2025 - The Year in Review

Bleeding Face at The Moshpit this year.

I thought 2025 would have just been more of the same for Noise Levels but our second year turned out to be even more eventful than the first. My initial plan for 2025 was to keep doing band profiles, keep archiving music online where people could hear it, and to put out a new zine every two months. 

Then, in about February, my computer crashed.

It crashed hard.

It's a long and dreadfully boring story but, with the help of a few people (thanks Matt, Gaby, and George), I eventually got connected with a data recovery specialist company who charged me a motza to get about 70% of the Noise Levels archive back. 

It was an expensive lesson to learn but things are more secure now! 

My plans for 2025 changed after that point. I couldn't bring myself to wade into gofundme territory so I figured the best way to recoup costs would be to offer something back to people who wanted to help out. Thus, Rare Cuts was born. The idea was to do a compilation of previously unreleased stuff from some of the great bands I'd been profiling on the site. I put the idea out there to see if it had legs and I was blown away by the generosity of those who came forward with offers to supply songs. In addition to this, Jay Blurter put me onto a great CD pressing company, Darryl Russell (Tocata) was kind enough to do the design of the CD, and Koby Geddes helped out with the mastering. The CD became a double CD with an accompanying zine, and sales have been helping me to keep this project going. 

Notable moments of 2025:

• The Zine - Three more issues of the Noise Levels zine came out in February, October, and November. February was Issue 2: The Hassle Brigade, October was the Rare Cuts issue, and November was Issue 4: a mini-zine focused on the Blue Mountains music scene of the '90s and '00s. 

• Show: In December 2024, I reached out to Dave from Nintendo Police and asked if they'd be open to a reunion show in July 2025. I'm still amused by his reply of "Hey Luke, what are you cooking up?" I don't think of myself as a wheeler-and-dealer but pulling together the Noise Levels July 27th show was a mission-and-a-half! Nintendo Police put me onto Bleeding Face, which created a fantastic late '90s double-bill of northern suburbs hardcore magic, with supports from Fur Brain (my new band with Noise Levels co-podcaster Colden 'Bundy' Locke), Snitch Trial, and Exit Mould (who I've interviewed for the next issue of the Noise Levels zine). We booked The Moshpit and sold it out. It was amazing. Such a great night, and I can't thank the bands enough.  

• Social Media: I briefly attempted to engage with Reddit by creating a Noise Levels subreddit but I just don't know enough about Reddit to make it work plus it was just time and energy I don't have. The Facebook group is still a great private community and remains the genesis point for all things Noise Levels. The Instagram account really took off in a big way after I realised what sort of content works on it. And YouTube has been great for the project too as more and more people have been sending me videos that fit the concept. 

• The Podcast: We worked on four podcasts this year but only one episode was completed - and this episode, the one focused on Tutti Parze, was a year in the making on its own. Suffice to say, I'm proud of the work we did on this one as it was a band before my time and the level of research involved went far beyond anything I'd done before for Noise Levels. It turned out great too - with huge thanks those who agreed to do interviews for it.

• Rare Cuts: I already mentioned this double-CD but I'll mention it again here. The following locations are carrying copies (unless they've sold out already): Rocky Road Records (Artarmon), Beatdisc (Parramatta), Prop Records (Ashfield), Red Eye Records (Sydney), and Hat Hill Records (Blackheath). Hit me if you want a copy.

• National Beer Day/The Rare Cuts Launch show: We were gonna do a second National Beer Day show but I just couldn't get things to align. There was an attempt to shift dates and locations to try and make it work for the best possible combination of bands but I felt this one slipping through my fingers and I had to cancel it a month out from the show because there were too many factors against it. 

• The Noise Levels archive: The Noise Levels blog and bandcamp continues to grow. I tend to work on about 10 band profiles at a time as they can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a whole year to complete. In the background, I've created a chronology of shows and flyers - currently sitting at 4500+ shows (1980-2010, or thereabouts). These are slowly all getting uploaded to the Noise Levels website, with the hope that this will become the largest online archive of alt-music show flyers in Australia. The website currently has entries for: approximately 1000 shows, 298 profiles of individual band members, 50 zine titles documented (with about 200 individual issues scanned and archived), 196 digitised cassettes and other recordings archived on bandcamp for free download, and 178 band profiles. 

• Radio Guest Spot: One last little surprise was a guest programming spot I did on D.I.R.E. Radio at the beginning of December. I'm not even sure if anyone heard it but I had fun pulling together a two hour playlist for this online broadcast - I chucked in some rarities and completely unheard stuff that hasn't gone up anywhere before. I think this might be available for listening next month.

Thanks again to everyone who has helped and continues to help make Noise Levels a reality. It's been a blast - here's to 2026!

2024 - The Year in Review

What a year it's been. Looking back, it's hard to imagine that Noise Levels was started just over 12 months ago. When I think back to the genesis of this project it now seems so long ago. 

Picture this - it was 2023 and a lot of things had finally settled in my life after a very eventful and (frankly) traumatic decade. It seemed like it was a good time to start being a person again, however, I'd been looking online for some of the old local bands I loved and simply couldn't find anything. The internet had proven itself to not be the sacred record of all knowledge that we'd been promised 25 years ago. Myspace had been purged of a lot of pre-2016 music in the Great Myspace Data Wipe. Other sites such as MP3.com.au had been superseded by streaming technology and maintaining a band website seemed like a thing of the past in the age of social media. So I wondered... perhaps an archive could be created and maybe some other people would be interested?

I started Noise Levels as a closed Facebook group, which has in many ways remained the core of the Noise Levels community. The description of this group initially read:

Sharing and collecting the oral histories of punk/metal/alternative music from Western Sydney and surrounding areas, circa 1980s to the late 2000s. Creating an archive of flyers, photos, music.

Amongst the first people to join the group and like the post was my former bandmate and friend Nigel Maher. He's sadly no longer with us but I still find myself thinking of him after his passing earlier this year. His interest in the group, his love of music, and the influence he had on me all those years ago all sit within my thoughts about Noise Levels and what it means. 

Back in April, spurred on by Tim Walter, I organised a Noise Levels get-together at the Henry Lawson Club in Werrington County. The club was kind enough to provide the function space for free after I told them it was for mental health. That sounds a little funny on reflection but I truly do believe that this project has a role to play in that sense. As we get older we can find our social circles shrinking and I've realised how much I needed to socially feel like I was more than just my job. I've always liked the idea of feeling like I was part of a community and it's one of the things I missed most about playing in a band when I was younger. In talking to hundreds of people over the last year it's become clear that a lot of other people valued this too. 

ABC journalist Daniel Johnson had twigged to this before I was even really aware of it myself. He reached out to me at the start of the project with an idea for a mental health-related article on the ABC News website and this helped solidify what Noise Levels has come to be.

The article was about a recording project that I was embarking on with close friend Colden 'Bundy' Locke, who had approached me with the idea of doing a Noise Levels podcast. I mean, it wasn't that hard for him to approach me, he only lives five doors down from me and we've stayed in fairly constant contact since we first met back in Year 5. The article can be read here, and I couldn't be more thankful to Dan Johnson for the chat that led to this as it helped to put the fire into me to push this project as far as I could take it.

So it's now been 14 months since this project started and I have to say I've enjoyed every aspect of it. Here's some of the other highlights!

• The Facebook Group - which has led to us tracking down and making available long-lost and never-before heard music from the '90s and '00s.
  

• The Podcast - five episodes recorded and presented on the Noise Levels YouTube channel. These take a long time to put together due to the research involved and the time needed to track down people for interview.

• The Bandcamp - which has allowed for music to be preserved and documented and made available to people again, 99% of the time with permission from the bands who made it. More than 100 CDs, cassettes, 7"s, and unreleased music has now been made available or mirrored on this site as part of the efforts to document and archive NSW's alt-music heritage.
  

• This Blog - the centralised suppository of everything I've collected. My initial idea was always to document these bands and create a wiki or online database of some sort. Everything else sort of just grew around this website as a way to facilitate the collecting of this information. As I mentioned before and elsewhere, Noise Levels simply wouldn't be possible without the collaboration of hundreds of other people. 

• The Instagram Account - suggested by Chloe Keeble (of Little More Than You). The Noise Levels Instagram account has grown well beyond the size of anything I could have expected.
  

• The Zine - the first issue of which has just been distributed to 14 stores across Australia. I'm already working on Issues #2 and #3. 
  

• National Beer Day 2024 - after years of being asked if there'll ever be another National Beer Day, Noise Levels seemed like the perfect excuse to bring it back. This wouldn't have happened without the enthusiasm of Mitchy McLennan, co-owner of the Moshpit and the brains behind the original National Beer Day parties. It was amazing to see so many familiar faces again and to watch sets performed by a great collection of re-formed bands such as The Brazen Hearts, Steppin' Razor, Save Some For Daddy, and Sunshine Winnebago, as well as Western Sydney/National Beer Day alumni in newer bands The Bottlers, Modus Fire, and Leuras. 

• And last but not least, Spilt Milk. Hearing more music from '90s Western Sydney punk band Spilt Milk has always been one of my white whales. I tried to track down their second demo 15 years ago without much luck so the uncovering of both this demo and a whole cache of previously unreleased recordings (thanks to Chris 'Goonie' Duckworth) was also a huge highlight. To then actually get to see Spilt Milk reform and play a show in Penrith this year, and for my very first band The Shenanigans to also reform and get asked to play support for this show at Elton Chong? Absolutely amazing. What a gift to my teenage self, haha. 

 Anyway, thanks to everyone for all the support and chats. Looking forward to a great 2025.