The St Patrick’s Festival have announced ‘Equivalent Exchange’, a collaborative evening of music with DJ and composer Kormac, The Irish Chamber Orchestra and special guests in Vicar Street on Sunday 18th March 2018.
Over 30 musicians will take part on the night including Kormac’s Big Band, Irish Sierra Leonean singer Loah, conductor and composer Eimear Noone and many more to be announced.
“The principle of Equivalent Exchange states that in order to gain something new you must first sacrifice something of equal value. I’ve applied this to my own writing process, forgoing my usual way of working but also in how I’m working with the artists I’m collaborating with for the show, bringing them songs and ideas at an earlier stage than I normally would. In this way, I’m giving up my usual level of control over the songwriting, allowing the collaboration to develop something completely new. It has also been a dream of mine for years to write an album’s worth of material for an orchestra and I’m so delighted I’ve been given the opportunity to actually do it. I’ve been working on this for the last 18 months and can’t wait to perform the full show with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, my big band and so many of the country’s leading vocalists, musicians and artists at St. Patrick’s Festival 2018.” – Kormac
Tickets for Equivalent Exchange priced at €24+ go on sale this Friday December 8th from Ticketmaster.ie.
Producer, DJ and big band leader Kormac is back with a new single.
‘I Believe’ is a whopping track that features the foundations of Kormac’ established sound of jazz and gospel samples. This time around, it feels like a new vitality and verve at play in the production too.
The song has definitely been roadtested at recent live gigs and his next one is live at The Sugar Club on May Bank Holiday Sunday April 30th with support from Soulé. Door 11pm – Tickets €15+fees.
“I Believe” is released on 28 April 2017 across all platforms.
Celtic folk pop duo Saint Sister have announced a headline show at Unitarian Church, Dublin on Friday 27 May 2016. Tickets: €15.00 + fee on sale today from Ticketmaster.
DJ Kormac has announced an Irish and UK tour of his A/V show. Featuring a stripped-down performance of Kormac, a drummer and vocalist, the tour starts Friday in Limerick: Friday March 11th – Limerick – Dolan’s Warehouse Thursday March 24th – Drogheda – Fusion Friday March 25th – TBA Saturday March 26th – Leap – Connolly’s Saturday April 2nd – Galway – Roisin Dubh Friday April 8th – Belfast – McHugh’s Friday April 22nd – London – Venue TBA Saturday April 23rd – London – Venue TBA
Japan’s cult punk trio Shonen Knife celebrate their 35th Anniversary this year with some Irish dates in April and May. April 30 – Dublin, Whelans May 1 – Belfast, CQAF May 2 – Cork, Crane Lane
UK indie electro band The Slow Readers Club are coming to The Workman’s Club on Saturday, 23 April. Tickets are just €6.
The Inishbofin Arts Festival returns from April 29th to May 1st in Galway and features I Draw Slow, Conor Walsh, Nicholas Timothy, Coda, Ye Vagabonds and Andy Irvine & Dónal Lunny.
Overhead, The Albatross‘ last gig at The Workman’s Club was cut short last time due to a power failure on the block but they are back in the venue on Saturday, 9 April to finish the job. Tickets are Pay What You Like on the door.
No Boundaries is an event taking place in The Academy on Friday night with all proceeds going to the Irish Red Cross Migration Crisis appeal.
Playing on the night will be:
Line-up: ELECTRONIC ROOM Le Galaxie DJ Set Mother DJ g_h_o_s_t_b_o_y Kelly-Anne Byrne Claire Beck GoldenPlec.com DJ Set The Last Mixed Tape DJ set And more TBA
LIVE MAIN ROOM Kormac Live Buffalo Woman The North Sea Cronin Chanele McGuinness And more TBA
Tickets are €15 and all bands are playing for free. Curated by The Last Mixed Tape and The Melted Lady
As broadcast last night, as it is every Thursday from 10pm to midnight TXFM.
This week’s album of the week is Father John Misty’s stunning and biting I Love You, Honeybear and there are debut plays from Diet Cig, Ex Hex, Alabama Shakes, Young Wonder, Portico and Unknown Mortal Orchestra. The first hour delved into dark electronics while the second was a bit indie, a bit rap and a bit gorgeous.
You can listen live on Thursdays to the show on 105.2FM, online, the iOs app, Android app or if you missed it, along with all the other shows, via the listen back section
Hot Chip – ‘Huarache Lights’ All Tvvins – ‘Thank You’ Ex Hex – ‘Don’t Wanna Lose’ Young Wonder – ‘Intergalactic’ Sylvan Esso – ‘Coffee’ Father John Misty – ‘The Ideal Husband’ Courtney Barnett – ‘Avant Gardener’ Diet Cig – ‘Scene Sick’ The Time – ‘Jungle Love’ The Go! Team – ‘Blowtorch’ Alabama Shakes -‘Future People’ Girlpool – ‘Jane’ The Drink – ‘Fever’
Portico – ‘101’ (feat. Joe Newman) Father John Misty – ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.’ Waterstrider – ‘White Light’ Hundred Waters – ‘Show Me Love’ Ibeyi – ‘Ghosts’ St. Vincent – ‘Pieta’ Wax Stag – ‘Race To The Lake’ Murlo – ‘Deep Breath’ (feat. Gemma Dunleavy) GOODTIME – ‘Did You Even Notice?’ I Am The Cosmos – ‘Look Me In The Eye’ Unknown Mortal Orchestra – ‘Multi-Love’ Kormac – ‘Wake Up’ (Feat. Bajka) Fort Romeau feat. New Jackson – ‘Not A Word’
The Coronas – ‘All The Others’ Delorentos – ‘Show Me Love’ Hozier – ‘From Eden’ Kodaline – ‘One Day’ Kormac – ‘Wake Up’ Little Hours – ‘It’s Still Love’ The Minutes – ‘Cherry Bomb’ Sinead O’Connor – ‘Take Me To Church’ The Riptide Movement – ‘All Works Out’ (pictured) The Script – ‘Superheroes’
The shortlist is compiled by combining selected songs from the Meteor Choice Music Prize Judging Panel, Today FM, and the Irish Airplay charts as compiled by Radio Monitor.
You can vote for your favourite at meteor.ie/choice but before you make your decision you can hear all the songs in the Spotify playlist below:
For the ninth year, I’ve handed the mic over to you guys to see what Irish albums made you move or moved you. This year 92 individual albums voted for and if you want to see the top 50, it’s at the end. But here’s a focus on the top 25 Irish albums released in 2014 as voted for by Nialler9 readers.
If anything tickles your fancy, be sure to drop into one of the Tower Records in Dublin, on Dawson Street or Eason’s, O’Connell Street and support the artist by buying a copy, preferably on vinyl.
NYC-based robotic Dubliner’s second album on DFA Records
With artwork from fellow Dublin globe-travelling artist Maser, Marcus Lambkin’s second album for the influential label is thoroughly of the DFA cannon. Those drums often associated with the label are felt throughout: post-punk-style yet filtered through Lambkin’ productions.
For the most part, the songs rely on club textures and modes: filtering from synth-disco to rave to electro to house. Dance and pop tropes are reinforced by vocalists Nancy Whang, Jenr and particularly by Holly Backer on ‘Feels Like’. The title track featuring the comedian Reggie Watts doing his soulful warble thing to a house-piano beat is a highlight.
Fourth album from the rejuvenated Dublin indie rock band.
“Assured from start to finish, Delorentos can even offer a peon to their hometown (‘Dublin Love Song’) that doesn’t leave you curled up in a ball of embarrassment. Yes they’re not exactly swimming against the musical tide but that makes the results all the more impressive, that in a world full of guitar bands they can still leave their mark. Another potential hurdle cleared with few difficulties, there’s even the feeling that the real Delorentos story is only just starting.” Phil Udell – State.ie.
The Galway kid moves from fiddling around into EDM pop circles on his own.
From his first forays into fiddle-assisted electronica, Daithí O’Dronaí has really raised his own bar and his sights. The music on his debut album In Flight (Co-produced by rising talent Ian Ring of Young Wonder) was unlike any other Irish album made this year as it was unabashedly a pop record: albeit one with the underlying structure of house, pop, trad and electronic music
Granted Irish radio is less accepting of this type of music than the UK is which maybe explained why the album didn’t spawn a big hit but in tracks like ‘Case Closed’ with Cork singer Senita, ‘Chameleon Life’ with singer Raye and ‘Have To Go’ featuring soul singer Jesse Boykins III there are certifiable chart house-pop bangers. No-one else in Ireland is making that kind of crossover music right now. Time for some catchup.
Yes, the electronic music pioneer is from Limerick so his first record in 13 years has been claimed.
“We know now that the contents of Syro is just some of the material recorded in the intervening years in one of James’ many studios. The oldest track stretch back six or seven years, using a massive 138 pieces of musical equipment (all listed in spiral on the artwork).
What appears before it also echoes the heavier side of Druqks but repeated listens reveal new textures, new moods, new avenues explored by James. The trademark eeriness of melody and general cheeky humour is still evident throughout but the greatest part of a new Aphex Twin record is that is truly allows you to get lost in its puzzle, a completely different musical terrain even when there are expected imprints of ambient works, electro, acid, jungle and squiggly funk.
The 10 minute experience of ‘XMAS_EVET10 [120][thanaton3 mix]’ feels different every time with environmental listening experiences changing the focus and feel (headphones, outdoors, late-night) as all the best electronic music can do. Syro still offers much to explore, many repeat listens in.
And that is the key to why Aphex Twin is pored over so minutely, because he goes into such detail in his music. James’ intricate compositional skills remains his biggest asset. While his sounds have been copied over the years, his brain is still peerless.”
A brilliant grimey hip-hop collaborative album via Clare, Zimbabwe and Limerick..
“As they describe it, ‘a Zimbabwean Christian and an Irish pagan sit down with a pot of tea’ with the expressed interest of changing the game.
What God Knows, the founding member of the Random Acts Of Kindness collective and Ennis-born mynameisjOhn came up with (along with MuRli) is a game-changer in the way it drags Irish hip-hop into a fully-formed album/mixtape format with a confidence and skill that is unfamiliar in this country’s rap output.
MC God Knows is a fervent presence, an MC with command, as heard on the soulful clip of ‘Standard’, an easy album highlight. MynameisjOhn provides the horn-soul hip-hop backing but doesn’t rest there, the beats bang, the strings stab and God Knows goes double time to the beat slowing to let the soul sample breathe.
The versatility extends to MynameisjOhn too. ‘Throw The Spear’ reminds me of an MF Doom production – Dangerdoom era, meets Machinedrum. ‘Habbahuk’ is more plaintive, ‘Twentyfourseven’ is psychedelic funk and there are hints of a knowledge of electronic subgenres, even African dance on ‘African Shirts’.
Aspects of being an African boy growing up in Ireland seeps through the lyrics in details about being black in an Irish school. He’s Joined by MuRli and Guide on ‘Words Of Our Fathers’, a track which, in the short history of Irish-African rap would have never been made twenty years ago, and serves as an aural document of one small thing that multi-cultural Ireland has given us.”
The electro-rock band’s swansong leaves us stranded on a Mario Kart cloud.
“It’s facile to call the band math-rock or post-rock because there aren’t many of the standard tropes of those genres really left in the Adebisi Shank sound.
Post-rock used a traditional band set up to create something new with the same instruments but Adebisi strive for euphoria through a larger palette of sounds that they’ve incorporated from 80s music and video game soundtracks through vocoders, one of their dad’s saxophone playing, electro synths and Japanese pop culture. This Is The Third Album Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank is a whizz-bang of flag waving exuberance.”
The two teachers’ second album rocks out with brevity and lyrical craft.
“The first album from John Duignan and drummer Conall O’Breachain as We Cut Corners clocked in at 27 minutes but packed in more passion, melody and meaning than most manage at twice that length. That brevity is one of the band’s greatest assets, the delivery of short, sharp gut punching tracks that bow to the three-minute rule has become a trademark.
The band’s second album Think Nothing, recorded in Donegal with Villagers’ producer/guitarist Tommy McLaughlin is no different in that regard. Two years in the making no less but running at just 34 seconds extra, it wastes little of that duration. We Cut Corners are not a band made for indulgences.”
Martin Hayes’ trad supergroup create an album that breaks many moulds.
“Those self-imposed challenges over the years lead fiddle player Hayes to to form The Gloaming, a group featuring two other Irishmen: singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh, playing his hardanger fiddle (a special instrument of Norwegian origin with eight or nine strings rather than four) and two Americans, the guitarist and frequent Hayes collaborator Dennis Cahill and American pianist Thomas Bartlett.
The Gloaming does create new ideas in old ones, by gelling the different experiences of the players. “I don’t recognise the lines that the rest of this band sees,” Bartlett says in a documentary about the band. ‘They’re very happy to go outside of those boundaries, but the fact that I don’t even know the tradition helps make them disappear.’
The Gloaming achieves a spacious temporal glow. Its evocative arrangements let the tunes breathe between the players, using familiar language in what feels like fresh ways. It communicates with the outside world from Cork to Clare to Vermont to Chicago to Norway and beyond. It has a context in that wide open world and does something delicate with the weight of history that informs it.”
The Wicklow bluesy/rock singer was Spotify’s most viral artist of the year and defied expectation. My, how he’s grown.
“The Wicklow man’s debut album’s 13 songs reveal an assured lyricist, a powerful singer and dedicated blues guitarist that is a stern reminder, despite his growing ubiquity, of exactly why the dude is only going to get more visible.”
“Taken all together in album format, it’s the howl, the voice that keeps drawing you back. Hozier-Byrne proves he knows how to write a good song or 13, and he knows how to use his Bill Withers bellow to memorable effect. Hozier has the confidence where it matters – in the tunes. Everything else is already on the cards.”
The Dubliner transitions from the folk tag to something much more effervescent.
“Post Tropical is all about breaking away from conventions of McMorrow’s previous form. It is more nuanced and less traditional. Since appearing as a bearded man in a flannel shirt with a guitar, McMorrow has talked about how appearing as a bearded man in a flannel shirt with a guitar has pegged him as a folk artist. Certainly, much of Early In The Morning fit in with that pastoral idea of a folk musician, even going on song titles like ‘Follow You Down To The Red Oak Tree’ and ‘To The Woods!!!’ alone.
McMorrow revels in defying those tags here. Recorded largely by himself, possibly all of the instruments and all of the layered harmonies which are also his, in a studio on a pecan farm in Texas on the Mexico border, Post Tropical is all about keeping away from the obvious.
It’s worth stating again, that the album is the work of one talented man’s intense schedule in isolation. It’s a towering achievement in that case but even without knowing that fact, Post Tropical stands up as a less-immediate release to its predecessor. It’s an emphatically unconventional yet rewarding album and a considerable achievement for its creator.”
Kormac’s new album Doorsteps features Speech Debelle, Irvine Welsh and Micah P Hinson among others and is out on October 17th on Bodytonic. ‘Another Screen’, the jaunty Lemon Jelly-style track featuring Irvine Welsh lamenting our reliance on the virtual (he says while writing on a blog) with lyrics like “don’t buy me a kindle for Christmas / just come by and rekindle my heart.”
The cute video for the song has Charlie Doran making some real life acquaintances.
Hard Working Class Heroes today unveiled 100+ artists who will play the festival’s 12th year in Dublin from Thursday October 2nd – Sunday October 4th. This year the festival is sponsored by HMV Ireland and as is now established will feature a conference taking in mentoring, panels, advice and involvement from the tech space.
500 bands applied for the festival this year and they were judged by music people at home and abroad (including me).
Here is the list of bands that will play this year. Deeper delving into the lineup will commence here in September.
The bands
A Lazarus Soul Acrobat Affleck Arborist Atriums Benihana Benny smiles Brian Casey Buffalo Sunn Buffalo Woman Carriages Carried By Waves Cfit Ciaran Lavery Cloud Castle Lake Clu Codai Color Sound Columbia Mills Conor Walsh Contour Deaf Joe Dear Desert Death In The Sickroom Dogs Dott DVO Marvell Eamon bode Elaine Mai Elastic Sleep Elephant Eoin Dolan Fallen Rule Floor Staff Florence Olivier Frankenstein Bolts Galants Ghost Estates God Knows + mynameisjOhn Grim Hags Hare Squead Hauer Hawk His New Atlas Hugh Hick I have a tribe I’m Your Vinyl Imploded View Jet Setter Kobina Kormac little xs for eyes Liza Flume Low Sea Maija Sofia Maud in Cahoots Me & My Dog Me Auld Flower Meltybrains? Mere Moths MKAI moossmann Myles Manley Neon Atlas Old Hannah Otherkin Paddy Hanna Participant Planet Parade Princess Red Queen Contest Replete Satori Je Silences Sisters Skelocrats Sleep Mc Evox Somerville Spies Subplots Tell No Foxx The Academic The Bedroom The Black Sea Fleet The Boxing Plot The Clameens The Debutantes The Hard Ground The Late David Turpin The Loafing Heroes The Magpies The Pale The Run Ons The Shaker Hymn The Statics The Vincent(s) Tino Ras Val Normal Vann Music Voids Walpurgis Family Wild Promises Yes Cadets
Venues
The Button Factory, The Workmans Club, The Mercantile, The Twisted Pepper, Bad Bobs, The Grand Social, Meeting House Square.
Sick of the festivals? Think again. Samhain looks good.
Samhain Festival is a new one-day festival brought to you by Emergence, Life Festival, Bodytonic, Bedlam and Human Music which will happen in Glendalough House in Wicklow on October 27th. It’s a BYOB, Fancy Dress Halloween festival and features a pretty good lineup for its first outing as you can see:
Nina Kraviz, Marcel Dettman, Todd Terje, New Jackson, Kormac, Frank B, Solar Bears, The Hot Sprockets, Cillo, Handsome Paddy, Conor Feeney, Cold Comfort, New Secret Weapon, Cocaine Ponytail, Blind Yackety, Verona Daydream Machine and more TBA.
Ticket prices for early bird start at €45 until next Sunday but keep an eye out on Facebook and the official site or here for more info.
NYC-based robotic Dubliner’s second album on DFA Records
Fourth album from the rejuvenated Dublin indie rock band.
The Galway kid moves from fiddling around into EDM pop circles on his own.
Yes, the electronic music pioneer is from Limerick so his first record in 13 years has been claimed.
A brilliant grimey hip-hop collaborative album via Clare, Zimbabwe and Limerick..
The electro-rock band’s swansong leaves us stranded on a Mario Kart cloud.
The two teachers’ second album rocks out with brevity and lyrical craft.
Martin Hayes’ trad supergroup create an album that breaks many moulds.
The Wicklow bluesy/rock singer was Spotify’s most viral artist of the year and defied expectation. My, how he’s grown. 
The Dubliner transitions from the folk tag to something much more effervescent.
