• Paddy Mulcahy – The Words She Said

    March 22, 2017 - By 

    The finest ambient music often finds the artist mining the barriers and plundering the gaps between analogue and digital. Julianna Barwick uses layers and loops to convert her own voice into a universe of sound. Ian William Craig feeds his operatic tones through layers of fuzz to create something quite brilliant and utterly unique. William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops chart the sound of old, decaying tapes, meant to be digitised – quite literally – falling apart as he lets them play out on rotation. The new record from Limerick’s Paddy Mulcahy has something of this feel to it. Mulcahy explores (in…

  • Looking Svelte – Gelatine

    February 17, 2017 - By 

    It’s not always wise to read too much into a record’s title, but in this case, it feels spot on. Gelatine, the debut EP from Looking Svelte, is a hot mess: thick and viscous, gluey and amorphous. It recalls at times the dense sounds of celebrated avant-gardists Gang Gang Dance and Purity Ring, along with the DIY aesthetic of WIFE (aka James Kelly of Altar of Plagues). But like the best of those projects, when you peel away the layers of reverb and distortion, there’s a pop song at the core. Looking Svelte is the stubbornly lo-fi, decidedly high-tech solo…