A House Party Called Echoes
Build the Atmosphere, Let It Burn: Notes on Community, Vibe Crafting and a Pirate Radio House Party in Redfern
I’m 37 years old. Whatever context that gives you, reader.
When I was a kid, I had guitar lessons from a friend of my parents. Sean. He was a great guy - kind, patient, a bit wild. I stopped lessons for a few years after Sean died of a drug-related issue in his studio apartment. He’d left the heater on, and they found the body several weeks later. I was maybe eight or nine. The details are a bit hazy, but I remember the funeral. Mum took me to the wake for a bit before it got too messy.
Sean had a lasting impact on me. Some of the people in his life stayed in mine long after he passed. I picked guitar back up again when I was thirteen and started lessons with Rod Wilmot. Mum would drop me at his place, and we’d sit in his studio - full of Warhammer figurines and amps - and go over chords, scales, exercises. Then we’d work out a song I’d brought on CD that week; Papa Roach, Blink 182, Jimmy Eat World, Jack Johnson, Egyptian Reggae. Rod had an ear like no one else. We’d throw the CD on, and he’d pull it apart and rebuild it with me. We’d jam on 12-bar blues, taking turns on rhythm and lead. He felt like a wizard who shared a bit of power with me when we’d play together.
Also in my teen years I used to mow lawns for the folks who organised Big Day Out Gold Coast and managed the Brisbane band The Resin Dogs. They lent me their 1200 Technics and mixers after some of the Resin Dogs came down and ran a hip hop workshop in our town. I was fifteen. I used to hang out in my room and play my Mum’s record collection, mostly punk, rock, ambient, funk and pop with a few old school hip hop records mixed in.
I’m 37 now. I started my first band last year.
From 2013, I worked at the Sydney Opera House as a Programming Assistant. My job started on May 12. Two weeks later, I was a runner on Vivid LIVE, looking after a rehearsal room where Justin Vernon from Bon Iver was putting together Sounds of the South, a project that saw a collective of modern singer-songwriters and folk luminaries come together to celebrate American folklorist Alan Lomax.
Just six months before that, I’d been taking class with Bangarra and the Australian Ballet in that same room.
I heard those rehearsals from the next room over, five days of this evolving soundscape that absolutely cracked something open in me. I watched the opening night and it changed the way I understood what music - and performance - could be. I bought a banjo a week later.
At the time, Fergus Linehan was the director of Vivid. I really got to know Fergus over the years, particularly through his friendship with my mate Alister Hill. Alister was a producer-extraordinaire - he brought incredible underground acts into the Opera House for Studio Parties, transforming that space with artists like Penny Penny and Royal Headache. He made things fit that shouldn’t have fit. He made the Opera House cool when it had no business being cool.
I also got to work with Rhoda Roberts, a completely different force of nature. She operated from community outward, always weighing the artistic vision with what it would mean for Mob. That’s hard to do in big institutions - balancing stakeholders, artists, budgets, legacy. Rhoda somehow made it work.
Eventually I left those spaces and built my own: Awesome Black. It’s not always easy to separate myself from that entity. It holds so much of my creative identity now.
Before I had a band, I had Source Decay, a solo sound art project rooted in field recordings, ambient textures, and digital synthesis. When SXSW Sydney asked if I wanted to create something ceremonial for their opening, I brought friends into the process - Alister and Tristan Field. We transformed two of my ambient tracks into spoken word/doom/noise pieces. That’s how the band started. We still don’t know what it’s becoming. That’s part of the magic.
Echoes of the Block was born out of a different kind of ceremony - one held not on a festival stage, but in the DMs of young rappers asking for a chance to spit.
In 2023, Awesome Black curated Louder (For Those at the Back) for SXSW Sydney - a genre-agnostic showcase colliding First Nations hip hop with hardcore and alternative sounds. We weren’t a label. We weren’t a community org. We were curators. The show went off. But in the days before it, I started getting messages. Young Blak rappers wanted in. They wanted a chance to show the audience what they were made of. They wanted a shot.
I couldn’t give them one. The schedule was locked. The license had a hard cut-off. And it killed me to say no. But it sparked something.
A month later, I was talking to Luke de Zilva, who was helping me shape the next year of Awesome Black. He asked if I’d spoken to Fergus - now artistic director at Carriageworks. I hadn’t. It felt awkward. I’d worked under Fergus, and reaching out for opportunity felt like asking a teacher for a favour.
Luke set the meeting. We went in. Fergus told me his vision for activating local community and artists. I told him about those DMs. About 3%. About the hunger for platform. He offered us four days during Vivid. Our shared goal became to make sure local Mob felt like Carriageworks is somewhere they feel they belong, that its doors are open to them (not just for this project).
That was the beginning.
I didn’t want chaos. I wanted a charged, live, creative space with structure. So I built a core team I could trust - Tristan Field (bandmate and project lead), Blake Rhodes (Mr Rhodes), Jacob Ballard (Izzy), and Lance Cheney (Chill Cheney). These were our lodestones. I tasked them with pulling in the next wave - emerging artists like Dylan Voller (who had to pull out for a Dark Mofo project), Rox Lavi, Akilaqui, Minty. We didn’t get everyone in; in the end our next wave artists were Minty, Yung Brotha, Prodikal-1, Emerald, Mali & Dave Gugliotta.
I drafted a concept:
Echoes of the Block is a dynamic, multi-night collaboration and performance series bringing together key voices from Sydney’s young and established hip hop scenes. Set within a custom-built studio at Carriageworks, it transforms from a creative hub by day to performance venue by night. Each evening, new music - written that day - is performed live. A house party onstage. A pirate radio show. A call-in from The Block to the airwaves.
The vision: Hip hop as live theatre. Collaboration as ceremony. Ego dropped through atmosphere and a shared love for what were creating and how we were going about it.
We asked Dobby along to guest, as well as Jack Hickey to hold down drums. Dave Gugliotta and Mali joined as producers supporting with DJ and bass chops. I was trying to get a few other people to come through as special guests but to no avail on the short notice. We didn’t need it though.
I brought my synths, drum machines and other fun music tech toys. We painted 10-meter canvas backdrops the day before artists arrived. Carriageworks gave us sound, lights, production and a great team to support us. We gave them a fucking show.
Dyagula was in the audience on the first night and offered to join for nights 2 & 3. A young fella who guys by the name A.P. Breezy showed up for rehearsals on the second day and joined the crew for the whole show.
All of the acts got to perform their tracks, with backing tracks brought to live by some incredibly talented session musos who also did extended version jam improvs of new tracks.
I worried I hadn’t explained the vision clearly. That it would dissolve into solo acts fighting for mic time. But something else happened: trust.
In less than two days, the artists wrote and performed five new songs. Everyone got a spotlight. Everyone lifted each other up. We created something sacred.
Someone once told me I cared too much about creating atmosphere. That I didn’t work on myself enough. That moment used to haunt me.
But you know what? Creating the right atmosphere is my work.
That’s what Echoes of the Block was. A house party. A mixtape. A collective dream. A 2-hour genre-bending show with 14 artists on stage and not one wasted second.
And yeah - I even got to play in the band myself.
Awesome read; great reward fire king years of grafting