UPCOMING GIGS June / July Sat August 7 Open Studio : VIC
BECOME OUR MYSPACE FRIEND |
Bizerka News2010 News News - January 8th Happy New Year Bizerka fans! And what a start to 2010 it is shaping up to be. There are several new tunes to look out for, including a rollicking set based around a dance called the “Patima” from the Greek Island of Lemnos. As well as the usual Melbourne gigs, Bizerka will soon be hitting the festival circuit with performances scheduled for the St Kilda Festival (6 - 14 February), Cobargo Folk Festival (26 - 28 February), Yackandandah Folk Festival (19 - 21 March) and the National Folk Festival, Canberra (1 - 5 April). Check out the gigs section for more details. The band will also be heading back to the studio as soon as everyone can agree on some dates. If in the unlikely event this can be achieved, a full length Bizerka album won’t be far away. Looking forward to seeing you at a Bizerka gig in 2010! Some photos from Majors Creek Festival...
2009 News News - July 27th It's been pretty quiet around here lately, but we wanted to reassure you that we're still about and will be gigging again soon. Teal is off galavanting around Canada, Nick's been away in Bosnia drinking Slivovitz and Jody had pretty major surgery which has knocked her off her feet for a few months. We'll be back with avengence in September as part of the Darrebin Music Feast and hope to see you all then! News - March 24th After a fairly busy February, which included a bush fire relief gig and a stint at Fed Square, Bizerka has scheduled a light March and April due to baby arrivals and other family commitments. Unfortunately, that means no big festivals this Autumn. But never fear - Bizerka will be back playing the festival circuit before you can say 'Kangaroo Sausage'. While things have been quiet of the gig front this month, we have not been completely slack and have added several new pieces to the repertoire, including a Macedonian pirate set, some new crazy pieces in 7/8 timing, the Flemish Bear Dance (an old favoutite) and the mighty Zorba! We're back this Friday with a gig at our favourite local venue, Open Studio in Northcote. Come along to hear the Bizerkified tunes you know and love, along with some spicy new numbers. Hope to see you all there and don' forget your dancing shoes 2008 NewsNews - December 31st We've been a bit slack on the news front lately as we've been gigging quite regularly and with all the end of year sillyness we overlooked adding anything here. A big thanks goes out to Majors Creek Festival for taking a risk with a completely unknown band from the wilds of Melbourne. We had a great time and sold 65 copies of our new EP that weekend so we were all pretty stoked. Thanks also go to The Tahini's for their Bellydancing routine on Sunday and to Ferral for stepping in on Friday night and dealing with the idiots - who would have thought folk music would rile people up so much :-) Our final gig of 2008 was lots of fun and it was good to see people dancing along to the Bulgarian and Greek pieces. A big thanks to Taegen for supporting us throughout 2008 and we look forward to gigging at Open Studio more in 2009. We're taking January off except for a private party, but there's 3 chances to see us in February - St Kilda Festival, Sustainable Living Festival and a Friday the 13th gig at Open Studio. Hope to catch you at one or all of them! News - September 2nd We're pretty happy with the fact that we'll be playing at Majors Creek Folk Festival in November. Niggles played there a few times with his old Canberra band Katyusha and assures everyone that they'll have a lot of fun - even if it's a bit cold at that time of year! Last Friday we played at Open Studio which is a great little venue. There was quite a decent sized crowd who were up and dancing right from the start. There were even a number of Serbians and Greeks checking us out (which is a little frightening), though they approved of our unauthentic but spirited renditions of their traditional music. Despite being Teal's birthday, everyone behaved themselves and didn't get too drunk until afterwards. Rumour has it that Teal, Niggles and Nick jammed on with some of the locals until 1:30am - those crazy musicians!!! As you can see from the gig listing, we're playing at Open Studio a few times again in the next few months - we really like the venue and crowd, so why not!!! We look forward to seeing you there. News - July 17th Things are back in full swing now with the band rehearsing every Tuesday night and learning heaps of new pieces. We decided that a few more easy to dance pieces were in order so Niggle put together a bunch of Serbian Kolos which even the drunkest Aussie can manage to keep in time to. But just to make things difficult he also put two pieces back to back that could cause peoples legs to become permanently twisted together. They're both from Bulgaria and the first one is in 15/8. If that easn't bad enough, the second one is in 25/8!!! Our next gig is on August 29th (though hopefully we'll book some more in before then) and is also our drummer Teal's birthday. So we're hoping you'll all come along to enjoy some great music, hear the new pieces and help Teal get rip roaring drunk (after the gig). News - June 7th, 2008If you're wondering why we don't have any new gigs lined up, its because we're having a few weeks off while the girls practice hard for their Uni exams. We are however about to start learning some new tunes next week and also should be playing in Yackandandah and Albury in August which should be fun! Thanks to everyone who came along to our gigs at Carni and Open Studio - we had lots of fun and hopefully so did you. Anyways, as soon as we have our new gigs lined up we'll let you all know through the newsletter. News - March 23rd, 2008Everyone had a great time playing at Yackandandahh Folk Festival last weekend! We did 4 gigs and they all seemed to go down well with the crowd - it was good (funny) to see people trying to dance in 11/8 during the Kopanitsa! A big thanks to Melska and Stephanja for their guest singing appearances. We took along a couple of video cameras to the festival and so we've got a couple of clips available now for you to see. We've put them up on the new Video section of the site. Dave also took some took some video footage and heaps of photos which we'll be adding soon as well, so make sure you visit again soon to see them. Next weekend we're doing 3 gigs - a couple of Harmony Day concerts as well as one at the CERES Harvest Festival. You can find more information on our gigs page. News - February 6th, 2008Bizerka is getting busier! After a three hour set at Palookaville in Fitzroy in mid-Jan, the band followed up with another short set at the same venue on Feb 5 that was filmed for Channel 31. Watch this space for details of when the set will be on air. There are plenty of gigs coming up for the band in the next couple of months, including something we are all looking forward to - the Yackandandah Folk Festival! This coincides with a significant birthday for our guitarist so it should be a huge weekend. The band’s repertoire continues to expand and now includes a couple of Serbian kolos (dances) and several Russian favourites. See the Bizerka gigs page for more info on upcoming performances. News December 12th, 2007
To our utter amazement the band was as to do a 7/8 piece as an encore! We played a second encore piece after that but had to stop as our arms were literallly dropping off after 3 hours hard and fast playing. Thanks heaps for having us there Yack! We ended up staying up until 4am partying on despite the fact that we really needed sleep to get through the gig on Sunday. After 4 1/2 hours sleep, 5 bleary-eyed musicians headed off for the gig in Wunghu where we played 2 much more sedate sets, but still had lots of fun. There's some photos of the weekend in the Bizerka Photo Gallery for those interested in seeing the band's first road trip! News December 1st, 2007We've been rehearsing out little backsides off recently, even rehearsing twice this week. We've got 2 gigs coming up next weekend and one of them is a 3 hour set, so we've had to learn heaps more repertoire. Some of it's easy, but a lot of it's quite tricky - either heaps of notes or in tricky time signatures. I love playing in 11/8, but it took a few weeks for the band to become comfortable with it. Among the new pieces are some Greek tunes which sound a bit like Klezmer (probably not helped by the fact I changed the key from major to minor) as well as an evil version of Teddy Bear's Picnic which would give any child nightmares! Surprisingly, the piece which has turned out to be everyone's favorite is a Turkish piece called Rampi Rampi in 9/8, but grouped as 2 + 2 + 2 +3. Again, it took a while to get sorted out, but now everyone loves it. We hope to start getting into gigging in a serious way next year and already have several gigs lined up in March and April - but one's in Sydney and the other in Albury - a long way away!!! NEWS October 22nd, 2007We're looking for gigs!!! If you can offer us a gig, please give Niggles a call on 0410 685 839. Also, if you're an Australian based band, why not add you link to AMWS - AMWS - providing Australian music links and resources since 1994. NEWS October 17th, 2007We've finally had the chance to do a proper demo recording! In the end we recorded 4 pieces and are pretty happy with the result. It's designed to get us some gigs and to use when applying for festivals. You can hear the MP3's on our repertoire page. We also managed to score ourselves a gig in Yackandandah on December 8th which should be lots of fun. With a bit of luck we'll also play in Violet Town on the Friday night to make the trip worthwhile. NEWS August 10th, 2007
Date: Friday 21st Sept Click the thumbnail to see a fullsize version of the poster!!! NEWS July 10th, 2007Teal, joined us tonight on Percussion! Everything which was fast and energetic suddenly became even more so and the quiet passages kept up a consistent speed instead of slowing down. Overall, everything felt much more lively and together with the help of Teal's excellent playing and obviously very skilled chops!!! NEWS June 27th, 2007We now have a full band together and are going to put a demo recording together next Monday night. We've decided to record 3 sets of tunes for the demo: • Murguletul / Briul pe Sase We're looking forward to doing the recording and can't wait to get out there gigging! We'd also like to welcome Jody and her fiery fiddle playing to the band - for a classically trained musician she's playing like someone who grew up in a Romanian village!!! NEWS May 29th, 2007After weeks of searching, it looks like we may have found ourselves a Cellist to fill in the bass end! In a strange twist of fate, a friend put us onto someone Josh and I had met several years ago playing at a folk festival in our old band Katyusha. It also redresses the gender balance which was in danger of becoming male dominated! We welcome Chess and look forward to playing music with her. |
© 2008 Bizerka & World
Music World