***On his debut live LP, Live at Phoenix Central Park, Melbourne-based/California-born songwriter and bandleader Michael Beach brings together three of Australia’s most well-known improvisers in a mercurial performance that is both contemplative and expansive, focused and fierce. Playing live together for the first time, the band—Lloyd Swanton (The Necks), Joe Talia (Oren Ambarchi, Ned Collette), and Mick Turner (Dirty Three)—supercharge Beach’s textural songwriting, and tap immediately into a propulsive cosmic pulse.
Known as a deliberate and masterful songwriter, adept in both guitar-based post-punk (recalling Peter Laughner, Pere Ubu) and off-kilter piano balladry (Bill Fay, Peter Jefferies), Beach focuses on the latter as a jumping-off point for Live at Phoenix Central Park. “My last couple of records were dotted with more reflective moments, and friends had been encouraging me for a while to put together a whole record of ballads,” says Beach. “With these players, I feel like this collection of songs can be both introspective and outward-looking – miniature in their parts, but ever-expanding when combined.”
Live at Phoenix Central Park was recorded in Sydney, Australia, on the final date of a busy 2025, during which Beach made festival appearances and headline tours across Australia, Europe, and America in support of his studio album Big Black Plume (Poison City/Goner Records). In the architecturally and acoustically designed space of Phoenix Central Park, surrounded on all sides by a hushed and reverent audience, the band immediately settles into a meditative mood, with Beach peeling fragments from the grand piano as “Introduction” segues into a dramatic reworking of “Societal Breakdown” (Beach’s one song on guitar), recalling Townes Van Zandt or Rowland S. Howard. “No One Knows Any Better” ends side A with the record's first crescendo, the Talia/Swanton rhythm section locked in from repetition to transcendence. Side B opens with “I’m Gonna Need Ya” (at times Turner could be mistaken for Bill Orcutt), then boils over into a cover of “Calvary Cross” by Richard Thompson. An eight-minute version of Big Black Plume fan favorite “The Sea” (elevated by the addition of Swanton’s oceanic bass tones) crescendos the record again, and “Only a Memory,” ends the record with the entire band at their most emotive.
For the last decade, Beach has called Melbourne home, splitting time between making his own records, engineering records for others (recent credits include albums by Tropical Fuck Storm and Exek), and teaching music (often to People in other Melbourne bands). He worked for years at San Francisco's Hemlock Tavern, a hub in the American musical underground, and is a commonly heard voice on Melbourne independent radio stations RRR and PBS. For years, Beach has been carefully fostering musical connections - for Live at Phoenix Central Park, it was time to bring
those connections together.
Beach will support Live at Phoenix Central Park with an Australian
tour supporting The Exploding Universe of Ed Kuepper) and a
headlining tour of the United States.
