We will experience the weekend like a bus traversing the tree roots of Blyth St. Clothes on back, banana in tum; Maslow’s hierarchy of needs starts and ends with whatever I can fit in bumbag. Turns out love isn't chemical but relational which is extremely annoying given how easy it is to form relationships with chemicals. On-arrival I quickly discover that I can control the weather and have decided to take mercy on the punters. Their sacrifices were plentiful and a pink cosmic beam emanates out left testicle and directly into the mesosphere, clearing away the storm. The soil microbiology under foot smells like museli bars and that restaurant I liked going to in Winter has a FOR LEASE sign out the front. I can only control primordial elements and not the economy which is criiiiinge as man. French guy won't shut the fuck up about tracing associations and the agency of non-humans and it leads me to believe the sniffables available in the 90s were of high quality. I wish he were still alive so we could watch The Dare togetha and write a journal article about the immutability of liking girls who do drugs and smoke cigarettes in the back of the club. But alas, it's simply Asha Mae and myself who must hold down an indeterminate scum perspective :) so let’s get into the best tunes we saw in the mosh, muck, marvel and magnificence of Meredith 2024.

Asha: I haven’t seen FRENZEE before because arguably, I’ve actually structured my life around not having to see stuff like this, but we’re here, and they’re in the Split System slot, so it’s gonna be pub rock and I need tinny-mainlining tunes pronto if I’m to achieve anything right now, so we’ll give them a crack. The Cretan siblings are on one, and it’s one of the few times I’m sad I was an only child, because how dope would it be to have a guaranteed band bound to you by blood, although I do think their parents should have popped another one out because they’d benefit greatly from a bass player, but we can’t have everything we want and I for one will be staying out of the reproductive affairs of strangers, which is more than can be said of this crowd just fanging to get a look up Appolonia’s dress. It’s RATM by the most bar-friendly sides of Fugazi, with a healthy dose of just crisp cool AC/DC, and once again it’s actually not bad and I’m just a huge wanker.

Let’s get down to absolute brass tacks about the term ‘conscious hip hop’. Hip hop is consciousness you fucking geek, just because you can’t give yourself clout for your cerebrality, or throw it on at your rubbish cafe job while you sexually hector the barely legal chick working the floor doesn’t make it any less conscious. This might be the closest to a noise set Meredith will ever get, Memphis-style cassette latency, math rock-y rhythm fucking with that tired old clap on the one and the three, dark and Death Grips-y, and an anger scarily tempered by the presence of the Don before us. MIKE takes the east coast tradition laid down by the Bad Boy crew of just nailing the bar line up to the wall until it screams and factorises it by some insane power until you enter a walking stupor of literary barrage like being smacked over the head with Scott-Heron’s manuscript of The Vulture. Minimal chat if any between tracks, and that line ‘I know you…saw me on the video but you don’t really know me though’ is a certified shoe-in-the-air moment. You can’t escape the shadow of Al Kapone but what you can do is sludge-ify it even further, creepy creepy cut-up alongside that tried and true bedroom-dream turned somnolent flow. The gentleness of MIKE’s whole thing could kid you that this is just another lo-fi hip hop beats to core the lifeforce out of your cerebellum with a melon baller type deal, but that’s only if you listen to music as background noise, and only at this moment am I glad that half these dweebs paid five hundred bucks to get pissed in a paddock because hopefully somewhere in the Soup the message weasels its way in and maybe promotes a little bit of class-consciousness. You wanna be conscious about hip hop? Take every leaf in MIKE’s book and mainline it up your snout and give yourself a break from those panadol-and-hairspray drugs you definitely got over-charged for. Dork.

Max: FAT WHITE FAMILY are a group couched in notoriety, leaning into outrageous acts on the stage, and quick to pen vitrole towards the industry off it. They’ve hit all the notes you expect from a band defined by transgressive drug-fuelled iconoclasm: flirting with the edge, members leaving, settling-down, becoming authors (posting), deciding to focus more on side projects etc. If the Smellvet Underground had a Facebook account they’d probably write some nasty shit about Mac DeMarco and The 1975 also. But here at Meredith, such drama seems less important – they sound fucking awesome and don’t even need to wear an SS uniform to have the audience pay attention. They get on around 7pm, and I indulge also, everything is pumpin’ as FWF rip through all the classics, frontman Lias goes from standing over the crowd to surfing on top of em’, raising his hands to conduct the nihilistic choruses of ‘Leather Redux’ and ‘Whitest Boy On The Beach’, fulfilling a familiar role as underground acolyte. He says at one point “this song is about Pitchfork Magazine, rest in peace those scum! Scum!”, but I’m pinging quite hard and don’t remember which song it was. As most the crowd have their arms raised in the air, a lady turns to me and says this would be the perfect scene for a deodorant ad. It’s a brilliant idea – I make millions stealing it thereafter and use it to fund a small, but professional bare knuckle boxing operation.

So I’m making conversation with two lovely queer fellas. We’re yapping and they offer me drugs which I wholeheartedly accept. As the bump is delivered to the deep recesses of my sinuses, the entire crowd disappears and I’m barely standing, only experiencing the traces of various fairy-light wrapped doof sticks. Time stops and we’re trapped in a purgatory soundtracked by Canberra’s finest-ever export, ice cold breath in nose. I hear from many that Genesis, and later, Mainline Magic Orchestra, were some of the best acts of the festival, but unfortunately my wax wings are in a puddle at feet and it’s time to retreat to camp. Sitting in chair, I am certain I’ve lost half my synapses, which, given how few I have to begin with, feels like it could become an issue. I munch on three grapes before crawling into the boot of car like a wounded, sick animal.

Asha: I’ve put Max down for a nap, walked back to my car for some more mid-strength beer which I was once cross about but have now realised doesn’t make much of a difference if you drink eleven of the fucking things, had a good long ketamine stare at myself in the toilets, and I have close to no idea what the fuck I’m walking into, so imagine the sight of an almost empty stage and just three fellas with what look like couch cushions strapped around their guts like kids playing that game where you fang into each other until the other falls over. It feels a bit like a stage invasion that the staff are just super chill with, kind of like locking the boys in the lounge room to sort themselves out while you reheat lasagna, and it’s a bit like having jetlag of the ears in that it takes me a while to actually register the sound, but oh brother when I do, you better watch the fuck out. I shove my dusty fingernail into the bag I found in the shitter and come away with a mouthful of grime, which is so far from what I needed right now. One of the pillow men cackling maniacally behind a CDJ, and there's these moments when the house-y beats fade into almost noise and get reassured in broken Spanglish that we’re all so sexy. We’re having a bit of an acid revival in the electronic scene, and I’m madly here for it. No aspect of Mainline Magic Orchestra’s music should make any sense: synth lines approaching bro-step, Italo keys trite in any other setting, but it all comes out into this bananas circuit-bent disco with a Spanish bloke doing fox screams into a microphone. Reggaton and baile, dub techno and a whiff of DnB, and I find more than dust on my fingernail this time as Skateboarding Is Not A Crime hits, sparkly delay on the synths and a smacked out jungle break flitters through the sampled vox, and I’m just floating on my back in the calm ocean, by myself under the big eucalypt as the acid synth builds through by veins, running through the sprinklers at Edinburgh Gardens again, feeling nineteen and loving it.

Going to take a moment to be super real and say I’m absolutely hanging out my ass waiting for this mix to be added to the Soundcloud annals. Early Saturday in the field and PGZ takes the decks for an intergalactic spin. I lick up a bit more of the toilet-bag and crack my final nurser for the night, and just get down to the work of re-igniting that alternating knee-sway you do for some good electronic music. It’s dance-futurism in here, the visuals an insane Galaga-style odyssey of shooting down alien invaders. We get Tobin-y vox cut-ups, a bit of a Ugandan syncopated groove, super-noisey manipulations, expertly timed breaks and pull-backs. The boy’s got it all. I’m digging like a Morwell-ian coal miner, and the planetary pace continues, expanding to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and then there’s a cut. Big dog has just thrown on Frank Ocean’s Pyramids front to back. I have goosebumps, and probably will every time this song comes on until Alzheimers robs me of this memory. Everyone is losing every pretention of dancefloor steeze, we’re all just arms up and in it, little drug brains forcing the lyrics from lips. The visuals have gone black, with stark white text: Always was, always will be; Free Palestine; Ouss ouss. You think it can’t get better and then we’re hit with the entirety of Kendrick’s squabble up, and I suddenly feel validated in how much of an embarrassing brain-worm that song is for me right now. What a fucking closer to the night man, I’m gonna get all munted-club-rat-woo-girl-I never want this night to end if I’m not careful. It’s not lame to have a good time, and here by myself, no one looking at me, no one even knowing where I am, my body lets itself fully dip, and I’m just glad I’m here with a beating heart and a somewhat-working memory, and one day down the line, a story to tell.

Max: I wake up as though trying to remember a distant car crash, neck stiff, groaning like an old man at frozen computer. Self-praise is no praise, but a complaint is universal and we share the mutual woe and pleasure of picking at calcified ketamine boogers and the intense stuffiness of morning sun against tent walls. I burn a hole looking through the grapes as though they have the answers and courageously decide to not shit. The battle today will not be of bowel or body but of mind and spirit. A precarious amount of weed sits in plastic bag fermenting, soon to be rolled into pleasure-tube and inhaled, completely obliterating the psyches of at least three hungover individuals otherwise subsisting entirely on stomach bile and mint vape. Cold brew and BOSS iced coffees emerge from water fka as ‘bag of ice’ and enter the tum of tragic creature fka as ‘Max’. I get just enough reception to check the cricket score and it makes me feel marginally better, that beautiful moustached miscreant Travis Head and his uncanny, disrespectful sense of line and length. If he can knock Bumrah around then I can stump up also. Asha casts me a look that suggests I was in all sorts last night but I start talking about the cricket and she quickly takes her concerns elsewhere. In a neurochemical light, the situation could be a lot worse, and in a neurocricketal sense, we’re pumping India so I gee up and head to le sup’.

KEANU NELSON’s debut LP ‘Wilurarrakutu’, released through Altered States Tapes late last year, and receiving an international reissue shortly thereafter, is an instant classic. The chance collaboration between Keanu and Yuta Matsumura (Low Life, Oily Boys, Orion) birthed a true gem of a record – the unassuming plod of electronica weaving a wholesome if outsider-ish palette for Keanu’s transcendent, unadorned crooning. You blow flies away as the pair evoke the simultaneity of place and environment, closing your eyes, rolling images of Sydney and the Outback in Walkabout, of fractures and family and community art centres. You wonder why the Dad shot at his kids, the young man danced himself to death after going all that way, and about the way the girl looks out the window at the end . As Keanu and Yuta start their performance, Asha turns to me, “this is the most punk thing I’ve ever seen here”, and I agree. Yuta says it’s their third live show as Keanu stands like a statue at the microphone, and who can blame him – travelling from a rural town in NT with a population in the hundreds to receiving feverish applause from a VIC audience in the thousands. Keanu leads songs that oscillate between the melancholic and merry, lyrics sung in English and Papunya Luritja, his voice resonating in the way your friends tend towards the end of a night, weathered but present, communicating a truth that’s bigger than language. The minimal production keeps Keanu the focal-point, who waxes understated spiritual balladry to simple drum machines and pads – what else do ya need when you’ve got a voice like that?

Asha: Out of the shed the hatchling chickens fly home to roost, matured and marvelling, meddling Meredith into a malestom of synth-punk mania. I’m a bit lost as to where I am or what’s going on around me, grounded solely by BILLIAM AND THE SPLIT BILLS in full flight, and what an upgrade it is. I hear rumours that Jack Thomas may actually possess a tuning pedal now, and while this remains as-yet unsubstantiated at least the guitar strap does not require sudden duct-tape repair. It’s classic fare which the titular character maintains is a “totally normal and not at all autistic thing to do” as the crew tap into a melee of scrapes and squeals, squeaky shopping trolley wheels rattling downhill at an increasing pace, and amidst it all I’m mostly just watching Sir Smith thunder ADD through a kick pedal with that characteristic Mount sneer across his face. Probably couldn’t name a song with a gun to my head, mostly just proud of ‘em hey, it’s a long way from that garage in Coburg with a proto-aneurysm brewing in your skull from a cigarette Lach pulled out of a ziplock bag. Good on the little fuckers, party hardy rock and roll, gets you up and about and forgetting you are a bit worried you might piss yourself. Bounce ya leg and then find JT during Party Dozen, give ‘im a big hug and say ‘you did great up there today’, and you’re proud of ‘em but mostly proud of yourself that you managed to hold back those stupid tears again.

By six-forty Saturday arvo there’s only one possible state to be in, and that is On. I think I’ve given myself heatstroke or possibly just a very sexy bronzing in the sun dancing to the smooth city-pop of Precious Bloom and the truly demented broken Latin house spewn out by Olof Dreijer, and while both were splendid, I’m ready to hear that homey Antipodean drawl. I’ve been following BARKAA’s every move since her feature on 22clan, and I’ve been hanging on for this set all weekend. Her live performances are truly for the books, flaming a DMX level of fury out across artfully produced 90s Californian type groove, and fuck me if the line “let me big note myself cos I deserve to bitch” doesn’t encapsulate my feelings about most everything. Everyone on stage is in peak form, drummer in the pocket like a stubborn grass seed, DJ bringing absolute heat with the backing vox, Barkaa burning the flag clad in an old Akka Dakka tee, and it’s like anger and you could cry but you also just can’t leave behind the dancefloor, and when that sample of Shareena Clanton’s speech comes in at the start of Blak Matriarchy the system’s seeing the light of the Reaper. There’s a Pac flip, a Five on It freestyle about ‘ smoking bongs in forty degree sheds’, and you gotta fucking Bow Down pussy. Shut ya mouth and ‘suck it from the back’, it’s not time for tears any more mate, get a move on cos there’s work to be done, get that Lucy Pearl by way of Kadafi all up in your grill and get your gob off the curb cos We Up.

Max: I don’t think I’ve ever been less conscious of a backing track than while watching PARTY DOZEN. Kirsty and Jonathan quickly suck you into their blown-out high-stakes world where wide-eyed sirens warn of the end times over the intercom, and mortars fall in rapid flurries, pounding rhythms in the decay. Party Dozen have always ripped, but since releasing ‘Crime In Australia’ and touring Europe, they’ve transformed from underground darlings to red hot stars, laying claim to one of the best albums of 2024, and as we saw on Meredith’s ginormous speakers, one of the best live bands in the country. Like people operating a mech, their two-piece performance moves laser-swords and artillery in the same way Ruins or Hella or Lightning Bolt might. The songs flash like comic book panels, Jonathan barely restraining himself on the kit, head ever-tilted, sneaking looks to Kirsty or the crowd or whatever higher power is flowing through him after particularly momentous sections. Like a dog’s tail wagging in front of a food bowl, you can feel him just waiting for ‘go eat’ as he launches into a ludicrous solo – shortly after, Kirsty practices a militant waltz across the stage, wielding sax and pedals and voice in unholy combinations, fulfilling the role of horn-yelling frontwoman and lead soloist, dishing razors, mandela patterns and Cowboy Bebop OST bombast. It’s taking Ritalin at your school athletics carnival, making it to the end of a hungover shift, the police car turning into a street behind you, now that’s FREE fucking jazz buddy. The psychedelia of ‘The Big Man Upstairs’ makes my entire body fold into a Mobius strip and it takes three security guards to unfold me. But it’s those industrial beatdowns that really make you want to start a band, Kirsty saying, “when we wrote this one, we had playing Meredith in-mind” before launching into ‘Money & The Drugs’. When they hit the drop – baby I’d no idea – the condensation around my beer immediately crystallizes into ketamine and the Eucalyptus trees start flowering weed, I see multiple people doing small bumps off their cans and a small team of men from Ballarat begin climbing the stumps. This is the government’s worst nightmare. Molten no-wave-noise-punk with a saxophone blasting like an out-of-control gurney in front of the gurnin’. My entire ancestral line is fist-pumping and saying thank you for letting us experience this through the astral plane. I say no worries cuntz while watching my housemate snort a large amount of md directly out the bag and all seems right in the world.

If it weren’t for the immense stimulation I’m experiencing, I’d probably have a lot more questions about ZAPP and their following of Party Dozen. But the crew is all long cooked, and we are at the mercy of the night. Zapp enter stage left with the energy of high level children’s party/cruise entertainment – bedazzled suits, choreographed stomping, lean and mean 80s quaalude funk. The frontman delivers lines like he’s outta GlenGarry Glen Ross, and once the hooks are in, multiple voicecoders are rolled out, everyone’s having a good time. Later, I find out that in 99’ one of the founding members shot and killed his brother in the band, and then committed suicide. Apparently they were in deep financial woes and such grisly scenes are a galaxy away from the quick-costume-changes and hand-on-heart scenes in front of me. Fratricide ASIDE they play Bounce to The Ounce twice which makes me shake my toot twice.

James Murphy was a relatively depressed music nerd moping about New York until he discovered ecstasy. When that pressed pill hit tongue, it was a Jeckle to Hyde moment, a deep love of CAN, Talking Heads and 80s alt-esoterica swirling through underground studio credits into d-floor epiphanies about club music and into LCD Soundsystem. By contrast, The Strokes were effete apartment dwelling twinks who were an instant sensation, playing sold out shows in Europe just months after starting. While James Murphy was producing proto-dance-punks like Radio 4 and industrial-rockers like Turing Machine — Julian Casablancas’ Dad was running an international modelling agency and shaking hands with Trump. Hey, listen, the photos are out there, I’m not a psychopath, I’ve lost a reasonable amount of my life listening to ‘Is This It’ like most, I’m just saying that although coming from the same zeitgeist, their music could not come from more divergent places. Sonically, THE DARE probably owes a lot more to James Murphy and Calvin Harris than anyone else, but I think as far as his narrative goes, and the spirit of his music, it feels closer to The Strokes. I’m of course thinking about all this after-the-fact, and as The Dare launches into ‘Perfume’, I am in full goblin mode right at the front, putting my arm around my mates, bouncing in a half-crouch, occasionally closing eyes with a dumb smile, in other words, conducting real investigative music journalism. Say whatever you will about the ‘thinness’ of The Dare’s dance-punk-indie-sleaze schtick, but flanked by strobes on midnight, day 2 of Meredith, the costume and choruses and drugs easily override my cynicism. If we’re being honest, this is no place for critique, this is, in fact, fun as fuck.

The laserz kick on, confusing me in the same way alfoil does a bird. If Albo likes music so much he’d be here shotgunning amyl and making incantations to Baphomet like the rest of us but I fear he’s only doing half those things. Before I can register much of anything, JAMIE XX wanders out on-stage, casually raising his water bottle to the crowd and manning the controls. He carries the energy of a tradesperson fixing the water-heater, easily navigating what was, moments ago, chaos. The grooves are straight forward in a pleasurable shut-up-and-dance sorta way, the production lush and slick, calming and euphoric rings being cast around house, alt-pop and techno. All the heaters off his recent album reflect efficiently off the various trendy sunglasses around me – ‘Baddy On The Floor’, ‘All You Children’, and ‘Life’ causing rampant bottom-lip bites, hand-waving and explorations of bumbag pockets. Jamie strikes me as someone in music for the craft of it all more-so than stardom, with a set that is patient and unpretentious, letting space build between climaxes and never needing to blow-out a sound or texture to get the point across. It’s just incredibly pleasant and enjoyable music to dance to.

Gawd damn if there were ever a pair to put on at 2am given my mentals, it’s IN2STELLAR. Four big fans are rolled out as though setting props for a theatrical warehouse rave and complement the pair’s flowing silhouettes. Darlings of the local scene, they’re poised for a big set and deliver: deep acid grooves, prog-house or whatever, anthemic soul samples and a deeply nocturnal sense of riddim that makes a 6000ish crowd in a natural amphitheater feel like shoulder-to-shoulder CBD bop. Lines of azure light waft the crowd as doof sticks nod in-agreeance with each drop — soldiers increasingly retreat to tents around me but some of the fattest club classics are saved towards the end, butterflies-in-stomach and fingers waving to sky as the choruses of ‘Happiness’ by Alexis Jordan and ‘I Need A Miarcle’ by Coco Star thump and ring in a way that beams deep appreciation for the source material. They play overtime but I don’t think many would complain too much, diese musikmaschine has the support and inertia of a fried and adoring crowd, sharing mutual hugs, revelling in the scale and success of a killer set. The first gradients of sun emerge in the background and I say fuck it and go back to the car to rest ever-so lightly vibrating eyes.

At the cafe in town the next morning, a cheery regular walks in and mock exclaims ‘what’re all these people doing here! What happened last night?!’, to which he then laughs, walks up, taps me on the stomach with a newspaper and says how was it? I reply like a cornered raccoon ‘heaps of fun, yeah was sick’, he’s planning to buy a ticket for Golden Plains because he likes the Kneecap movie, I’m planning to make sweet sweet love to this meat pie and coffee, so we go our separate ways. Later, I’m thinking about the immediacy of it all, and how Meredith can be a bit of a blur, ya brain isn’t used to watching so many different and high quality bands in rapid succession. And lawd knows there're plenty of other factors that may affect your memory of those couple days. But when I listen to the tracks of say, Party Dozen, or Fat White Family, or jamie xx thereafter, I can’t help but crack a smile and remember the emotions and yes, FUN of seeing them at Meredith more-so than the specifics of their playing. You associate watching them with your crew, the neurochemicals, the random funny shit that happens, the scope and immensity and singularity of Meredith’s stage/sound… all those ties emerge and are forever tied to you and your mates’ experience of the music. That extra dimension to the meanings and feelings of hearing the recordings afterwards is so-often the most enduring part of attending festivals and Meredith 2024 delivered treasured memories of our fav acts ! (Asha may think this conclusion is corny but I have locked her out of the google doc :)