• Sonic Youth: 30 Years of Daydream Nation @ Irish Film Institute

    January 28, 2019 - By 

    On Saturday, March 2nd, Dublin’s Irish Film Institute will host a special screening of Lance Bangs’ Sonic Youth: 30 Years of Daydream Nation. Celebrating the recent thirtieth anniversary of the seminal album, the event will also feature Bangs (director of Slint documentary Breadcrumb Trail) and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley presenting programme of films related to the album, which will include excerpts from the Bangs-directed concert film along with documentaries Put Blood In The Music and On Rust. Tickets are priced at €16 and can be bought here.

  • Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy and De La Soul Set For Dublin Show

    January 28, 2019 - By 

    Dublin’s 3Arena will play hosted to one one of the strongest bills of the year in May. The sole Irish installment of the Gods of Rap 2019 tour, hip-hop giants Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy and De La Soul will play the venue on May 14th. The show will be hosted and presented by DJ Premier. The tour will mark the anniversary of three iconic records: Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) turns 25, Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back turns 30, and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising turns 30. Tickets are…

  • 19 for ’19: Porphyry

    February 1, 2019 - By 

    We continue 19 for ‘19 – our feature looking at nineteen Irish acts that we’re convinced are going places in 2019 – with Derry artist Daryl Martin AKA Porphyry. Photo by Mickey Rooney “To explore the relevance of old philosophies and the art of the past in modern music, with layers of meaning created through leitmotif, musical allegory and literary references”. It’s no stretch to call Daryl Martin a genuine polymath. Based in Derry, Porphyry – named after the Roman Neoplatonic philosopher – is a fully-formed artistic vision, executed unlike anything else in Ireland. When we first 2017 debut EP…

  • Machinefabriek – With Voices

    January 26, 2019 - By 

    How much does concept matter? Hackneyed as it may be, it’s a question that comes up while listening to the latest album from prolific Dutch artist Machinefabriek AKA Rutger Zuydervelt. With Voices, as the title suggests, is an album of eight tracks composed around the human voice. Heard blind, it’s a fascinating document filled with fascinating sounds that evoke a host of different moods. Reading into it and things get even more complicated or interesting, depending on your view. Machinefabriek crafted a 35-minute piece of music that was sent to the eight vocalists involved, each of whom responded in their…

  • The Mule

    January 25, 2019 - By 

    In Clint Eastwood’s The Mule, The Man with No Name is faced with his biggest adversaries yet: Cartels, the DEA, and smartphones. A quite strange and mostly not very good version of what David Lowery and Robert Redford were doing in The Old Man And The Gun, Eastwood directs and stars as a 90 year-old horticulturist who has fallen on hard times and becomes a drugs mule for the local Cartel. Like Redford’s career criminal in Old Man, Mule is a possible swansong in which a screen icon plays a compulsive workaholic who has neglected his family. But Mule has a sourer…

  • Belfast Film Festival Euro Comedy Season

    January 24, 2019 - By 

    The Belfast Film Festival’s Euro Comedy season continues this week with two eccentric, original offerings: The Man without a Past and A Town called Panic. Aki Kaurismaki’s (The Other Side of Hope) The Man Without a Past plays like a cross between the Coen brothers’ character driven, noir-influenced cinema and the dryly deadpan, surreal films of Roy Andersson. It’s also incredibly beautiful to look at, with cinematographer Timo Salminen and Kaurismaki achieving a kind of live-action Edward Hopper painting in the film’s golden lighting and the precise posing of the characters.   The plot follows M (Markku Peltola) as the…

  • 19 for ’19: Carlton Doom

    January 24, 2019 - By 

    We continue 19 for ‘19 – our feature looking at nineteen Irish acts that we’re convinced are going places in 2019 – with fast-rising Belfast producer Chris Hanna AKA Carlton Doom. Photo by Leah Carroll Though the moniker Carlton Doom might currently be unfamiliar to some, the name Chris Hanna has long been one synonymous with the forward-pushing, world-beating electronic community in Belfast city. An elemental, much-admired presence in the city, he has released a string of releases under different guises in the past. Running parallel with borderline legendary sets at showcases including AVA Festival and homegrown club institutions such as Twitch,…

  • Bouts – Flow

    January 24, 2019 - By 

    After a five year hiatus, Dublin based Bouts have harkened back to when they were regulars on the Irish music scene, circa 2013, and gifted us with a long awaited second album. Flow is the result of two years of intercontinental songwriting and recording, as the lads are now spread across Dublin, London and Amsterdam. But has the maturity and cultural expansion added to the creative and musical process? Barry Bracken (vocals, guitar), Colin Boylan (guitar, vocals), Niall Jackson (bass, vocals) and Daniel Flynn (drums, percussion) have nurtured a sound that’s familiar and comforting in its ‘90s inspired indie pop…

  • Video Premiere: Post Punk Podge feat. TPM – Government Security

    January 25, 2019 - By 

    One of our 19 for ’19 featured artists, Limerick’s Post Punk Podge and the Technohippies are back with another establishment-botherer in the form of ‘Government Security’. Tackling the insidious danger of their hapless rep, given what they’ve been at recently, it’s another timely number from one of Ireland’s foremost Zeitgeist-catchers. Mixed by Theodore Vain and featuring a cameo from Dundalk duo TPM, this single precedes his forthcoming EP, Post Millennium Tension – out February 15. One of the most engaging live performers and prolific acts on the isle, Podge is currently working on his debut album, a mixtape, and astonishingly, ‘Government Security’ won’t even feature on the new EP. Grab the track…

  • Countersunk share video for 101 Beats Per Minute track, ‘I Only Have Eyes’

    January 23, 2019 - By 

    From August 2018 right up to the end of the year, Dublin experimental label, Countersunk, has been sharing a track a week as part of its 101 Beats Per Minute project. Featuring contributions from a wide range of Irish musicians and producers, each track in the collection is as distinct as the next, with the only brief given being that it had to be 101 bpm. The tracks themselves have been released anonymously, but among the contributors are the likes of Jape, ELLLL, Margie Jean Lewis, Somadrone and Countersunk’s own Sunken Foals AKA Dunk Murphy. The anonymity of each of the release’s…