• Sonic Youth: 30 Years of Daydream Nation @ Irish Film Institute

    January 28, 2019 - By 

    On Saturday, March 2nd, Dublin’s Irish Film Institute will host a special screening of Lance Bangs’ Sonic Youth: 30 Years of Daydream Nation. Celebrating the recent thirtieth anniversary of the seminal album, the event will also feature Bangs (director of Slint documentary Breadcrumb Trail) and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley presenting programme of films related to the album, which will include excerpts from the Bangs-directed concert film along with documentaries Put Blood In The Music and On Rust. Tickets are priced at €16 and can be bought here.

  • Nirvana/Sonic Youth in Cork: 25th Anniversary Show

    August 5, 2016 - By 

    “[Cobains] came from County Cork, which is a really weird coincidence, because when we toured Ireland, we played in Cork and the entire day I walked around in a daze. I’d never felt more spiritual in my life. It was the weirdest feeling and I have a friend who was with me who could testify to this. I was almost in tears the whole day. Since that tour, which was about two years ago, I’ve had a sense that I was from Ireland.” The words of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in an interview with a US magazine in July 1993. Less than two…

  • Monday Mixtape: Lee Ranaldo

    September 21, 2015 - By 

    The folks at The Thin Air have asked me to provide an eight song mixtape. I’ve been in the studio at the moment working on ‘that difficult third album’, as Clinton Heylin calls it, and so most of what I’m listening to at the moment is the stuff we are making. But within that activity is the acknowledgment of a host of previously-made music – references, riffs, textures, emotional tones – so the following selections reflect some of these various influences we have been obsessing over at the moment. In no particular order. Something From Pet Sounds or Smile We…

  • Stream: Sun Kil Moon – Universal Themes

    June 1, 2015 - By 

    Due for release tomorrow, just over 6 months since his last record, Mark Kozelek’s seventh album under the Sun Kil Moon pseudonym – Universal Themes – is now up for streaming on his official site just one day before its official release date. Continuing on where last year’s career-defining Benji left off, all the hallmarks of his raw, sardonic musings are instantly evident in the tracklisting: 1. ‘The Possum’ 2. ‘Birds of Flims’ 3. ‘With a Sort of Grace I Walked to the Bathroom to Cry’ 4. ‘Cry Me a River Williamsburg Sleeve Tattoo Blues’ 5. ‘Little Rascals’ 6. ‘Garden of Lavender’ 7. ‘Ali/Spinks 2’ 8. ‘This Is My…

  • The End of an Era? How a Generation Got Beat Pt. 1

    November 27, 2013 - By 

    I looked down at my wrist. I held the scissors in my other hand, almost trembling with excitement. Or was it fear? I couldn’t say. Closing my eyes, I felt the pressure in my fingers, and heard the gentle sound of metal slicing through ribbon. After three years of wearing my ATP 2011 wristband, I removed it, like a surgeon operating on a tumour. I still hadn’t slept properly since The End of an Era Part 1, the first half of the festival’s great farewell, but the magic had been broken. If this was the end, then it was a…

  • Label Lessons: SST Records

    May 3, 2013 - By 

    The wonderful thing about a deplorable culture like that of the 1980s is that the counterculture is sure to be interesting; this brings us to SST Records, one of the landmark independent record labels filed away in the lower, yet equally storied recesses of popular music. Originally purposed as Solid State Transmitters – a small electronics business formed by a 12 year old soon-to-be founding member & guitarist of pioneering hardcore act Greg Ginn – SST Records opened for business in 1978 as a way for Ginn to release and distribute his own material with Black Flag, and shortly thereafter…