Danger accident black spot

Tweet We used to go to Mayo to visit granny four or five times in the year. That was some long journey from Kells, cooped up in the back of a Nissan Bluebird with my brother and sister, watching half-lit midlands towns streak past the window at forty miles per hour (this was the speed at which my Dad drove) while something maudlin warbled on the radio - "I wonder if it's raining back home in Donegal". We used to fight in the back of the car too. Terribly. I remember elbowing my sister's nose near Strokestown once and the blood pumping down her face. Another time, my twin brother flung a burger I bought from the Luigi take-away in Longford out the car window. I recall how we both watched in shock and amazement as it lay sad and tiny on the road before disappearing under the headlamps of the car behind.

When we got west of the Shannon it was normally dark, even though Daddy used to say we'd be there by night time. It wasn't his fault though - he had good intentions but just never managed to break the 40 mph barrier. At this point, the back of the Bluebird was a funny little place onto itself. My sister would be fast asleep, actually nearly comatose, and her little head would bounce audibly off the car window. Meanwhile my brother and I were lost in eddies of perception and thought which changed depending on where we were sitting in the car. Whichever twin sat at the side window had a view of Bellacorick power station sticking blackly out of the bog. The twin looking forward saw pointy Achill Island cut out of the navy sea. Both views were something different after four hours of Strokestowns and Edgewardstowns. Bellacorick was a gigantic cooling tower belonging to the ESB which loomed over the local flatlands and our imaginations. We called it the big chimney.

We knew we were coming close to granny when the big chimney reared out of the bog. On winter nights the steam sometimes floated a mile above. Frozen. Like a cloud in an acid trip. Sometimes the steam caught the moon. Sometimes it looked further away, weirder than the moon. And the stars, of course, were rampant. No light pollution. Indeed, the far west of county Mayo is still one of the most perfect places for star spotting in Europe. Once, long ago (the 80s), our parents told us Santa lived in Bellacorick. It made sense. He came down a chimney. And, after all, Bellacorick was a big chimney. As a child, it looked to me like it could manage a lot of industrial toy manufacturing too. I really thought Santa lived there. I stopped believing in Santa in 1989. Bellacorick cooling tower was demolished in 2007. Watch below. The wind whistling in the camera mic is my favourite thing about the demolition of Bellacorick.



This post was going to be about Hunter-Gatherer, an Irish electronic producer who has a current album called 'I dreamed I was a footstep in the trail of a murderer'. I started writing this post while listening to the album, and it was on loop when I finished. The album is a fine piece of work and I believe it audibly fits with all of the thoughts expressed above. Hunter-Gatherer FTW.

MP3: Hunter Gatherer-Left for Dead

I'm a virtual tour venue!!

Tweet Sure, Vicar Street might have some classy acoustics, and, yeah, I suppose the O2 has been known put on the odd showstopper for the masses, but next month sees the opening of Dublin's ultimate venue - a place where the bouncers take Ketamine and the flamin' Moes run free, where cougars prowl to the free-from jams of Amon Duul II! and Harry Nilsson tickles the ivories in the corner. Wild times abound 'til the bleed of dawn a-comes, leaking through shutters closed over a pretty tableau of giant Black Metal fans and gawky girls in vomit-flecked American Apparel unitards, all dancing their last slow set against the watery light. As proprietor, I smile from behind the Smithwicks pump and let them have one last spin of the floor before I ring my little brass bell and boot open the doors onto Kells' main thoroughfare, Farrell Street.

But really, I'm becoming a virtual gig venue. You see, the excellent Candy Claws from the Indiecater label are going on a blog tour where they will be uploading unique video or mp3 content to everywhere they visit. A virtual tour, if you will, and, as I mentioned, Asleep on the Compost Heap is one such 'venue'. Woop Woop. I guess they heard about our legendary rider - I'm busy sourcing stuff for them now, but the live conga eels are proving tricky to track down. You can listen to an MP3 from the 'Claws below the virtual tour dates.

CANDY CLAWS VIRTUAL TOUR DATES:
8/12 – Liverpool – The Devil has the Best Tuna
9/12– Ireland – Asleep on the Compost Heap
10/12 – Norway – Eardrums Music
11/12 – Germany – Das Klienicum
12/12 – Scotland – Song, by Toad

14/12 – Switzerland – Music of the Moment
15/12 – Huggerland – mp3hugger
16/12 – Venezuela – Gopher Illustrated
17/12 – Philippines?
18/12 – Surprise Finale!

MP3: Candy Claws-Island Grows

AND FINALLY - Check out the Home Lights Festival this weekend. Awesome acts, awesome idea, and awesome Adem who is welcome to stop by and play on the 'Heap any time he wants!

Oh goat-foot God of Arcady!

Tweet

first popularised by the goat-foot God Pan, the pan-pipe was a much-maligned instrument before it was rehabilitated by indie tastemakers Animal Collective in Winter 2009

Whatever criticisms you might throw at Animal Collective, never let it be said that they don't cater to their fans. 'Fall be Kind' sees them release their fourth EP of fine music following an album proper. And, like the EPs which preceded it - Prospect Hummer, People and Water Curses - the sense you get listening to this material is less one of scraps of stale crud cleared from the cupboard (as so often can be the case), but more a sense of evolved, upgraded music which has grown with the musicians during the gestating period between its release and the album which conceived it.

In 'Fall Be Kind's' case, the dominant shaping force in the intervening period was an extensive wigged-out tour of Merriweather Post Pavillion - a tour which saw the band sometimes attracting criticism for *ahem* too much 'strawberry jamming'. In that light, it will come as no surprise that the songs on 'Fall be Kind' are looonnnngg and that the EP itself is album length. It's also, perhaps, a bit knowing of the group to smuggle both a loopy pan-flute solo (Graze) and a Grateful Dead sample (What would I want? Sky) into proceedings. Yup, all the signs point to 'Fall be Kind' as Animal Collective's jam band EP. And, thanks in no small part to the immense presence of 'What would I want? Sky?' (truly a floating church of a song), it's also probably the best of their short players.

Lyrically, the band tunnel deeper into their strange, strange, burrow where domestic triviality is blown asunder by moments of psychedelic transcendence - a place Avey Tare in particular has made his own. In fact, if I am not wrong, there is a very crafty acknowledgement of a famous antecedent to this style of songwriting on the track 'On a Highway'. Tare, bored on a tour bus, sings about feeling dizzy with sunstroke and needing to piss. After smoking some hash, he becomes jealous of Noah Lennox dreaming - cue a disembodied Lennox harmonizing all over him. A Day in [their] Life? It's clever, yet not clever-clogs, and brilliant.

What else is there to say? Some people will say the record, and Animal Collective's music in general, can be solipsistic. Well it is, a bit. But unlike, say, the Arcade Fire (who always attach an angsty, cod-intellectual rationale onto their regressions to child-land), Animal Collective see no reason why both an innocent way of thinking and adult responsibility can't coexist without the agonized soul-searching. Not that there aren't flickers of darkness here; there are actually a couple of moments of abstract lyrical dread. Regardless, here, as on any of their recent records, they never strive for insincere explanations of what they are up to; a reason why they are my favourite current band. Well, that, and the monster fucking melodies.

MP3: Animal Collective-Graze

AU Irish albums of the decade.

Tweet Ah northern Ireland, it's brilliant isn't it? Home of May McFetteridge, crap ads for shopping centres, the Hole in the wall gang, Julian who introduces Coronation Street, and, er, lots of rally cars. I jest, I jest. Norn Ireland is great, and it has a brilliant music magazine called AU, which I've written for a few times. AU are currently having a tilt at compiling a list of the top Irish albums of the decade. To do this, they want as much input from Irish music fans as they can get. Anyone can vote, and moreover, you can list up to 20 albums - gloriously allowing for the entire spectrum of anal retentiveness. If this endeavour interests you, get on over to their site and throw your tuppence worth in BEFORE MONDAY. Mundy O'Rourke and Glenn Hannigan for the motherfucking win y'all. Here's the link.

"'Bout yis? Neuowyeee on Corrie our Deirdreeee is getting a wee bit carried away with her toybowyee Rasheed. It's only scandalous. Why am I grinning? Well, sit yerselves down and I'll tell yis a wee secret. I just voted for my favourite wee band Adebisi motherfucking Shank in the AU magazine poll."

on the office stereo in a manner of speaking

Tweet I thought I'd quickly share a couple of tracks that I am enjoying at the moment. The first is a remix of rare beauty from dub-step producer Joy Orbison. He has done magical uplifting things to Four Tet's already quite special 'Love Cry'. Both of these guys will be releasing stuff in early 2010- what a minty fresh start to the year.



I'm enjoying the new stuff from German microhouse producer Dominik Eulberg, such as the track below. It reminds me of Aphex Twin's fingerbib in a way - it's that crystalline sounding sine wave effect. The video is ace. Lots of high definition footage of various insects bumbling around, chilling out on plants, and doing their thing. Eulberg is a big fan of the natural world and his music draws on it. A word of warning to Lolo if she is reading this, there are moths and butterflies in this video (compost contributor Lolo has a crippling phobia of both).



Finally, more Joy Orbison. Hyph Mngo was a set-topping stonker in many clubs this year. It's easy to see why; it plays out like condensed joy, a track where the vitamin D deficient sound of Dubstep goes ripe in the sun.

nicknames

Tweet Irish realist dramas such as pure mule tend to have charismatic characters with nicknames. Yet, the nicknames are usually shit. I mean 'scobey', come on. They are often like the name of a crap character from an early Tommy Tiernan riff or recent Ardal O'Hanlon. You know the bit in the act where said comedian says to the audience "wait til I tell yis about the fella from navan, his name was 'shovel' and then we knew this traveler called 'black and decker'". I also notice that Dublin-based shows or plays have the same problem. Crap nicknames; Anto et al.

I'd like to alleviate this 'shovel/hatchets/anto' cliché in Irish drama and fiction. Here comes a roll call of Kells nicknames. Borrow at will, but give credit.



Lala Smith, Bee Baw Power, Bop Power, Flap Lynch, The U boat (went to school with me but is follically receding now), the Plank, Mono, Luscious Lynch, baldy barrett, bodice mitchell, the honey monster, bubble balfe, turkey hogan, johnny eyeballs, skinny O'Brien, forty arses, hulky smith, snialler, scrounger, fisher price, dots, mongo, the soggipins (i might have made up this one, they were rival twins who took up bodybuilding and appeared on ricky lake as Ireland's hottest twins in an international hot twin episode), piko, parrifin lamp, jellyhead, Braysheens, beano laing, little wart, big wart, forty year old man, scaldy reilly, tailor, donkey, ironside, wolf, spud, magic arse, pudsy, piko, gilly, ironside, the honeymonster, Ba Tum, smiley Kiely, jomps, jaffa, razor, Hollywood, bear, smelly benny, and so on and so forth

minding the shop

Tweet Trains will be leaving compost heap station at regular intervals soon. Please mind the gap. In the meantime I am busy thinking about the albums I enjoyed this year in preparation for a more dedicated effort than I usually put into the whole lists thing. The main reason for this gestating project is that I listened to wheelbarrows of albums this year. Seeing as I spent most of said year hunched over a desk with headphones on, I had little choice. I may have a grotesquely curved spine and the muscle tone of a filleted salamander, but on the upside I can pontificate over the relative merits of Sunn O)))'s 'monoliths and dimensions' and Bat for Lashes' 'two suns'. Also, I am going to do a top five (or ten) of the older albums which helped me through the academic year. Like I said, all this is coming soon.

First, some quick shopkeeping.

With the exception of the few in my sidebar, I know fuck all about other Irish music blogs at the moment. Are there any new ones worth checking out? Do any readers keep their own blogs? I'm shit and inconsistent at checking stats or the like, so I also don't know whether people with nice blogs are linking to this site much or not. Leave me a comment below if you have a blog.

I'm writing a little more consistently on food over on tumblr (actually, can something be 'over on' inside the internet? In this part of the country, we might say it's adin' in the internet or adover on Tumblr). The latest effort relates to an ongoing quest for casserole perfection. Read it here.

And now a beautiful MP3 to round things off. 'Angel version' is a dub edit from Stephen Hitchell's Intrusion project. Let it soothe thy frazzled brow and take you down an elevator shaft into his warm subterranean happy cavern. While there, admire the stalactites but for the love of God DON'T LICK THEM. Listen to the echoing sounds that fill the cave, including a painterly analogue hiss that might either be an effect picked up from the recording technique or the actual sound of billowing clouds of skunk pumped through fissures in the happy cavern floor. Okay, now look deep into my eyes not around my eyes look into the eyes not around my eyes now put your headphones on, mewl like a cat and press play.

MP3: Intrusion-Angel Version

Hitchell's beautiful 'seduction of silence' album is available to buy here.

Man's best friend

Tweet First up, anyone who has not yet caught Episode 1 of Analogue TV really oughta! You can watch it on the embedded vimeo below. I declare a multiple win for the gang behind it. The production values, the sense it gives of a developed (rather than grab-bag) editorial taste, not to mention the quality of the show's interviews, make a screaming case for this to be watched by ANYONE who gives a hoot about that endangered televisual subspecies - proper Irish music television. Take a bow dudes.


Analogue Episode 1 from Analogue on Vimeo.

Second up: people who walk dogs in Kells, take note. I have one eye on some of ye now and I'm wise to your greasy little tricks. I had to catch a 5.40am to work in Dublin earlier - the eerie ol' 109 red-eye, a bus where the soft gloom of snoring Poles is sometimes punctured by the sad hiss of surreptitiously opened cans from behind the seat hiding the ubiquitous old fella of the eternal maudlin morning. On my way over the town to catch this bus I spotted two suspect characters in the dark, both pausing along the street with their hairy best friends. Bold as brass, they were, and definitely taking the dogs for a sneaky stroll with benefits - AKA the Farrell Street poop n'run.

Before six is the turd hour, it would seem. The hour when nobody can see your rat on a string void some reprocessed animal offal out of its trembling little hole (they alway shit on streets like they are getting off on it) onto Kells' main thoroughfare. Nobody, that is, bar the odd magpie taking a break from fighting a rook over a discarded three in one, and me. So what did I do? Nothing of course. I just stewed all day until I could write this spineless diatribe. But I might. I might *ahem* write a strongly worded letter.

gis a fuckin chip will ya?

Did I say dogs? I used the term loosely. These rambling little micro-mutts are the sort of canine which is more weight-watcher accessory than animal; a nondescript little shit factory on paws dragged over the town under darkness by some sweating, demented wagon in all-over-gortex as she trys to pound out the last bit of whatever bowl of uncle Ben's slop buckled the weightwatcher chart the night before.

The current dog craze hit Kells around Christmas 2006 I think. Almost overnight there were a million of them. My Dad has a good Dad-like theory on all this. "It was them Dubs who moved into the new estate houses" he says. "They can't do anything without a stupid dog, them Dubs. And now the Kells crowd are all at it too. Copying them." It's most probably not true. But it's funny, and it makes me think of dogs barking in either Kells accents or Dublin accents, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Atlas Sound and Tickley Feather giveaway

Tweet Update: Tickets have been randomly selected. Congratulations to Morgan and Eoin who have been notified. I'm also aware that I had the wrong email address written at some point in the text. Woops and sorry.

Thanks to the nice people at Foggy Notions I have two sets of double passes to give away for upcoming gigs.

The first are for Atlas Sound (Bradford Cox of Deerhunter) and Hulk (Bruce Banner when he's angry - kidding. Hulk makes the sort of dome-ceilinged, instrumental electronica this blog loves. His album 'the silver thread of ghosts' is beautiful in all sorts of ways). The gig is in Whelans Saturday 21st at 8pm. For the chance of a pair of passes email asleepontheheap@gmail.com with your name and the name of Atlas Sound's new album and I will select your name using a random number generator tomorrow night 8pm.

hulk play whelans, hulk support atlas sound, hullk want to know who spilled hulk's pint

The second set are for Tickley Feather. Tickley Feather is the work Annie Sachs who makes woodsy, distorted music that is LOW-fi. Think of a creaky, smudged take on Animal Collective's campfire phase. Indeed, she is signed to their Paw Tracks label. Tickley Feather is supported by local boy wonder Patrick Kelleher and his full band upstairs in Whelans on November 18th. This promises to be an intriguing night. For the chance of a double pass to this email asleepontheheap@gmail.com with your name and the name of Tickley Feather's errr, actually screw that just email your name and mark it tickley feather. I will use a random number generator to pick a winner by 8pm tomorrow.

Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

Tweet Ah, wanderly wagon. A children's show from those days where a vignette about snakes and ladders could prove as terrifyingly existential as a one-act Samuel Beckett play. And, as we all know, life sometimes still feels like a fucked up game of snakes and ladders with a know-it-all prick of a crow cackling 'I told you so' over your shoulder.

(Aside - If there was an Irish 'Neon Indian', he'd swipe the theme tune to wanderly wagon and fucking run with it for ever, the chillwave cunt. Hey, wait...I'm just kidding Neon. Come back please, I need you. Hang out with me and the possie like we did in the 'Shaw last week. Remember how we ironically ate roast potatoes cos it was Sunday, then non-ironically gobbled a load of cattle wormer pills from New Zealand and jiggled around the barr to your tune and it was only lunch and it was mad? Then we capered through Rathmines in the daylight until the worming tablets wore off. Remember how we got home to play guitar hero and luxuriously felt that every time we busted major fret during Dragonforce's 'fire and flames' a discrete unit of the human soul did not have to die? Y'know, not like it felt that time before? The time you cried at the TG4 euroweather?)

When this show used to come on, my brother and I went quare. Bloodless faces, tiny bodies collapsed in stiff sobbing angles behind a couch. Indeed'n I still feel the visceral panic which used to overcome me at the start, when the wagon moved in semi-animate slow motion through the air, piloted through waning time-lapse light by a peculiar sort of overjoyed pig lady pilot. My mother describes the scene well: two screaming twins, faces pumped beetroot, scrunched together in mutual telepathic horror behind a couch, yet still very much drawn to the source of that which demented their wee minds.

And as for fortycoats? I remember clearly a demonic shade to his persona. He was like an archetypical travelling salesman form hell - a comically devilish character out of Bulgakov. He also flew some sort of contraption, and confidently spoke in rhyming verse ("I'll take look at me breakfast bowl, it's empty crow, now where'd it go? And that shoal of herring which flew beyond the wagon, which caught me eye before that dragon?"*) He was a spooky fucker. And with the exception, perhaps, of rimini riddle, the single most spooky entity on RTE kid's TV.

*made up in the fortycoats style

Music things to see and do this month

Tweet "Nothing lasts for ever in the cold November rain" is a lyric Axel Rose wrote after he was kicked out of Whelans and left holding a bag of half-cooked chips from Roma II one pissing November night. Sure enough, those chips never saw the watery dawn, and Axel suffered inside himself. However, suffering begets inspiration, and earth is now one hair-ballad the richer.

Like Axel, many of us find the month of November as grim as a greying carpet of tripe of left out in a butcher's window in Phibsborough. Yet, we needn't turn to smack to help us through the gathering gloom. Why? Because there are a bunch of fun things to keep us otherwise occupied (in Dublin at least - if you live in Offaly heroin might be a reasonable seasonal crutch). Here are a few of them in order of their occurance.

Tripe: its repeating honeycombed surface makes it a foodstuff much feared by magic mushroom gobblers and neurosurgeons alike

Analogue Episode 1 Launch Party: Joy Gallery (Thursday November 5th, 7.30pm)

Analogue, the online Irish music magazine, is launching its excellent new Web-TV show in the Joy gallery this Thursday.  For the price of a pint you can catch a screening of the first episode of the show - followed by music from Hunter Gatherer (sepulchral grooves from a wandering boy poet's mind), Angkorwat (smudged expressionist electronica that walks a tightrope between euphoria and worry), and The Great Lakes Mystery (gliding half-way house between post-rock and techno). Like Analogue's excellent Peeek! CD, this night promises to be a signpost toward the innovative, the fresh, and the left-field in Ireland.

Check out Angkorwat here

Check out Hunter-Gatherer here

Yours Truly: Crawdaddy (Friday November 13th, 11pm)

Yours Truly is a night starting soon in Crawdaddy (Tripod). I know the lads behind this and they have great musical taste. They will be casting their net broad and wide to pull in a bunch of quality bands from home and abroad for some proper alterno-weekend fun. As the night is in Crawdaddy and on a Friday, it will go on late. It will feature regular DJs (including Aero - my old bud from Kells), and should prove a proper tub of happy craicers. We Have Band are headlining the first night with support from Feed the Bears. A lot of brilliant acts are on the agenda for this night (from Ireland and abroad): more details will follow.

Homelights: Whelans (Friday November 27th - Monday November 30th)

Foggy Notions and Adrian Crowley are behind this one. It is a sort of micro-festival taking place in Whelans at the end of November, which appears to reflect the musical sensibilities of Adrian Crowley as it is quite a folky weekend. It is also a potentially awesome weekend. In addition to Adrian Crowley, you can catch the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Minotaur Shock and Hulk. You can also see AN-ALL-TIME-COMPOST-HEAP-FAVE in the shape of Adem Ilhan, who is playing on the Saturday. The tickets for this are priced between €12/€15/€20 for single nights or €45 for the weekend. If you have 45 quid to spare it might be a nice weekend. Whelans smells of pine and Christmas as winter draws in.

MP3: Adem-Statued