Live in concert: Yungchen Llamo via inuit panda scarlet carwash
This was at the Festival of World Cultures in Dun Laoghaire. I had wanted to go the Éthiopiques again, but they were sold out, so we took a chance with this Tibetan lady. This was on in the Monkstown Church venue. A sinking feeling manifested in my stomach.From the moment the support act (some Tibetan bloke with an Irish woman singer and some other people of indeterminate nationality) started. The singer opened with an unaccompanied song in Irish about the plight of the Tibetans, and nearly burst our eardrums when she hit the high loud notes. This was not her fault, but the Monkstown Church sound munter had obviously turned everything up to eleven and then headed off to the pub, suggesting that we would be in for a treat when Ms Llamo (or Ms Yungchen) took the stage.The rest of the...
Some real highlights this weekend for me.
Daedelus absolutely killed his set on Friday night. What a performer (see video below) - he’s the apotheosis of a DJ - playing his own tracks amidst a gazillion others with a big smile on his face and his hands darting around his
Monome box.
Steinski was better as a speaker at Sweet Talk on Thursday than as a mostly perfunctory DJ on Friday though it was nice to see him up there rocking his old nerdy emotionless self complete with nerdy trackball mouse selectah style.
Also good fun at !Kaboogie’s show on Thursday in ALT with
Ed Devane and
Ebola. Didn’t stick around for Mad EP though.
M83 were brilliant in Vicar Street and really took advantage of the soundsystem there. Precise serene synths, loads of “dum dum ba... 
So much to look forward to this weekend (besides Kraftwerk!) with Hard Working Class Heroes taking place once again. The festival is generally an accurate barometer of the Irish music scene for live bands and artists. Here is a list of things to check out before, after or during the festival.
A tip: Tickets are cheapest if you purchase them directly from the Box Office in the Temple Bar Information Centre near the entrance to the Meeting House Square.
State curates the photography exhibition.
Festival schedule - Friday | Saturday | Sunday
Previews: State | Asleep on a Compost Heap | Entertainment.ie | Unarocks
Entertainment.ie has tonnes of MP3s from the bands. Though I wish they zipped them like SXSW do.
I’m doing visuals in the Meeting House Square tonight at 10.10pm.
Footmap in... 
This year's Dublin Electronic Arts Festival looks pretty interesting. I have not seen the hard copy programme yet, so I don't know if it is the usual design-heavy illegible monstrosity, but the web lineup has loads of kewl stuff on it - people from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Detroit techno fellows like Model 500, gratuitous swearers like Fuck Buttons, and so on. I'm surprised they are not making more of having David Vorhaus along, given that he is apparently the man who recorded the ORCH5 sample. Not like I am obsessed or anything. It would be great if they got Vorhaus and some orchestra to do a live performance of ORCH5, though what he is actually going to be doing is playing the White Noise's Electrical Storm album live - a possibly worrying outbreak of Don't Look Back style rockism.... 
A mixtape of 17 artists playing Electric Picnic this weekend. ZIP file available also. YAY! All these songs will be deleted on Tuesday.
nialler 9 Electric Picnic Mixtape (85MB, Rapidshare)
Johnny Flynn - The Box
Sunday, Little Big Tent,12.30pm
R.S.A.G - Stick to Your Line
Saturday, Body and Soul, 11.00am
Diplo/Santogold - LES Artistes (XXXChange remix)
Saturday, Cosby Stage, 11.00pm
Thom Yorke - Skip Divided (Modeselektor remix)
Sunday, Bodytonic Main, 10.30pm
Jamie Woon - Wayfaring Stranger (Burial Mix)
Sunday , Pod stage, 8pm
Midnight Juggernauts - Ending Of An Era
Saturday, Electric Arena, 3.15pm
Pivot - Fool in Rain
Sunday, Little Big Tent, 2.30pm
Ra Ra Riot - Ghost Under Rocks
Saturday, Little Big Tent, 4pm
Florence And The Machine - Kiss With A Fist... 
A couple of years ago, I promised myself I wouldn’t return to Oxegen after a frankly crap year in 2005 and a horrible one-day experience in 2006. This year I returned under different circumstances as part of the State team with the proviso what we would review as many bands as we could over the weekend. It was actually a great experience plus, I got to avoid the campsites and head home to my parents house every night for a real bed and a shower. In the morning, as web editor, I collated everyone’s reviews and James Goulden (above) and Shawna Scott’s excellent photos into our reviews of the previous days. It was a gratifying job.
There were some clear highlights for me: most I have written about for State such as Aphex Twin, Vampire Weekend, Pendulum and Holy Fuck.... 
Image from Shellshock Rock designed to blind you for the weekend.
Darklight is on right now folks as well as all the many highlights, pay particular attention to the events curated by Underground detailed here. Alongside the showing of rare music documentaries Last Night of The Funnel, The Stars Are Underground and Shellshock Rock Underground are running an exhibition in the basement of Road on Fade street focusing on the changes of independent music over the last 15 years. Get down to the launch at 6.30pm for a STREET PARTY in Fade St with music from Mici Durnin (Maximum Joy) & David Beattie.
Also, MP3Hugger has tired of promoting unsigned artists and seeing them get no just monetary rewards so he decided to curate an indie compilation called Indiecater. The idea was “to... 
As the Future Days draws to a close, I wonder how successful it was for the promoters? Last night’s Vicar Street show was far from full and people told me there was free tickets being handed out left, right and centre. In fact I have 5 free tickets left for Metronomy tonight if anyone lives near D6W…
In the end, the double header of Dan Deacon and Jape relegated the crowd attendance to a distant memory. It was my third time seeing Dan and I wondered how he would cope with such a large venue. There was no need to worry as the opening Deacon-led warm-up got everybody hyped for what was to follow. The atmosphere became something more closely associated with playground antics than a concert as Dan commanded us to run circles around the venue in a swirling whirlpool of giddy... 
Living Music Festival 2008: Concluding CommentsOne thing I read before the Festival was a review of that Remembering Ligeti thing I talked about a while ago. This was of course in the super soaraway Journal of Music in Ireland. The reviewer (one Barra Ó Séaghdha) did the usual thing of going on about how great Ligetti was and how much fun it was to hear his music in Dublin, but he then launched into a bit of a screed against the then forthcoming Living Music festival. Basically, he reckoned that it has gone soft, and that by basic itself around nicey composers like Pärt it was trying to court a boring mainstream classical audience. As members of Frank's APA may recall from a zine by my beloved, a mere four years ago the festival was focussed on electro-acoustic weirdo music,... 
Sunday, National Concert HallRTÉ Concert OrchestraIan Humphries & Darragh Morgan (violins)David Brophy (conducting)David Brophy was very enjoyable to watch conducting, for all that there was the slight fear that at any moment his mother might arrive and bring him home for being out past his bedtime. Tonight we heard three Pärt pieces before the interval, these being Collage über B-A-C-H (1964), Passacaglia (2003 / 2007), and Tabula Rasa (1977). After interval drinks, we had local composer David Fennessy's This Is How It Feels (Another Bolero) and two more Pärt pieces: Wenn Bach Bienen gezuchtet hatte (1976 / 2001) and Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977 / 1980). One odd thing about this evening's entertainment was a sudden attack of TALKERS, not something you normally get at... 
The Mantua Festival has announced some more headline additions to the three day event taking place in Ballinagare, Co.Roscommon from the 1st - 3rd of August for the fourth time. Múm, Daedelus, Poets Of Rhythm, Infomatics, Jinx Lennon, Bats, Terrordactyl, Gravenhurst, Clark, Shackleton have been added with a full line-up after the jump.
Main Stage
Múm / Gravenhurst / Daedelus / Build An Ark / Poets Of Rhythm
The Victorian English Gentlemens Club / BLK JKS + Much More TBC
Alphabet Set Stage
Clark (Warp, UK) / Taskforce (MFTC, UK) / Shackleton(skull disco, de)
Clouds (live) (nopa, 2nd drop, FL) / Cotti(soul jazz, bassface, UK )
ItalTek(planet mu, uk) / Datasette (AI, UK) / Super Extra Bonus Party
Colz&Grizzle / Sunken Foal (planet mu) / Filaria (bugklinik, acroplane)/ Solen... 
National Gallery of IrelandRTÉ Vanbrugh QuartetJoanna MacGregor (piano)This took place in the afternoon. Ms MacGregor only joined the Vanbrughers for one piece, a performance of a 1976 piece by the late Alfred Schnittke. The rest of the programme had everything that Pärt has ever written for the string quartet. This came to three pieces, Fratres (1977), Psalom (1986/1991), and Summa (1977/1991). They also performed Lamentations of the Myrrhbearer 2001 piece by some guy called Ivan Moody (not a local composer as originally inferred), and Schnittke's Piano Quintet of 1976. I enjoyed this programme a lot more than I expected to, finding myself coming to the conclusion that maybe string quartet music is the highest form of classical. The Schnittke piece might well have been the best, having... 
This seems like ages ago... I seem to be generating material faster than I can post it here. Oh well. Anyway, Arvo Pärt is this Estonian composer guy. He is quite old now, and has been writing his music for a long time, producing work that fits into the 20th century musical mould of dissonance and atonality as well as making tunes your mother would like. His religious faith seems to have increasingly informed his work as his career progressed, with much of what he does being choral work of a devotional nature. This year Pärt was the featured composer in the RTÉ Living Music Festival. Unlike last year's composer (John Adams), Pärt actually showed up, which was nice. My beloved and I went to a good few of the concerts, though we missed a few because lethargy made it impossible for us to... 
National Concert HallRTÉ National Symphony Orchestra & RTÉ Philharmonic ChoirJoanna MacGregor (piano)Tönu Kaljuste (conducting)The first piece was a non-choral 2003 composition of Pärt's called Lamentate. It was nice enough, but I could not really get much purchase on it. To extend the tactile metaphor, its surface seemed too slippery for me to get to get to grips with, so I cannot really say whether I think it is any good or not, which I suppose must be a criticism of either me or the piece.After the interval we had the 1990 Berliner Messe. This was a choral & orchestral work, and when you realise that messe is the foreign for mass you get the idea of what they were all singing about here. However, there was no priest on stage, so this was not a real mass. I found this piece pleasant... 
Christchurch CathedralPolyphonyStephen Layton (conducting)This was all choral all the time, with these Polyphony people performing various short religious choral pieces by Pärt, and a couple of others by some Poulenc guy. Poulenc seems to have been some French shagger before he got religion and started writing loads of god-bothering work. Although there were no musical instruments being played, the singers were effectively being accompanied by the audience – not through their singing along or giving them the rhythmic clap, but through their inability to sit still despite the Cathedral's provision of the world's creakiest chairs. What did I think of the music? Ah sure it was grand, it's always nice to hear the religious music in an actual church. I'm not sure if I was actually blown... 
(Reds)These were the last band we saw; there were others playing, but by now I was getting puppy tired. Blood Island Raiders are another metal act, probably from Geoff Barrows' label. They are a somewhat odd band. Musically they seem to be uncompromising, but they are metal in a fairly old-school way. By this I do not mean so much lamer false metal, but more like metal from way back before the young people were even born. The other funny thing about them is that although their singer sang lots of songs about proper metally things (like TEH DEVILLE, Armageddon*, the shiteness of humanity, and so on), his in-between song banter established him as something of a lovely bloke. This maybe ran against the OMG EVIL nature of the band's music, but it did make them a surprisingly pleasant band to... 
We saw a bit of Trisha on Monday morning, in which some young lady suspected that her Albanian husband might have a secret Albanian wife on the side. I wish I had seen to the end of this, I was wondering what the twist could be. Maybe the Albanian fellow could turn out to also be jazzing her mother, always good for an OMG moment on this kind of programme.ATP TV also showed the episode of What's My Line? on which Salvador Dali appeared as a guest. I found it strange that someone like Dali could be such a household name that he could appear on this time of programme, or that he would want to. You can see it for yourself here.After that, no TV.image... 
You will be pleased to hear that this is my last post on the Nightmare Before Christmas. Looking back the festival now, I am reminded of how each night seemed to trail off a bit without the kind of climactic event that you would get as a closer in traditional Camber Sands ATPs. I do not know if this is down to pricky programming or is a feature of some sort driven by the venues here in Minehead. If I had my way, they would finish the bands around midnight, with a big league headliner, and then go straight to non-stop Jarvis Cocker DJing. But I never have my way. However, the niceness of the chalets pretty much trumps anything the other venue has to offer.image...