Never one to balk at a remix, Herb Magee aka Arvo Party’s latest re-imagining is arguably one of his most inspired to date. The Belfast producer and musician (who also features in our round-up of the best Irish tracks of last month) has taken the slick, slow-burning alt-pop of HEX HUE’s ‘Numbers’ and reworked it as a widescreen electro gem in his own image. Stream it below.
Was June the strongest month in Irish music this year so far? By way of Girl Band, Yankari, Uly, Roisin Murphy and more, Colin Gannon makes a strong case in his monthly round-up. Girl Band — Shoulderblades Girl Band (pictured) are back. Dara Kiely’s ungodly, contorted howl is back, as exorcistic and scabbed as ever. In the same month that Two Door Cinema Club made their excruciatingly ghastly comeback, Ireland’s revered purveyors of shadowy, techno-informed noise rock arose from their slumber. Kiely’s health problems led at least in part to their lack of visibility over the past few years, creating a…
Taken from one of the Irish releases of last year, the five-track Death of the Shadows, ‘Black Moon’ found Kilrea singer-songwriter Robyn G Shiels‘ funereal folk craft stripped back to a plaintive, five-minute ode. It was a fitting curtain call for an EP that doubly confirmed the Belfast-based musician as one of the most incisive songwriting voices around. Three months on, Herb Magee aka Arvo Party has given the song the remix treatment. And how it comes off: leaning into the innate spaciousness and yearnful quality of the original, Magee’s inspired washes of ambience and decay reveal a whole new character to Shiels’…
In the first of a new regular series, Colin Gannon rounds up the very best Irish tracks released of the month just gone, featuring SOAK, Arvo Party, ELLL, Problem Patterns, James Joys, Sister Ghost, Gadget & The Cloud , Maria Somerville and more. Problem Patterns — Allegedly In a month where the R&B musician R. Kelly—after painfully long years of swerving accountability for persistent, unsettling claims of heinous abuses—may finally have his day of reckoning in a court, new Belfast-based feminist punk group Problem Patterns’ snarling debut single, ‘Allegedly’, lands a certain potency. The word allegedly—itself a necessary adverb used in copy…
Following a big 2018, a year that saw the Belfast-based producer and musicians release his second album, II, all while emerging as one of the country’s strongest electronic artists, Herb Magee AKA Arvo Party has returned with ‘ouroboros’. Across nine minutes, the track untangles as a masterfully propulsive effort, marrying ecstatic synth shapes, woozy ambience and drubbing rhythms. Better still – in a move that fully underscores the broad-minded spirit that’s setting Magee apart – there is, ladies and gentlemen, a sax solo. Delve in below. ouroboros by Arvo Party
John Carpenter’s soundtrack to his 1978 classic Halloween remains one of the greatest horror scores of all time – a fact reflected in the many tributes and remixes of its main themes over the years, not least Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ cover of the film’s menacing and instantly recognisable main theme. Last Halloween, Belfast producer Herb Magee AKA Arvo Party offered his own take with a “VHS Mix” interpretation that blended original with a lo-fi, wonderfully warped aesthetic and shuddering synth work more redolent of Carpenter’s soundtracks to the likes of Assault on Precinct 13. Now, in the year of our Lord John Carpenter…
When Belfast musician and producer Herb Magee AKA Arvo Party unveiled his self-titled debut album last July, we quickly learnt that we were dealing with something pretty special. Having previously established himself as a formidable one-fourth of erstwhile Belfast alt-rock heroes LaFaro, and later with GOONS, it made for a feature-length curveball from a musician who has seemingly, and rather quietly, mastered a whole different palette of sound. The dancefloor nocturnalism of ‘Grube’ hit home hard. The widescreen ambience of ‘Thirty Five’ was a spectral tidal of ambience on mute. ‘Null Set’, meanwhile, proved an unravelling eight-minute centrepiece, and a track that continues to…
Having bridged the gap with the equally masterful ‘Liberté’ and ‘D U S T’ (a track Resident Advisor called “surging but melancholy synth pop”) Belfast-based producer and musician Herb Magee AKA Arvo Party is back with ‘D a N S E’. The second single from his forthcoming second album, which is set for release next month, it finds the fast-rising multi-instrumentalist marry spectral electronica with a host of backwashed beats. Listen to the track – and watch its DIY visuals – below. Magee plays our co-hosted Culture Night Belfast bill at Oh Yeah Music Centre on Friday night (September 21).
In July last year, Belfast electronic/ambient producer Herb Magee AKA Arvo Party arrived via his self-titled, Northern Irish Music Prize-nominated debut LP. Recorded and written in Belfast, Bangor, Bushmills, Denver, Strasburg, London, Holland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Dublin and far beyond, it was a carefully-crafted trip veering between drone, dense ambience, and shapeshifting electronica à la Wolfgang Voigt, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Tangerine Dream. Having bridged the gap with the sublime ‘Liberté ’ back in May, Magee is back with his strongest single effort to date, ‘D U S T’ . Marrying bushwacking beats and propulsive synth-bass with submerged vocals that sees…
So, the last gig at Mandella Hall. Probably a pretty great venue when you sit and list off all the great gigs you saw there. But nostalgia is for later. WASPS are a pleasantly rambunctious start to the evening, playing in Bar Sub they strike excitable silhouettes adrift in a haze of dry ice and some slick, stark lighting. They find their groove somewhere between desert surf and mathy punk and mine it to death, littering it with nice interplay and clever fills, throwing in some swampy rock riffs every now and then, too. They give an energetic and warm…