Australian Music Is Bloody Great: Rainbow Chan

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 Cameron Menegoni

Hong Kong-born, currently Melbourne-based award-winning interdisciplinary alt-pop artist Rainbow Chan has recently announced her forthcoming third album, The Bridal Lament. Inspired by a Hong Kong folk tale, the first taste of the album, Seven Sisters, is a celebration of female empowerment, resilience and the unwavering strength of sisterhood. To get us into the mood, Rainbow Chan takes us through her current Australian favorites including Small Island Big Song, Rebel Yell and Yeo.

Ripple Effect Band - Loving And Caring

Loving and Caring is a new single from Ripple Effect Band, an all-women’s rock band from Maningrida. I had the pleasure of working with them a few years back and they are such lovely, awesome people. This single is dedicated to a departed loved one and is all about bringing love, positivity and light to those who are suffering grief. I love the roots-reggae influences as well as the experimentation with autotune on this track. It’s really refreshing, it’s totally infectious and sends a hopeful and bright message to the world. Lets face it, we probably all need a little bit of love in our lives right now.

Small Island Big Song - Lament For A Dying Ocean

This album is an international collaboration, bridging cultures across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Putad uses vocals techniques from her Aboriginal heritage and combines them with rock and punk. The result is a harrowing, evocative and beautiful track that also raises awareness about climate crisis and it’s impact on Island nations. [It's] something that we all should be paying attention to.

700 Feel - FAMILIAR FLAVOURS

Next up we have Familiar Flavours by Sydney outfit 700 Feel. I saw them perform last year during FBi’s SMAC Festival at the Oxford Art Factory and really loved their set that combines chopped and pasted samples among dark, electronic synth lines with throbbing bass. This song continues in that trajectory and is so rhythmic, frenetic and danceable.

Tkay Maidza - Ring-A-Ling

I love some good onomatopoeia as a hook for a song. I also love the production on this track and I think her delivery is sublime on this. The verses are great, the flow is great and the chorus is catchy. This is taken from her second album Sweet Justice, which is coming out in November. I can’t wait to hear more.

Rebel Yell - Kombat

We’re going heat things up a bit with a new track by Rebel Yell called Kombat (yes, with a 'k'!) Just going to get those BPMs increased a bit, [and] get our heart-rate up. All the distortion and washy vocals work well on this very industrial and heavy-hitting dance number. Great performer, great producer.

Grievous Bodily Calm - Spirals

This next song is by Grievous Bodily Calm, a five-piece instrumental outfit from Boorloo (Perth). Really loving the genre-bending collision of melodies and rhythms in this song, Spirals, which is taken from their latest release, Cascades. [It] reminds me a bit of Broken Social Scene, a little bit of the Avalanches or Hiatus Kaiyote-style songs. Lots of breakbeats, improvisation and jazzy harmonies mixed in with retro-analogue synths.

Yeo - 试探 TENTATIVE Feat. Melodia Kong 孔藝弦

The next song is by Yeo and it’s his collaboration with Melodia Kong on a track called 试探 TENTATIVE. It’s smooth and silky. The jazzy harmonies with RnB influences are absolutely delicious and I’m always in awe of people who can write in a tonal language, as writing lyrics in Mandarin is quite difficult. So applause! Great stuff.