This was a play set by Zinnie Harris, set on an unnamed remote island (but clearly one modelled on Tristan da Cunha). This production was by some theatre company called HATCH, and took place in the Project Arts Centre under the direction of Annabelle Comyn. I enjoyed this so much that I found myself wishing I went to the theatre more – good job there is a theatre festival coming up*. The play does the usual thing of comparing the isolated islanders to the people living in the wider world, suggesting that the islanders lead a simpler and more real life, but then we learn that the island folk have their own ways and so on. It is so evocative of living in the world's most isolated community that I am now pondering the practicalities of visiting Tristan da Cunha (for what would probably the...
I saw this on TV down in Sligo. My beloved thinks I should let it go, but it is one of the worst films I have ever seen, and I reckon people should be warned against it. You might think "Hey, film set in New Orleans, this will be good", but you would be wrong; trust me on...
You probably saw this when it was in the cinemas ages ago, as did I. It is about this guy who dresses up as a bat to fight crime, and about this crazy criminal guy who tries to thwart him. It goes on a bit, but it's all good, and features the kind of well-drawn characters and kewl action sequences that are something of a rarity in long-underwear films. I enjoyed it a lot, liking how it never relented and how all the characters in it seemed very well realised. It also has some great action sequences, with the big car chase bit being a particular favourite. image...
This was a documentary about this crazy French guy who tightrope walked between the two towers of the World Trade Centre. It was fascinating and very enjoyable, and not just for the character who said "I spent thirty years of my life being stoned every day, so yes, on that day it is probably the case that I was high". It was also interesting for the sense that while doing the walk catapulted yer man into a world of celebrity and easy sex, he seemed to have lost a lot from it (notably his best friend and his amazingly rowrsome girlfriend of the time). I think maybe that the tragedy of the tightrope walker was that he did not seem to have realised what he had lost. But yeah, great film, see if on the big screen for full vertigo action.I wrote that ages ago, when Man on Wire was still in the...
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...
I have been talking about the emotional last ever meetup of the Bowlie Forum. Previous episodeThey were giving away a record to all Final Countdown attendees, a 10' featuring two tracks each by Wintergreen and the Gresham Flyers, with each band contributing one original song and one cover. I liked the covers here more, partly for their bold audacity. The Gresham Flyers' cover starts off sounding like a Kinks album track, but then turns into 'Are "Friends" Electric?', with Sharon on robotic Gary Numan vocals. This storms. Wintergreen, meanwhile, play some 'Somewhere In The Night' (some tune by Smog), only with the track retuned so that it becomes an electropop anthem. Apparently this is the only recorded track from a proposed concept album of electropop covers of songs from some doomy Smog...
I am writing about bands I saw at The Final Countdown, the last ever meetup of the Bowlie Forum. Last episode hereBack in July, I met one of the event organisers, and he was talking about the bands who were going to be playing. "We've got The Deirdres playing," he said. "They don't really have any link to the Bowlie Forum, but I reckon people will like them. They are basically a load of teenage girls who jump around and shout a lot"."Something for the dads", I thought.As it happened, the Deirdres had a few blokes in their line-up, but the girls are a bit more noticeable. They were very much the kind of band who jump around and shout. They also like to stop playing and have somewhat staged arguments on (er) stage. And they do formation dancing and stuff. So yeah, a lot of fun, from the...
I am discussing the last ever meetup of the Bowlie Forum, back in August. Awesome. See part 1 hereThe first band was The Gresham Flyers. It was something of a relief that they weren't rubbish, as their bassist Thom is one of my Frank's APA pals, and interaction could otherwise have become a bit difficult. So yes, they were better than bad – they were good! If I were going to play the genre classification game then I reckon I would call their music motorik indie. In fact, yes, the idea of their playing on the same bill as Hawkwind (as apparently once almost happened) would not be completely ridiculous.there was also DJing between the bandsWintergreen are almost like the official house band of the Bowlie Forum, featuring so many Bowlies in their line-up that it is a wonder that I have...
You may or may not have heard of the Bowlie Forum. It was one of those Internet forum things, having its origin as the forum for Jeepster, then the record label of popular band Belle & Sebastian. After a while Bowlie cut loose from Jeepster (which in any case went into an undead state), but it retained its roots in B&S and indie fandom. It was an entertaining place to hang out and chitter chatter about stuff, but then the guy who ran it decided that he had enough, and he announced that it was going to end in August this year. Meetups had been a Bowlie thing, and The Final Countdown was to be the final Bowlie get-together, taking place about two weeks before the end. I must confess to having coined the name for this last meet-up, which explains why it was named after a song by LAIBACH....
So I went to this free concert thing in Meeting House Square over the summer. It was free, but you had to get tickets for it. Someone else arranged this, such things are beneath me. When we arrived, Liam Ó Maonlaí was on stage with some tradders, largely being ignored. I think this is the curse of free concerts, people just show up and don't pay attention. Or maybe it is the curse of Liam Ó Maonlaí. Next up were Afel Bocoum. Or next up was Afel Bocoum. I am not entirely clear on whether this is the name of a person or a band. I think a person. He is this fellow from Mali, and he plays with a load of other local musicians. The instrumentation and musical style comes across as very traditional, but I think the songs are often new, with Afel Bocoum singing about important concerns in his...
As you know, Thee Headcoats were a garage punk influenced band formed by Billy Childish. Thee Headcoatees were this all-women band he conjured into being to cover Headcoats songs, in the process unleashing the musical career of Miss Holly Golightly. Famously, Thee Headcoatees records outsold those of the band whose tunes they were covering, or so people say. This is a reissue of one of those albums, containing loads of rough tunes like Mama used to make (if she was a bit of a bad girl skank). It's a pity there aren't more clubs in the world playing this kind of music, or that when these clubs exist in my town I don't turn out to be too *tired* to go to...
This record contains just three songs – by Oneida. I've only listened to this once so far, but early impressions are that this is AWESOME. It is one of those records that demands to be played loud, and the music on is the kind of enveloping drone rock one associates with this kind of band. The middle track in particular is incredible, maybe because of the way the music combines with the indistinct yet ritualistic vocals.I've heard other Oneida records before, but this is the one that really really does it for me. Now I can't wait for Oneida to come play these tunes in my town, so I can spoil the concert for everyone by enjoying...
This is one of many CDs given to me recently by Paul Watts. I think he is trying to turn me on to his crazy music. Well it won't work, I tell you! Like pretty much everything else mentioned lately, I haven't listened to it too much, but if you are American and were into kewl US music in the 1980s then you probably know all these tunes.I was going to make some snide comment stereotyping this compilation (and all American music) as being terribly earnest (and therefore shite), but a quick bomb through the tracks reveals that many of them are as quirky and playful as their UK indie contemporaries, and there are a good many more nods to electronic music and non-standard rock instrumentation than stereotypical thinkers like me might expect. Even a lot of the rockier and punkier stuff is a big...
So this was a free CD that came with Artrocker magazine. I like Artrocker in theory, as it covers the kind of yeow! rock sounds I profess to love. However, the issue this came with was pretty dull, so I have not really got round to listening to the disc (which is meant to be of unsigned bands of the sort you will all be loving tomorrow). There is also the creeping fascism of the magazine, whose editorial was full of praise for that Tory bastard Boris Johnson.I noticed the other day that I am not the only person perturbed by Artrocker's incipient conservatism – a recently revived thread on I Love Music revealed that the magazine's rightwing tendencies have been under the spotlight for some time. One person theorised that conservative music and conservative politics go together. There may...
I was reading about Highlife music in a book about African history. It mentioned Highlife as one of the strange African pop cultural things that popped into being in the last years of the colonial period (see also Congolese rhumba and the strange tendency of street gangs to dress like cowboys in some other country). The book mentioned Highlife as being a specifically Ghanaian form, but didn't really say too much about it beyond that, but it nevertheless piqued my curiosity. And so in London, when I saw this compilation in Rough Trade, I snapped it up. For all that, though, it is not quite the Highlife I was reading about – this is from a later period and features Nigerian musicians more than ones from Ghana. But anyway, what is it like? I'm not actually sure if I have entirely got to...
So yeah, as previously noted, Dengue Fever are the band mysteriously thrown together by these American fellows who developed an interest in the exciting pop music that existed in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge took over and decided to kill everyone. They found some beautiful Cambodian American woman to front their band, and so a winning formula was born. It is striking, though, how fresh Dengue Fever sound, and how unlike some lamer covers band. A lot of this, of course, comes down to their decision to write their own tunes, ones which nod stylistically to the Khmer Pop sounds of yore while still being new and exciting and oddly surf influenced. That the DF singer has an amazing voice is of course no hindrance. On this record, some of the tracks are sung in Khmer, but some are also sung...
Mahmoud Ahmed Éthiopiques 6: Mahmoud Ahmed 1973v/a Éthiopiques 13: The Golden Seventies/Ethiopian GrooveWoahhh yeah. Two CDs picked up over in London towne, at that Éthiopiques gig I mentioned glowingly a while back. Eh… yeah, you probably get the idea of all this 1970s Ethiopian jazz and nightclub music. I know I do. Mahmoud Ahmed has a nice voice, but I prefer the stuff on the other disc, partly because it has the original of that track covered by The Ex and Gétatchèw Mèkurya, partly because I prefer the variance you get with the multi-artist Éthiopiques records.By the way, I wonder where I will go next with the Éthiopiques records. I would like to hear some of that Tigrayan music, or on music fronted by women. That one with Tigrayan lady playing the kora should be right up my...
I think maybe the Hotel Ghion band missed a trick by not having any CDs to sell to whitey, but the Hotel shop did sell some local music discs. These leaned more to the world of contemporary Ethiopian pop, something I know next to nothing about and did not want to take pot-luck with. I nevertheless purchased two discs during my stay in this institution, both of which have their problems. The first one was an album called Assiyo Ballema by Mulato Astatqé. Maybe you know him, he is one of the stars of Ethio-Jazz, with Éthiopiques 4 being largely given over to his music; he also recently appeared in the Barbican and at the Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures. Although an actual musician, he is perhaps more noted as a band-leader and arranger, explaining his understated presence when I...
Back in Addis Ababa, and this time with my beloved, we ended up eating in the restaurant of the Ghion Hotel where they serve national food, with live musical accompaniment. As with the Azmari place in Bahir Dar, the extent to which all this was laid on for whitey was somewhat debateable – on one occasion, we were the only Caucasian diners present. This music seemed to be of a broadly traditional sort, so from the world of neither 1970s Swinging Addis nor contemporary Ethio-pop. It was also rather different to the Azmari stuff too. At the start of the show, while the other musicians were tuning up or getting ready, this older guy who came across as the band leader would play haunting and almost melancholic notes on an accordion. I think he was improvising to some extent, at least with...
My driver brought me out to a local bar in Bahir Dar. This had a form of local music going on in it, which research suggests is called Azmari. In this place, there were a couple of people making music, including someone playing drums, someone was playing a stringed instrument called a masinko, and a couple of people were singing. The masinko sounds not unlike the fiddle in Irish traditional music, and at times it sounded like it was about to break into something you would hear at a trad session, but then the other instruments would come in and take things off in some crazy direction. Azmari is this folk musical form that seems to have adapted well to modern life in Ethiopia. It works both as unproblematic fun for the locals and a window into exoticism for whitey. Azmari's big thing seems...
As you know, I was recently in Ethiopia. I know what you like – you would like if I wrote about my own time there in a style similar to the one used when recounting Irene's adventures. Well, you're not getting that, or at least not yet. What you are getting now is some commentary on musical stuff I came across in that country.First of all, I must mention the music my driver would play as he drove me around and between Bahir Dar and Gondar. He did play some Ethiopian music, including one or two tracks that sounded like they might be Éthiopiques-era tunes (with Alèmayèhyu Eshèté or one of his sound-a-likes getting a look in). This was not really where his heart lay, however, and whenever he put on any of this type of stuff he would usually take it off after a couple of tunes. The...
Another cheap record from Claddagh, this has music played on both the funny stringed instrument we saw Miya Masaoka using at the DEAF festival (this being the Koto) and that bamboo flute the Japanese love (the Shakahachi). This is restful, contemplative music; I would have put some on my own secondExtremely Uneventful Music compilation, if I had not already put it...
I bought this because the dubstep music they were playing before Public Enemy sounded really good. At least, I think it was dubstep… well, DJ Krossphader said it was, and he is a man of honour. Anyway, this compilation, pretty good stuff. If you have ever read anything about dubstep or the music young people like these days you will broadly get the idea – super-low frequencies, music reminiscent of that Jungle stuff David Bowie invented eleven years ago. Some of the tracks are maybe a bit generic, but 'Poison Dart' by The Bug and Warrior Queen stands out as being that bit more engaging. Maybe I am just being seduced by tracks with vocals, but this song smokes and I can imagine it being pretty tasty on the dance floor. Can anyone recommend anything else by The Bug and/or Warrior...
This was one of those Don't Look Back style concerts, where a band plays the songs from their classic album in order. I always swore that I would stay from such things, so how come I found myself here? Have I become a hypocrite? Well, maybe, or maybe not. It suited me to go because I enjoyed Public Enemy a lot the last time I saw them, so seeing them play in the Tripod sounded like a potentially very big bag of fun. And hey, I do actually like the tunes on It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. And ah, yeah, coming up against time pressure now, so let me just say that this was great. Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad was DJing beforehand, playing music that DJ Krossphader felt counted as dubstep, but which Shocklee named differently. Public Enemy themselves delivered 100%, even if...
I think wor bird picked this one up, when we visited popular local record shop Claddagh on a record buying splurge. This one was pretty cheap, I seem to remember, and we are always easily tempted by cheap treats. It is also really good. In musical terms, it does what it says on the tin, but the selections are a lot better and less generic than I expected. In some ways this is like an English language version of one of those Welsh Rare Beat records. I wouldn't like to play favourites with this record, as it all brilliant and all of a piece, but the tune that sticks in my head the most is maybe 'Cherry Blossom Fool' by Duncan Browne, though that is not to say that it is actually the best. 'Harvest Time' by the Water Into Wine Band is also interesting as the source of all Michael Nyman's...
If you've been paying attention, you will understand that I have a certain fondness for Ladytron. This was initially born from a hearing of their single 'Seventeen', and then from the album Light & Magic from whence it sprung. That album is still very much my favourite, but there are tracks on their others that also meet my approval. I also use and endorse Softcore Jukebox, their compilation of tunes they like.But for all my love of the Tron, I have long failed to catch them live. While they had come over to Ireland a couple of times, it was always either to deliver DJ sets at clubs for kewl people or to play at one of those boorish music festivals the young people like. So I was rather excited when they announced a concert in Dublin's Tripod, a short hop from where I live. My beloved...
Yeah I know, Eritrea is not part of Ethiopia anymore, but it was when they put this disc together. This record does not have any of that Swinging Addis jazz stuff on it, but is rather a collection of traditional music, split up into those three conceptual parts of the country. It is all a bit ethnographic. The track that makes the most impact on me is the record's opener, a piece of liturgical music from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (a monophysite Christian church that has developed separately from the rest of Christendom). It consists of people chanting while a priest bangs on some enormous drum, all sounding very strange and otherworldly. I could see how this king of music would make you feel like you were leaving behind earthly things and ascending to the divine, and my current...
I went to see that film about Joy Division – the documentary, not the Anton Corbijn one. Having read Deborah Curtis' Touching From A Distance and been exposed to the mass media I am broadly familiar with the story of Joy Division. Essentially, four lads from Manchester form a punk band, and develop their own brooding and hypnotic sound that meshes well with the intensity of their lead singer; just when the band seem like they are on the brink of mega success, their singer kills himself, torn apart by the stresses of incipient stardom, his emerging epilepsy, and his own tangled domestic situation. The film treads this well-worn path, but a couple of things make it worth seeing even if you know where the road ends. For one thing, sitting in a cinema while Joy Division tunes pump out of...
Another birthday present, this time from "Accent Monkey", and it is a record by someone I had never heard of! Imagine. A first listen revealed this to be an mix of girlie vocals and extremely fiddly sounding music. Research revealed that Marnie Stern is famous as a guitar goddess, which was a bit of a surprise as your correspondent had failed to register that the musical accompaniment was guitar and not some kind of crazy synthesiser thing. Mmmm. Whatever way you look at it, this music is pretty in-your-face, and not really the kind of thing you can have on in the background to while trying to concentrate on something else, and it's not the kind of record you want to listen to with other people, in case they say "So what is this shite?". I had planned to renew my relationship with Ms...