2016 Waves

Thank you for joining us on a second amazing year of Making Waves: listening, enjoying and sharing the newest music of Australian composers and performers. It’s been such a wonderful journey of discovery each month! This is a credit to the amazing quality and breadth of composing and music-making occurring in the Australian new-music scene, from the undergraduate study level, to some of our most loved mentors.

This year, we’ve been very excited to build on the core Making Waves playlist offering, making a foray into podcast production. A successful Pozible crowdfunding campaign in May 2016, with support from Creative Partnerships Australia, has led to the Making Conversation: Australian Composers Podcast. Currently in production, we’ve sent a fabulous team of emerging music journalists out to record interviews with composers all over Australia, and some overseas, and the finished series will be launched in the first half of 2017.

Later in the year we released a small line of merchandise – with the plush Making Waves tote bags now for sale in 5 designs. Our most popular bag is also the one dearest to our hearts, featuring the entire list of Australian composers featured in our playlists through 2015-2016.

We also released the first instalment of our Favourite Things collection: essential resources for serious composers and musicians. By checking out the collection you can also lend your support to our endeavours, and in particular support the excellent work of our local colleagues at CutCommon and Rehearsal Magazine in releasing some beautiful manuscript and music business resource. Use our promo code: MAKENEWMUSIC to receive your special Making Waves community discount.

We’re really proud of all the new collaborations and conversations we’ve this year in order to share new and hard-to-find compositions and interviews on radio and into podcasts. We hope listeners will find them just as inspiring as we have! In June we released our first international special edition playlist, Canadian Waves, curated by Elizabeth Knudson, and are thrilled to discover the work of some northern hemisphere counterparts. Not long after, we invited another guest curator, Leah Barclay, to assemble a playlist based on the Sonic Environments conference in Brisbane in July. Hats off to you, Leah, this playlist saw the most website traffic out of any during 2016…!

Lisa & Peggy could not have managed all of this without the support of some wonderful Interns: many, many thanks to Angus Baxter and his successor Marlene Radice for joining us for part of the Making Waves journey. We absolutely appreciate all your input, ideas and instinct and all the Skype chats!

Now, back to the music: again in 2016, we’re delighted to bring the year’s music together in one marathon playlist for the holiday season, 2016 Waves. This year we share 8 Vimeo videos (c. 1.25 hours), 12 YouTube videos (c. 1.5 hours), and 71 tracks from Soundcloud (c. 9.5 hours), for over 12 hours of music! Whether you pick through your favourites, catch up on the year of composers, performers and works, or have a binge-listen on shuffle, we hope that you enjoy!

We encourage you to leave your thoughts, most-enjoyed playlists, listening experiences and listening suggestions for others in the comment section below. And if you haven’t already, you can subscribe to our email list, submit your own work, and share the project across your favourite social media channels with anyone you know who might like to open their ears to the new.

Seasons greetings,
Lisa & Peggy
Making Waves

VIMEO

Explore all the year’s Vimeo tracks in one playlist in the 2016 Waves Vimeo album, or individually here:

YouTube

The ‘playlist’ button will bring up a track listing which you can use to skip back and forth between the works. If you want to check out the playlist and works in more detail, there is a button at the bottom right of the picture taking you directly through to YouTube. Please be mindful that this is an hour worth of video, and it will chew the data! If you were going to tune in on a mobile device without a large data allowance, please consider listening in over wi-fi instead.

Soundcloud

To find out more about a musical work, click on the track name in the playlist and then again on ‘view track’.

The 2016 Waves playlist will be featured until the end of January 2017, after which we will add the first playlist for 2017 on February 1st at 9AM AEST. Stay tuned!

2016 Playlists

Meanwhile, the individual monthly playlists from 2016 are listed here if you want to look at any of these in more detail. These will remain archived on the Making Waves website into 2017 and beyond, so do revisit anytime.