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Marion Bay

The Falls Music & Arts Festival Anniversary Announcement!

Words by Scenewave Oz - Published on July 3, 2012

The Falls Music & Arts Festival reaches not one but TWO milestone years, celebrating the 20th and 10th anniversaries in Lorne and Marion Bay this year. Ditching the traditional china and tin and preparing for celebrations grander than the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Festival’s gift giving has commenced in fine style with the following artists signed up and packing their balloons and confetti for a helluva lota fun in Lorne and Marion Bay this summer.

With the full festival lineup featuring over 80 first class artists each year there’s a lot to be announced as the festival draws near. Here’s a taste of what’s to come (in alphabetical order)…

By combining the sweeping pop orchestration of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, Beach House have become an act whose every album gets filed in the “instant classic” section of your local CD store (or your RDIO playlist – hello 2012). It happened in 2010 with “Teen Dream” and history has repeated itself with this year’s glorious “Bloom”. It’ll be their first tour to Australia playing tunes from their new masterpiece, which promises to be extremely special.

“The Only Place”, Best Coast’s follow-up to 2010’s acclaimed “Crazy For You” finds the proudly Southern Californian duo of Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno maturing in both their sound and perspective.The dynamic duo known to cook up an addictive brew comprising surf rock, dream pop and cute-as-a-button lyricisms have delivered another ode to their seaside home. An amazing live act, their new songs are a match made in heaven for the stunning coastal locations of The Falls Music & Arts Festival.

Breathtaking. Sterling. Peerless. There aren’t many superlatives left that haven’t been used to describe Boy and Bear. Unearthed by triple j in 2009, their rise to the throne of Australian music has been nothing short of extraordinary. Need some stats? How’s 5 ARIA awards (including Best Group), a number 2 charting album (“Moonfire”) containing hits like Feeding Line, Milk & Sticks and Part Time Believer. It’ll be one of your last chances to catch them before they bunker down towards album number two.

Coolio has been dropping hits and acting up a storm since reaching chart paradise in the mid nineties; pumping out tracks like the mega hit Fantastic Voyage, 1,2,3,4 (Sumpin’ New), GangstaWalk (which featured none other than Snoop Dogg) and even making a guest appearance on Futurama. He’s a Grammy Award winner and a 3 time MTV Video Music Award winner. The most important fact remains though, everyone is about to lose their Dangerous Minds when Gangsta’s Paradise (a world-wide #1 hit which remains one of the most successful rap songs to this day) starts pumping through the speakers!

No milestone event would be complete without taking a look back at its epic and ever changing journey. The Falls Music & Arts Festival has played host to the likes of Iggy Pop, Silverchair, The Black Keys, Modest Mouse, Kings of Leon, Franz Ferdinand, Public Enemy, Groove Armada, Angus and Julia Stone, Fleet Foxes, Yeah Yeah Yeahsand that’s naming less than 1 percent of the acts that have graced the stages! Time to celebrate – and what better way to do so than to enlist Australia’s favourite sonic adventurer Sampology Presents a Falls Anniversary Live AV Show. It’ll be a blockbuster mash up of the Festival’s soundtrack and video footage history over the years. Yep, you read that right; Sampology will be cooking up a Lord of the Rings sized playlist that will touch on every New Years’ memory you’ve managed to keep. If 2012 marks your first The Falls Music & Arts Festival, this will be the perfect place to start your collection.

SBTRKT, the man without vowels will be parking his spaceship smack bang on top of us this summer. Emerging from London’s thriving dub step scene in 2010, wearing a ceremonial mask to hide his true identity, he proceeded to wub-wub-wub his way into the hearts, minds and playlists of DJ’s locally, nationally, internationally. From club hit Wildfireto his epic latest track Hold On, the essence behind SBTRKT is his knack for straddling the margins of what dance music can really do.

More than a band, they’re the soundtrack to your latest musical religious experience. The Flaming Lips, those eccentric folk from Oklahoma touched by genius and led by one man highlight reel Wayne Coyne are coming to The Falls Music & Arts Festival! With mind bending results, their latest opus “The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends” – an expansive record of collaborations, has served to prove that whatever they touch turns immediately to gold. As far as celebrations go there is no act more qualified to lead the pomp and ceremony in such milestone years than The Flaming Lips. Balloons, confetti, animal costumes, crowd-surfing bubble? All we know is that they’ll be bringing a lot of party to the party and it’s going to be huge!

Everyone’s favourite social savvy British indie group The Vaccines have spent the last couple of years touring the globe in support of their blockbuster first album “What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?”. Tracks like If You Wanna and Post Break-Up Sex became bona-fide anthems. With a new album “The Vaccines Come of Age” due out in September, they’ll have a new bag of songs and tricks to delight their audiences with all over again as they sweep the nation with their sound – for which there’s clearly no cure.

There we have it, kicking off The Falls Music & Arts Festival 2012 line-up in style and alphabetical order:
Beach House,
Best Coast,
Boy and Bear,
Coolio,
Sampology Presents a Falls Anniversary Live AV Show,
SBTRKT,
The Flaming Lips
The Vaccines.

With over 80 artists included in the ultimate Festival music & arts program, there are many more to be announced over the coming months.

The Falls Music & Arts Festival 2012
Dec 28 – Jan 1 in Lorne, Victoria (established. 1993). 18+ event
Dec 29 – Jan 1 in Marion Bay, Tasmania (established. 2003). All ages

Tickets: To be at The Falls Music & Arts Festival this year enter the ticket ballot which is now open via www.fallsfestival.com get in before it closes at midnight on Thursday August 02.

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