• Album Stream: Sleep – Portals

    January 26, 2018 - By 

    Sleep is the alias of Dublin-based electronic artist Shane Cusack. A producer of vast, enchanted drones and ambient soundscapes, he recently released his debut mini-album Portals via the Urban Arts Berlin label. A richly textured collection, this five-track release is specifically designed to guide you into slumber when nothing else seems able to. On his regular midnight show on Dublin Digital Radio, Cusack produces an hour long mix exclusively to cater to the first hour of the sleep cycle. On Portals, he achieves something much the same, only this time the music is his own (naturally). Inspired by the likes of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS, William Basinski and Alvin Lucier Cusack “explores a variety…

  • Primavera 2017

    June 8, 2017 - By 

    After 16 years, there’s no doubt that Primavera is Europe’s premier festival, for everyone from the capped-up indie kids to right-on middle-agers seeking some escapism, from the techno heads on through to High Fidelity type nerf herders and vinyl hoarders. So: how does Europe’s best music festival follow up on a last year’s best-ever edition – a mammoth lineup topped by Radiohead. Well, partially through sticking with what works – every sub-genre well catered for and then some, and not just on the three main days at Parc del Forum, but in venues across the city in the preceding weeks.…

  • Listen: Sleep – The Clarity

    July 18, 2014 - By 

    The legendary stoner metal band Sleep have released a brand new track entitled ‘The Clarity’. It’s the first release from the group in over 20 years, following 2003’s monumental Dopesmoker – a single 63 minute track of thunderous and intoxicating guitar riffage. The Californian trio began creating music in the mid 90s and, drawing from influences as varied as Black Sabbath and Black Flag, helped pioneer the stoner rock genre. This new track promises more of the same, that familiar guitar groove slowed down to a crawl and unabashedly soaked in vibrato – you can almost feel the desert sand…

  • All Tomorrow’s Parties: End of an Era Part 2

    December 5, 2013 - By 

    All Tomorrow’s Parties is a festival that’s had a place close to my heart across the past four years of my life, since my first foray, lured by a reformation gig by underground heroes Sleep. So perhaps I should have had a sense of sorrow looming over me as I sat on a minibus toiling along a motorway in the south of England, for I was on my way to the final ATP festival, at least in its classic form in an English holiday camp. Truth be told, the mixture of familiarity (not limited to buying three times as much…