• Countersunk share video for 101 Beats Per Minute track, ‘Retkiluistelu’

    August 15, 2019 - By 

    Following the success of last year’s immense compilation, Dublin experimental label, Countersunk, has been sharing a new track every week since April as part of 101 Beats Per Minute II. Featuring contributions from a wide range of Irish musicians and producers, each track in the collection, as with the first edition, is as distinct as the next, with the only brief given being that it has to be recorded at 101 bpm. The tracks themselves continue to be released anonymously, with the likes of Blusher, Kobina, Eomac, David Kitt, ROMY and Linda Buckley among the new compilation’s contributors. “We’re hoping to create a dialogue between…

  • Album Stream: Mark Waldron-Hyden – Stream Segregation

    July 30, 2019 - By 

    Last month, we premiered the cavernous somnambulance of first single, ‘Did You Hide’, and today, founder of Cork-based label Sunshine Cult, and psychgaze act The Sunshine Factory, Mark Waldron-Hyden has released the debut album under his own name. Titled Stream Segregation, and out through his own label, the LP’s source material is a blend of field recording, acoustic instrumentation, synths and tape machines, and was written, recorded & produced by Waldron-Hyden. Its name came from a psychoacoustic phenomenon “in which a sequence of sounds is perceived as more than one auditory stream, each arising from a distinct acoustic source in the environment”. Mark goes on: “That’s what I wanted…

  • Premiere: Mark Waldron-Hyden – Did You Hide

    July 3, 2019 - By 

    Mark Waldron-Hyden, as a member of cosmic psych outfit The Sunshine Factory & founder of Sunshine Cult Records, has become an integral figure of Cork’s underground music community. Today, we’re pleased to premiere the first release under his own name, single ‘Did You Hide’. Lifted from his forthcoming debut album, Stream Segregation, it’s a somnambulant, sedated piece of experimental electronic music. The song marries the sparse otherworldliness of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to the cavernous ambience of Pauline Oliveros’ school of Deep Listening, while impressionistic, Thom Yorke-ian vocals draw in something recognisably – just about – of the now. ‘Did You Hide’ was written, recorded and produced by Waldron-Hyden using a mixture of field recording, acoustic instruments, synths and tape…

  • Sounds Of The Undergrowth: Open Ear redefines what an Irish festival can be

    June 11, 2019 - By 

    If there was ever a space to disprove the absurd notion that the world of Irish independent music is disjointed or lacks community it would be Open Ear – Not that it needed disproving. For the past four years, the small festival on Cork’s Sherkin Island has shone a light on a countrywide scene that has, for some decades now, been quietly growing – thriving in the undergrowth. Expanding this year to a capacity of roughly 600 attendees, Open Ear’s celebration of Ireland’s experimental music scene, from its stalwarts to its adventurous young artists, is a testament to the unity and…

  • Preview: Robocobra Quartet & Meltybrains? @ Black Box, Belfast

    May 6, 2019 - By 

    Two of the island’s most unclassifiable and artistically uncompromising – not to mention finest live acts – are set to play a double-headliner at Belfast’s Black Box on Friday, May 17 in what looks to be a contender for Irish Gig Of The Year. Proudly co-presented by Moving On Music and yours truly, it’s the first hometown headline show of the year for Robocobra Quartet, and the first Northern show in years for experimental  Meltybrains?. Perpetually a band of contradictions, we’ve long been one of Robocobra Quartet’s most ardent voices of praise. Their string of EPs and NI Music Prize-nominated pair of LPs – 2016 debut Music For All Occasions and Plays…

  • Stream: Zeropunkt – Bitch Nails

    February 26, 2019 - By 

    Long one of our favourites in the (admittedly bereft) Irish free psychedelic improvised scene, Dublin-based outfit ¡NO! have announced a name change to the substantially more Googlable Zeropunkt, and with it have issued standalone single, ‘Bitch Nails’, available as a free download. On the name change, the band are self-awarely oblique: “The 0ught of N0ught is the point of zer0. NO. N. 0. The zer0 Number. The p0iNt. Zeropunkt.” Following a quiet 2018 for the generally prolific – 10 albums since 2014 – outfit, this single comes with the announcement of two forthcoming LPs, Clap Your Hands Say No and Open War, as well as the announcement of…

  • 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…

  • Arthuritis – I’m Great

    November 23, 2018 - By 

    Pan-dimensional (Cork) experimental electronic artist Arthuritis is set to release his sprawling fourth album, I’m Great through KantCope on tape & digitally next week via Bandcamp. Following up on the supremely-titled Neglected Ambient Shirts Vol. 1 and The Worst Of, alongside Arvo Party II, it’s as texturally-rich an Irish album we’ve heard this year. It’s presentation belies the presence of a real vibe here, and like that artist, it deserves to be taken much more seriously than its name & presentation suggests. In Arthur’s own words, it’s “a collection threaded together by themes of confusion and isolation”. An eclectic collection, and an internalised world in itself, where…

  • 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,…

  • Blue Whale – Process

    September 21, 2018 - By 

    At long last, one of our favourite bands in Ireland are set to release their debut album. Alluding to their deconstructivist tendencies, Belfast-based experimental rock band Blue Whale release Process on November 9. Recorded with Ben McCauley at Start Together Studios, lead single ‘Shortbread Fingers’ has recently premiered over at The Quietus, and ‘Coitus‘ featured on Irish independent compilation A Litany of Failures: Volume II. Their carefully-constructed chaos has led to a considerable live portfolio, where their potency is as undiminished on the dancefloor as it is with Can’s Damo Suzuki as improvised sound carriers. Oft-compared to Swans, Captain Beefheart, King Crimson and Slint, we’ve described them as “one of the country’s most thoroughly…