Astro & The Ages' Childhood Band

Adrian Perger started playing in bands at age 13 — but not the cute primary school band common in the backstory of most musicians. He was a trumpeter in Wiley Reed's band — the award-winning jazz musician — and went on to record and arrange with Melodics, Bertie Blackman, Sally Seltmann and Husky. After a lifetime of working on other's music, he's bringing his own to the forefront with Astro & The Ages, who make "danceable soul and world music infused with sweetness and melancholy", out of Melbourne. "My songs all absorbed the sounds and styles that I was into playing and hearing at the time," he explains of the tracks on his self-titled EP. "My first group of songs is unrecorded, then there is the group of songs on this album which is based in soul and reggae, and my new unfinished songs are different again.

"My personal favourite song on this album is called The Sun & Me. It came in a flourish of inspiration very early one morning, through me, in a few brushstrokes; it is my little gift to the world. It's eight minutes long and slowly wells up and up inside you," says Perger. "Some of the songs on this album were refined over many years. The world doesn't need another thrown together album just because there's a singer that needs something new to sell. The songs lived first and led to the recording, the opposite of how it is often done now."