The 2011 Laneways Festival line-up was just announced.  Being held on Auckland Anniversary Day (31 January 2011) at the re-christened Aotea Square, this year's announced line-up are: Yeasayer - Foals -Ladyhawke - !!! (CHK CHK CHK) - Deerhunter - Blonde Redhead -Children's Hour - Warpaint - Beach House - Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti- Lawrence Arabia - Holy F*** - An Emerald City.

Acts I'm looking forward to seeing:

This an indie heavyweight line-up for sure, but it does omit lots of great artists that are on the Australian leg of the tour.  Why couldn't Auckland get the insanely amazing Les Savy Fav,  Los Angeles upstarts Local Natives, skewed popsters Menomena, and the cutesy duo of Jenny and Johnny?  Yes, I'll end up going and will probably enjoy myself in the sun(fingers crossed) and sonics of Aotea Square. Although one has to ask, when does Auckland begin to not get the short end of the stick when it comes to Laneways?  Just saying.

 ~Jerome

With the vast amount of technically brilliant studio albums released today, the result has been the great improvement and ease of home recording. What used to involve a bedroom full of heavy and expensive analogue equipment is now refined into a laptop with Garageband or Protools. It has become so readily available, anyone with a microphone and a bit of computer know-how can record.
 

All you need next are some songs.

 

And plenty of fellow Aucklanders have swooped on these new opportunities to produce their own music. To encourage this creativity, Auckland City Libraries started the Made In Auckland CD collection, for unsigned artists who do not have the funding to professionally record and distribute their works.

 

The cool thing about Made in Auckland is the CDs are free rentals! They’re also an ideal way to share and archive artists’ work, as we all know by now: itunes hardly caters for tangible album artwork, or familiar names in the credits and thanks notes. So if you have an EP or album that you would like to see stored in hard copy on a shelf, send it in to the Music department.

 

Our latest donations to the collection include quality sounds from The Roulettes, Toi Ora Live Art, and Anna Kaye. Check out the collectionhere, or come into Central Library and have a listen.

There's so much coming and going musically through town right now, we're trying to keep up. Coming up soon on the blog: Metallica, Laneways and Super City Summer Anthems!

 ~Matthew