The Duke

Happiness (feat. Charlie Stacey & Moses Boyd)

Those Days

Those Days (feat. Leah Yeger)

LUCID DREAMER

Sundried

A Tribute to Gary Numan, inspired by the track Replicas - https://youtu.be/3kdefBY9-PU

The song comes from his 1979 album Replicas, which was actually based on a half-written science-fiction novel Numan was sketching out at the time. The novel (never completed) described a near-future city controlled by machines, with humanoid “Machmen” and android “Replicas” designed to replace or control humans. Think Blade Runner vibes, but darker and more claustrophobic.

Lyrically, Replicas is about these synthetic beings who are physically similar to people but lack real human emotion or individuality. They’re manufactured to maintain control, almost like soulless replacements for us. The “you’re just a replica” line cuts straight to that eerie sense of dispossession — that humans are being swapped out for something cold, programmed, and compliant.

On another level, many fans (and Numan himself in later interviews) have said it also reflects his own feelings of disconnection at the time. He often wrote about not feeling “real” or “authentic,” being alien in his own skin. So Replicas blurs that boundary — is it about robots taking over, or about being human but feeling like a machine?

It’s dystopian, but also strangely intimate — which is why it still feels so haunting today.

Replicate

cyclone

from the new EP 'Antiphon'  - https://alfamist.bandcamp.com 
Alfa Mist - Keys
Rudi Creswick - Bass
Jamie Houghton - Drums
Maria Medvedeva - Sax
Johnny Woodham - Trumpet
Jamie Leeming - Guitar

Antiphon

Keep On

Stranger Than Fiction

Texas Sun

C-Side

There is something simultaneously both brand-new and retro about 'All News Is Good News’ - the debut album from Melbourne's instrumental soul group Surprise Chef. It sounds like something dreamt up by lo-fi cousins of David Axelrod and Janko Nilovic, with dramatic Library-music-esque cinematic arrangements echoing both light and dark, delving into moments of dissonance and positivity. There is a meticulous education of 1970’s soul on display that touches on the legacies of the great composer / producers, yet at the same time, this is a truly contemporary record that could have only been made now. 

The first limited pressing of 'All News Is Good News’ was released on the band's own 'College Of Knowledge' imprint in November 2019. It slipped rapidly into the collective consciousness of underground music lovers around the world, with all copies selling out within a week and becoming a firm favourite at Mr Bongo HQ in the process. We felt Surprise Chef had made something very special, a future-classic, and that needed to be heard well beyond those lucky enough to have bagged those limited first copies.

Formed at the end of 2017, Surprise Chef have grown within the fertile, creative, and supportive Melbourne music scene. Whilst the band is comprised of four core members, the album features friends and family as guest instrumentalists on flute, saxophone, vibraphone, congas, and assorted percussion; all adeptly recorded by engineer Henry Jenkins from the band Karate Boogaloo. The warm-raw-authenticity of the album was captured in the recordings live to tape over a handful of sessions in the band’s home studio in Melbourne’s inner-northern suburb of Coburg. As band member Lachlan Stuckey explains “All of the music we record is tracked live to tape, simply because so many of the records we love most were made that way".

The results are a captivating journey of instrumental cinematic-soul that will connect with the hardened Axelrod, Truth & Soul, El Michels Affair, and Daptone's fans, as well as the open-minded first-time listener. We are very excited to share this first slice of Surprise Chef’s world, with plenty more magic from these guys coming around the corner very soon.

All News Is Good News

Surprise Chef - All News Is Good News

Nubya's 5ive

Lost Kingdoms

The Comet Is Coming has possessed an air of inevitability almost from the word “Go”! Much like the trail-blazing name they originally lifted from a BBC Radio Workshop record, the trio has participated in a kind of Big Bang. Its immediately relentless sound demands a sense of being present in the moment yet lost within it, much like how visceral punk rock, interstellar jazz blasts, deepest dance-floor trances and real-time technological breakthroughs do. Octavia Butler once wrote that, “There is nothing newunder the sun, but there are new suns.” And on their third album, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, synthesist/studio-magician Danalogue, drummer-producer/intuitionist Betamax, and saxophonist/spiritual riffologist Shabaka bring her verses to life. They burn brightly, directly and confidently, soundtracking our epoch of change in ways their contemporaries simply aren’t trying to. Like great artists throughout the recorded century, they possess, in Shabaka’s words, “a sensitivity to the zeitgeist,” channeling their sound into both a mirror to our times and a potential healing process for it. If that seems like asking a lot, The Comet Is Coming is uniquely qualified. Because even by their own telling, that other-worldly power was almost instantaneous.

On Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, they turn it back onto the listener. Wish us all luck!