• Exhibition: Babel Unbound @ CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery

    June 13, 2017 - By 

    This Friday at 6pm sees the opening of Babel Unbound in Cork’s CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery. Featuring the works of American artists Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban, Babel Unbound is a multi-disciplinary show with focus on the print medium. Mutchler and Urban are collaborative artists and here they focus on the role of printed media and editions within the context of a library, and ultimately as a curated and performative space. “A series of printed works, risographs, xeroxes and screenprints become a publication pulled apart, ephemeral and in-flux, lining walls of the CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery. Photographs, 3D printed objects and large-scale digital prints…

  • Watch: Wild Rocket – The Future Echoes

    June 9, 2017 - By 

    Heft, beautiful heft. Hands down one of the country’s finest heavy psych propositions, Dublin quartet Wild Rocket have returned with the fuzzed-out, low-end, bastardised cosmic mastery of ‘The Future Echoes’. Taken from their forthcoming second studio album, Disassociation Mechanics – released via the mighty Art for Blind on July 7 – the track has a brand new (and suitably impressive) video courtesy of Thomas Parkes. Check it out below.

  • Video Premiere: Lauren Bird – The Way Out

    June 9, 2017 - By 

    Having recently released her debut album The Inbetween, Strabane singer-songwriter Lauren Bird has made a name for herself on the live circuit in the North over the last couple of years. Making a little go a long way via just her vocals and ukulele, she delivers confessional lyricism, subtle-wielded truths and a strong knack for melody – something new single ‘The Way Out’ has by the bucketload. Undoubtedly Bird’s most quietly emphatic effort to date, it’s a maudlin and nicely earworming song from an artist whose pop prowess grows stronger by the day. Featuring animation by Gina Cuarán, here’s a first look at the video for…

  • Is It Happening Again? David Turpin On The Uncertain Return of Twin Peaks

    June 8, 2017 - By 

    It’s hard not to feel sympathy for anybody who ‘binge watched’ Twin Peaks in anticipation of the much-ballyhooed revival that began airing on Showtime / Sky Atlantic this May.  Seven episodes long and broadcast in the spring/summer of 1990, the first series is still the best serial drama ever made – an enchantment emerging from the attrition between soap opera surface and the febrile imagination of co-creator David Lynch.  It was humorous, slyly erotic, sometimes terrifying, and occasionally profoundly moving.  Following its progress into the gradually more dispiriting second series is an experience that can only be described as heart-breaking. …

  • Irish Tour: Mitski

    June 12, 2017 - By 

    The mighty Mitski live at Belfast’s Empire Music Hall and Dublin’s Whelan’s. Words by Aoife O’Donoghue, photos by Sara Marsden and Pedro Giaquinto. Empire Music Hall, Belfast Photos by Sara Marsden Whelan’s, Dublin Photos by Pedro Giaquinto Fresh from her show in the Workman’s club last September, Mitski made a welcome return to Ireland this week, playing not one, but three locations; Cyprus Avenue in Cork, The Empire in Belfast, and finishing up in Whelans in Dublin. The New York-based artist has quickly grown to prominence and praise after four albums, her latest being Puberty 2, released last June, and…

  • Ulrika Spacek – Modern English Decoration

    June 8, 2017 - By 

    It’s scarcely more than a year since Ulrika Spacek appeared as if from nowhere with their critically lauded debut, The Album Paranoia, on the ever reliable Tough Love Records. So it’s surprising, by today’s standards at least, that they’re already back with a follow up, Modern English Decoration. Recording and mixing the whole record entirely in their own shared East London house that serves as their creative hub probably helped speed things along, mind. Although the band had already expanded from the core duo of Rhys Edwards and Rhys Williams to a full five piece by the time of The Album Paranoia’s recording…

  • Dan Auerbach – Waiting On A Song

    June 8, 2017 - By 

    Poor Dan Auerbach. Since the first Black Keys album arrived fifteen years ago, he’s been consistently portrayed as an ersatz Jack White. It was pretty inevitable, of course, as both singer-guitarist in a two-piece garage band and vinyl-loving champion of all things retro-rock, with Auerbach painted as the workmanlike copyist of White, the true artist. And while it’s true that none of Auerbach’s work has approached the heights of Elephant or White Blood Cells, he doesn’t have dodgy Bond themes or baffling collaborations with the Insane Clown Posse to explain away either. And, to be fair, he has produced a few…

  • Primavera 2017

    June 8, 2017 - By 

    After 16 years, there’s no doubt that Primavera is Europe’s premier festival, for everyone from the capped-up indie kids to right-on middle-agers seeking some escapism, from the techno heads on through to High Fidelity type nerf herders and vinyl hoarders. So: how does Europe’s best music festival follow up on a last year’s best-ever edition – a mammoth lineup topped by Radiohead. Well, partially through sticking with what works – every sub-genre well catered for and then some, and not just on the three main days at Parc del Forum, but in venues across the city in the preceding weeks.…

  • Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly & James McAlister – Planetarium

    June 7, 2017 - By 

    “I am the god of war. I reside in every creature. Dispose of the future or put away your sword.” Michigan’s musical polymath Sufjan Stevens takes aim at the stars to reflect on the best and worst of our human nature on this collaborative record with Bryce Dessner of The National, composer Nico Muhly, and drummer James McAlister. The arrangements may be stellar, but earth is never too far away. “Love me completely in song” opines Stevens on ‘Venus’, with its references to Methodist summer camp and formative sexual experience. Each of the planets is a canvas for Stevens to ruminate on…