• the arts column: February 26th

    February 25, 2019 - By 

    In this week’s edition of the arts column we’ve details of this a spoken word event, a proposal for a new arts space in Dublin, studio lets, exhibitions and funding deadlines. As always, if you have an event, talk, exhibition, or would like to recommend one please get in touch via aidan[at]thethinair.net Event | Performance @ IMMA, Dublin Tomorrow, Wednesday 27th, sees IMMA After, a collective of artists and young art professionals based in IMMA, are due to host a spoken word event in the museum. Titled Spoken Realties and hosted in association with Poetry Ireland, the evening sees poets Maighread Medbh, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Padraig Regan and…

  • Watch: Robyn G Shiels – Black Moon (Arvo Party Remix)

    February 26, 2019 - By 

    Taken from one of the Irish releases of last year, the five-track Death of the Shadows, ‘Black Moon’ found Kilrea singer-songwriter Robyn G Shiels‘ funereal folk craft stripped back to a plaintive, five-minute ode. It was a fitting curtain call for an EP that doubly confirmed the Belfast-based musician as one of the most incisive songwriting voices around. Three months on, Herb Magee aka Arvo Party has given the song the remix treatment. And how it comes off: leaning into the innate spaciousness and yearnful quality of the original, Magee’s inspired washes of ambience and decay reveal a whole new character to Shiels’…

  • Massive Attack @ 3Arena, Dublin

    February 25, 2019 - By 

    When Massive Attack announced their current Mezzanine XXI tour last October, no one could have reasonably expected a safe or linear presentation of the band’s seminal – and arguably career-cresting – 1998 album. With founding member Robert Del Naja aka 3D promising a “one-off piece of work; our own personalised nostalgia nightmare head trip”, at Dublin’s 3Arena tonight, the Bristol luminaries deliver on that pledge and then some. Unless you’ve been keeping a close eye on recent setlists, the big curveball of tonight’s set isn’t the top-drawer guest vocalists (in this case, Horace Andy and the ever extraordinary Elizabeth Frazer).…

  • Julia Jacklin – Crushing

    February 24, 2019 - By 

    From the outside of a diary we observe nothing but casual scratches and marks of use on deep brown leather. Gently a hand moves to it, and with intention flicks to the next available blank page. A pen moves swiftly to and fro. Ink enters the page not by any requirement of physics, but seemingly through the weight of the deliberation behind it. Lines cross and titles sit unassumingly, until the sign off they reach outwards; the cover is closed and again the aged leather holds our gaze. Following up her 2016 debut Don’t Let the Kids Win, Julia Jacklin…

  • Panda Bear – Buoys

    February 23, 2019 - By 

    Panda Bear’s Buoys is a mirage of deconstructed indie governed by its uninhibited stream of consciousness lyrical style. His writing makes this one of the most vivid depictions of society in 2019 so far and a lament to a generation condemned by its own vanity. Through minimalism, Panda Bear – Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox – draws the listener’s attention solely to his sincere, reverberated vocals through which he bares a haunting portrait of the modern human psyche. Lennox succeeds in making the familiar sound unfamiliar, taking the roots of conventional tracks and scrambling them into something completely unrecognisable and unique.…

  • Stream: Swimmers Jackson – Believe

    February 28, 2019 - By 

    A jack of all trades and master of many, London-based Dubliner Niall Jackson is right up there as one of the hardest-working Irish musicians you’re ever likely to come across. Beyond being a member of indie-rock quartet Bouts (who have just released quite possibly the Irish album of the year thus far) and post-punk duo Sweat Threats, he’s also been drip-feeding the world some stellar sounds in his solo guise, Swimmers Jackson, since 2013. New single ‘Believe’ is one of his most emphatic efforts to date. A candid and carefully-crafted tale, it doubles up as something of an extension of last year’s ‘Pain In the Heart’.…

  • Premiere: Joshua Burnside – The Good Word (Live at the Elmwood Hall)

    February 25, 2019 - By 

    Northern Irish alt-folk trailblazer Joshua Burnside has announced the release of a new album, Live at the Elmwood Hall. Recorded at Belfast’s historic Elmwood Hall, as part of Quiet Arch’s fourth birthday in December 2018, it’s release that reveals the full spectrum of Burnside’s emphatic craft. Featuring reworked, full-band arrangements of tracks handpicked from his Northern Irish Music Prize-winning album, EPHRATA, as well as EPs Hollllogram and All Round the Light Said, it captures a set that leaps between intimate and raw, to full-blown and celebratory. Speaking about the album, Burnside said, “It’s quite strange listening to it back in way, like…

  • Stereolab Set For Irish Shows

    February 20, 2019 - By 

    Re-emerging English-French avant-pop heroes Stereolab have announce two Irish shows. Having went on hiatus in 2009, the band will return to play a series of dates in 2019, including Belfast’s Empire Music Hall on June 24 and Vicar Street in Dublin on June 25. Tickets go on sale at 9am on Friday.