Promises – Mama Kin Spender
August 15, 2025
From Margaret River to Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Mama Kin Spender—Danielle Caruana and Dingo Spender—deliver raw, percussive energy and soaring harmonies on Promises. The duo combines blistering guitar, intricate percussion and shimmering vocal arrangements, crafting songs that explore life’s joys, bruises, scars and stretches with emotional depth and unflinching honesty.
Longtime collaborators and mischievous storytellers, Mama Kin Spender create music that feels alive, communal and primal. They often gather local choirs, amplifying the vibrancy of each performance. “Mama Kin Spender produce a set that epitomises what this festival is—Kin drumming upright with a voice that builds and projects, Spender on guitar, a twenty-piece choir—they breathe soul and vitality into the place,” capturing the duo’s powerful, openhearted spirit. Promises is intimate, exhilarating and impossible to ignore.
Expanding to One – Phi-Psonics
May 23, 2025
Los Angeles’ Phi-Psonics, led by bassist Seth Ford-Young, offers a meditative, spiritually infused journey on Expanding to One. Composed largely in the moment and recorded live at Healing Force Of The Universe Records, the fourteen tracks feature a rotating cast—including Sylvain Carton, Randal Fisher, Josh Collazo and more—crafting expansive sonic landscapes of acoustic and electric instruments, pedal steel and harp.
Ford-Young reflects, “We live in increasingly dark times and while I intend our music to be a balm to those who connect with it, I also want the context of our musical conversations to include the outer as much as our inner worlds.”
Phi-Psonics’ improvisations transmit ideals of connection, community and inner peace, blending contemplative jazz with spiritual warmth, making Expanding to One both immersive and profoundly human.