local woman

A respected and sought after DJ, Kalyani’s reputation as one of Melbourne’s most dynamic and captivating live performers has been rapidly growing. Kalyani’s recent release Local Woman reworks pop songs from the likes of Jessica Mauboy and Silverchair. Both intimate and expansive, these experimental bootlegs convey the working of pop music into the most personal parts of our lives. The minimal, considered productions conjure a dream state of hazy familiarity, allowing for a new intimacy to be felt. Kalyani pulls them apart and puts them back together, stripping them down to their emotional core, and offering them buck to us, rawer, stranger, deeper.

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batemans bay

Batemans Bay is Sam Miers. Sam was born in the bay and is devoted to a life caring for it. Over the last twenty years he has curated shows there which have become a core site in the australian music scene for cross-Country, cross-cultural, cross-class, cross-time an cross-species dialogue. Since the undoing of the 19/20 bushfires, Sam has become a lyrebird, building a six hour compilation of indigenous and newcomer sounds from Yuin Country (which holds the bay) on an array of subjects through time. With this project and his various collaborations with Yuin Elders, E Fishpool, Kalyani, Laura Miers and Daniel Oakman, he is constantly at work for the dialogic health of his community.

local woman / batemans bay biennale show

Kalyani and Sam were brought together by E Fishpool for the iconic local music x local woman closing set at Inner Varnika last year. This performance was the beginning of a trio that anything is possible through. In music and curation, their mixing of narrative, theatre, pop, experimental and field recordings creates cracks between city & country, human & animal, and flora & fauna. These are portals where australia is reflected back at itself for us to confront and become eternal with. They are realities that hum with Indigenous systems of belonging, while holding the violence of external structures integrating locally.

For the Biennale, Kalyani and Sam step out from the trio to make sense of who they are before stepping further in. Local Woman is moving to Batemans Bay.