Concrete Playground

music Cloud Control

Friday, 25th June - 8PM
@ Annandale Hotel

If looks are anything to go by, Cloud Control are a neat, quaint and homely band — but your mum was right when she told you looks can be deceiving. The kids from those mountains of blue are making waves in this city — waves of crowds so large they...

art music think PAN Magazine Launch

Saturday, 26th June - 6PM
@ Red Rattler

Sydney-based, with a mission to cover arts, culture, fashion, literature and music through a meaningful lens, [i]PAN[/i] Magazine is about to be born.

music Sarah Blasko

Friday, 29th October - 7PM
@ Enmore Theatre

Nothing disappointing has ever come from a Sarah Blasko album. Her songs are sweet but never naive, and her propensity to write about personal battles with a voice as strong and frail as woven spiderwebs reveals something of her old-fashioned soul.She sadly left our shores a few months back to...

music Xiu Xiu + High Places

Thursday, 2nd September - 8PM
@ Oxford Art Factory

The making of this kooky group's new album included Nintendo sounds, a vibraphone, tenor recorder, optigan, desk bells, a Game Boy, harmonium, chamberlain - even a celeste. So if glitchy abstractions, ambiguous beats and Nintendo bleeps sounds like your thing make your way to the Oxford Art Factory this Thursday.

music Young Heretics

Saturday, 10th July - 8PM
@ Spectrum

Their album, [i]We Are the Lost Loves[/i], caused a stir when it was released as a free download, and it will cause a stir in your soul with its emotionally charged and a-little-bit eerie lyrics.

music Super Wild Horses

Saturday, 24th July - 8PM
@ The Excelsior

Back in the day, punk music was pretty scary. There were crazy piercings, dudes fashioning mohawks with eggs — even the ladies of punk were pretty scary. You may have noticed that punk is experiencing a revival (or new-wave) at the moment, something that Amy Franz and Hayley McKee of...

music Tame Impala

Thursday, 14th October - 7PM
@ The Enmore Theatre

Your folks might like this band's sound for the psyche-idyllic memories it brings back from their days as Flower Children, but you'll like it for its totally mesmerising riffs and laid back tone.

art Troy Emery & Justin Cooper

Tuesday, 5th October - Sunday, 24th October
@ Iain Dawson Gallery

The works of these two talented artists combine to create a compelling exhibition that explores the wild and the surreal. Beautiful, bizarre, unnerving and confronting - these guys are definitely worth checking out.

art free Beg, Borrow, Steal

Thursday, 21st October - Saturday, 30th October
@ amBUSH Gallery

Tristan Still documents D.I.Y skateboarding culture in all its motivated, anarchic glory. Using abandoned buildings, empty swimming pools and even bedrooms, these skaters are curious and talented at re-inventing spaces, then skating in them.

music Low

Friday, 22nd October - 8AM
@ Factory Theatre

If you're not familiar with this three-piece band's minimalistic beats, harmonic singing and abstract instrumentation, now is the time to get acquainted - they're heading on over from the States for an Australian tour.

performing Tom Ballard & Acquaintances

Thursday, 28th October - 8PM
@ Oxford Art Factory

This is no laughing matter. This is work. Just because this smooth-tongued comedian of Triple J Breakfast fame happens to work as someone who is paid to make people laugh, doesn't mean you should laugh at him about it.

free play Dear Pluto's Outdoor Flea Market

Sunday, 31st October - Sunday, 28th November
@ Dear Pluto

Those kids from Hibernian House's successful vintage pop-up shop bring you an outdoor market packed with clothes and accessories sourced from roadtrips around the state.

performing A Midsummer Night's Dream

Friday, 5th November - Sunday, 28th November
@ Centennial Parklands

Pack a picnic hamper, pick up a bottle of your favourite summer drop, grab as many friends as will fit in the back seat and head to Centennial Park for some Shakespeare without all the rules.

art Art Sydney: The Affordable Art Fair

Thursday, 11th November - Sunday, 14th November
@ Royal Hall of Industries

Sounds like a bit of a contradiction doesn't it — Affordable Art? Well imagine walking through a bazaar of art — there's some you like, some you don't want to look twice at but there's also the freedom to openly discuss these things without feeling the pressure of a 'formal...

art Double Glazed

Wednesday, 10th November - Sunday, 28th November
@ Firstdraft Gallery

Even Books have more ideas for ways that nerds can have fun than the universe has room for. First they combined books, parties and braininess (whoever imagined THAT would be considered fun?). Then they created a Reader's Festival during the Sydney Writer's Festival(!) And now they're taking over First Draft...

art Support

Thursday, 11th November - Sunday, 14th November
@ Shapiro Gallery

With the help of a bunch of talented artists and designers, Concert for the Cure aim to generate fresh discourse about breast cancer and raise money for further research into tumour dormancy.

play Lost in the Blitz

Saturday, 13th November - 12PM
@ tba

Ever imagine what it might be like to be caught in a WWII air raid? Sure, it’d be scary as hell but imagine the parties you could have in the underground drinking dens and cabaret bars. Hidden from the warning sirens and surrounded by gorgeous ladies and men in uniform,...

music The New Pornographers

Wednesday, 10th November - 8PM
@ Manning Bar, University of Sydney

The New Pornographers tread a categorical line between rock and roll's grungy distortion and pop pleasure — basically they're contemporary pop musicians in the true form. So if we were to categorise theirs as pop music, let's distinguish it from the fake, plastic kind. With rich harmonies and vocal layers,...

performing 2 Dimensional Life of Her

Monday, 10th January - Thursday, 13th January
@ Seymour Centre

You might not call Fleur Elise Noble 'careful' but somehow, she manages to skirt around imagined, created and real with incredible fluidity and sanity. Using real-time 2D and 3D tricks (puppetry, animation and inventive brilliance), Noble plucks the characters out of her mind and interacts with them on stage.

performing Misanthropology

Tuesday, 11th January - Sunday, 30th January
@ The Famous Spiegeltent

Eddie Perfect's sense of humour is disturbingly funny. With a three-piece band in tow, Misanthropology asks, 'What makes us human?' and 'Does a shopping trolley full of 'eco' and 'organic' make you a better person than one full of 'No Frills' and 'Made in China'?

music Holy Fuck

Thursday, 27th January - 8AM
@ Becks Bar

With music that lives up to the gasping expletive in their name, the pouncing electronic waves that spill from the leads and cables of this Toronto band's equipment is mind-bendingly fun - as is watching them live.

play The Big Fashion Sale

Wednesday, 26th January - Sunday, 30th January
@ Paddington RSL

The sale to end all sales, this one comes but twice a year and promises a host of cult designer bargains from Ellery, Nathan Smith, Elke, Ruby Smallbone, Fernando Frisoni and many more.

think Sex, Love & Passion

Friday, 11th February - 6PM
@ Ultimo Community Centre

Although she was rather fond of the visually stimulating and sensuously heightening colours of a dance floor, Eloise knew that a library — not a discotheque — was where she felt most at home on a Friday night. Tonight however she found herself distracted by that buffoon who was making...

performing COOLie: Asian Australian Performance Event

Tuesday, 8th February - Sunday, 13th February
@ Belvoir Downstairs

So successful has William Yang been at affecting audiences with his storytelling, that Performance 4A asked him to direct, teach and guide a group of Asian Australians in how to tell their stories in front of an audience: this is the enlightening result.

music Warpaint

Tuesday, 8th February - 8PM
@ Oxford Art Factory

There's something nostalgically romantic about the sound and story of Warpaint. It might be the fact that they formed on Valentines Day, or perhaps the level of reverb they use on their harmonised vocals, but there's no denying the happy place Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman take you to when...