expanded the sound palette to take in additional repulsive capabilities of the selected instrumentation. This instrumentation is essentially comprised of accumulated analogue junk and garden variety rock apparatus. The resultant smut is centred squarely on metal abuse and screaming distortion, with cruelly minimal compositional ideas employed to establish structure. Family Money follows a short run, no sold out double cassette on Sabbatical from 2009, titled Sharon Stone/Michael Douglas. Expanding on ideas from this earlier release, Family Money is comprised of edited live takes recorded at Melbourne’s PBS Studio 5 for broadcast on the program Ear of the Behearer. Recurrent throughout these pieces is a sinister narrative concerning a boomer seachange, and the abuse of privilege.

Available now on the Sabbatical website or via the PayPal button below.

Available in shops around Australia in coming weeks.

You can listen to the track 'Tight and Fearful' on the Sabbatical Myspace page.

Documentation: 21 January 2010

Some shots form our last monthly show at the Old Bar.

Recent UK import MV brought the beautiful analogue sounds of the cassette. The buzz and hiss of the multiple walkmans was woven together beautifully.



Sean Baxter schooled everyone in the possibilities of the drum kit. The master extended technique percussionist highlighted you don't need big amps or manic flailing to create intense sounds, bending enamel plates and creating tuned rumble from the skins of the drums.



Ethic Cleansing, the first time collaboration between Screwtape and Ebola Disco, brought an angry, confrontational edge to the evening with their painfully descriptive explanation of the horrors of dementia.

Watch the video here.



Rounding out our final night at the Old Bar was the now iconic Australian grind trio, Agents of Abhorrence. Flat out grind for 15 minutes. Nothing more to say.



A big thanks to all the folk at the Old Bar for the last year and bit. The boys have been huge supporters of what we do at Sabbatical, first hosting our monthly shows at their previous venue, The Afterdark, giving Sabbatical a monthly platform to present the various musical happenings we were interested in. Thanks for everything.

We will continue to present shows at various spaces around town and will soon find a new home for regular nights. Watch this space for all the news.

Absoluten Calfeutrail / Dead Boomers 16/17.01.10