• Video Premiere: Grave Goods – Source

    May 16, 2019 - By 

    Ahead of only their third show to date, supporting Beak> this Saturday, May 18 at Whelan’s, tri-city post-punk trio Grave Goods have kindly given us a first recorded glimpse of their visceral power. ‘Source’ is the first release from a session filmed by experimental filmmaking platform IMPATV, which records & broadcasts the heavier side of DIY, experimental & underground culture. Featuring members of Pins, Girls Names and September Girls, ‘Source’ forgoes the brooding atmospheres & jangle of the aforementioned in favour of primal urgency. More than delivering on the promise of its constituent parts, Sarah Grimes & Phil Quinn’s Girl Band-recalling rhythmic syncopation lay claustrophobic, anxious loops between which Lois MacDonald’s buzzsaw guitar finds voids to…

  • the arts column: March 12th

    March 12, 2019 - By 

    In this week’s edition of the arts column we’ve details of exhibitions that are opening and closing around the country, a pair of residencies and an application deadline. 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 | Eamonn Doyle @ RHA Gallery, Dublin Opening this Thursday, March 14th in Dublin’s RHA Gallery is a new exhibition featuring the work of Eamonn Doyle. The eponymous show is born out of Doyle’s new book titled Made in Dublin, which features images from the artist’s first three books: i, ON and End, as well as previously…

  • 19 For ’19: Jordan Adetunji

    February 27, 2019 - By 

    We continue 19 for ‘19 – our feature looking at nineteen Irish acts that we’re convinced are going places in 2019 – with young Belfast-based hip-hop RnB artist Jordan Adetunji. Photo by Joe Laverty Still only in his teens, Jordan Adetunji has already shown a chameleonic, self-reliant instinct to a Prince-esque degree, highlighting the kind of restless creative spirit destined for the bright lights – successful modelling career notwithstanding – despite little precedent for his brand of hip-hop in Northern Ireland. Thankfully, the once-barren RnB scene in the North is taking shape, thanks to the support of Belfast artist group NxGen and prolific Ireland-based Word Up Collective – home to the…

  • Premiere: Mob Wife – Captain Care A Lot & Hellsong

    February 8, 2019 - By 

    Following the release of debut single ‘Warm Water’ in August, Belfast’s Mob Wife are back with new double A-side Captain Care A Lot / Hellsong. Recorded by Chris Ryan at Start Together Studios, with striking artwork by Billy Woods, the release strikes a midpoint between the dissonant fury of Metz or Unwound, and the melodic vulnerability of Pile. A contrasting couplet, ‘Captain Care A Lot’ continuing down the narrative & noise-ridden path of twentysomething angst and confusion laid by ‘Warm Water’, sardonically chronicling mass depersonalisation as a result of social media. ‘Hellsong’ is a more inward-looking exploration of disintegration, through the maelstrom of substance abuse, isolation and depression; in eschewing the…

  • 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…

  • the arts column: January 29th

    January 29, 2019 - By 

    In this week’s edition of the arts column we’ve details on a film screening, studio spaces, talks, commissions and job opportunities. As always, if you have an event, talk, exhibition, or would like to recommend one please get in touch via aidan[at]thethinair.net Screening| The Memory-Image + Mark Leckey @ IFI, Dublin Tonight (January 29th) the IFI and aemi continue their joint series of screenings with The Memory Image + Mark Leckey. Leckey, who won the 2008 Turner Prize, is showing his 2015 film Dream English Kid 1964-1999 for the first time in Ireland, a work created using found footage on the internet that explores the…

  • the arts column: December 18th

    December 18, 2018 - By 

    In this week’s arts column we’re looking at shows that will be on over the festive period, featuring shows in Cork, Dublin, Belfast and Roscommon. Be sure to check out last week’s edition which details of two shows closing this week in Belfast and Dublin. [In]Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives @ The National Gallery of Ireland. Dublin 2018 was a year packed with anniversaries and centenaries, notably the 100-year anniversary of the end of ‘The Great War’. In Ireland it was also the centenary of the first time women were granted suffrage, in an election that also saw the begins…

  • the arts column: December 11th

    December 11, 2018 - By 

    In our new weekly arts column we’ll be rounding-up some key events in the Irish art world be they exhibition opening and closings, art talks and workshops, submission deadlines and guidelines, and everything in between that fits under the arts umbrella. This week we’re looking at four shows across Ireland which are drawing to a close as we approach Christmas. Martin Healy’s The Augury @ Butler Gallery, Kilkenny This week is your last chance to catch Martin Healy’s show The Augury in Kilkenny’s Butler Gallery. The work sees Healy explore our often fraught and conflicting relationship with the natural world, with particular focus…

  • 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…

  • EP Premiere: Son Zept – Q2B

    October 19, 2018 - By 

    Liam McCartan, AKA Son Zept, releases his debut today, and it’s one of the most exciting, forward-thinking electronic releases to emerge from here in some time. Parallels could be drawn with the likes of Autechre or Aphex Twin from an experimental standpoint, as his Q2B EP reveals McCartan as a true polymath, where concern with ideology is tantamount to creating limitless club potential. Brimming with atmosphere punctuated by his dense ‘polypatternism’, the Q2B EP is a work of deconstructed club music that alludes to the memory-triggering aspects of techno, noise, trance, power-ambient and industrial, often falling into umbrella of electroacoustic composition. We’ll have a full interview with Son Zept in the coming…