• Monday Mixtape: Maija Sofia

    January 25, 2021 - By 

    Galway singer-songwriter Maija Sofia talks us through some of her all-time favourite songs, featuring Kate Bush, Planxty, Katie Kim, Joni Mitchell and more. Katie Kim – Pause I keep coming back to Katie Kim’s 2012 album Cover & Flood since watching her collaboration with Radie Peat. It’s such a special record to me, I came to it as a teenager and deeply fell in love with its strange, ghostly world of genuinely amazing songwriting and murky, deep sea drones and reverbs. I’m such a Katie Kim fan it’s almost embarrassing, and this song literally makes me cry, I keep going…

  • Denise Chaila Announces Mixtape ‘Go Bravely’

    September 11, 2020 - By 

    Limerick rapper and poet – and one of our 10 for ’20 – Denise Chaila has revealed details of a new mixtape. Set for release on October 2nd, the 11-track Go Bravely was announced this morning. Posting online, Chaila said, “I have been waiting to say this for AGES! It’s my pleasure to finally (finally!!) announce that my mixtape, Go Bravely, will be dropping on October 2nd. A bouquet of songs. Not just one. My WHOLE mixtape. I cannot wait. October 2nd.” In a press release, she said, “This mixtape is a series of sonic polaroids; a patchwork collection of snapshots and messages that came to…

  • Mixtape Premiere: Acid Granny – Just Be Hoors

    March 27, 2020 - By 

    One of a handful of Irish acts that we recently singled out as being destined for special things in 2020 and beyond, Dublin’s perfectly unpigeonholeable Acid Granny have wasted no time in making their very own brand of face-searing, genre-flaunting shock-and-awe heard. Stocking more bangers than a mid-Ulster fireworks dealer come October, their freeform explorations via the time-untested medium of drum kit and electrified shopping trolley will, if you allow them, yield demented patterns and ecstatic locked grooves à la Afrika Bambaataa on sneachta and Zach Hill being flung down a flight of stairs. Intrigued? Daunted? Barely keeping it together after a couple of weeks in the gaff? Look no further than…

  • Mixtape Preview: Amazing Grace

    December 3, 2019 - By 

    “If you watch modern music documentaries, you have all these talking heads who explain it and lead you by the hand through the whole thing, but in this, the music envelopes you, there’s no chat.” These words by Joe Boyd, one of the producers on Aretha Franklin concert film, Amazing Grace, sums up, with incision and pure, matter-of-fact concision, what sets it apart in one fell swoop. Originally directed by the Oscar-winning Sydney Pollack, and later predominantly realised by producer Alan Elliott, it is an experience that is revelatory in all the right places. Capturing the Queen of Soul as…

  • Mixtape Preview: Donnie Darko

    September 24, 2019 - By 

    Mentally divorce, for a moment, music from Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko. You’re still left with a genre-defining film. A contemporary indie classic. A movie blurring the lines between horror, black comedy, teen drama and cult sci-fi mind-bender. Put it back – Michael Andrews’ motifs brimming with vintages Moogs and electric vibraphone, alongside era-defining jams from Tears For Fears, Oingo Boingo, Echo & The Bunnymen and more – and you have a near perfect big-screen encapsulation of a particular breed of ’80s suburban ennui.   Despite its lacklustre performance at the box office, Donnie Darko was, of course, a runaway critical…

  • Mixtape Preview: Hit So Hard

    August 28, 2019 - By 

    Not least considering the sheer amount of high-profile figures who dominated grunge’s heyday in the early 1990s, it may seem curious – that is on the surface – that P. David Ebersole opted to delve into the backstory of Hole’s relatively shy-and-retiring Patty Schemel in his 2011 documentary Hit So Hard. But it’s a thought that, sans facts, neglects not only the drummer’s vital involvement in one of the generation’s biggest bands, but the heady, tragic lives of those whose personal lives often eclipsed the music. In focusing on one of the scene’s more unassuming characters, Ebersole traces hugely engrossing narrative. Chronicling…

  • Mixtape Preview: Teenage Superstars

    August 19, 2019 - By 

    Running (independently) parallel with equally generation-shaping scenes in cities like Washington and Minnesota, Scotland was a singularly fertile ganglion of DIY and indie music throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. From Teenage Fanclub and The Vaselines to The Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream, towns like Bellshill and East Kilbride – as well much bigger scenes in Glasgow – gave rise to some of the most influential artists of a generation. Such a mottled and many-chaptered narrative can’t exactly be reeled off or pared down into a précis, which is perhaps why few books – and much fewer films…

  • Monday Mixtape: Andy Ortmann

    August 19, 2019 - By 

    In the latest installment of Monday Mixtape, Chicago based sound/visual/conceptual artist and founder of Nihilist Records Andy Ortmann selects some of the tracks that have inspired him recently. “As of late, I’ve been in the studio, chipping away at the new Panicsville double LP. It will have a slew of guests including Rudolf Eb.er, Diana Rogerson, Christoph Heemann, Matthew Waldron & Daniel Menche. My newest solo album Eye of the Beholder is to be reissued on cassette September 2019 (pro-dubbed Chrome tape) in an edition of 100 copies with artwork by Paul Nudd. Myself and VIKI (Detroit) will be touring Europe October…

  • Mixtape Preview: Madonna – Truth or Dare @ Oh Yeah Music Centre

    July 30, 2019 - By 

    Let’s face it: honorific nicknames in popular music don’t come any more clear-cut than Madonna and the Queen of Pop. The singer, songwriter, businesswoman, actress, producer, dancer, director, author and humanitarian born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958 has ceaselessly shapeshifted and fearlessly reinvented like no other. Her musical output is but half the story. Naturally, such a towering legacy has attracted its fair share of filmed exposés and feature-length accounts over the years. None, however, even flirt with the sheer watchability of Alek Keshishian’s 1991 film Madonna: Truth or Dare (or In Bed with Madonna outside of North America). Filmed…

  • Mixtape Preview: The Promise – The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town

    June 27, 2019 - By 

    In the latest installment of Mixtape, a season of music films curated by Feature, the Oh Yeah Music Centre will play host to a screening of Thom Zimny’s 2010 Bruce Springsteen doc The Promise – The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town on July 3rd. As modern retrospective music films go, none have pulled off conveying the bliss and burden of mounting superstardom – the legal issues, the towering pressure, the creative gestation – with the same power and panache as Zimny’s film. With his 1975 third album, the critically and commercially devoured Born To Run having made him a star beyond his wildest…