about a month ago, while i was still on the other side of the planet, a circus called the rad balls music academy rolled into melbourne. as far as i can understand it involved talented musicmakers and producers being flown from generally more exotic locales around the globe to wonderfully damp and grey melbourne for a ‘music school’ slash love-in curated by musical nerdites where they could play in custom built studios with large amounts of expensive and rare equipment and saunter about with music royalty under the guise of gettin a ‘good learnin’ from them. if i sound down on it, trust me i’m not, i’m just jealous - it sounds like big transcontinental party almost completely funded by an energy drink and also a seriously life-altering mind-altering musical experience.

the good news is you can catch up with the lectures from this years academy in the form of podcasts. i took a four hour train trip up to wodonga a couple of days ago and got plenty of time to get through these mp3 highlights from this year’s lectures. i learnt that derrick may is not my friend. other lecturers include cut chemist, paul kelly, danny wang and peter hook. it all makes for great listening, with some great stories being told and some ‘industry wisdom’, but the podcasts contain only highlights from the lectures - you’ll be left wanting more, and for some inexplicable reason the good folks at rad balls pulled all the video streams of the lectures down at the close of this year’s academy. so that sucks. the closest you can get to feeling like you were there is probably to check out this blog where one of this year’s ’students’, simon from sydney, got the whole experience down on type.