In this Issue: Abbe May launches Kiss My Apocalypse, Wavves headline Plus One, The Bootleg Beatles return to Australia, Cold War Kids launch new album Dear Miss Lonely Hearts, Elli Schoen launches debut EP, Love in Suburbia, Andrew Stockdale is back with self-produced album Keep Moving, Chance Waters brings you acclaimed album Infinity and journey with Clare Bowditch on her Winter Secrets Tour.

Abbe May to launch Kiss My Apocalypse in Adelaide

'Winter Secrets' has crept up on us again this year. For those of you who don’t already know, 'Winter Secrets' involves Clare Bowditch picking a talented collaborator and brings them along for her string of tour dates. This year Spender will be joining her. Together they’ll be putting on one hell of a show, and one of the best parts? Audience members get to be her back-up band!

All tickets are on sale now.

Dee Why: Thursday 1st August: Lizottes

In this issue: awesome gigs to help celebrate Australia Day, Musicians band together for The Evening Cast benefit show, Drum & Bass duo Calyx & Teebee play Perth and loads more!

Claire Birchall plays a Public Bar Australia Day Show!

Plenty of news from the industry circles this week, mainly in the opportunity area, with a chance to get grants galores care of The Hilltop Hoods or The Australia Council for the Arts. Push Songs also are giving a chance to get songwriting tips and advice for aspiring musicians. Also, CMJ applications have opened and Simon Crean appoints a new director of Sounds Australia. All this, and a historic event in the ARIA charts on The State Of Affairs this week.

In this issue: Grand Salvo leads an excellent line up of acts to play at St. Philips Anglican Church in Sydney, Hermitude announced to perform at Coopers Alive and much more!

Grand Salvo, Heather Woods Broderick & Seaworthy at St. Philips Anglican Church, Sydney

The Melbourne Zoo is about to get wild in a whole other way, with the announcement of their 2013 Twilight Zoo Program, with tickets available now. Kicking off on January 25 with ARIA Award winner Missy Higgins, the Zoo Twilight Program, sees the zoo put on a live music event every Friday and Saturday night through until March 9th.

Proving to be a massive success with audiences in Echuca-Moama, Melbourne, regional Victoria and southern New South Wales, the Riverboats Festival is making a great comeback next year, with Pete Murray set to headline the 2013 festival!

Artists who are set to join Murray include the likes of the following:

Clare Bowditch
Archie Roach
James Reyne
Tim Rogers
Joe Camilleri & The Black Sorrows
Mia Dyson
Clairy Browne & The Bangin' Rackettes

This week in the column: opportunities galore for electronic artists, SXSW process get confirmed, and the AGE EG awards are announced.

Elke caught up with Clare Bowditch last week to talk about her new album The Winter I Chose Happiness, knitting and cultivating creativity.

As a vibrant, exciting and highly informative music conference that brings together a vast number of figures in the local and international music industry, Bigsound is an event well worth being a part of. Held at a range of venues and bars in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley from last Wednesday to Friday, the Bigsound program was bursting with an array of interesting seminars and live performances, presenting attendees with some difficult decisions when it came to planning our schedules.

Clare Bowditch seems like a genuinely beautiful person. She has a social conscience, she’s intelligent and globally aware and full of life – and if all that isn’t enough, she’s an absolutely inspired musician. In this album alone, there are moody tracks, ecstatic ones, completely jazzy ones – and in other albums she’s done rock, she’s even done stuff verging on dance – the thing is, she does it all so well.

This week in the State Of Affairs: Fun times at the top of the ARIA singles chart, the Unsigned Only finalists are announced with a few local talents getting through to the final stage, many new signings from the musical to the hard edged, plus are Australians paying too much for music?

A new revolution was spawned when reality television paved the way for relatively unknown musicians to catapult themselves onto the main stage and become what seemed an almost overnight success.