Concrete Playground

I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but Sydney has a very healthy noise scene. Our pretty harbour city is home to some of the finest purveyors of all things fucked up and scuzzy. Music that is often alarming and surprisingly beautiful.

Of course, one of the problems with live music in Sydney is that venues keep closing - and one of the arteries of Sydney's noise scene, Serial Space, has just shut down its live music because of council issues. So it is great that the coolest barber shop in Sydney, Sedition, has put up it's chair for the Difficult Music Festival, with music happening every night in January.

This particular night sees Dale Gorfinkel, Ben Byrne and Ivan Lisyak take to the airwaves in the shoe box sized space. Gorfinkel builds crazy instruments that are somehow automated and play themselves. Byrne is a musicologist and performer who has graced stages at countless festivals. Besides being a producer and drummer in The Paper Scissors, Ivan Lisyak is a noise artist who experiments with guitar pedals and feedback and sometimes smashes heads off with disgustingly noisey-shoegazey laptop sonics. It will live up to it's name, so take some earplugs and an open mind.