• Girls Rock Dublin Announce 2019 Camp

    April 3, 2019 - By 

    Following the success of the past two years, Girls Rock Dublin has announced the return of its summer camp for 12-17 year olds. Set to take place over the last week of June, from 25th-29th, the camp has taken great care in ensuring more inclusivity than ever before. There are spaces for 20 (cis & trans) girls and gender non-binary folks, with half of this number designated as scholarships to applicants from Direct Provision and low-income households. Over the five days, twenty applicants will form a band, learn an instrument, write a song & perform onstage by the end, with no previous…

  • A One-Off Event Will Explore the Weird & Wonderful Work of Irish Video Director Bob Gallagher

    March 20, 2019 - By 

    If you’re in any way au fait with the likes of Girl Band, Villagers, SOAK, Pillow Queens, Saint Sister and Myles Manley, you’ll be at least familiar with the name Bob Gallagher. Over the last few years, the director and cinematographer has emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the world of Irish video direction On April 18, Dublin’s Button Factory will play host to Under My Garage. It’s an evening of discussion, music and live visuals that will explore Gallagher’s work by inviting attendees on a “journey through his subconscious, transforming the Button Factory into the set of a…

  • Preview: Brian Irvine Ensemble @ Brilliant Corners Jazz Festival

    March 5, 2019 - By 

    It was at last year’s Brilliant Corners when the Brian Irvine Ensemble ended their 6-year hiatus, and for good reason. Irvine cuts a singular figure not just in Northern Irish music, but worldwide, as one who embodies the spirit of the perpetually open-minded Brilliant Corners and all that jazz music encompasses, by pushing ever forward, with only a slight glance at anything that preceded.  The ensemble comprises around a dozen in number, drawn from varying backgrounds of contemporary classical, jazz & improvised music in Europe & Russia. As with many of artists comprising the Brilliant Corners 2019 lineup, their performances give themselves entirely over to neither formless improvisation…

  • Preview: Izumi Kimura @ The Black Box Green Room, Sunday March 3

    March 1, 2019 - By 

    Brilliant Corners, as we’ve said before, is “the finest patchwork of jazz & sonic digression that Belfast has to offer”, and, in its seventh year, has pulled out all the stops to make this another memorable piece of scheduling. It officially kicks off tomorrow with Ulster Youth Jazz Orchestra & The Comet Is Coming – the latter of which is sold out – and we’ll be highlighting some of the events on offer throughout its run from March 2-9. Firstly, we have contemporary pianist Izumi Kimura, who plays an afternoon show this Sunday in the intimate Black Box Green Room. Her liminal craft is one of nuance, subtlety and precipitous…

  • Brilliant Corners Announce 2019 Programme

    January 30, 2019 - By 

    Now in its seventh year, the tastemakers at Moving On Music have announced the programme for their annual highlight – and the country’s finest jazz festival – Brilliant Corners. The festival will take over various venues in Belfast across March 2-9, with a kickoff solo piano concert from Craig Taborn at SARC’s Sonic Lab on Saturday, February 16. As expected, it’s a wonderfully diverse patchwork of jazz and first-rate sonic digression in the spirit of MOM’s booking the year round. It’s appropriate then, that the two first-night offerings on March 2 are the Ulster Youth Jazz Orchestra Shabaka Hutchings’ unmissable apocalyptic synth-jazz project The Comet Is Coming, supported by…

  • Sonic Youth: 30 Years of Daydream Nation @ Irish Film Institute

    January 28, 2019 - By 

    On Saturday, March 2nd, Dublin’s Irish Film Institute will host a special screening of Lance Bangs’ Sonic Youth: 30 Years of Daydream Nation. Celebrating the recent thirtieth anniversary of the seminal album, the event will also feature Bangs (director of Slint documentary Breadcrumb Trail) and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley presenting programme of films related to the album, which will include excerpts from the Bangs-directed concert film along with documentaries Put Blood In The Music and On Rust. Tickets are priced at €16 and can be bought here.

  • Quiet Arch Fourth Birthday Party

    December 20, 2018 - By 

    Belfast independent label Quiet Arch celebrate their fourth birthday this year, and to celebrate, they’ll be holding a concert featuring some of their foremost artists at Belfast’s Elmwood Hall on December 21. The bill is as fittingly eclectic as the label itself, and NI Music Prize-winning singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside, Derry electronic wizard Ryan Vail with Arco String Quartet, power-pop/folk craftsman Malojian, indie-pop quartet Beauty Sleep, with spoken word artist & poet Stephen James Smith as compère for the night. Tickets, priced £12, are available from Ticketsource. Doors open at 8pm.

  • Preview: Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids

    November 22, 2018 - By 

    For some people, genius is a bottomless well that flows from within and permeates everything it touches. Like our first co-presented show with Moving On Music back in October – Peter Brotzmann’s Full Blast – we’re delighted to bring an artist to the Belfast, who, despite decades between his inaugural cultural moment and now, continues to create music of astonishing relevance. Idris Ackamoor is a saxophonist, sometime keytarist & artistic director of afro-jazz ensemble The Pyramids. An Angel Fell by Idris Ackamoor and the Pyramids The Pyramids were founded in the early 70s through Antioch College as part of Cecil Taylor’s Black Music Ensemble. Embarking on the kind of pilgrimage that’s the stuff of musical…

  • Cuttin’ Heads Collective 3rd Birthday Weekender

    November 9, 2018 - By 

    Over the last three years, Cork’s Cuttin’ Heads Collective have flown the flag for hip-hop – both homegrown and further flung – like none other. A team comprising fifteen producers, DJs, designers, breakers and rappers, they have played a broad, and increasingly vital role in promoting all things hip-hop, beats and turntablism. This weekend, the collective celebrate their third birthday with an unmissable two-day event assembling some exceptional talent. On Saturday (November 10) The Poor Relation will play host a DJ set from UK turntablist and producer Touchy Subject, the high energy live finger drumming of Germany’s Clockwerk, and Limerick-based scratch master and experimental hip-hop producer…

  • EP Premiere: Porphyry – Wounded, White Light

    October 26, 2018 - By 

    The term folktronica is just a touch reductionist for what the Derry-born, now Berlin-based Porphyry is doing. While in a more superficial sense, he could be described as an outsider Villagers, nothing in Ireland is attempting to achieve what Daryl Martin has with new EP, Wounded, White Light.  We loved his previous, self-described ‘maximalist’ Ursa Minor/Coming Home EP, not least for managing “the unenviable job of being boldly unpigeonholeable as art, and deeply personal, without approaching any level of bloated grandiosity”. Through minimalistic methods, however, the same result has been reached once more, with effortless finesse. Its cleansing, organic, seemingly breathing compositions weave unexpected synth textures into alternately piano & guitar-led freak-folk-meets-Robbie Basho-ian primitivism. Across its four tracks,…