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F A R E W E L L T O U R

Introducing FAREWELL TOUR, an ambient psych-rock band by Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier, centred on themes of love, death, and loss. Their music is a cathartic response to grief arising from Chanelle’s Stage 4 Cancer diagnosis. Incorporating field recordings, guitars and vocals; the band's entire existence is a continuous drawn-out goodbye, bringing a unique urgency and finality to every performance and recording.

“…an epic love story of a band where every song is their last. A never ending farewell tour.”

JULY 5th, 2025 “farewell tour live at the renshaws” - Fortitude Valley

A new exhibition by Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier At The Renshaws’.

Every song is a farewell and every concert a culminating event; yet the tour seeks to go on as long as it can, in a perpetual state of epilogue and reinvention. This meta-narrative invites audiences into the transient present of life, into the soft lines between the band's reality and its fateful mythology. 

“This sound practice is a refuge. From grief, death, loss, imminent doom etc. It brings us into intimate contact with time because it's a space where each second is noticed, felt and responded to with care, through deep listening, not letting any one of them pass without being valued. This slows time and offers the desired respite by elongating the temporal distance between ourselves here now on the studio floor with our guitars and love and voices; and our eventual heartbreaking demise. A slowing down to go between us and death.”

l o v e .•. f r i e n d s h i p.•. g r i e f.•. R E S P I T E

p l a y . s o m e t h i n g . e l s e .•. p l a y . s o m e w h e r e . e l s e

“…an epic love story of a band where every song is their last. A never ending farewell tour.”

“Is this understandable?: I feel out of time. Not as in a lack of it, but unstuck. loosed from it. Disconnected. Adrift. Floating in non-linear observation. Like right now, the studio's dim warm lamplight w joe poring over posters at 8pm seems like the film from our documentary shot 50yrs earlier and I'm not sure if I'm in the past making it or in the future watching back. (If I want to know what to do next, maybe all i have to do is remember?) It's somehow like this time has already happened and I'm here again but not actually here. I'm actually in that final eternal moment just before death looking back that everyone talks about where time elongates so much that a moment, that last moment, is always. An ever lasting microsecond created by your brain being flooded by some awesome giant acid trip like hormone. So I am here again and it all seems so real.

Joe often says he feels like he's in slow motion. And that we need to feel slow. Here in the studio, we can go so carefully, having all the days and hours. That sometimes, I can just forget everything so well that I have to remind myself to feel bad that it's already over.” - CC

album launch and live performance of 'Farewell Tour' Thursday, December 11th at 7:00 PM AT NASHA

GO SMALL

I love being a band. It’s not about making it. We'll keep doing small gigs for as long as we can, bring the conversation about dying to audiences. Art is existential.

Crack The Egg. 

The performance aims to be more than a musical set, but an artwork that can open up, share in, the universal feelings around grief. In this, we don’t want to be the focus of the attention post-perfromance, but rather the catalyst for conversation and open sharing of personal experiences amongst those attending. We also don’t want to host or carry those emotions from others ourselves, rather this the area we envision hosting by doulas trained to discuss, reveal, and consider the depth of feelings and experiences that have risen to the surface.

Audio Palimpsest

Farewell Tour gives us a strange experience of time. In a way we feel like the project is a re-writting of our history, and past. We’re fictionally playing into our past lives, chasing dreams that have already come and gone. When I make a recording of a moment, of nature or lay down a rhythm, I play it back and then layer a new moment over it. It doesn’t play forward in time but rather backwards; and that new layer is pushed into the past. I imaging recording every moment from here on out, until Chanelle has passed. Instead of going into that dismal future maybe I can play back those last years; travel into those moments again and layer new memories into those precious hours.