• Preview: Pauli Lyytinen Magnetia Orkesteri @ Brilliant Corners

    March 8, 2019 - By 

    On Friday, March 8, Belfast’s Black Box will play host to one of the outright highlights of this year’s Brilliant Corners Jazz Festival. Backed with his Magnetia Orkesteri – a masterfully mottled assembly of some of his country’s very best players – multi award-winning Finnish saxophonist Pauli Lyytinen will present a career-spanning performance. Renown for drawing on their individual soloistic strengths and nigh on psychic interplay, this project’s blend of free-jazz and western chamber music is implosive, triumphant and essential. Tickets are a measly £12 and can be snapped up here. Sitting on the fence? Delve into 2017’s Pauli Lyytinen Magnetia Orkesteri. Pauli…

  • 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…

  • the arts column: March 6th

    March 5, 2019 - By 

    In this week’s edition of the arts column we’ve details of exciting new exhibitions opening, a charity event, a pair of residencies and studio memberships. As always, if you have an event, talk, exhibition, or would like to recommend one please get in touch via aidan[at]thethinair.net Exhibition | Jane Fogarty @ MART, Dublin This Thursday Jane Fogarty’s new exhibition opens in MART’s Rathmines space. The exhibition, titled slow motion, sees Fogarty explore themes of time, form, colour and composition through a new body of work. This new work from one of Ireland’s most exciting emerging artists is a combination of painting and sculpture.…

  • 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…

  • the arts column: February 26th

    February 25, 2019 - By 

    In this week’s edition of the arts column we’ve details of this a spoken word event, a proposal for a new arts space in Dublin, studio lets, exhibitions and funding deadlines. As always, if you have an event, talk, exhibition, or would like to recommend one please get in touch via aidan[at]thethinair.net Event | Performance @ IMMA, Dublin Tomorrow, Wednesday 27th, sees IMMA After, a collective of artists and young art professionals based in IMMA, are due to host a spoken word event in the museum. Titled Spoken Realties and hosted in association with Poetry Ireland, the evening sees poets Maighread Medbh, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Padraig Regan and…

  • Album Stream: Regret Will Come – Regret Will Come

    February 13, 2019 - By 

    We didn’t know about this until yesterday, but thanks to a rare bit of social algorithmic fortune, we’re sharing with you the new, self-titled album from lo-fi bedroom indie project Regret Will Come. At times a catch-all Bandcamp postcard of a solitary bedroom life unlived in the vein of early (Sandy) Alex G – see: ‘Tainaka’ – and at times vulnerably discordant and slowcore – there’s Duster all over ‘Akari’ – it was seemingly made to fit on the dynamic shelves of Exploding In Sound Records or some other unheard-of indie label out in the American midwest. Regret Will Come is comprised solely of Co. Monaghan auteur Fintan Gallagher, who writes, plays and…

  • the arts column: February 19th

    February 18, 2019 - By 

    In this week’s edition of the arts column we’ve details of this year’s PhotoIreland Festival, talks, workshops studio lets, as well as a walking gallery tour of Temple Bar. As always, if you have an event, talk, exhibition, or would like to recommend one please get in touch via aidan[at]thethinair.net Open Call | PhotoIreland Festival 2019 PhotoIreland returns for its 10th anniversary edition this summer and details have been announced about how to get involved. The festivals two main exhibitions, Luis Alberto Rodriguez’s The People of the Mud and the group exhibition The Invention of Memory in Rathfarnham Castle, have been revealed along with an open…

  • the arts column: February 12th

    February 12, 2019 - By 

    In this week’s edition of the arts column we’ve details of the a series of events in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, open calls for writers, studio lets, talks as well as the final call for the LUX Critical Forum. As always, if you have an event, talk, exhibition, or would like to recommend one please get in touch via aidan[at]thethinair.net Talks, Tours and Walkthroughs | Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin There are a number of events taking place this week and next in response to the latest exhibitions in Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery: Jumana Manna’s Wild Relatives and The Artist’s Eye: Haig Aivazian. Tomorrow (Wednesday 13th) sees…

  • Album Premiere: Postcard Versions – Postcard Versions

    February 6, 2019 - By 

    Making good on the promise of last year’s debut single ‘Sunday Morning With Nate‘ – which came in at number 28 on our 2018 Irish Tracks of the Year and featured on independent compilation A Litany of Failures Volume II – Postcard Versions‘ debut album is here. Comfortably resigned and pragmatic in its optimism, Postcard Versions looks at a hungover languor as a chance for reprieve. Its 10 tracks never outstay their welcome, clocking in at just short of half an hour, making this another essential breezy indie rock album to add to Dublin canon alongside Popical Island, Tandem Felix & company – and it’s arguably the finest ever not to include a cymbal. Clearly a…

  • 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…