• BFF 19: Float Like A Butterfly

    April 18, 2019 - By 

    “It’s not about how many times you get hit, it’s abut how many times you get back up.” A flash of Rocky Balboa machismo seems inevitable in Float Like A Butterfly, another dose of feel-good Irish quasi-realism from the producers of Once and Sing Street. But Carmel Winters’ film, her second after 2010’s Snap, complicates the sentiment, delivering it in a moment of desperation, as a proud Traveller forces his meek son into a seaside fistfight he’s wholly untrained for. For the teenage Frances (Hazel Doupe), fighting is a means of asserting herself in a world where hostility comes from…

  • Final Acts Announced for Open Ear 2019

    April 17, 2019 - By 

    Hands down one of the must-attend festivals in the Irish summer festival calendar is Open Ear, which returns to Sherkin Island, West Cork across May 30 to June 2. Today, organisers have announced the final acts to play this year’s outing. And true to form, it’s a wonderfully genre-spanning affair. Joining the likes of Radie Peat, Maria Somerville, Patrick Kelleher & His Cold Dead Hands, Woven Skull, T-Woc, Áine O’Dwyer and many more include J Colleran, S>>D, Zeropunkt, Ocean Floor, 101 Beats Per Minute, Donal Dineen, Ordnance Survey, Son Zept, Gadget and the Cloud, Dublin Digital Radio and more. See…

  • BFF 19: Birds of Passage

    April 17, 2019 - By 

    Plagues, locusts and temptation in the desert: Birds of Passage is biblical in its grandeur and moral ruin. The current cultural fetizishation of drug cartel savagery is vampiric and lazy racism. Can-you-believe-this travelogues and “dark tourism” tours take the cash of white hipsters to show them the houses where monsters lived, while much TV and film deploys stock montages of whirring cash counting machines, biped planes stuffed with narcotics and South Americans going loco, bro. But Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s follow-up to 2015’s Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent cuts through the fake glamour and returns to the roots of…

  • Stream: Elma Orkestra and Ryan Vail – Arrival

    April 16, 2019 - By 

    As collaborative projects go, Borders by Derry artists Ryan Vail and Eoin O’Callaghan aka Elma Orkestra is one that fully deserves your attention. Having both been releasing music independently of one another since 2012, the pair have worked together on a release that sees their diverse creative paths meet head-on. Across eight tracks, from opener ‘Droves’ to the beat-laden outro ‘Arlene’, they masterfully blur the contours between contemporary electronic and classical realms. This breaking of new ground – of pushing boundaries and thwarting expectations via attention to detail and a joint penchant for analogue equipment – is what underpins Borders,…

  • The Specials @ The Olympia, Dublin

    April 16, 2019 - By 

    With The Specials’ last tour here being November 2014, it should have come as no surprise that they sold out all three nights in an instant. Adding to the anticipation is the fact this highly influential band finally decided to release new music, in the form of this year’s Encore. As a result night two was a feverish hive of positive energy and activity, as a multitude of skinheads, mods, punks, rude girls and bootboys of varying ages and hair lines, beamed and skanked their way throughout a sweaty 90 minute set of two-tone classics, sliced with a few new…

  • Turning Pirate’s Mixtape @ Lost Lane, Dublin

    April 16, 2019 - By 

    Lost Lane, Dublin’s newest venue, opened its doors this weekend on the site of what used to be the relatively infamous Lillie’s Bordello. While the truism about difficult second albums doesn’t quite translate to a live venue, word about the success of the launch night does put some pressure on tonight’s Turning Pirate Lost Lane Mix Tape to deliver. The bill is promising in itself, we know we can expect to see Barq, Cathy Davey and Niamh Farell of HamsandwicH fame but we are also promised VERY special guests. They even used caps lock. Compere Bryan Quinn introduces Barq (Half…

  • Body & Soul Add Fifty Acts to 2019 Line-Up

    April 16, 2019 - By 

    Body & Soul have added fifty new acts to its 2019 line-up. Joining previously announced acts including MODESELEKTOR, Princess Nokia and Kate Tempest are the likes of Confidence Man (pictured), The Black Lips, Post Punk Podge & The Technohippies, TPM, Chymera, Moxie, FEET, Mashrou’ Leila, King Kong Company, Molly Sterling, Junior Brother, Proper Micro VC, Sing Along Social, prYmary Colours, Kitt Philippa, Æ Mak, Just Mustard, Happyalone and EMBRZ. Here’s the new additions in full: Director Avril Stanley said, “Body & Soul’s 10th Anniversary line-up will lift your heart and send your hands into the solstice night sky. As well as presenting…

  • Win a Golden Ticket to Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival 2019

    April 15, 2019 - By 

    It defies logic how Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival consistently deliver on world-class, exceptionally diverse programmes, year after year after year. And yet, it’s something that the festival has managed, once again, for this year. Returning to the city across May 2-12, it will welcome everyone from Teenage Fanclub, Anna Calvi and Spiritualized to Jason Lytle, Lisa O’Neill and Echo & The Bunnymen. And that’s only scratching the surface (go here to delve deep into this year’s line-up, which, as ever, spans music, words & ideas, theatre, comedy, sound & vision, visual arts, and various special events.) It gives us no…

  • Watch: Just Mustard – Frank

    April 15, 2019 - By 

    With their singular brand of miasmic, trip-hop-inspired sorcery, the rise of Dundalk’s Just Mustard over the last few months has been a real pleasure to see. The latest milestone in their ascent is the release of ‘Frank’, a track that has emerged as something of a peak from the band’s scintillating live sets as of late. Accompanying the single release is Tim Shearwood’s video. Frontwoman Katie Ball said, “We thought it would be interesting to use stop motion animation to emphasise the broken rhythms of the song. Every character and prop in the video and their interactions represents a different musical or thematic…