Having received airplay on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6Music show yesterday, ‘Love is a Crow’ is a one-off collaboration from Derry’s Ryan Vail and Portadown’s Naomi Hamilton AKA Jealous of the Birds. Melding a trickle of sublime spoken word from the latter and a bobbing flurry of beats and spectral synth-work from the former, the single is accompanied by remixes from The Cyclist and Belfast’s Dee Lucille AKA DIE HEXEN. Dig below.
Two years on from an extraordinary show at The Button Factory, Californian singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe has announced that she will return to Dublin to play Whelan’s on April 15. Kicking off an 11 date European tour that concludes in Athens two weeks later, full ticket details for the show – including price – are yet to be announced. Check out the full European tour dates below and stream a highlight from her 2015 album Abyss below.
30 years on from forming in Oxford, shoegaze pioneers Ride have announced they will play Belfast’s Limelight on March 21 and Dublin’s Olympia on March 22. Having been busy working on their first studio album in twenty years, Andy Bell and co. reunited in 2014 and performed a series of tour dates in Europe and Northern America in early 2015, as well as playing the likes of Coachella and Primavera. Tickets for both shows go on sale this Friday, January 27, priced £24 + booking fee for Belfast and 34.50 inc. booking fee for Dublin.
While 2016 has proved a political and problematic wreck in many regards, Dublin trio Alien She have made the most of it, using the ups and (mostly) downs of the past twelve months to fuel their experimental and progressive sound. While the group has been floating around the Dublin music scene for the last number of years, 2016 proved to be a particularly productive year. Besides their active gigging schedule, the latter half of last year brought the release of the track ‘Cold Brain’ from their debut album Feeler, soon to be released. The group comprises of artists and activists…
There’s nothing rough about the waves that Bad Sea have been making in the Irish gig scene. Their dreamy folk-country combo has seen them playing everything from Castlepalooza to Other Voices to the recent Therapy Sessions at the Workman’s Club (as part of the First Fortnight Festival). The duo, Ciara Thompson and Alan Pharrell, met on Tinder, and managed to form a powerhouse of a musical relationship out of a dating site. All that’s available for listening online at the moment is the band’s poignant debut single, Solid Air, which offers the perfect juxtaposition between Thompson’s unique and gentle swaying…
For over 16 years, Ninja Tune veteran Simon Green AKA Bonobo has been making the kind of music that seems to be able to frame every and any mood that a listener is capable of feeling. There was an invariable funkiness to Animal Magic; Dial ‘M’ for Monkey provided as much whimsy as it did downbeat introspection; Days to Come and follow-up Black Sands saw Green building upon his knack for constructing subtle yet arresting modal shifts; while The North Borders added guest vocalists and traditional leanings into the fray. Now, with Migration, his sixth studio LP, Green has taken his…
Wallis Bird live at Connolly’s of Leap in Cork. Photos by Jason Lee.
Our Krypton Son’s ethereal sounds may seem bathed in “the glow that flashes red” from the sun of Superman’s home planet, but we don’t really need to look as far as the celestial bodies. Those auroras closer to home should take just as much responsibility for where Chris McConaghy’s melodies emanate from, piercing every so often through the coastal skies to inspire and ignite. Written in the small village of Creeslough in northwest Donegal, the sonic themes of Fleas and Diamonds swell and meander like the landscape of the county that birthed it; impenetrable yet so welcoming once breached, a…
Brian Eno invented ambient. Did he? Maybe. Who knows? He’s done a lot over the years – insert chronology here, from Roxy Music to Music For Airports, producing Laraaji, teaming up with Bowie and then U2, film soundtracks, Windows 95, and finally releasing albums for Warp. The latter is why we’re talking about him here, as he kicked off 2017 with a beautiful piece of work called Reflection, which was released on January 1. It’s the latest in a series of works in a bracket he calls “thinking music”; works that are “generative”. He takes a series of sounds, sets…
Cass McCombs with support from The Silken Same at Galway’s Roisin Dubh. Photos by Ciaran O’Maolain.