• Singing And Dying Is What We Are Born For: An Interview With RÓIS

    October 10, 2024 - By 

    Song as a fundamental part of the human experience, a force both profoundly quotidian and supernatural, sits at the heart of RÓIS’ new release MO LÉAN. Its guiding theme is that of death and grief and their expression through music, inspired by forms that served an exalted purpose for generations and generations of Irish people. Caoineadh or keening is a form of vocal lament that existed in Gaelic society since antiquity and only ceased as a living rite at the turn of the 20th century. Sung at wakes near the body of the deceased, generally by a single or a…

  • Field Music: An Interview with Natalia Beylis

    September 13, 2023 - By 

    The Leitrim-based sound artist speaks to Ruairí McCann about her new album, Mermaids, and her music’s relationship to place, language, and community Photos by Aislinn McGinn The great Leitrim-born author John McGahern spent a large portion of his adulthood outside of the country and yet his artistic life remained there, rooted, and deeply concerned with recreating on the page its people, sights, sounds and rhythms, to an almost hypnotic degree. To the extent that the last scene of his last book, Memoir, is occupied with a stroll along the lanes, streams and hedgerows which define and feed Leitrim and much…

  • The Museyroom and Many Worlds of Roger Doyle

    August 1, 2023 - By 

    Irish composer and godfather of Irish electronica Roger Doyle speaks about his latest album, Finnegans Wake – Suite of Affections, performing live, science fiction and the creative process Photos by Loreana Rushe When Roger Doyle graduated from the University of Utrecht, he was told that he was “the flowering of a seed that was never planted”. It was a poetic summation of his anomalous position on the 1970s Irish music scene, as an electroacoustic composer. What’s more remarkable is that this has been just one strand in his radiating, ever-evolving corpus. For over fifty years, he’s been a force of…

  • Color Out of Space

    February 28, 2020 - By 

    After his quarter-century exile from feature filmmaking, writer-director Richard Stanley returns with Lovecraftian passion project Color Out Of Space. It adapts H. P. Lovecraft’s short story of the same name, where an asteroid strikes a remote New England farm, unleashing an incomprehensible alien entity which begins to infect the bodies and minds of the family it finds there.  The combination of the excellent source material and Stanley—who even when his films were run ragged by studio interference remained a strikingly distinct visual stylist—should have made for an abundantly weird film, and yet the results are disappointingly orthodox. There is potential,…

  • Uncut Gems

    January 17, 2020 - By 

    Uncut Gems, writer-directors Josh & Benny Safdie’s fifth feature together, starts full throttle and only occasionally lets up. It is fixed to the world and worldview of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jeweller for the stars in New York’s diamond district: a chancer and grifter, thriving in an ecosystem of insatiable avarice. As it becomes rapidly clear, he is a man that gets both a hit and an identity from triumphing over the constant barrage of knife-edge negotiations and impossible odds. Or, failing that, just surviving them. Ratner juggles his family life, with kids he is provisionally interested in and…