Since debuting at the Brisbane Powerhouse in 2023, the Festival of Other Music has made a name for itself as a platform for performers who are innovators, pioneers and tomorrow’s legends in their respective musical fields.
The line-up for 2025 builds on that stellar reputation, showcasing local and international musical acts running the gamut from folk, meditative classical and electronica to silent disco, jazz, rock and cabaret.
US folk music phenomenon Bonny Light Horseman will make their Australian debut at the festival alongside Irish cabaret chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan, Nigerian rock legends Etran de L’Air, Japanese rock band The 5.6.7.8’s and Australian surf rockers King Stingray.
IMAGE of King Stingray supplied by Brisbane Powerhouse
Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra will present Interludes – Music for Meditation, a 60-minute concert-meditation experience in the round by Camerata. Audiences are invited to BYO yoga mats and immerse themselves in a tranquil journey through Beethoven, Max Richter and beyond.
IMAGE of one player from Camerata supplied by Brisbane Powerhouse
Local jazz talent Toby Wren leads a hauntingly beautiful exploration of love and loss inspired by 18th century shipwreck paintings with the live performance of his album, Songs for Dead Sailors.
Bonny Light Horseman frontwoman, Anais Mitchell, is looking forward to escaping her ‘absolutely freezing’ home in upstate New York and catching some of Brisbane’s famous sunshine during her time here.
Mitchell, an accomplished independent solo singer/songwriter who found mainstream success with her musical, Hadestown, formed the band with Fruit Bats frontman Eric D. Johnson and producer / musician Josh Kaufman in 2018.
The group released three critically acclaimed albums, one of which is the sprawling 18-song, 2024 double-album Keep Me On Your Mind/See Me Free, a magnum opus with no official track-listing, just a continuous soundscape of songs flowing into one another.
‘This album is a lot. It’s life, it’s midlife, it’s family life, domestic frustration, falling in love, seeing the love of your life somehow disfigured by your relationship, remembering mortality, a lot of journeying and a lot of trying to be present – all of that,’ says Mitchell.
‘It often felt like we were writing towards or into each other’s experiences or conversations. I think it ends up feeling a lot like a long dinner conversation with old friends.’
Johnson and Kaufman come to folk music from rock backgrounds while for Mitchell, forming the group was a return to the genre after the fevered and passionate time she spent writing Hadestown, her multiple Tony Award-winning retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
While the band wanted to explore traditional folk music, they had no desire for their recordings to sound like Smithsonian research material. Instead, the trio set out to have a conversation and invite a collaboration with the songs. Mitchell says that approach has worked ‘beautifully’.
‘I think the main thing that sets the album apart from some revivalist folk music is that there is a lot of space around the verses and the voices. We started all these songs with open tunings on the guitar and just kept seeing where the music would take us. With some tracks, we are interpreting traditional songs. On others we’ve departed so far from the originals that we felt like we had co-written something with that tradition.’
‘I’m looking forward to seeing how Australian audiences react to these songs.’
Festival of Other Music programmer, Phoebe Meredith, says the event aims to bring together a diverse group of performers whose musical practice spans wildly different genres and provides ‘a little bit of something for everyone’.
‘We work with a number of local producers and promoters to keep abreast of who is going to be in the country when the festival is on. We’re really lucky in that we have had many of them approach us and ask whether we’d be keen to have particular acts involved.
‘We’ve got a pretty radically broad line-up of performers who hit different marks and suit different tastes this time around and hopefully that makes for a great festival.’
The Festival of Other Music runs at the Brisbane Powerhouse from 28 February – 22 March.
IMAGE at top of story of Bonny Light Horseman supplied by Brisbane Powerhouse
