• Picture This – Your National Visual Arts Guide: PhotoIreland Special

    July is a strange month in Ireland, an interim of sorts. It’s the summer month without a bank holiday. Most sports have taken a hiatus. The Euros are done and dusted. Even the GAA Championship, that bastion of Irish summer months, doesn’t really start until August. The Leaving & Junior Certs are over, as Alice Cooper once said – school’s out for the summer. You could be half tempted to either count down or whittle away the days until that glorious long weekend at the start of August – and with the weather we’ve had this week who’d blame you.…

  • Inbound: Lauren Bird

    Hailing from Strabane in County Tyrone, Lauren Bird is is an artist steadily making a name for herself within the Irish singer-songwriter scene. In May 2014 Bird – or McGeogh to the family postman – uploaded her self-titled debut EP onto Bandcamp, and within two days it had hit the number one spot on the site’s acoustic chart. Bird’s affiliation with the world of music began after she took up the viola aged 7, and from there she gravitated toward the guitar, piano, drums, bass and finally the ukulele. It’s the latter instrument that is the main focus of her…

  • Preview: The Night Institute Turns One

    This Saturday marks the first anniversary for The Night Institute, one of Belfast’s newest and most popular dance music fixtures (and very likely its best weekly electronic music event) at Aether & Echo. The night was set up in 2015 by the city’s very own Timmy Stewart and Jordan (the latter of which used to run the Nocturne parties at the same venue). Their fifty-second shindig, which is on this Saturday from 11PM-3AM, will take place at their regular haunt and cap off a journey through a rip-roaring past year which has earned The Night Institute a devoted local following. To help…

  • Inbound: Flecks

    There is an intimacy inherent in Flecks’ understated, atmospheric songs – enveloping sonic warmth that’s an invitation to lean closer; to listen beyond the quintet’s instrumental weave and hear what whispered reflections await to be deciphered. The members have converged from various musical outfits and endeavours, uniting with an ease that manipulates the auditory sense; slowly coating the listener in an aural glaze like the honey that seems to glisten on Freya Monks’ vocals. Soft, insistent percussion pushes and pulls the band along – both a quickened heartbeat and a measured pulse behind the tonal undercurrents and lyrical disclosures. Their…

  • Festival Mixtape: Knockanstockan 2016

    Ahead of its highly-anticipated return to Blessington Lakes in Wicklow this weekend, we’ve compiled a Spotify playlist featuring twenty artists we highly recommend checking out at this year’s Knockanstockan. Celebrating their 10th outing – a huge accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination – here’s our recent interview with Bettine McMahon and Graham Sharpe from the fiercely independent, homegrown Irish festival right here. And here’s Holly Pereira’s rather pretty Knockanstockan 2016 Festival Map.

  • Banter & Eventbrite Event Talks: Does Dublin Need a Night Mayor?

    Tuesday July 12th saw the third in this year’s Event Talk series take place in Wood Quay. Hosted by Banter and Eventbrite, the series focuses on event-related talks and conversations, including festival trends and the science of events. For the third talk the topic was that of Dublin needing a Night Mayor, a topic of debate at SXSW and something many other European cities have brought in. The panel, hosted by Banter’s Jim Carroll, was made up of Richard Guiney (CEO DublinTown, Dublin City’s Business Improvement District), Niall Byrne (Nialler9) and Roisín McVeigh (Cheap Trick, Frock Advisor and Totally Dublin). Over the course of about an hour the…

  • RIP Alan Vega: The Elvis of Psychosis

    Like many who would become fans, I can vividly recall discovering Suicide. I was barely eighteen, having returned home from yet another ill-advised rural Northern Irish Saturday night out. A few days before, a classically myopic Nirvana devotee a tad too immersed in late-teen hubris, guitar angst – I seem to have told myself – just wasn’t cutting it much anymore. Suddenly gluttonous almost to the point of panic for musical discovery, I had recently spent several consecutive late nights in the back room downloading countless vigorously recommended albums by two sonic savants I recall swearing by then, Piero Scaruffi…

  • Rave New World (15/07)

    Antoin Lindsay is back from Freero, and he and Aidan Hanratty return with the best electronic gigs, tracks and mixes and releases of the week. Gigs Bap To the Future with Optimo at Electric Garden & Theatre, Galway Friday 15 July 2016 Glasgow stalwarts Optimo are coming Bap to the Future, bringing their world-famous eclecticism to the 2020’s European City of Culture. Their label continues to innovate, with release #36 from Pussy Mothers sounding key, and their DJing is utterly unquestionable. AH Twitch Present Martyn at The Bunatee, Belfast Saturday 16 July Finally Martyn makes it to Twitch. The constantly…

  • Track Record: Toby Kaar

    In the latest installment of Track Record, Cork producer Toby Kaar talks us through some of his all-time favourite records, featuring Kanye West, Warieka Hill Sounds and Fleetwood Mac. Various Artists – No Oil Crisis This is a really funny record. A New Thing album in response to the Gulf Oil crisis. I’ve never understood that kind of contrived connection between music and current events. Like the time they sent Rahzel out on a boat to beatbox about melting icecaps. Anyway, I got this in a second-hand record shop in Bristol. The album is a great cross-section of the kind of…

  • Feel Good Lost’s 5th Birthday

    The working name for Cork director, editor, designer, cameraman, alternative DJ, live visual artist and media designer Brendan Canty, Feel Good Lost just celebrated their 5th birthday party in the panoramic Mitchelstown Caves. This year featured candlelit performances from the enigmatic JFDR (Iceland) and an immense and explorative performance from Cork act Talos. As well as taking photos of the event, Blair Alexander Massie had the pleasure of chatting with Brendan about the milestone. After 5 longs years of emails, flights, videos, EP and LP’s and now a show in a cave. What’s the most rewarding part about what you…