“Billie Reid is a dusty troubadour, a poet and songwriter and activist whose music is steeped in concepts and images that echo down the centuries. His words spill through the mouths of some of our other artists, new light pouring through glass stained with red wine, raised to toast victories, remember the fallen, and curse those whose fall we ache for”
Let’s get this thing started, yeah? We’ll do that by saying dude is not a gender-exclusive term. The word has 60’s connotations for some, and had a comeback thanks to a very special 1998 film called ‘The Big Lebowski’. The movie is a shaggy dog story with music at its heart, one beating in the chest of Jeff Bridges, whose character is known as The Dude.
Bridges conjures a bowling alley philosopher who doesn’t think so much out of the box as put it to one side suspecting that’s where the smell of two-day old kitty litter comes from. He’s a gentle soul until riled, and in that he has much in common with Billie Reid, and he’s where this site begins and ends.
Billie Reid
Billie is a dusty troubadour, a poet and songwriter and activist whose music is steeped in concepts and images that echo down the centuries. Here and now they wear the clothes of rootsy Americana, Celtic seers, and the holy ghost of rock and roll. His words spill through the mouths of some of our other artists, new light pouring through glass stained with red wine, raised to toast victories, remember the fallen, and curse those whose fall we ache for.
Sometimes Billie writes stripped-down, just a few words capturing the core of a moment, an emotion, that listeners can connect with. Other times he packs syllables with density that warps space and time. Even across the course of a couplet he can go from what feels like a classic folk song in words and delivery before a collision with Dorothy Parker’s acerbic wit: “They won’t let us live on the beaches ‘n’ trees, while they breakfast at Maximes, and brunch at Los Angeles”. In a flash Billie does with 19 words something akin to what Kubrick did with his classic cut from a neanderthal throwing a bone at the sky to a spaceship floating above the Earth in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.
The song those words comes from is ‘Ode To The Dudes That Own Their Own Nukes’, another origin story for the name of this site. Shooting the breeze one evening, Billie shared an unexpected passion … “… I’ve always liked Einstein’s theories, they were quite valid, they lead to my own …”. The Einstein’s interest in numbers started as a child when a relative captivated him by saying that to find a solution for a maths problem imagine the answer as a creature leaving a trail everywhere it’s been.
Something of that process applies to Billie’s way with constructing a song. Or you could hop and skip to science fiction writer Samuel R Delany, author of books including ‘The Einstein Intersection’, and as a musician part of the ‘Greenwich Village’ scene that spawned Dylan. The angle he had on those years as a queer black guy is fresh – like the eye Billie brings to the world we’re accelerating into now, and may be heading away from at lightspeed assuming things work out the way they could. Whether the impact of that counts as better or worse is the kind of judgement call that Billie’s around to chronicle.
Lily
It started with a keyboard, and a fascination with the music of Prince. From there Lily took her piano skills backwards to Ray Charles, and to whatever timeless place it is where Nina Simone’s music radiates. As she did, Lily began to get more interested in developing her voice.
You can hear every step of her path in Lily’s singing. Right lovers and right now ones, wrong decisions and being wronged, moves forward and time out, hurt and heart. Lily knows more of the classic songbook than she’d like to admit outside the company of fellow geeks, from Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald through to Debbie Harry (Jazz Passengers as well as Blondie). And that background allied with innate taste means she inhabits the songs she chooses with unshowy conviction. And there are ones she turns down if she scents misogyny or other ugliness in a lyric, whatever a promoter or producer might say.
Every bar and every melody charts Lily’s growing confidence in her songwriting. She holds herself to high standards, and being around Billie Reid has given Lily insight into layering words and meaning with the same deftness she puts into vocal arrangements. That skill too is a rare talent, for which she’s soaked up reference points from joyful Motown through to the layers woven into Kendrick Lamar’s take on rap.
Lily’s sophistication often wears pop clothes, and some of the world’s best and brightest music is pop. More than anything, Lily is an artist exploring what sound and emotion and technique can accomplish, and wherever that journey takes her, we want to hear the magic she brings back.
Quinlan Porteous
Quinlan grew up listening to his family’s record collection. Parents and siblings introduced him to the close-knit harmonies of the Everly Brothers and – like a tossed pebble skittering across a pond – he effortlessly dipped in and out of new influences as he went. South African township music. British blue-rock before Led Zeppelin rewrote the rules … Chet Atkins and other titans of Americana, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, James Brown and Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton and Tina Turner.
Now, Quinlan Porteous has come full-circle. After misadventures and problems around the fatal trifecta of ego, substances, and productivity, he’s pretty much at peace with the men he’s been and the man he’s become. Rueful for sure, but no harm in that when another opportunity to put music into the world appears. Still drinking from the same well, and now supping steadily while he works on songs old and new with rising players and producers.
There’s range in Quinlan. He can hold with conviction a Billie Reid lyric inviting listeners to a world where “Dark shadows fall away beneath the giant magic eye of day”. Sometimes big feelings and big ideas need big metaphors. And they’re more easily inhabited when the singer is a stormcrow who has flown through such darkness and been seared by the light.
Same goes for another Billie-penned song, ‘Acid Blue’. It’s a paean to the power psychedelics can have that’s also cautious about them, rightly so when micro-dosing is touted as a tool to mould happier citizens and more productive employees. Delivering a message both mercurial and saturnine takes more than vocal skills, it calls for decades lived with some of the issues that Billie too struggles with. In that, and more, he and Quinlan are brothers.
Wayne A Halifax
There’s a touch of Chris Isaak to Wayne, and it’s about more than the kind of songs he favours and the way he delivers them. Doing that requires anything but the life well lived anodyne self-help books urge us to make our aspiration.
That road less travelled is one where there are burned-out cars and the howling of an unknown crittur somewhere close. Judging by the smell the wind carries it could be a bunyip, and is that a warning sign or an invitation to check out what happens next? Most men wouldn’t get to place where they’re faced with such choices. Wayne, like our other artists, is a dude.
As a dude, Wayne walks between worlds. He’s been involved in and around film and television, sometimes popping up as an actor in movies including Thunderstruck – other times delivering the vocals for commercials. A man has to pay his way, after all.
Like our other artists Wayne has range, and his take on adult contemporary sounds draws on instrumentation including mandolin. Something about it connects him and many of us to country – not just the music style, but the landscapes it brings to mind. And he’s sure enough of himself to open up and bring himself to a song in ways a younger Wayne would have been intimidated by. Now, he’s at the “bring it on” stage where such vulnerability is concerned. Which might sound like a paradox – but creativity grows out of those tensions, and we’re here to nurture it and share the results.
Soundscape Media | “Poet, shaman, Billie Reid’s talents are the molten core of what we do”
Somewhere in the embers of last century, the work of songwriter and poet and shaman Billie Reid started to exert a pull on other independent-minded Australian artists. Billie Reid’s talents are the molten core of what we do. To those who’ve come across him, Billie’s an irascible generational talent. And we want the number of those who share that impression to grow.
Sharing the load, and bringing a canny female take on Billie’s words, is versatile Fremantle-based singer Lily – who’s also writing impressive material of her own, in-house stormcrow Quinlan Porteous – a man who’s weathered years of industry bullshit and continues to find redemption in music regardless – Wayne A. Halifax, the man whose vibe Chris Isaak channelled – and Alfredo Malabello, cursed by Universal Music Australia describing him as the country’s “Voice of Romance”. He’s more content, and rightly, with the tag “Australia’s Leonard Cohen”.
Soundscape sounds dip in and out of alt-rock, Americana, and smart pop. Our production styles range from roots-raw to Netflix-friendly rock with splashes and squeals of electronica. We can do polished, but we’re a fan of loose edges and first take magic too. And we look forward to hearing from you – about what we’ve done, what we’re doing now, and what we could perhaps do together.
Billie Reid | ‘self, muso, poet, regenerationist extrordinaire, polymathic re-planetarizationist’
i began wandering around Australia, mostly on foot working farms, building sites, gold claims etc, from the south west through the gold fields and northern gold fields, out to the Kimberleys for walks through boab “forests”, into the northern territory (probably my favourite part of any good walk, that 1st glimpse each time of the rocks and “cliffs” before Victoria River as you 1st walk in from west oz) because you know Katherine ain’t “far”, all the while checking out the different facets of the Natural eco-system, how it’s changed since my last walk there in a different season etc, checking out the man-made catchments and dams stretching out around northern wa, etc, etc, et ***, cetera, my goal, to put all of this knowledge, hard won, into developing a plan to put PEOPLES in the “driving seat” of Australia again, which i proceeded to do, and to give y’all these perfectly workable ideas, designed to benefit y’all and your Kids and their Kids ad infinitum … njoi!billie
Billie Reid | Single Tachyon Extrapolation of Existence | Ode To The Dudes | Youtube
“…. this is the lightspeed and below universe of our physical senses, the single-particle-theory tachyon soup created as the single tachyon intersects with itself in different places at the same time, and the same place at different times; this may be metaphorically considered as the consciousness of creation, the mind ….“
Just as the cosmos in its physical sense is a totally inter-related manifestation of its component attributes of gravitational and electromagnetic coincidence, so the events/consciousness’s within that cosmos may be seen to be dependent on/connected to everything else that occurs within that same instant (i.e, synchronicity). Accepting this, and being that we can have no real concept of (or existence in) an instantaneous universe, we may extrapolate that for all our intents and purposes a combined continuity of time and space is a prerequisite of our conscious awareness of the reality that we appear to occupy and that therefore, all events throughout time and space are influenced by and influencing all other events within that continuum in a coherent and instantaneous manner regardless of temporal and/or spatial remoteness. This is the lightspeed and below universe of our physical senses, the single-particle-theory tachyon soup created as the single “tachyon” (4want’v betr word, i.e, instantaneous particle/wave “pixel/bit/packet” … no mass, no volume, “just” infinite velocity) intersects with itself in different places at the same time, and the same place at different times; this may be metaphorically considered as the consciousness of creation, the mind. The faster than light realm of the uninterrupted tachyon may be thought of as the subconscious mind of Eternity (as above, so below etc). We have the potential (in our role as an interface between rational/instinctive/emotional consciousness, between physical/spiritual, matter and energy) to challenge the apparent boundaries of our existence, to examine the walls of our cell for loose stones, to grab a can of spray paint and try to tag the invisible as it moves amongst us. Some try…. this is their Lounge … Welcome to the Dawn … “The game is afoot” … Eternity Beware, Oblivion is at hand. LOL.
