Zaccaria Concerts & Touring are thrilled to announce that SummerSalt is back this summer to deliver another season of live music in some of the most scenic locations in the country! This year showcases exciting international artists alongside some Aussie favourites for a stellar line-up featuring Angus & Julia Stone, Ben Harper, City And Colour, The Rubens, Middle Kids, and Alex The Astronaut.
For the first time since its inception, international artists will join the concert series to culminate an unforgettable music experience. Ben Harper will be gracing our shores from the USA to co-headline the new series of shows across Australia in 2023, along with Australia’s most beloved sibling duo, Angus & Julia Stone. They will also be joined by Canada’s City And Colour as SummerSalt’s sunny line-up gets ready to shine.
SummerSalt has become an enormous success over the years delivering feel-good music to unique and picturesque destinations with a family-friendly atmosphere perfect for making memories. This festival event is the perfect place to bask in the sunshine with live music and a vibrant setting. Sun-drenched days and a sparkling haze of good times while you kick back or dance the day & night away!
LIVE MUSIC | PICTURESQUE LOCATION | FAMILY-FRIENDLY ACTIVITIES | FOOD TRUCKS | POP-UP BAR
The three-time Grammy Award winning singer songwriter/musician/producer, Ben Harper, has had a long touring history and a great affinity with Australian audiences. He released his eagerly anticipated & fiercely personal 17th studio album, Bloodline Maintenance, on 22nd July this year. The result is a fearless and immensely soulful work, largely inspired by the loss of a long-time friend, and the lingering influence of a mercurial and charismatic father. Along with guitar and bass, Harper also played the drums including an eclectic assortment of percussions and a plastic toy snare. The deliberately open spaces and accented beats influenced, in large part, by the exploratory rhythms of the hip-hop he has loved since his teens. It is less a direct influence than the applying of hip-hop’s inventiveness to longstanding paradigms of soul, blues and jazz, spinning it all forward into a reconfiguration of a new black Americana. Bloodline Maintenance is both a political and personally revealing work.
Ben Harper’s unceasing commitment to touring has seen him amass international critical applause and a worldwide fan following. Whether it’s through the soul of southern Gospel, 70s funk, blues, reggae, or straightforward rock and roll, Harper and his trademark Weissenborn guitar continue to stun audiences with incendiary live performances and timeless song writing. He is one of Australia’s favourite soul men and will, once again, wow audiences with his mesmerizing shows.
Sydney-born sibling duo Angus & Julia Stone have had us swept up in their dreamy fairy-tale for more than a decade, offering floaty acoustics and raw, emotive lyrics that paint the perfect indie-folk picture.
They have built an outstanding international career. The past 15 years has brought them widespread acclaim, seen them perform in front of enormous crowds across the world, and release some of the most captivating music to come out of this country in decades.
Their fifth and latest album, Life Is Strange, was released in August last year. They hadn’t planned to make another record — for a while, at least. But life had other machinations in mind, as it always has with Angus & Julia. The pair were famously brought back together by the legendary Rick Rubin and now again, were presented with an impossible-to-ignore opportunity, to reconsider themselves as artists in a new way — as composers, scoring for an award-winning video game.
Made over the course of a few years, in the moments where Angus & Julia weren’t devoted to their respective solo projects, Life Is Strange is unique in the Angus & Julia Stone oeuvre: it’s the most free, the most willing to cover new sonic territory. It is a testament to life’s strange confluence, the magical and spiritual forces that guide us through. Life Is Strange was recorded in, and inspired by, some of the most beautiful places in the world: the studio on Angus’ farm, ‘Stonecutters’, where the bulk of the record was made; Boulder, Colorado, where Life Is Strange, the video game, was developed; and Neil Finn’s studio in Auckland, New Zealand, where Angus & Julia finished parts of the album.
City and Colour has resonated throughout the international independent music scene. Following the 2005 debut Sometimes, and the Double-Platinum certified Bring Me Your Love (2008), Green debuted at No.1 in Canada on four consecutive releases – the Double-Platinum Little Hell (2011), the Platinum The Hurry and the Harm (2013), and Gold-certified If I Should Go Before You (2015) and his most recent release A Pill for Loneliness (2019). If I Should Go Before You also debuted at No. 16 on the U.S. Billboard 200 Chart and No. 5 in Australia where Green’s LP Little Hell was certified Gold.
Beyond his legacy as a co-founder of hardcore luminaries Alexisonfire where Green received Platinum-certification for four of the band’s five full-length records, he also teamed up with global icon Alecia Moore (a.k.a. P!nk) to record as folk duo You+Me. Not only did their debut Rose Ave. attain Platinum certification in Canada, but it also topped the Canadian chart at No. 1, the Australian chart at No. 2, and soared to No. 4 on the Billboard Top 200 in the USA.
The Rubens hail from Menangle, New South Wales, Australia. They are the three Margin brothers, Zaac, Sam and Elliott, and long-term friends Scott Baldwin and William Zeglis. With tremendous backing from triple j and Ivy League/ Mushroom Music, their self-titled debut album was released 14 September 2012. It was a resounding success nationally in Australia, where it is now ARIA Certified Platinum. This saw them sell out several national tours, perform at every major Australian music festival, support several major acts (Bruce Springsteen, The Black Keys, Grouplove), and sell out shows worldwide. The follow up album Hoops was released 7 August 2015 and debuted at Number 2 on the ARIA charts. The band once more sold-out venues all over Australia, playing to crowds of 5000 people a Night. The album is ARIA Certified Gold, and title track Hoops (triple j Hottest 100 Winner) has been streamed over 40 million times.
In October 2017, the band released Million Man, which saw a 27 global tour for that single and sell out 5 of their North American dates and their hometown show at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall. In 2018 the band released their third album LO LA RU, debuting at #3 on the ARIA Album charts, with Million Man also receiving ARIA Gold certification. At the end of 2018 the band supported PINK on her 42-date arena tour across Australia and New Zealand to huge success, playing in front of 500,000 punters across the tour. A main stage Splendour In The Grass performance in 2019 saw the band do a live debut of their collab with US hip hop star, Vic Mensa.
To date their entire catalogue has amassed over 200 million streams & 250,00 physical albums. The fourth studio album 0202 topped the ARIA Charts on its release in February 2021 and has also been nominated for The Australian Music Prize. The 0202 album tour sold 23,000 tickets nationally. In November 2021, the band announced the release of a new single Waste A Day, alongside the staging of a festival in their hometown of Camden called ‘ValleyWays’ to celebrate 10 years playing as a band, as well as the “Waste A Day 2022 Australian Tour’.
Middle Kids write and perform critically acclaimed, emotionally vulnerable and complex indie rock music. Riding the wave of success on their first single ‘Edge of Town’, they released their award winning, debut album ‘Lost Friends’ in 2018. This record earned them Triple J’s Best Australian Album, multiple ARIA nominations and sent them on a seemingly endless multi-year run of dates across USA, Europe and Australia.
In the final months of 2019, Middle Kids recorded their most recent album ‘Today We’re The Greatest’ in Los Angeles with legendary producer Lars Stalfors (St. Vincent, Purity Ring). Released in March 2021, it received fawning reviews worldwide, an ARIA award for ‘Best Rock Album’ and had them performing on prestigious US late night shows (Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Late Late Show with James Corden, CBS This Morning, and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert). Middle Kids toured North America in late 2021 – where they were one of the very first bands to tour internationally since the onset of the COVID pandemic.
An unforgettably original lyricist, the music of Australian singer/songwriter Alex the Astronaut cycles through a series of radiantly detailed slices of life. Alex documents moments of both the seemingly mundane from a haircut, a therapy session, a trip to the beach and to the supermarket to then utterly life-changing experiences as a caregiver along with the PTSD that followed and her recent diagnosis with autism. The 26-year-old artist imbues her songs with equal parts self-awareness and sensitivity, imagination and idiosyncratic humour and in its intimate exploration of post-traumatic growth, the result is a body of work affirming Alex as a truly essential songwriter, capable of transforming the way we view ourselves and the world around us.
Born in Sydney, she first started writing songs at 12, then moved to New York in 2017 to study math and physics at Long Island University. That same year, she delivered her debut EP To Whom It May Concern and its follow-up See You Soon, whose opening track Not Worth Hiding became an unofficial anthem of the Australian Gay Marriage referendum and earned support from Elton John on his Beats 1 radio show. In addition to releasing The Theory Of Absolutely Nothing to widespread acclaim (NPR Music, NME, The Sydney Morning Herald, OUT Magazine, The New York Times, The Guardian), Alex has since taken the stage at major festivals like Primavera Sound, The Great Escape, and Splendour in the Grass and toured Australia on a sold-out headline run.
SUMMERSALT TOUR DATES 2023:
Friday, 27 January – Stage 88, Canberra ACT
Saturday, 28 January – Thomas Dalton Park, Wollongong NSW
Sunday, 29 January – Esplanade Park, Fremantle WA
Friday, 3 February – Royal Botanical Gardens, Hobart TAS
Saturday, 4 February – Rochford Wines, Yarra Valley VIC
Sunday, 5 February – Torquay Common, Torquay VIC
Saturday, 11 February – Park Beach Reserve, Coffs Harbour NSW
Sunday, 12 February – Broadwater Parklands, Southport QLD
Tickets on sale Thursday 13th October at 10.00am AEDT
Tickets are available at: www.ticketmaster.com.au
For further information, please visit: www.summersaltmusic.com.au
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