• Rave New World: Inside Moves, Willow, XOSAR

    July 22, 2016 - By 

    With his handsome and esteemed Rave New World partner Antoin Lindsay AWOL, Aidan Hanratty delivers a look at the very best electronic gigs, tracks and mixes of the week. Gigs Inside Moves – Dan Shake at T13, Belfast Friday 22 July  Inside Moves bring Dan Shake over for his Belfast debut. Hi brand of house is warm, full of samples and soul, and he’s known as being the first European artist signed to Moodymann’s Mahogani Music. Bastardo Electrico presents DJ Bone at Cyprus Avenue, Cork Friday 22 July Detroit don and deck wizard DJ Bone comes to Cork for a…

  • Picture This – Your National Visual Arts Guide: PhotoIreland Special

    July 22, 2016 - By 

    July is a strange month in Ireland, an interim of sorts. It’s the summer month without a bank holiday. Most sports have taken a hiatus. The Euros are done and dusted. Even the GAA Championship, that bastion of Irish summer months, doesn’t really start until August. The Leaving & Junior Certs are over, as Alice Cooper once said – school’s out for the summer. You could be half tempted to either count down or whittle away the days until that glorious long weekend at the start of August – and with the weather we’ve had this week who’d blame you.…

  • Inbound: Lauren Bird

    July 21, 2016 - By 

    Hailing from Strabane in County Tyrone, Lauren Bird is is an artist steadily making a name for herself within the Irish singer-songwriter scene. In May 2014 Bird – or McGeogh to the family postman – uploaded her self-titled debut EP onto Bandcamp, and within two days it had hit the number one spot on the site’s acoustic chart. Bird’s affiliation with the world of music began after she took up the viola aged 7, and from there she gravitated toward the guitar, piano, drums, bass and finally the ukulele. It’s the latter instrument that is the main focus of her…

  • Preview: The Night Institute Turns One

    July 21, 2016 - By 

    This Saturday marks the first anniversary for The Night Institute, one of Belfast’s newest and most popular dance music fixtures (and very likely its best weekly electronic music event) at Aether & Echo. The night was set up in 2015 by the city’s very own Timmy Stewart and Jordan (the latter of which used to run the Nocturne parties at the same venue). Their fifty-second shindig, which is on this Saturday from 11PM-3AM, will take place at their regular haunt and cap off a journey through a rip-roaring past year which has earned The Night Institute a devoted local following. To help…

  • Waxing Lyrical with Cork’s Plugd Records

    July 21, 2016 - By 

    Situated in the beautiful Triskel Arts Centre, independent record shop Plugd is a central hub for music of all creeds and flavours in Cork City. Apart from selling records, founder Jimmy Horgan has been a pivotal figure in the shaping and cultivation of the vibrant Cork music scene. Words and photos by Blair Massie. First off, I wanted to ask you how your affinity for records began? What would you recall being the first records that you bought? Well… growing up in the pre-CD era, I had really cool aunts who collected a bit – mostly folk stuff like Dylan…

  • “If you aren’t catered for make it happen.” An Interview With All-Female Night GIRL

    July 21, 2016 - By 

    The brainchild of DJs Venus Dupree AKA Claire Hall and Marion Hawkes, Belfast’s The Pavilion will see the launch of all-female DJ night GIRL tomorrow night (Friday, July 22). With a vast musical back catalogue between them, the residents are promising a full-on musical assault spanning the gap between disco, Italo, house and techno. Brian Coney chats to Hawkes about why the time is right for the country’s first regular all-female night. GIRL is launching this weekend at the Pavilion in Belfast. When were the proverbial seeds for the project first sown? A few months after meeting Claire I guess.…

  • Inbound: Flecks

    July 19, 2016 - By 

    There is an intimacy inherent in Flecks’ understated, atmospheric songs – enveloping sonic warmth that’s an invitation to lean closer; to listen beyond the quintet’s instrumental weave and hear what whispered reflections await to be deciphered. The members have converged from various musical outfits and endeavours, uniting with an ease that manipulates the auditory sense; slowly coating the listener in an aural glaze like the honey that seems to glisten on Freya Monks’ vocals. Soft, insistent percussion pushes and pulls the band along – both a quickened heartbeat and a measured pulse behind the tonal undercurrents and lyrical disclosures. Their…

  • Festival Mixtape: Knockanstockan 2016

    July 19, 2016 - By 

    Ahead of its highly-anticipated return to Blessington Lakes in Wicklow this weekend, we’ve compiled a Spotify playlist featuring twenty artists we highly recommend checking out at this year’s Knockanstockan. Celebrating their 10th outing – a huge accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination – here’s our recent interview with Bettine McMahon and Graham Sharpe from the fiercely independent, homegrown Irish festival right here. And here’s Holly Pereira’s rather pretty Knockanstockan 2016 Festival Map.

  • Banter & Eventbrite Event Talks: Does Dublin Need a Night Mayor?

    July 18, 2016 - By 

    Tuesday July 12th saw the third in this year’s Event Talk series take place in Wood Quay. Hosted by Banter and Eventbrite, the series focuses on event-related talks and conversations, including festival trends and the science of events. For the third talk the topic was that of Dublin needing a Night Mayor, a topic of debate at SXSW and something many other European cities have brought in. The panel, hosted by Banter’s Jim Carroll, was made up of Richard Guiney (CEO DublinTown, Dublin City’s Business Improvement District), Niall Byrne (Nialler9) and Roisín McVeigh (Cheap Trick, Frock Advisor and Totally Dublin). Over the course of about an hour the…

  • RIP Alan Vega: The Elvis of Psychosis

    July 17, 2016 - By 

    Like many who would become fans, I can vividly recall discovering Suicide. I was barely eighteen, having returned home from yet another ill-advised rural Northern Irish Saturday night out. A few days before, a classically myopic Nirvana devotee a tad too immersed in late-teen hubris, guitar angst – I seem to have told myself – just wasn’t cutting it much anymore. Suddenly gluttonous almost to the point of panic for musical discovery, I had recently spent several consecutive late nights in the back room downloading countless vigorously recommended albums by two sonic savants I recall swearing by then, Piero Scaruffi…