EMILY BARKER

In the organizer's words:

Presented by kulturnews & SZENE Hamburg.

The first song Emily Barker recorded for her latest album "Fragile as Humans" was the title track. To capture the "hyper-real recording" he wanted, producer Luke Potashnick surrounded Barker with microphones in the Wool Hall, an impressive 16th century stone building that was converted into a studio by Tears For Fears in the early 1980s. Accompanying herself on a Potashnicks 1938 Gibson L37 archtop guitar, they recorded six takes, but the first was the best.

Written and recorded as her time in the UK was coming to an end, Fragile as Humans shows Barker turning her lyrical gaze inward. The expansive themes of her previous album 'A Dark Murmuration of Words' (released in 2020) are replaced by an empathetic concern for more personal, familial and closer themes.

Support: LIZ STRINGER

Liz Stringer is one of Australia's most admired and versatile songwriters and instrumentalists. Hailing from Melbourne and recently located to London, Stringer counts seminal artists such as Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Midnight Oil (with whom she toured the world as backing vocalist and occasional instrumentalist between 2020 and 2022) as fans. Her most recent album, 2021's First Time Really Feeling, released through Courtney Barnett's Milk! Records, won an Australian Independent Record Award and debuted at #14 on the ARIA charts in her home country. Stringer recorded the follow-up full-length album in Brixton, London in Summer 2023 with award-winning UK-based producer Beni Giles. Due for an early 2025 release, this record sees her lean further into her influences not yet explored in her recorded music, including soul, funk and jazz, marking a musical departure while maintaining her extraordinary storytelling at the heart of each track. Liz Stringer's notoriously powerful live performances and melodically rich, story-based songs have earned her a unique place among the most important Australian songwriters of the modern era.