• Sun Araw – Rock Sutra

    May 14, 2020 - By 

    Some music can act as a time capsule. Just think back to the last time you listened to a song you hadn’t heard in a while, and the forgotten associations that hang faintly by the periphery lit up. Other music, however, seems to come pre-loaded with such memories, evoking a feeling so strongly you could almost forget that you had never actually experienced it. The work of Cameron Stallone, a.k.a. Sun Araw, often explores such ideas: what Burial is to a 5am walk through south London boroughs, Sun Araw is to the last July sunset while spaced out on a…

  • Queef – Presence

    April 18, 2020 - By 

    There’s a curious video of a live performance from Queef (the collaborative project of Laney Mannion and Claire Guerin) performing at the Monk and the Nun festival in 2016. In a forest clearing, Mannion and Guerin hang chimes and bells from the branches, balance kalimbas on tree stumps, and feedback sounds of the natural world through portable amplifiers. It gives the impression of some middle ground between a biological field study and a meditative retreat: an exploration into the minutiae of the smallest, most familiar sounds that surround us. And through their album Presence, they attempt to bring this soft-eared…

  • Rising Damp – Petrol Factory

    April 22, 2020 - By 

    So what exactly is punk? It’s a question that probably goes back at least as far as when The Damned released ‘New Rose’, and tends to get easily muddied in issues of purity and pretension. It was addressed again recently through a tongue-in-cheek, classroom-style approach on Declan Synnott’s  Ain’t You on Dublin Digital Radio. While following along with specially prepared Powerpoint slides and track selections from artists as diverse as Special Interest, Rites of Spring, and Dustin the Turkey (!), Mr.Synnott and his class mused on the punk credentials of various topics. And while there were occasional unambiguous declarations (cats:…

  • Shabaka and the Ancestors – We Are Sent Here By History

    March 30, 2020 - By 

    In a recent article for The Outline, “Don’t leave jazz to the jazz guys”, writer Shuja Haider laments on the fact that jazz has, in the eyes of many music lovers, been co-opted by a certain superficial and off-putting fan – the “jazz guy”. Given that the depth of jazz history makes exploration an intimidating prospect, it’s perhaps not all too surprising  that many of its most noticeable modern listeners have hesitated to dip beyond shallow, well-trodden edges. For those looking for a shot of adrenaline before diving fully into its vast, exhilarating waters, however, one could do much worse…

  • Beatrice Dillon – Workaround

    February 28, 2020 - By 

    It can be quite instructive to look back on divergent points in popular culture, and speculate on what could have been: the War of the Romantics between Brahms and Wagner, Bob Dylan going electric, the split between Gangsta Rap and Conscious Hip-Hop. One example which may not be mentioned in many history books is the evolutionary split in dubstep at the beginning of last decade. On one branch there was the more subtle approach by artists such as Benga, Coki, Skream and pre-chart mainstay, James Blake, whereas on the other there was the ultra-aggressive American wave spearheaded by artists like Skrillex. Of course…

  • Claire O’Brien – The Hollow

    February 22, 2020 - By 

      Folk music is an oral tradition: a passing down from generation to generation of not just songs, but tales and memories also. But does this definition hold up when discussing more modern incarnations of folk sounds, especially those of so-called “freak folk” or artists tagged with the New Weird label? At their best, these soft, subtly-psychedelic sounds evoke a different kind of memory, a collective natural memory passed down through the trees, the soil, and the wind. Such thoughts come to mind while listening to Claire O’Brien’s The Hollow, the latest gem from Glasgow-via-Kilkenny label, Moot Tapes.  The majority…

  • Andras – Joyful

    February 19, 2020 - By 

    What happens when the rave has to end? Ideas of nostalgia have been a frequent presence in the zeitgeist of recent dance music; from the endless-party revivalism of Jamie XX’s In Colour, to the lost futures that critic Mark Fisher identified from Burial’s debut. Those albums are arguably positioned on the extremes of nostalgia, however; for a more tender, bittersweet exploration of these ideas, Australian producer Andras presents his latest album, Joyful. Andras himself describes Joyful as “cutting a path through an overgrowth of nostalgia around 70s acid folk and 90s acid house”, which on first listen is an intriguing…

  • Gareth Davis & Merzbow – Broken Landscapes

    January 30, 2020 - By 

    To be rich in friends is to be poor in nothing, or so the saying goes. Given how barely anyone who dedicates their life to experimental music ends up rich, perhaps the success of such musicians should be measured by their influence and the connections they create. Of course, such an idea cannot be measured quantitatively, but if one were to do that, collaborations could be a handy metric. And by that standard, Masami Akita, or Merzbow to you and I, would take some beating. An exhaustive rundown of his collaborations would be too exhausting to list, but in the…

  • God Alone. – God Alone

    January 20, 2020 - By 

    Genre is a tricky thing. While useful for an audience looking for a labelled path to expand their listening, the idea of slapping a label on your music chafes most artists. This can be especially true for metal acts; given its highly specific sub-genres,  it is hard to not be boxed into one or the other. Cork band God Alone. are aware of this, and on their self-titled second EP they demonstrate their grasp on a variety of different styles to avoid any easy categorisation. Opener ‘Feeling on Tic’ is, by a large margin, the heaviest song on the EP.…