‘Instrument’, A new Magazine For Australian Music
Instrument - the massive new Australian print magazine - is more for music than about it.
You will find little praise for bands here. This is less a magazine for learning Billie Eilish’s favorite color or which one of Fontaines DC are single. This is a magazine about the Australian music scene, the music fan, and those in the music industry who make everything happen.
A magazine for passionate audiophiles who love to feel their palms sweat every time Blue Monday plays in their headphones and are transported back to a basement rave; for the kid on the carpeted floor of their family living room hitting play on a tape or a cassette or a CD and hearing something that moves them for the first time. Because music is about more than the people who make it, it’s about the feeling you get when you experience it.
In the inaugural issue, Instrument focuses on Australia’s music photographers, their individual styles, techniques, and the things they see in the moments you cherish; a showcase, a map, pulling back the curtain of an industry and revealing to you the strange and talented people who capture the music you love and make it visible.
One of those featured is Australian photographer and frequent Monster Children contributor, Charlie Hardy. Hardy’s work is extraordinarily stoic, mystic, and has a knack for highlighting the clash within the rituals of the live show, cataloging the journey of both the band and the fan all the way from soundcheck to confetti cannon, and whose passions for photography and music collide in delight.
Hardy is a live photographer as well as a tour photographer, two halves of an industry whole who is able to simultaneously capture the bands as people, their personalities, and the experience of their music as it hits the crowd.
‘For me, connecting with the artist is so important – basically, it all comes down to feeling and resonating with their music sonically.’ Hardy explains. ‘It’s like something unlocks, and there are moments when I just want to pause, listen and observe everything happening around me. When that feeling kicks in, I know I’m here for the right reasons… Photography gives a very vulnerable insight into someone’s life at that current time.’
For photographers like Charlie Hardy, Dougal Gorman, and the countless other talented artists featured in issue number one, the consumption of media is 99.99% digital, and for their work, the phone screen is often the end of the line, which is sad, and underserves their art.
In the introductory paragraph of the first issue, designer and founder, Campbell Milligan, explained how Instrument came about.
‘Recently, I was having a beer with Maclay (Heriot), who had just returned from a trip with King Gizzard in the States. I asked him where most of his images end up after a lengthy tour like the one he had just completed. Pointing to the shiny little screen on the bar, he said, “Pretty much all of it will end up on here.”
That doesn’t sit right. Music plays an important role in all of our lives, whether we realize it or not. The melodies you hum that keep you company when you’re alone, the songs that greet us on our nights out, the sounds of birds waking you the morning after. The people who facilitate, capture, participate in, perpetuate, and instigate those moments are deserving of greater prestige, and so is the storied Australian music scene.
‘There’s an emotion that's lost when experiencing through a small digital square. Instrument was intentionally printed over-sized so that you can see the faces in the crowd,’ Milligan says, and it’s true, you can see yourself in there. By printing these images (and at a giant scale), you can hold them, experience them in their greatest and most active form. They cannot be scrolled beyond, they demand to be noticed.
‘When I see a shot I love, I just feel really inspired. There’s always a part of me that wishes I’d taken it but that feeling serves as a reminder of the kind of work that I aim to create.’ says Hardy.
Social media demands attention, but only for a split second. It is a fleeting medium that is negligible by design - trapped by convenience. It often bends people to cater to an algorithm rather than being delivered the strange and challenging and delicious bits on the fringe, which, ironically, is usually also the description of the most passionate and avid music fan. The hope is that through a platform like this, a viewer might not only feel the tingle of that which they love, but the inspiration to take on something creative themselves - to be a perpetuator of an authentic and enthusiastic music scene.
Instrument isn’t about the people on stage, it is about the people watching them. You, your friends, the people who designed the album covers, the passionate letter writers, the fan clubs, the long and willing queue, and in this issue, the photographers in the pit with you getting tossed from side to side - a worried grin on all of your faces that perhaps this might be the fateful stage dive that becomes a scar and a story, but it’s all worth it in the end. It is a magazine composed of moments that happen all around Australia’s vivid musical world, and the people who capture them.
Instrument doesn’t praise the bands, it praises the feeling you get when you hear the music that they make. That wistful, stomachy lightness. That flutter, that instant happiness, sadness, love, hate, longing, satisfaction, or excitement - kicks to the face and confetti explosions, rabid fans feeding the band all the energy they need to tear their soundsystem down - all so strong and all so true.
print is dead. long live print.
A special thanks to Hung Supply and Young Henry’s Brewery.
