Click Here To Listen To “Mermaids” Track
CMJ Dates
Thursday 10/18 – 9pm
Neon Gold presents PopShop CMJ @ Santos Party House
Friday 10/19
The Standard (East) w/ Kishi Bashi and Citizens
Friday 10/19 – 11pm
NME / The Great Escape CMJ showcase @ Cakeshop
Saturday 10/20 – 1am
The Aussie BBQ @ The Delancey (downstairs)
Saturday 10/20 – 8:30 pm
Irving Plaza supporting Electric Guest
It was simple beginning, as all tales should start.
Marcus Azon & Pepa Knight met over a campfire party of mutual friends, beside the sub-tropical forests of Australia’s eastern coastline. Pepa, as a 22 year old producer whose long hours experimenting with bizarre eastern instruments yielded a vast inventory of sonic adventures that he alone had heard, collected & banked away soaring melodic tapestry.
Marcus – with hidden note-book & bedroom wall covered with handwritten lyrics, held a sparking curiosity of his Grandmother’s African home, the east Ugandan town of Jinja. Pooling together their childhood friends – quicker than you could say ‘Lost Boys, Assemble’, the rag-tag team of Jinja Safari was born. Alister ‘Nugget’ Roach grew up with Marcus in Tasmania and jumped out of a troupe busking up the coast to join Jinja Safari – armed only some spare half-taped together percussion trinkets. Joe Stranger & Jacob Borg (bass &drums, respectively) had both attended high school with Pepa and were prepared to take time out from their weekend jobs to bring a some ideas to life.
And here is where their luck turned, and their simple story gets dense & exciting… Jinja Safari quickly dove into the national consciousness and yielded 5 high-rotation singles across national radio, knitting together music replete with manipulations of eastern
psychedelic jams, lilting choral art-rock, collages of sampled field-recordings, acrobatic vocal harmonies and dense polyrhythmic drum adventures.
Being self-recorded & produced, Jinja Safari was able to release a near constant stream of music that increasingly built upon the foundations of a bubble universe, reflections of modern youth pitched into a framework of escapism and commonality. With one of the hands-down most encapsulating & incredible live shows in the country, it doesn’t take long to give yourself over to a Jinja Safari show: the beat of a drum, a rouge attitude and five rat-bags clambering over a stage. After 6 months of existence, they had been nominated as ‘Best Live Act’ in the Sydney Music Arts & Culture awards.
Within their first twelve months of stepping foot onto a stage, Jinja Safari had been plucked from the coast and selected for supports with Born Ruffians, Menomena, The Joy Formidable as well as a
long line of major national festival appearances including Splendour In The Grass, Big Day Out, Good Vibrations & Falls Festival.
Recently grazing London for the first time on special invitation from BBC1’s Rob Da Bank to play his rowdy Isle Of White weekender, Bestival, Jinja Safari have also seen spot performances in & around UK, including a key support for LA sisters Haim.
Reactions from the massive, sold out Australia theatre rooms across multiple national tours indicate their audience shares common traits – anyone who thrives from dancing in the dirt, howling at the sky & cheering-on able young men climbing 80’ stage scaffolding (much to the dismay of festival promoters worldwide).
The adventure has just begun. Welcome to the Safari.