• Interview: Hornets

    March 8, 2016 - By 

    Ahead of their rather special, secret album fundraiser on Saturday, Melanie Brehaut chats to Belfast hardcore quartet Hornets about their influences, ambitions & love of the local scene. You have a rather exciting event coming up. Can you tell us a bit about it? We’re having a bring your own event in Belfast City Centre in order to raise funds for recording our debut album. It’s limited to 80 spaces and you can receive details via sending your name over to hornetsbanduk@gmail.com. We’re playing alongside us will be Apartments and Unyielding Love. There will also be an Exhibition featuring work from Jenna Hayes,…

  • Interview: Hamell on Trial

    March 9, 2016 - By 

    When Ed Hamell decided he was done with bands, picked up a battered acoustic guitar, and decided to go it alone, he called himself Hamell on Trial. And whether he meant to or not, he set the scene for over two decades of confessional, confrontational, and apocalyptic music. Make no bones about it, when he gets on the stage, Ed Hamell is on trial. And we’re judge, jury, and executioner. With numerous brushes with mainstream acclaim under his belt, the New Yorker has managed to keep in underground for most of his career, but that acerbic style, calling to mind…

  • Texture and Physicality with ELLLL

    February 16, 2016 - By 

    Having featuring as an Inbound act in the second issue of our magazine, Cork-based producer Ellen King AKA ELLLL has well and truly kicked into gear with recent release ‘Romance’, a self-professed “beat-driven collage with a playful and sinister narrative”. Touching on her creative process, Irish electronic music and what the future holds, King talks to fellow Cork native Mike McGrath Bryan. Photos by Louise Adelaide McKeown. How did ELLLL start? Where does Ellen King end and ELLLL begin? I had been writing some music as an undergrad and was approached to play live. I needed a name. So, that’s how it came…

  • Crowded With Different Voices: an interview with Julia Holter

    February 11, 2016 - By 

    Few artists follow their own path so downright convincingly as Californian experimental pop auteur Julia Holter. With her extraordinary, peerlessly prismatic fourth studio album, Have You In My Wilderness, finishing at the top-end of many ’15 End of Year lists, her standing as a supremely individual musician is incontestable. Ahead of her show at Dublin’s Button Factory next Wednesday night (January 17) Brian Coney chats to Holter about inspiration, the thematic concepts underlying her music and the consequence of widespread critical acclaim. It’s five months on from the release of Have You In My Wilderness. I’m curious: does the kind of acclaim it…

  • Inbound: Bear Worship

    February 9, 2016 - By 

    Bear Worship is the new project from Irish musician Karl Knuttel, who has previously performed as Pinkie and as Ivan St John.  Here, he talks about his love of synthesisers, making music out of necessity, and the benefits of being ‘ridiculously controlling’. Words by David Turpin. You’ve said that Bear Worship emerged out of a time of anxiety and depression, and yet the music is far more dreamlike than nightmarish, and far more expansive than claustrophobic.  What do you mean when you say it was made “out of necessity”? You know, anxiety is a harrowing experience. It’s not at all…

  • Interview: Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys

    February 8, 2016 - By 

    The non­-for­-profit­ run ​Open House Festival​ finished its round of sold out gigs across Northern Ireland at the weekend. The festival, which organises live performances in unique and intimate venues, treated guests to acts such as homegrown talent Stephen Maccartney; Jarrod Dickenson, an upcoming Texan-­born Folk and Roots­ Blues singer; and last but not least, Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys, a Bluegrass band from Michigan. During the festival, Claire McKeever caught up with Mark and Josh, one half of Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys, at their penultimate gig at The Arcadia in Portrush. How was Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys…

  • Interview: Noise, Lust and Depression with Autumns

    February 4, 2016 - By 

    Ahead of three Belfast shows in the coming months, Derry’s Christian Donaghey AKA Autumns is a man on a mission. Having recently recorded his debut LP in two days at Smalltown America Studios, Donaghey chats to us about the art of improvisation, the literary impact on his work and his plans for the year. Hi Christan, you’ve recently finished recording your debut album.Who did you record with and how did it go? I recorded the album with a great engineer and long-time friend of mine called Caolán Austin, who I’ve known since I was around thirteen. We recorded it in my…

  • Interview: Steven Agnew – Punk Principles & Policies (Part 2)

    February 4, 2016 - By 

    Part 1 of our interview last week with the Green Party NI leader Steven Agnew focused on his early involvement in the local music scene and the anarchist movement around it, leading toward his eventual election and current role at Stormont. Here, we’re given a seldom-seen look into the – apologies – Kafkaesque system within which the only Stormont-elected member of a minority party has to work – overcoming contradictory policy, surrounded by homogeneous career politicians in the red-tape-encumbered uncooperative & uncommunicative system of departments that make up the Executive. It’s the devolution of power in more ways than one,…

  • Interview: Steven Agnew – Punk Principles & Policies (Part 1)

    January 26, 2016 - By 

    This two part interview gets into the bones of how and why someone who grew up in a predominantly working class Protestant background, who associated and lived primarily around those of an anarchist persuasion with a grassroots ethos, came around to getting involved with the slimiest business around: Big NI politics. We’ll follow through, in The Thick of It fashion, to the absurd complexity inherent within any political structure, and how it’s navigated by someone who actively tries to get things done outside of tribal politics – the extent of which is felt far beyond simply Green vs. Orange. Where…

  • Premiere: Strength – Northern Ireland Yes

    January 21, 2016 - By 

    Set to play our Independent Venue Week show at/with Belfast’s Oh Yeah Centre on Saturday, January 30, Derry band Strength are one of sixteen Irish acts we’ve handpicked for our current 16 For ’16 feature. Ahead of a string of shows to mark its 7″ release, we’re pleased to premiere the video for their positively singular new single, ‘Northern Ireland Yes’, along with a revealing Q+A with the band’s main man, Rory Moore. Dig in. Hi Rory. When and how did Strength come about? Strength came about at the tail end of Red Organ Serpent Sound. I felt we were losing a lot of the live, creative…