• Video Premiere: Great White Lies – Fear

    June 18, 2019 - By 

    Led by singer Siobhán Shiels, one of the gems of Derry’s thriving experimental jazz & weirdo pop scene are Great White Lies. They last week tackled Brexit scaremongering with single ‘Fear’, for which we’re pleased to be premiering the video today. Accompanying Shiels in the band are Comrade Hat, aka Neil Burns on keys, incredible young double bass player Jack Kelly, Ruth McCartney on vocals & ukulele, with Luke Beirne on drums, who deftly weave around her composed & repetitive, yet evocatively uneasy vocal. ‘Fear’ is the first single to be taken from their forthcoming debut album, Chrysalis, which is set for an Autumn release. It was inspired…

  • Monday Mixtape: Bullitt selects Soul Jazz Records

    May 13, 2019 - By 

    This Saturday, May 18, the Bullitt Courtyard will host a summer sound system from esteemed label Soul Jazz Records. The label was founded in London in 1992, with the idea to draw “cross cultural connections” between soul, jazz and reggae through compilation albums. Almost 3 decades on, Soul Jazz has expanded its style and breadth – still releasing landmark retrospectives, but also sending contemporary, underground vibrations into the world. Pete and Scott will be your musical guides at Bullitt, playing across funk, soul, jazz, ska, reggae, dancehall, Latin, disco, punk, hip-hop, house, electro, UK & worldwide beats. Here, Bullitt resident DJ Jonny Carberry selects 20 of his…

  • Preview: Robocobra Quartet & Meltybrains? @ Black Box, Belfast

    May 6, 2019 - By 

    Two of the island’s most unclassifiable and artistically uncompromising – not to mention finest live acts – are set to play a double-headliner at Belfast’s Black Box on Friday, May 17 in what looks to be a contender for Irish Gig Of The Year. Proudly co-presented by Moving On Music and yours truly, it’s the first hometown headline show of the year for Robocobra Quartet, and the first Northern show in years for experimental  Meltybrains?. Perpetually a band of contradictions, we’ve long been one of Robocobra Quartet’s most ardent voices of praise. Their string of EPs and NI Music Prize-nominated pair of LPs – 2016 debut Music For All Occasions and Plays…

  • Buntús Rince: Explorations in Irish Jazz, Fusion & Folk 1969-81

    May 2, 2019 - By 

    Indie-punk wunderkinder Fontaines DC drew the ire of many an Irish music fan lately with the neophile claim that until Girl Band’s emergence, “the only way to sound Irish was to be fuckin’ ‘diddly-diddly-aye’”. Perhaps that statement is more telling of the limitations in Ireland on exposure to genuinely forward-thinking music on a grassroots level as it is of the band’s attitude. On an island the size of our own, there does tend to be room only for that lucky few in the bylines of the Great Irish Narrative, but that overlooks the communities of troubadours, session players and ubiquitous…

  • Preview: Brian Irvine Ensemble @ Brilliant Corners Jazz Festival

    March 5, 2019 - By 

    It was at last year’s Brilliant Corners when the Brian Irvine Ensemble ended their 6-year hiatus, and for good reason. Irvine cuts a singular figure not just in Northern Irish music, but worldwide, as one who embodies the spirit of the perpetually open-minded Brilliant Corners and all that jazz music encompasses, by pushing ever forward, with only a slight glance at anything that preceded.  The ensemble comprises around a dozen in number, drawn from varying backgrounds of contemporary classical, jazz & improvised music in Europe & Russia. As with many of artists comprising the Brilliant Corners 2019 lineup, their performances give themselves entirely over to neither formless improvisation…

  • Preview: Izumi Kimura @ The Black Box Green Room, Sunday March 3

    March 1, 2019 - By 

    Brilliant Corners, as we’ve said before, is “the finest patchwork of jazz & sonic digression that Belfast has to offer”, and, in its seventh year, has pulled out all the stops to make this another memorable piece of scheduling. It officially kicks off tomorrow with Ulster Youth Jazz Orchestra & The Comet Is Coming – the latter of which is sold out – and we’ll be highlighting some of the events on offer throughout its run from March 2-9. Firstly, we have contemporary pianist Izumi Kimura, who plays an afternoon show this Sunday in the intimate Black Box Green Room. Her liminal craft is one of nuance, subtlety and precipitous…

  • Stream: Zeropunkt – Bitch Nails

    February 26, 2019 - By 

    Long one of our favourites in the (admittedly bereft) Irish free psychedelic improvised scene, Dublin-based outfit ¡NO! have announced a name change to the substantially more Googlable Zeropunkt, and with it have issued standalone single, ‘Bitch Nails’, available as a free download. On the name change, the band are self-awarely oblique: “The 0ught of N0ught is the point of zer0. NO. N. 0. The zer0 Number. The p0iNt. Zeropunkt.” Following a quiet 2018 for the generally prolific – 10 albums since 2014 – outfit, this single comes with the announcement of two forthcoming LPs, Clap Your Hands Say No and Open War, as well as the announcement of…

  • Premiere: Maya Goldblum – Light Me Up

    February 15, 2019 - By 

    Content Note: Depression & suicide One of the growing number of Derry-based acts currently blurring genre lines and eschewing conventions, Idaho-born singer & guitarist Maya Goldblum – or Queen Bonobo in a full band setting – is set to release her debut album, Light Shadow Boom Boom, in May. Ahead of that, we’re premiering lead single ‘Light Me Up’, a buoyant slice of soulful jazz whose winsome face belies a diaristic portrayal of depression, as Goldblum brings gravitas and candour to a style of music currently underrepresented – at least in an artistic sense – in Northern Ireland. Maya had a chat with us about its subject matter: “Light Me Up stemmed from feeling constrained in…

  • Brilliant Corners Announce 2019 Programme

    January 30, 2019 - By 

    Now in its seventh year, the tastemakers at Moving On Music have announced the programme for their annual highlight – and the country’s finest jazz festival – Brilliant Corners. The festival will take over various venues in Belfast across March 2-9, with a kickoff solo piano concert from Craig Taborn at SARC’s Sonic Lab on Saturday, February 16. As expected, it’s a wonderfully diverse patchwork of jazz and first-rate sonic digression in the spirit of MOM’s booking the year round. It’s appropriate then, that the two first-night offerings on March 2 are the Ulster Youth Jazz Orchestra Shabaka Hutchings’ unmissable apocalyptic synth-jazz project The Comet Is Coming, supported by…

  • Preview: Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids

    November 22, 2018 - By 

    For some people, genius is a bottomless well that flows from within and permeates everything it touches. Like our first co-presented show with Moving On Music back in October – Peter Brotzmann’s Full Blast – we’re delighted to bring an artist to the Belfast, who, despite decades between his inaugural cultural moment and now, continues to create music of astonishing relevance. Idris Ackamoor is a saxophonist, sometime keytarist & artistic director of afro-jazz ensemble The Pyramids. An Angel Fell by Idris Ackamoor and the Pyramids The Pyramids were founded in the early 70s through Antioch College as part of Cecil Taylor’s Black Music Ensemble. Embarking on the kind of pilgrimage that’s the stuff of musical…