Student-led festival is music to our ears: SCU Buzz

Bachelor of Contemporary Music student Alako Myles wants to rewrite the gigging experience for musicians. He is the brains behind the hugely successful Anemoia Music Festival, held recently at the Aardvark on the Northern Rivers campus.

Speaking to student host River for the SCU Buzz podcast, Alako said he wanted to create an event for local musicians with all proceeds going directly to the bands.

“There’s a lot of costs involved in performing live including travel expenses, gear transport and paying for a sound engineer,” Alako said. “Plus, the added stress of making enough money to make it worth it.”

“We need to sort of shift that and what we did with the Anemoia Festival is see a massive shift because all the money from ticket sales went straight to the bands.”

One of the bands involved in the festival was Alako’s own band, Liminal, a psych rock group based in the Northern Rivers. They recorded their first album, Place, throughout lockdown by sending Google Drive files to each other and are have now released their second album, White Dots.

The band has made their albums available on vinyl which Alako said he prefers over streaming.

“Its about the listening experience,” Alako said. “I find that on Spotify, people might hear one of your tracks in a playlist but they don’t listen to the full album. If someone buys a vinyl, it’s a guaranteed listen from start to finish of your album.

“When we did our first pressing, hearing our tracks on vinyl with the kind of crackling underneath, that was a very fulfilling, warm sort of feeling. It’s hard to describe but it was very special to hear your own music playing back to you from a record.”

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