• Festival Mixtape: Castlepalooza 2016

    June 28, 2016 - By 

    Set to return to Charleville Castle in Tullamore in Co. Offaly this weekend, the line-up for this year’s Castlepalooza is a perfectly balanced affair boasting everyone from Caribou, Villagers and Jurassic 5 to Cat Power, Field Music and Cian Nugent. Easily their strongest bill to date, this year’s genre-spanning schedule also features the some of the country’s very best homegrown acts including The Altered Hours, I Am The Cosmos and New Jackson. Got your ticket? Stream our twenty-five track Festival Mixtape below.

  • Picture This: Your National Visual Arts Guide – Boundaries

    June 27, 2016 - By 

    Boundaries as a theme is present in the four shows in this week’s Picture This – don’t worry we here at The Thin Air are not talking about Brexit. We mean boundaries in the sense of where something can be pushed to and expanded beyond, rather than the traditional sense of landmass and exclusion. Boundaries come with preconceptions, limitations and a sense of where something should stop or where you should stop exploring. The shows this week in Dublin, Belfast, Sligo and Cork alter, expand and shatter these while housing engaging and thought provoking exhibitions. We see a reexamination of…

  • Monday Mixtape: Alison Spittle

    June 27, 2016 - By 

    In this edition of Monday Mixtape comedian Alison Spittle selects some of her favourite songs, including Morrissey, No Monster Club and Everything Everything. Here’s a mixtape of important bits of my life. Some are from my college days, being a child and some that have lifted my mood and comforted me. I fell in and out of love with music as a teen. I was dangerously obsessed with looking for meaning in every lyric but now I’m in my twenties so I’ve calmed down! I look to music now to give me a pick me up and to have the craic.…

  • Rave New World (24/06)

    June 24, 2016 - By 

    There’s a strange mood in the air. All we can do is give you some music to help you get through it, as Aidan Hanratty delivers a look at the best electronic gigs, tracks and mixes of the week. Gigs Inside Moves 1st Birthday with Maurice Fulton at The Belfast Empire Music Hall Friday 24 June The legendary Maurice Fulton is playing this island twice this weekend (he’s in Dublin for Discotekken’s Pride event tomorrow), bringing a wealth of experience to the dance. I only learned this week that he was behind ‘Gypsy Woman’, a veritable classic. That’s on top of his…

  • Watch: Confess The Night, a new short by Dublin director and writer Dave Tynan

    June 23, 2016 - By 

    Featuring music by Dublin duo Simon Cullen & Sorca McGrath AKA Ships, Confess The Night is a brief yet perfectly engrossing two-minute short by Dublin director and writer Dave Tynan. A piece that is, according to its creator, “not exactly a short film but not exactly a music video either”, it is imbued with a curious somnambulist subtlety that has proven a lure in his previous efforts. Watch the film and see our brief Q+A with Tynan – in which he discusses his latest work, his early beginnings and career to date – below. Hi Dave. Can you give us some background…

  • Festival Mixtape: Interlude

    June 23, 2016 - By 

    Following their debut in October last year, Dublin city festival Interlude returns to the RHA Gallery this weekend for three days and nights of first-rate, decidedly eclectic global and homegrown sounds. With art and film also more than accounted for, Grandmaster Flash, Lisa Hannigan, Ships, Exmagician and Booka Brass Band are just some of the names that make up this year’s bill. Ahead of what’s set to be a memorable second outing, stream our twenty-track Interlude Festival Mixtape via Spotify right below.

  • Should We Stay Or Should We Go: An EU Referendum Playlist

    June 22, 2016 - By 

    With the all-important EU Referendum vote taking place tomorrow, we’ve sidestepped the unyielding electioneering to compile a genre-spanning Spotify playlist featuring fifty tracks – from The Fall, Amon Düül II and Galaxie 500 to Neutral Milk Hotel, Minutemen and The Velvet Underground – that we reckon some up the great continent in song.

  • Inbound: Elephant

    June 16, 2016 - By 

    With a busy few months ahead of him, including the release of new single ‘Stay With Me’ and a slot at Body & Soul at the weekend, Dundalk-based multi-instrumentalist Shane Clarke AKA Elephant is an artist carving out his own wonderfully inimitable path. Eoin Murray chats to him about his debut LP, Hypergiant, new stirrings and what it means to be a musician beyond the city. Since Hypergiant came out last October what have you been up to? Well I spent the end of last year gigging the album around. I decided at the beginning of this year to take a wee break…

  • Picture This: Your National Visual Arts Guide – Education

    June 13, 2016 - By 

    The three shows that make up this week’s edition of Picture This are as diverse and seemingly contrasting as the come. One features the retrospective of an Irish painter born a hundred years ago (Ulster Museum in Belfast), another is a graduation show of 16 photographers (Gallery of Photography in Dublin), while the third (Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda) takes a look at an altogether more national subject – The 1916 Rising. While the dates of 1916 and 2016, as both departure and reflection points, feature in each exhibition it’s the themes of education and understanding the ring out loudest from these four…

  • Monday Mixtape: Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre)

    June 13, 2016 - By 

    Ahead of The Brian Jonestown Massacre dates at Belfast’s Limelight on Wednesday, June 15 and Dublin’s Academy on Thursday, June 16, Anton Newcombe selects and talks about not five, not ten but twenty-three of his all-time favourite songs, featuring 13th Floor Elevators, Joni Mitchell, Dungen, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone and more. The Doors – The Crystal Ship There’s something about this beautiful love song that touched me when I was very young. Still love it. Dungen – Panda God, when this came out I was taken back – so powerful in any language. Love these guys, love Sweden. John’s Children –…