I'LL TEAR DOWN THE EIFFEL TOWER IF I HAVE TO!

I've done some unfortunate shit in my time. At the age of three I robbed an egg from the fridge and sat on it to see if it would hatch. In junior infants I walked out of the classroom jacks with little gardenhead waving in the breeze and asked the teacher for toilet roll. In second class I called my teacher "Mammy" in front of a ruthless audience of sneering Kells boys. At the age of twenty, when at a house-party, I necked some extra virgin olive oil from a fancy bottle thinking it was white wine. This week, the chronicle of shame continues. I rented the preposterous, cinematic chunderfest that is 'Taken' from Xtravision in Kells and accidentally brought it to Dublin for a week. Then I lost it. That's right, Xtravision have been charging me round the clock for it since Sunday and as far as I am aware it is either on the floor of Bus Aras or near the big log fire in Whelans. Of course, that's if it hasn't been nicked by a crudely stereotyped Albanian child trafficker. If it has, I will look for him, I will find him and I will kill him. Pffnar.

Everyone and their pet dogs are reviewing the new U2 album. I haven't heard it and probably never will. Weirdly, I've never heard a full U2 album from start to finish. I heard my dad calling Bono a smug bollocks when I was young and that coloured my impression of them until I was old enough to make up my own mind, but by then I was too self-consciously into grunge to listen to something so mulletty. I've also never been to a wedding, smoked a fag, drank tea or seen the film Titanic. Once I've avoided doing something long enough I wear it as a freaky badge of pride and try not to do/see that thing ever. I don't know whether this is a minor character quirk or the signifier of some deep mental sickness. For example, over the years my avoidance of tea has taken on a life of its own and developed into something bordering on phobia. When someone near me leaves the last slurp of cold grey tea in their cup my skin crawls until the moment I can wash it down the sink. If the bad guys from Oceania ever caught me and locked me into room 101, they'd only have to chain me to a chair and leave the dregs of a really milky cup of tea with a fag butt in it inches from my face. I'd break down and blub like a baby in seconds.

For what it's worth I'll review the U2 album cover which is probably a lot more interesting than the music contained therein.



Earlier this year Animal Collective set the standard for album covers with Merriweather Post Pavillion, a bonkers Briget Riley tribute that you could not only watch like a telly but, cunningly, actually hypnotised bloggers into writing hyperbolic gobbledigook about the band. Excited critics proclaimed it album cover of the year despite it only being January. Now, from waay left of field, veteran Irish rockers U2 have thrown their stunning effort into the ring. A striking, minimal and downright mysterious exercise in tonal greys, the cover of 'No Line on the Horizon' uses a photograph by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto overlaid with an equals sign. Imbued with an eerie, sad calm, the cover is so evocative it could nearly be taken as a negative of a Mark Rothko painting. If I didn't know it was a load of self indulgent Dadrock tarted up by Brian Eno I'd wager that the music on this album was serene, instrumental, stately and melancholy, like the decaying loops on William Basinski records. I give this cover 5 out of 5.

MP3: William Basinski-Melancholia 1

Wolfgang Voigt plays Gas live

Some time into Wolfgang Voigt's performance of his Gas project in a small gallery in Leuven, I noticed that the burly man in the seat next to me was behaving a little oddly. He had his head hanging between his knees and was hyperventilating like a dying donkey. From time to time he'd swing his head up toward the huge screen in front of us (we were in the front row) and stare, terrified, at the endlessly replicating visuals in front of him. "Mein Gott" he moaned to himself, wiping the sweat from his brow with a sopping hanky before dropping back into the Ryanair emergency position. I half expected him to puke all over the floor. It was not a good gig to attend while on something. But then again, so powerful was the combined effect of the mysterious visuals and a musical score (which sounded like the workings of the molecular perpetual motion machine that turns the universe itself), that most of us left the place feeling quite 'altered' regardless.


Here's a similar show from Berlin. By the time this segment ended I was seeing blurry witches flit by on broomsticks. Fuck knows what the dude next to me was seeing.

The venue suited Voigt's show smashingly. It was half theatre and half cinema with a steep and cozy auditorium allowing the entire audience a terrific view of the visuals which were overwhelming in both size and strangeness. Voigt himself stood stage right, dwarfed by the gigantic projections representing the near mystical experiences he experienced wandering through forests as a youngster. Dressed in a snug velvet suit with a white cravat, he looked like something removed from olden times, the baron of a Bavarian castle as opposed to the founder of a contemporary techno label. As a fashion journo might say, he cast an impressive silhouette.

He stood motionless throughout, tweaking his laptop from time to time, occasionally glancing into the audience with an enigmatic look on his face, something between fascination and pride perhaps? Anyway, resplendent as he was, the emphasis was squarely on the visual effects behind him.



The music was a seamless mix of various tracks from the albums collected on the 'Nah und Fern' boxset. The mix leant toward the darker tracks. I don't think anything from 'Pop' (his dappled sunshine album) got an airing. This was shadowy, tangled and grand stuff, with drones coming down like prevailing winds from the Alps and the overall Gestalt shifting so imperceptibly from one mood to the next that I often snapped out of a dopey state of contemplation, alarmed and lost in 'new surroundings' so to speak.

Visually, I don't think I've ever been as impressed by a gig. Voigt's music is powerfully abstract and would certainly not work with visuals too representative of the real world. He knows this of course, and his intricate videos spun the most extraordinary semi-abstract patterns and impressions out of the undulating music. The building blocks were trees. Roots, branches and leaf veins were often discernible in the teeming and hypnotic panorama. But, as a young Voigt must surely have felt himself when lost in the forest, the sheer complexity of their their perpetual movements coupled with the music soon overwhelmed the inner eye, causing you to drift into wild imaginings and even contemplation of life itself budding and dying in its infinite ways. Colours were mostly muted. They changed slowly, from a dull red flickers on ferns to retina-searing bursts of screaming white. During the darker compositions (of which there were many) clever use of parallax motion created, for me at least, the illusion of ranks of animals or monsters moving through winter vegetation.

The gig built to a thunderous finish where a steady muffled beat grew clearer and louder, emerging from the amorphous uber-drone as spindly branches flashed into view, spotlit by epilepsy inducing flashes of lightning and rearing shadows.

I left the venue sweating and weak at the knees.

MP3: Gas-Zauberberg 3

Bedroom sounds

First, it was brought to my attention today that this site made the final list for best music blog at the awards to be held in Cork this weekend. Gulp. I'm delighted, but feeling a bit scaldy faced and undeserving too. In the unlikely event that this should win anything, I'll be sending down Sacheen Littlefeather, a beautiful Native American by day (by night, she's Trevor Nevin, a cross-dresser from Carlanstown), to collect the award and highlight the forgotten plight of Native Americans living on reservations around Kells.

The others who made the list
MP3hugger
Nialler9
State blog
On the record

Belgium is a weird place. But more of that in my next post where I will try to describe the undescribable and desperately toss some impotent adjectives around the sublime gig Wolfgang Voigt played in Leuven. Two thoughts. The entire country of Belgium smells of waffles, and the centre of Leuven reminds me for some odd reason of Dundalk, except err, more ornate.


Belgian Waffles: fun and games until your heart spazzes to a halt as you ejaculate sputtering arcs of congealing fat out of every orifice.

Some nice sounds from Ireland:

I thought a Tenaka was a type of shape-shifting raccoon ghost with huge testicles from Japan. I was wrong. It turns out that's a Tanuki. A Tenaka is a Limerick man (who may or may not have huge testicles) who lives in Galway and makes understated pastoral electronica in his spare time. Think the clockwork rhythms of Plaid, the folky sensibilities of Fridge, and some hushed singing. If Greg from Masterchef heard it he might say "emotive bedroom electronica DOESN'T GET BETTER THAN THIS".

MP3: Tenaka-Alaska

And, Tenaka's full EP can be downloaded fer free right here



Jamie Clarke strikes me as the sort of dude who spends Autumn sitting in golden fields wistfully blowing dandelion clocks and thinking about lost love. Because it's not Autumn all year 'round Jamie needs to channel his natural melancholia elsewhere, so he plays in The Ambience Affair with his friend and drummer Marc Gallagher. Jamie and Marc just released their new EP 'Fragile Things'. It is a heady collection of emotive folk numbers driven by Jamie's raggedy feelings and the impressive militaristic roll of Gallagher's percussion. Catch them before (a) Jamie's heart stops being broken (b) it's Autumn and the dandelion clocks are out. Oh, and the lads are a force of nature live. They are capable of leaving an audience completely spent.

MP3: The Ambience Affair-Fragile Things

And finally, Kells news. I am so very close to securing a vegetable allotment in the fields on the Oldcastle road. Talk about exciting. It's a steal at €40 per year and it's bigger than my back garden. I know I'm running a serious risk of becoming a vegetable bore, so shut me up if I ever break off from licking Animal Collective's arses to shite on about carrot fly.

Oh and last of all, the rather excellent Dent May is supporting Animal Collective in Tripod. Hoo-ray.

If you go down to the woods today..you'll hear some kreepy techno

I got a lovely Christmas present from my girlfriend. She booked us a mini-trip to Belgium where we are going to see Wolfgang Voigt play a rare performance of his Gas project this weekend. Last year, I raved and dribbled a lot about the Nah und Fern boxset. Getting to see this stuff live has me very excited indeed. I don't know how exactly he is going to work it, but apparently it will involve sizable, tripped-out projections of murky forests and a huge sound system. I can well imagine some of the low end sounds in the Gas records dropping into the 'brown' zone, so I'll pack some Immodium just in case. I'll report back to the compost heap with a full review on Sunday.

In the meantime, I'd like to draw your attention to some ultra-blissful music from technopop merchant Popnoname. How blissful? How about as blissful as when you were ten years old and turned the outside tap onto your bare toes on a sweltering July afternoon? Or as blissful as that first time you shot a speedball into your cock backstage at a Grateful Dead gig?


I don't know what the fuck this is, but I kind of want to climb into it and have a nap.

The album 'Surrounded by Weather' even has a blissed out cover. On it, a mysterious geometric glass structure hangs impossibly over a blurred seaside scene. It's a pretty if perplexing vista, and one that suits the music to a tee, which sometimes gleams and wibbles in that futuristic Royksopp way and at other times glides and pops in the slipstream between shoegaze and electronica. The place where Ulrich Schnauss and Axel Willner like to fly. Try these tracks out for size and see if you aren't transported to a dreamy Balaeric place where there is no recession, global warming or PhD research to worry about.

MP3: Popnoname-ID Card
MP3: Popnoname-The Movement

teen creeps

Hoo-ray. We got our snow in Kells. Earlier, I pulled socks over my hands in lieu of mittens, jimmied my feet into my mother's daisy-patterned wellingtons (she has big feet) and got to work on a snowman. Here's the photographic record of my endeavour.


From this angle he looks rather demented, eyeing up the house. A rogue snowman driven insane by his slowly melting brain, determined to destroy his human overlords. I gave him the mop purely for self-defense, which you'll find out is essential for a Kells snowman, but going by this photo I'm not sure that's all he'd use it for.

I took the photo at 3 o'clock. By 5, a bunch of young fellas dressed up as republican paramilitaries (wearing hoods, scarves and even sunglasses) had hopped the hedge into the garden, kicked the snowman to pieces and fucked a large amount of him at the back window. Such is the fleeting and tragic existence of all snowmen in Kells. He'd have done better in Cavan where, my fuming sister tells me, there are still proud snowmen more than three days old.

Now, some housekeeping...

I've been meaning for a while to write a blog about some new Irish music and told some people it would materialise in January. Bear with me 'cos I hope to have it up in a few days.

Lolo moved house to wordpress. Ch-ch-check her blog out. It's swell.

Thanks to anyone who nominated me for a blog award. I was chuffed to see my blog on the list. I think, however, that there are a few music blogs missed by the long list that really should be on there.

There is a lot of meaty new content over on Analogue Magazine, including an interview I did with the upcoming songwriter Dent May who recently signed to Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label.

As you saw, my brother posted here recently. I hope he'll fill some of the gaps between my posts if the research takes over too much in the coming months. 'Take my Breath Away', the new Gui Boratto album from which he retrieved a few MP3s has its moments of brilliance, but overall it's a bit stretched and tired, like the elastic in a discarded pair of maternity pajamas (the ones a heavily pregnant Boratto wore before giving birth to 'Beautiful Life'?). A few of the tracks, especially 'no turning back', smell overcooked and definitely too long for the simple ideas at their core. In trying to mine the same magical seam twice, Boratto has tipped slightly into the realm of stadium techno. It sounds a tiny bit, dare I say it, like the Chemical Brothers.

Today's MP3 comes from a band called Nodzzz. Presumably following the trend started by Wavvves they have an odd bunch of extra consonants in their name, making them a valuable word in indie-geek scrabble. When they aren't gluing extra zeds onto things Nodzzz are a solid lo-fi band who sound like they were sucked out of the embryonic period of British post punk and are almost inevitably going to appear on a quirky Foggy Notions poster before the year is out...

"Foggy Notions presents: upstairs in Whelans. Wavves, supported by Nodzzz, and local group Dubzzz."

This song is rocking though. The chorus tickles my Guided by Voices gland.

MP3: Nodzzz-In the city (contact high)

Overlooked by social partnership: frightened: cornered: like a bad Thom Yorke lyric

See, it's sort of a pugg and sort of gorilla, but in reality it is neither. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It combines the dexterity of the gorilla with the forlorn sort of 'old man time' melancholy that, following years of specialised inbreeding by humans, radiates from the face of the pugg. It is a pugilla. If you want to catch them in the wild, there's supposedly a ' nest' - the scientific term for a social collective of pugillas- in some fields near Johnny Fox's pub in the Dublin mountains, but having said that I don't know much about their affairs.... in the wild at any rate...apart from a rumour that they are struggling with the snowy (and recessionary) conditions...

Why do you find yourself eye to eye with a picture of a pugilla? Well, first of all this is the internet, where pugillas should have the same rights to hog bandwidth as you and me, and secondly, Darragh likes to accompany his music blogs with such GOOGLE IMAGES exotica, and who am I to break with tradition? By the way if anyone wants an actual pugilla please PM me for further details...apparently there's this middle aged fellow who, when not purchasing drinks for impressionable indy striplings throughout the pubs of the Wexford/Camdem Street Triangle, captures pugillas to order.

Here's a track by Gui Boratto off an album that hasn't been released yet....

MP3: Gui Boratto-Take my breath away

This one's even better...think Orbital circa their legendary Stone Rose substituting Glasto appearance with Pulp in 1995

MP3: Gui Boratto-Colors

Disclaimer: I'm not Darragh.

A short blog about snow...

My twin brother and I have a strange primal thing about snow. Maybe it snowed on the night we were born? It was the 23rd of December.

One of my very earliest memories is one of snow. I was sitting on red kitchen linoleum with my brother with my hands plunged into a big blue basin my mother brought in from the garden. It was full of snow. She brought it in for us to mess around in because she wanted us to experience the stuff but thought it too cold for us outside. She told me earlier today that I was two years old at the time.


This what the Met Eireann rainfall radar reads as I write this blog. My brother told me to check it out because I am pissed off that it is not snowing in Kells. That's a reassuring big blue blob of snow with Kells directly in its path.

I got this text off my bro too. "I am walking along sandymount strand with a slow steady blizzard coming off the sea. It is ghostly."

Gah. I wish I was there too. I can imagine the strand making a curved gleaming crescent moon against the dark sweep of the Irish Sea, and the beacon of Howth lighthouse leaving the dimmest suggestion of itself against the drifts.

If it doesn't snow in Kells tonight my heart will probably break. In recent years it never seemed to. Places within spitting distance always seem to get blanketed while we escape untouched. It'll be our luck to see snow in Athboy, Mullagh and Navan tonight. But not here. Kells will be a sad, circular green wound on the white map. An irradiated abscess. Or maybe we'll get a miserable talcy dusting. And I'll watch with a groaning heart as the local five-year-olds bravely try to scrape it off concrete walls without bending their soft little fingernails into bloodied shreds.

Okay. I'm looking out my window at a stark, starry sky and a baldy back garden. Come on snow. Come to Kells. Come coat us. Make us, for one night, feel a little less boggy and drab. Prettify us. Hans Christian Anderson-ise us. And then disappear. Because if there is one thing worse than no snow, it's slush. Slush; when a dreary county town boils rancidly up from the muddy, iced-up remnants of a picture postcard, and whippet thin kids wearing balaclavas can remove half your ear from fifty yards with the "Kells snowball"; a dirty brown ball of cold shit as hard as granite.

Chilly MP3: David Cain-Autumn and Winter

UPDATE: No snow came. Kells is actually cursed.

Squinting in the haze.

From the blurry, sun-dappled backwoods of camp Deerhunter comes a delicate treasure, the first album proper from guitarist Lockett Pundt's Lotus Plaza. Keen fans of the band already know that Lockett is a talented creature (and he is something of a creature, looking for all the world like a newly hatched elf-child) having written the marvelous 'Strange Lights' and all.


It's Lockett's backing band

Pundt's debut will have reviewers abusing their thesauruses for all sorts of synonyms for the words 'beautiful' and 'dreamy' (the sort of words that I've heard many female mates apply to him). And The Floodlight Collective is both of those things, being most obviously in debt to the gentle, spacey washes of Slowdive. The title track, in particular sounds like 'Souvlaki Space Station'. But, hold onto yer prejudices, nugaze-phobes, it's not slight for that comparison. Sure, the songs sound like they're woven out of gossamer but blow away the threads and veils and you'll find something there. Not the sickly and rejected child at the heart of Bradford Cox's songs, but something intensely personal. I can just feel it. I hope someone more geek-minded works out what the lyrics are, because that's the only way I'll properly pry the lid off of this treasure chest.

In the meantime here is the first song from the record, redoakway. The helicopter-like drum tap that bursts in after a minute is typical of Pundt and the sort of understated surprise that makes the whole album rewarding. Now Bradford, it's your turn again.

MP3: Lotus Plaza-redoakway