• Preview: Borders

    February 27, 2020 - By 

    If you’ve caught only a fleeting second of the visuals accompanying the music of Borders, you’ll know that it carries with it a huge weight of visual import. Spanning symphonic ambience and widescreen electronica, the record – which scooped last year’s Northern Ireland Music Prize – was a remarkably filmic meeting of the minds from two of the country’s most innovative artists, Ryan Vail and Eoin O’Callaghan AKA Elma Orkestra. It checks out, then, that such a naturally scopic, wonderfully-wrought statement on belonging and the universal power of nature and our place within it would translate well to the documentary format.…

  • 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: 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…

  • Mixtape Preview: 30th Century Man @ Oh Yeah Music Centre, Belfast

    June 11, 2019 - By 

    Some things just bear repeating: between Aretha, Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Prince, popular music has lost some towering and boundlessly influential figures in recent years. In March, perhaps the most inimitable of them all passed on, leaving behind a legacy that, above all else, remained impervious to second-guessing. Over six decades, Scott Walker emerged as an auteur effortlessly wielded progression, enigma, and subtlety like no other. From fronting L.A. pop trio The Walker Brothers in the 1960s right up until his sublime score for Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux last year, he steadfastly broke new ground, contorted boundaries and followed one of most remarkable trajectories in popular music.…

  • Mixtape Preview: Bad Reputation @ Oh Yeah Music Centre

    May 31, 2019 - By 

    “A girl can do what she wants to do, and that’s what I’m gonna do.” Not least looking back, these words from Joan Jett’s debut solo single ‘Bad Reputation’ feels something of a mantra for the legendary L.A. musician. Jett — who was born Joan Marie Larkin in Philadelphia in 1958 — has spent the best part of five decades underscoring one indubitable fact: in a male-dominated, prejudice-heavy industry, she stands tall as a feminist rock pioneer whose influence, defiance and autonomy have coalesced to help pave the way for countless other musicians. As Joan Jett saw it, and saw…

  • Preview: Matmos @ Sonic Lab, Belfast

    May 29, 2019 - By 

    Few modern outfits have collaborated and flaunted convention quite as abundantly (or consistently) as Matmos. The San Francisco experimental electronic duo, aka M.C Schmidt and Drew Daniel, have spent the last three decades banging heads together – as well as lining up with the likes of Terry Riley, The Kronos Quartet, David Tibet, the Rachel’s, Lesser, Wobbly, Zeena Parkins, and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra – to carve out an increasingly singular sonic trajectory. At the heart of the duo’s implicit manifesto is a uniquely curveballing and reliably curious M.O: from sampling everything from freshly-cut hair and washing machines to an array of plastic objects, to…

  • 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: Stick in The Wheel

    October 23, 2018 - By 

    On Thursday, October 25th, we team up once again with the North’s finest promoters of forward-moving sounds, Moving on Music. And it’s all for good reason: the Belfast debut of East London four-piece Stick in The Wheel at the Duncairn. Led by vocalist Nicola Kearey and guitarist Ian Carter, the quartet are widely regarded by everyone from MOJO,  UNCUT and the BBC Folk Awards, to our very own Lankum, as one of the most compelling – and not to mention most culturally and politically switched – folk acts around. Combined, the band’s two full-length albums to date – From Here and Follow Me True –…

  • Uprising: Spirit of ’68

    September 25, 2018 - By 

    Bringing together some of the North’s finest artists to produce and perform new live soundtracks to films made in 1968, Uprising: Spirit of ’68 is primed to be an unmissable night in Belfast on Saturday, September 29 Each of the short films are all experimental in nature; in technique and content they reflect the spirit of the era. The event – which is held at Carlisle Memorial Church – is co-presented by Belfast Film Festival, BFI Film Audience Network and Film Hub Midlands. Off the back of appearing on David Holmes’ Late Night Tales compilation (and a run of shows…