Bush Gothic

Beyond The Pale :: Bush Gothic

It is deeply unfashionable to perform traditional Australian folk songs and so thank goodness for all our supporters who have encouraged us since our first album release in 2009. Your encouragement worked, we kept at it, and our second album 'The Natural Selection Australian Songbook' was received all around the world including a 5 star review from BBC Music Magazine. We are commited, perhaps obsessed with finding beauty and nuance in old songs and so have now recorded our third album, 'Beyond The Pale' and are inviting you to help us fund the post production of the album by choosing a reward. Our albums are released under our own independent label 'Fydle Records' and by supporting us you will become a member of our record company! You can even call yourself a record company executive if you like - we don't mind.

Jim Jones is the first single from the album and has recently been released in Australia along with an accompanying video. Eleven more tracks were recorded at Sing Sing Studios the week after Easter where we were joined by the exquisite Lonely String Quartet. Now it is time for album post production - the most fun part of all! This involves mixing the songs (by producers Roy John and Jenny M. Thomas at Crackle Studios in Gippsland) and mastering (sparkles and making sure it doesn't blow up your speakers). Michelle Jarni will take photos of the band which our designer Dan Witton will use to form the artwork before manufacturing. Finally we post the album to the media and with help from our publicist everyone around the world will recognise that listening to Australian folk music is good for you. 

We will put a lot of effort into publicising Beyond The Pale because we want as many people as possible to hear the album. Trad music is about us - folk music is for the people. As a band we can’t untangle Australia’s history of invasion and colonisation but we can respond to it through our music.

‘This is about all of us. It’s not some concession to the Natives. It is about this nation coming to terms with it’s dark, desperate and miserable history. But yet being able to celebrate the British tradition, the multiculturalism and the Indigenous heritage and to intertwine that in a way that gives this civil state we call Australia a new identity, a new capacity to do things differently.’ 

Pat Dodson, Garma festival, 2016

The rewards we are offering bring us much joy as they are based on our favourite things in the whole world. When we first played The Campfire Club in London we dreamed of bringing it to Australia and so we are thrilled to offer tickets to our Campfire Club exclusively for this campaign. In each city we have a different celebrity story teller joining us for an ancient concert around a fire in a hidden city location. We are beside ourselves with glee to announce our storytellers: in Sydney (Oct 4th) we are joined by David Hunt, in Hobart (Sep 27)  Ryk Goddard and for Melbourne (Dec 8), Zulya. We also adore radio and historical stories both dramatic and funny and these will unite in our podcasts which will be recorded in Jenny’s Dad’s studio. He’s a retired radio announcer with fancy microphones.

Our new album has a strong concept behind it that we have been thinking upon and researching for many years. You can read our Artistic Statement at the bottom of this page if you are keen but in short, Beyond The Pale is an album about Australians. Australians with pale skin whose ancestors left their homelands and have never quite worked out where it was they landed. Will this be an album for white Australians? Can we even say that?

The phrase "beyond the pale" dates back to the 14th century, when the part of Ireland that was under English rule was delineated by a boundary made of stakes or fences, and known as the English Pale. To travel outside of that

 boundary, beyond the pale, was to leave behind all the rules and institutions of English society, which the 

English modestly considered synonymous with civilization itself. - Urban Dictionary

Beyond The Pale :: Bush Gothic

SEP 2018 -  Australian release and national tour

OCT 2018 -  UK release and tour of England and India

MAY 2019 - European release

ALBUM TRACK LISTING

Jim Jones

Pub With No Beer

Convict Maid

Country Town

Mines of Australia

Streets of Forbes

Ballad of 1891

Streets of Forbes Quartet reprise

Road to Gundagai
Andy's Gone With Cattle

Past Carin'

Andy's Gone With Cattle coda

$ 4,000    Mixing studio and engineer/producer Roy John at Crackle Studios, Foster

$ 1,100    Mastering suite and engineer Lachlan Carrick at Moose Mastering, Richmond

$    800   Album artwork photography by Michelle Jarni

$ 2,800    Manufacture and print album, 1000 units in CD format at Replicat

$ 1,500    Publicists fees

$    800    Publicity pack production and postage to media outlets

Beyond The Pale - Artistic Statement

‘A society which is in process of losing its memories of the past is capable of all sorts of crass tasteless and philistine behaviour unless it is educated in the possession of what it should retain.’ W.R Rodgers (Irish poet and broadcaster)

The transportation and migration of thousands of Anglo Celtic peoples to a strange land on the other side of the planet severed cultural ties that had nourished and guided these people since the bronze age. In the convict settlement of New South Wales the Irish were officially discouraged from speaking their native tongue. Together with prisoners from Wales, Scotland and England they were separated from their unique dances, ceremonies and moral codes. 

To be Irish in the colonies was to belong to the lowest class. Discriminated against for being considered a stupid and uncultured race they would then in turn go on to commit some of the most atrocious crimes against the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The oppressed become the oppressors. 

The Anglo Celts who found themselves in Australia were predominantly poor working class or political prisoners. In their struggle to break free of authoritarian British rule they stole aboriginal land, murdered aboriginal communities and continued the cycle of imperialism that had been waged against them in their own homelands. They struggled to assert their new identities as landowners and their folk culture went underground.

We want to want to drag it out into the light, to remind those of Anglo Celtic heritage of the culture we lost, the indigenous culture we tried to destroy and the culture we are now privileged to inhabit. 

‘This is about all of us. It’s not some concession to the Natives. It is about this nation coming to terms with it’s dark, desperate and miserable history. But yet being able to celebrate the British tradition, the multiculturalism and the Indigenous heritage and to intertwine that in a way that gives this civil state we call Australia a new identity, a new capacity to do things differently.’ 

Pat Dodson, Garma festival, 2016

Bush Gothic treat folk songs as contemporary citizens of multicultural Australia. Folk music is not a genre, it is an oral history and we delight in referencing many cultures, exploring the history of migration to Australia through research, reconstruction, composition and performance.

People are talking about a growing worldly anxiety about belonging, about nationalism gone ferocious. Bush Gothic’s response is to engage with the complexity of the human story, to challenge the ‘thin ideology’ of ill-defined populism. Narratives of immigration help to define identity: from the continuing story of the first Australians, to the great grandchildren of modern Europeans or the grandchildren of North Vietnamese, there is huge diversity in survival, exultant success, tragic loss or the banality of continuance through generations of ‘peace’.

www.bushgothic.com

Rain on Campfire Club nights - don't worry, there will be cover.

Odd questions from the media about bunyips or Kylie Minogue (we really do get asked).

Restoring trust after our fans notice that we recorded 'Pub With No Beer'. But really the melody is very beautiful - go on, have a sing now...