Engineered by Paul Maybury
Recorded at PBS FM Studios, Melbourne, 27th November 2014.
Emma Donovan grew up singing church songs with her maternal grandparents on the North coast of New South Wales. Her first gigs were singing in The Donovans, a band comprised of her mother and five uncles. With her mother, Emma sang country for years, and in her youth was a fixture at the Tamworth Country Music Festival, but she always yearned for the bluesier tones of her Father’s record collection, full of American artists like Laverne Baker and Etta James and Indigenous Australian artists like No Fixed Address and Archie Roach.
Years later, after touring and recording with many of the mainstays of Indigenous music and developing as a solo artist in her own right, Emma met members of The PutBacks, and finally she found a band with the gritty blues soaked tones she had been looking for. She also found, in PutBacks bassist Mick Meagher, a co-writer and collaborator on the the soul songs she had been waiting a lifetime to write and sing. They recorded and released the record ‘Dawn’ in 2014 to mass critical acclaim and gave birth to a new style, ‘Indigenous Blues’.
Engineered by Nao Anzai and Myles Mumford
Recorded at PBS FM Studios, Melbourne, 20th April 2016.
Chanted female vocals, pitched down male vocals, wild sax and horns that coalesce into something uniquely antipodean, a bluestone back-alley hallucination that NO ZU call Heat Beat – a nocturnal sex dream bringing together no wave, funk, house, techno, and global percussion.
With two albums, 2012’s ‘Life’ and 2016’s ‘Afterlife’, and a slew of other cassettes and twelve inch’s, the octet’s prolific diversity has garnered them praise from national and international publications who are taking notice.
Airing details: Originally via Zed Digital, 7-8pm, Sunday 10th July 2016.
Show production and engineering: Branko Cosic.