Spoonbill

For many up-and-coming artists, it would be a dream to perform at a music festival. For Jim Moynihan, better known on stage as Spoonbill, is not only well versed in performing at music festivals, but around the world. Jim has been performing at the Rainbow Serpent Festival for close to a decade, playing up to 17 sets in that time. His 10 year anniversary with the festival comes with the Rainbow Serpent Festival of January of 2015, an exciting milestone in his long and prosperous career as a musician.
“Back in 2005 when I released my first album, a bunch of people that were involved with Rainbow, like some of the crew and friends, must have enjoyed my first release and got in their ear and managed to convince them to book me,” Jim laughs, explaining that he’s always had a good rapport with the festival.
The kind of music that Spoonbill encompasses is definitely not easy to describe. It seems to be a big mix of a lot of different kinds of music and genres, so it’s very difficult to pigeonhole it, more often a good thing than not. It consists of recordings of real life instruments and bits of pre-existing songs, mixed in with organic sounds such as a twig breaking and adding it with the drums to add texture. Then putting in some extra fancy computer generated noises in a process that I’m not going to even pretend to understand, but somehow works.
Having been with the festival for so long, Jim is eager to try something new with 2015’s festival – promising a separate live performance on the stage as part of his set. “I’m pretty sure my main set is an hour, which is not super long but it’s cool to do a set that length because you can really add a lot of changes and variations, particularly with the kind of music I make, so it’s good to keep things fast paced and exciting.”
To add to the excitement of the performance, Jim confirmed that festival goers can expect to be hearing some brand new material, making its debut at the festival. “People can definitely expect to be hearing some stuff that nobody has heard,” he promises. “I’ve been working on a lot of down tempo stuff as well, so hopefully I get to include that somehow.”
Throughout the time he has spent planning for the festival, creating new material and putting together new tracks. He’s also putting together a new album as well as touring around North America, Europe, India, Japan, Russia and Israel. “At first I was sort of nervous as to how certain places would receive my music, particularly at the beginning when it was very tongue in cheek, ‘Australiana’ based music, but it went down surprisingly well.”
For those of you who are looking forward to the new album release, Jim has confirmed that there is one on the way, very vaguely due to drop “sometime next year.” On top of that independent album, he’s also bringing out a compilation album with his label Omelette Records, in celebration of Omelette Records reaching it’s first decade in existence. But, if you’re looking to check him out live, or if you’re looking for something that sounds quite unique, I certainly wouldn’t be missing the Spoonbill set at Rainbow Serpent.
When&Where: Rainbow Serpent, Lexton – January 23-26
By Jessica Alves