• Ships Scoop Album of the Year 2017 at RTÉ Choice Music Prize

    March 9, 2018 - By 

    Dublin electronic duo Simon Cullen and Sorca McGrath aka Ships have walked away with the Album of the Year 2017 at tonight’s RTÉ Choice Music Prize. The event – which took place once again at Vicar Street – saw the pair scoop the prize, as well as a cheque for €10,000, courtesy of The Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) and The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) for their stellar debut album, Precession. Along with a premiere of the album, which was the product of two long years of writing, demoing, debating and recording, we spoke with Cullen and McGrath back in April last year. Revisit…

  • Political Partying: An Interview with Room For Rebellion

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    Ahead of its next takeover in London, Belfast and Dublin on March 23, we talk awareness, action and momentum with Jess Brien, Anna Cafolla, Isis O’Regan, Hollie Boston and Cait Fahey of Room For Rebellion, a “political party” who host synchronised events in aid of Abortion Support Network. Go here to buy tickets for Room for Rebellion Hi guys. Take us back to the roots of Room for Rebellion. When and how did it come about? Room For Rebellion was first set up by Isis who felt implored to do something about the state of women’s healthcare in Ireland. Anna and…

  • Alien She’s Manifesto For Creative Aliens

    March 6, 2018 - By 

    Make a work that you would make if you were the only person in the world. Don’t worry about pleasing others. A true work will find the people who need it, always, and they will be the people you need to. Trying to please with your work will bring the wrong people to you. Take up space with your work. Use your voice, your unique identity. Stand strong and tall on your own two feet. Shake your body. Feel the vibrations of your song and art. Let it energize and motivate you. Love your thoughts and words. They belong to…

  • From One Alien to Another: Alien She Interview Each Other

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    Katie and Aoife of Alien She interview each other and delve deep on the topics closest to their hearts for International Women’s Day. Photos by Sarah Ryan and art by Katie O’Neill. Why do you make art? Aoife: I need to express myself or I’ll explode. Expression is the opposite of depression. It’s something I find comfort in, and maybe other people will find comfort in what I create. Katie: It’s a deep impulse. It helps me express myself in a way that I find very challenging to do verbally. I figure my life and my feelings out by making…

  • In Their Hands: A Conversation with Wyvern Lingo

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    Bray’s Wyvern Lingo chat to Nicole Glennon about being women in the Irish music industry,their camaraderie, activism and plans for the future. What does it mean to each of you to be a woman in 2018? Caoi: It’s socially more acceptable as a woman to dress in a garish fashion..? I don’t think about being a woman. The day our album was released, we were loading the van after our sold out gig in the Button Factory in Temple Bar, and some random prick walking past smacked my ass. When I ran after him, punched him in the back and screamed at…

  • Album Stream: David Kitt – Yous

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    Back with his first solo full length in almost a decade, one of modern Ireland’s most enduring, chameleonic songwriters, David Kitt, has just released Yous through All City Records after its preceding Still Don’t Know EP. It’s a soothing, typically stellar effort from Kitt, who, since breaking through with 2001’s bedroom indie mini-masterpiece The Big Romance, consistently remains one step ahead at every point of his musical path, with him in the running for this year’s Choice Music Prize for his electronic New Jackson project. Entirely written and produced by Kitt, aside from a cover of Fever Ray’s ‘Keep The Streets Empty For Me’, it’s a wistful, intimate release, with flashes of a JJ Cale’s Troubadour for the 21st century. As…

  • Being a Woman, Singer & Vocal Coach in the Music Industry by Nichola Hegarty

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    I’m a 31 year old female singer and musician with 16 years’ experience performing music on stage and 5 years’ experience in vocal coachin, and like a lot of performers, I’ve been singing from a very early age. My father was a musician, lead guitarist and lead singer in numerous showbands back in the 60s and 70s. At the time when my dad was in the height of gigging, there were no iPads, iPhones or laptops to look up lyrics to a song, so you had to rely on your memory, a well-inked pen with plenty of paper to write…

  • Sorcha Loughrey Hoey: Shake off the Shackles and Shimmy

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    My foray into performing proper began with my running and hosting Burlesque shows in Dublin. Not content in the sidelines, I then began to perform myself. I have always had a penchant for glamour and ‘fancy dress’ since I was a child, so this was a way of my incorporating that into adulthood as well as trying to resolve my own body dysmorphia and learn to see myself in a different light. I truly believe my experiences as a performer have changed me as a woman. It allowed me to tour universities, youth clubs and women’s groups giving talks on…

  • Women Are The New Men – Elaine Malone of HEX

    March 7, 2018 - By 

    When I told my friend Donal O’Gara I was writing this piece, he came out with the most incredible sentence, ‘Women are the new men’. He’s not wrong. Starting tonight, March 8th on International Women’s Day there will be a four day Weekender, based in the Roundy, Cork. Each day there will be an Artist’s Market, followed by live music, performance art, poetry and some of the towns finest brunch and night-time Djs. The project has a dual purpose, promoting female artists and raising funds for the Rape Crisis Centre in Cork. The event has been a collaborative effort of…

  • Fan-Girl Power: Feminism and Female Fandom

    March 7, 2018 - By 

    In a recent interview with The Guardian, Kim Deal of The Breeders claimed that “misogyny is the backbone of the music industry.” The events of the past several months have started long overdue conversations about gender equality in creative industries. This misogyny does not stop with music industry professionals or artists, though. Female fans – especially those in their teens – are regularly subjected to sexist stereotyping and derision. Language of madness is frequently used to describe female fans. Fangirls are apparently “hysterical” most of the time – a term that harks back to the Ancient Greek notion of a…