Australian Music Is Bloody Great: Caiti Baker

Where do you hear great new Australian music these days? Community radio is one crucial outlet and Amrap – the Australian Music Radio Airplay Project - offers Australian musicians a pathway to airplay from the hundreds of community stations to a weekly listenership of nearly 6,000,000 people. Go to amrap.org.au to get your music to thousands of presenters using the site each month to find new Australian music. If you haven’t got your music on Amrap, what are you waiting for? Community radio uses Amrap to source Australian music for airplay. You can discover all the great Australian music championed by community radio on the Community Radio Plus App, featuring the diverse range of community radio stations nationwide in one handy spot!

Amrap’s national radio show Australian Music Is Bloody Great features Australian artists presenting their favourite recent Australian music. Australian Music Is Bloody Great’s previous hosts range from Dune Rats to Sampa The Great to Phil Jameison.

We’re proud to team up with Amrap to bring you Australian Music Is Bloody Great as a Pilerats feature!
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This article originally appeared on amrap.org.au
Written by Ella Stewart

Producer, artist, and creator Caiti Baker is one of Larrakia Country's (Darwin) central creatives. Once up front of electronic soul duo Sietta, Caiti has since established her solo career with her distinct take on urban R n' B and soul. After spending time mentoring young artists and honing production skills, Caiti returned earlier this year with Stay Down, a track offering a nostalgic twist of trip-hop beats and classic club synth waves. Caiti takes us through some of her top picks released by female artists on amrap.org.au.

Emily Wurramara - Midnight Blues

We are going to look at one of my favourite songs from this year and it just so happens to be a song by my good friend, Emily Wurramara. I was very privileged to produce and engineer this song. Emily is one of those sensational artists that just completely embodies what it is to be a creative - everything from her songwriting, her vision, her artistic endeavours away from being a musician, her collaborations when she writes and makes music, when she jams, when she performs live. She's an incredibly inspiring artist to me and I'm very privileged to work with her and call my homie.

Milan Ring - High As The Moon

Milan Ring just recently released an incredible album called Mangos. Milan is super inspiring to me, she's an incredible all-round producer, engineer, vocalist, arranger, songwriter and just such a killer human and I've been waiting for this album for quite a while.

Dallas Frasca - Stand On My Shoulders

We're going to go somewhere a little bit heavier with the new one from OG blues soul Southern gothic gangster Dallas Frasca. Stand On My Shoulders is her new one, and good lord, when I first heard this: goosebumps. The verses are killer, the guitar riff and the solos are something else - that heaviness, those drums and bass line, that chorus is  . . good lord, love it.

Jamison - Twenty Two

I'm going to assume that she's 22, or maybe early 20s, with [Jamison's] new song called 22. [She's based in] Melbourne, I believe, and [this is] dreamy girl pop. I just really love the songwriting and the melody, it's like a time stamp for this generation. I'm clearly not of this generation, but the new generations are somewhere I look to be inspired by and listen to, because they are our future. I just absolutely love her, her tone, her delivery, I'm just excited to hear what else she'll do.

Kim Yang - The Nurse

We're gonna go now with the beautiful dulcet tones of Kim Yang. I'm such a big fan of Kim Yang. Currently she's residing in China, she's Taiwanese but she has spent a lot of time in Canberra building a beautiful community and fan base there. This song is from a live recording she did and I just absolutely love Kim's songwriting and her ability to tap into emotion even when she's just talking or singing about everyday experiences. She's quite relatable and her voice is just dreamy, this band is beautiful and I really, really love the live production and the energy that they captured in this.

Caiti Baker - Stay Down

It's been a long time since I've been able to hit the studio after going through a few ups and downs of life challenges and industry hurdles. I was getting to a point where I really needed to write about what I was going through but I hadn't had time because lots of things were out of my control. The co-producer and main producer of this song, Kuya James, aka James Mungohig, who is also my partner, was like “look I think you really need to go and write some songs. You haven't had a chance to decompress a lot of what you've gone through and it's been quite heavy”. So this is about having imposter syndrome and kind of realising that's what I had been dealing with for the last couple of months. Dealing with everything that was happening in my life at the time, I just wanted to celebrate the fact that I had identified what was going on and that I wasn't going to have any of that. I've been doing this for 18 years and I love my career. I love my music. I'm super passionate about being an artist and I'm not going to stop doing that and being who I am. So this was a celebration.