Dublin’s fringe festival has rolled round again, and a variety of musicians are appearing in the Spiegeltent, which has been hoisted in Iveagh Gardens. Now while this is a disgraceful appropriation of public resources for the private use of privileged cunts – a harbinger of US style neoliberal fuck the commonmanism (kind of like the LUAS) – there are some interesting gigs available, including..
Cathy Davey – Monday 9.30pm, €20
The Fall – Tuesday 9.30, €29.50
(Appropriately circus like post punk legends)
Duke Special – Wednesday 9.30pm, €20
An Introduction to Dubstep – Friday 9.30pm, …
Interviews with high plains drifters Calexico are ten a penny at the moment, ahead of their European tour and the release of their sixth studio album. You can find Irish inquisitions of the band on Drop-d, Entertainment.ie and Connected, so what’s the point of reading another?
I spoke to lead singer Joey Burns on the 21st of August, and have lacklusterly avoided posting said interview till now. To make up for my tardiness, and out of sheer unremitting hatred of transcription, I’m going to post the whole (only very slightly) unedited …
Ireland’s other new national music magazine has announced it is to take a months break from active production, relaunching as a freesheet. Before I get to an analysis of the change, I’d like to point out a little something from States’s press release (reprinted in full below), which sticks in my craw.
The phrase is “It is set to become the first Quality National Music Monthly available completely free of charge!”. Lets parse that shall we, ‘first’ means original or only, ‘quality’ as in indicative of worth or high value, ‘national’ …
New music sharing service Blip.fm bills itself as Twitter for music. Really it’s not. Like twitter it allows brief posts to be quickly shared between friends. Unlike twitter the service doesn’t provide for posting (or receiving posts) via SMS. That’s sort of immaterial, because what Blip does do is freaking awesome. Once you’ve created an account on the service, you carry out a search for the artist or song of your choice (so far almost everything I’ve looked for has been found – and you can upload your own music …
Outsider composer Harry Partch abandoned a university musical education, lived as a hobo for ten years in depression era America, and wrote an opera based on Yeat’s translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. At an early age Partch forsook the ‘dead, white, middle class musical tradition’ and the Western system of musical notation; developing new scales (including a 43 tone scale, with 43 notes per octave rather than 12!), inventing new methods of musical transcription, and constructing instruments which could ‘capture the melodic contours of dramatic speech’.
Above is a youtube …
The pitched fork has pronged another prize with the fantastic documentary, Reformat the Planet on the emerging Chiptune scene. Chiptune (as distinct from 8bit music per say) has been around for about a decade, and is finally garnering some critical acclaim. Not content with inventing punk music, Malcolm McLaren hopped on the bandwagon early, writing an hilarious piece for Wired in 2003 claiming the birth of a new scene, ‘Chipmusic’. In the article McLaren is escorted my mysterious French underground electronic musicians to a dingy factory where credibility and curry …
