• Interview: Rory Nellis

    Just over a year since the release of his wonderfully beguiling four track EP, The Moon, Belfast-based singer-songwriter Rory Nellis is currently crowdfunding for his forthcoming debut album, Ready For You Now, via Pledgemusic. Ahead of its release in June, Nellis – also frontman with the indie rock quartet Seven Summits – talks to us about the crowdfunding process, the host of local musician friends who feature on the album and how focusing on the positives of his hometown pays creative dividends. Hi Rory. Your forthcoming debut solo album, Ready For You Now, is being released via PledgeMusic – an increasingly…

  • Monday Mixtape: Ror Conaty (No Spill Blood)

    Ror Conaty is currently drumming with cosmic heft overlords No Spill Blood and with Wizards of Firetop Mountain. Today, he shares a playlist of some heavy duty tunes he’s currently enjoying. In his own words: “These are songs I’ve been hounding on lately, some are better off heard in the context of the album like Clint Mansell or Swans but all of them psych me out, some for their intense drive or their ability to make me focus while making things and others for giving me that last shot of serotonin when I though I was empty.” No Spill Blood launch their debut album…

  • Label Mixtape #003: 4AD

    A label based on aesthetic principles, 4AD has spent over 30 years being everything you think it is not. Initially founded by Ivo Watts Russell in 1980 as a vehicle to release music by bands at the centre of the nascent goth scene, the label quickly established a style and format that would lead to it becoming one of the most iconic record labels of the 80s.With records clad in immaculate Vaughn Oliver sleeves, the label originally specialised in floaty, gothic ambience, before encompassing world music, dance music, and – perhaps most significantly – the cutting edge of the US…

  • Deep Down South: Affirmations and a Few More Gigs, There, Lads

    To be quite frank, your writer is still recovering from an excellent few bouts of sleep deprivation on the trot, so a short one it is this week, before another gig-news binge next week. Deal? Okay. Saturday night saw about five or six majorly important shows happening in town at once. That hasn’t happened in a really long time. To be quite frank, the gig-going public was a little small until recently to be pulling in multiple directions, and if you’d told your writer this time last year that five shows in one night would do well, he’d have told…

  • Rave New World (6/3)

    Rave New World: Antoin Lindsay and Aidan Hanratty return with this week’s unarguably indispensable guide to the very best electronic/dance tracks, mixes, releases and gigs taking across the country this weekend. GIGS Gary’s Gang presents: DJ Fett Burger at The Sweeney Mongrel, Dublin Friday, March 6 Tonight sees the arrival of DJ Fett Burger in Dublin. Fett Burger’s the owner of the constantly fantastic Sex Tags Mania label from Norway alongside his brother DJ Sotofett (who I covered on here last week). It’d be foolish to tell you what to expect but it’ll probably have some balearic and disco in there with…

  • The Hefty Fog: Sludge in 2015 – The Early Pickings

    There’s a very noxious chemical present in sludge metal that separates it from all other forms of transgressive music. Even when placed side by side with contemporaries from every god-forsaken, drop-tuned fashion known to the underground, the crooked spoon fury of bands declaring themselves to be sludge stand out like a sore thumb. If punk rock is rebellion and heavy metal is hedonism, for instance, then sludge is a terrible nothingness that is all too human to recognize yet exemplified by sounds which are inhuman. That may sound like a bit of mental gymnastics, but no other subgenre of music has resonated with the…

  • Track Record: Brian Kelly (So Cow)

    In this installment of Track Record we head to the little blue house in Galway to hang out with Brian Kelly  from So Cow to chat about the records that influence his daily life. Photos by Sean McCormack Disclaimer: These are not my ten favourite albums of all time, though I’d say four of them would be on that list. These are the ten records I play most when cooking, sweeping or pottering about. They are the go-tos. I have about 180 LPs on my shelves, or Two Ikeas worth, as is the official measurement. About 100 or these are honest-to-goodness purchases made…

  • Army of We: International Women’s Day 2015

    In March 2010 Oh Yeah put out a call for women in music to come together for a photo that would be included in the NI Music Exhibition. The photo (above) was launched on International Women’s Day (IWD) and was inspired by an earlier more spontaneous image (below), which captured a group of promising young acts that were around at the time. For some reason there were no women in that earlier picture, it wasn’t intentional, but it did get us thinking about the gender gap in music. Since then we have marked IWD annually by showcasing or celebrating great…

  • Front of House: Chloé Nagle

    In this installment of Front of House we chat to Chloé Nagle, a freelance sound engineer and part-time teacher based in Cork. Photos by Brid O’Donovan. Hi Chloé! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure! My name is Chloé Nagle and I’m a Front of House Sound Engineer. I’m based in Cork and work on a freelance basis for various bands, venues, production and PA companies. I also teach sound part-time on the Music, Management and Sound course in Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa in Cork. How did you become a sound engineer and how long have you been involved…

  • From Book to Band: A World Book Day Playlist

    “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” The astute words of Ernest Hemingway – and there’s a fair chance he wasn’t wrong. To coincide with this year’s World Book Day, we’ve set aside our latest read – Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun, if you must know – to compile a ten-track playlist featured artists named after novels, including The Fall, Pylon, Soft Machine, The Blue Nile and The Art of Noise. Delve in to the literarily-leaning sonic wielders so.