Download: ‘The Killer Podcast’

Every few years hollywood is shocked by an utterly predictable success. Some startling maverick producer actually markets a movie to an underserved audience. The flick makes major bank, and a mad scramble begins, as studios line up to cash in. Five years ago it was the grey dollar, as the critically acclaimed Kings Speech dragged in sexagenarians who’d drifted away from the action packed vacuity of the block buster era. Our screens are still filled with it’s predictable follow ups, from Cannes darling Amour to The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Five years before that it was kids movies; as a series of franchises, from Harry Potter to Spy Kids proved that tweens had a powerful grip on mammy and daddy’s credit card. Now another, arguably more sinister trend has taken hold, as Hollywood seeks to cash in on a long ignored and even disdained audience. Mel Gibson might be persona non grata, but his 2004 spatterfest The Passion of the Christ nailed a market so lucrative even progressive, secular Hollywood could no longer ignore it. Ever since, the Jeebus movie has edged towards becoming a box office mainstay. Contemporary Christian movies religiously follow a variety of tropes. They exist in a post racial America of prosperous, hard striving, counter-culturally embattled Christian families, whose faith sets them at odds with a world literally in thrall to the devil. Their production tends towards the almost pornographically chintzy, and they’re most often staffed from a self contained stable of avowedly Christian actors.

Most of these movies – like the flurry of wide release Bollywood flicks current aimed at the Indian diaspora – appeal exclusively to their target audience. But breakout hits like this years ‘War Room’ prove that even ‘the lost’ (as evangelicals refer to their secular brethren) are no longer allergic to holy fluff. ‘War Room’ depicts a particularly pentecostal version of Christianity, in which the almighty can be compelled to intervene in ones career and marriage, but only if the lowly penitent rolls up her sleeves and really squeezes out an old prayer. This world view, with it’s sinister implication that misfortune is the deserved result of insufficient faith, ties into the evangelical belief that prayer is a weapon of mass demonic destruction. To a conservative America, still in the grip of a variety of wars on abstract concepts, from terrorism to the gay agenda, the idea holds a powerful appeal. To this view, the social ills of our time are not so much the result of economic inequality, or a history of prejudice, as the active intervention of Satan and his minions. The heavens fight a proxy war on earth, intervening in daily life for good or ill, much like the Gods of the Greek pantheon. With mortals as their emissaries, empowered to perform magic, good and evil battle in our daily lives.

The War Room’s setup exemplifies this narrative. An elderly magical black woman ‘Miss Clara’, played by Karen Abercrombie, helps repair the failing marriage of a wealthy couple, by her ‘war room’, essentially a closet full of prayer paraphernalia. Making her own Christ closet enables the young wife Elizabeth (played by Priscilla Shirer) to battle the demons threatening her marriage. Notable incidents in the film include a mugger fleeing, after a verbal slap down, ‘in the name of jesus’, and a alluring temptress defeated from afar by the power of prayer.

Producers, the Kendrick brothers, have created a slew of ‘educational materials’, to accompany the film. This merch includes a bible study kit, a branded teen prayer journal, the original War Room novel and a ‘battle plan for prayer’ which exhorts the reader to build a magic prayer room of their very own. This rather lucrative package, marketed directly to evangelical churches, along with suggestions to block book tickets, invites comparisons to George Lucas’s galactic scale entrepreneurship.

Fireproof, The highest grossing independent film of 2008, set the kindling to the current round of Christian flicks. The film – which in a deeply Freudian moment begins with a small child asking her mother if she can marry her father, is a romantic fantasy in which an inattentive fireman follows a forty step programme encouraging him to smash his porn riddled computer, and love his cheating wife unconditionally.

Despite their increasing ambition, relatively high budget Jeebus movies are not yet guaranteed success. The formula to reach a wider audience seems to require an Oprah style appeal to the power of positive thinking. ‘Yellow Day’, which opened to minute box office last month, features a glossy combination of animation and live action. The film imagines a kids camp where once a year on the mysterious ‘Yellow Day’ God ‘bestows incredible visions and miracles’ on the faithful, like a narcissistic santa claus. Perhaps the movies failure lies in it’s emphasise on the more feverish, fantastical aspects of evangelicalism.

Last years creepy ‘Heaven is for real’, recounted the story of a four year old boy who has a near death vision of heaven. This trip includes meeting Jesus riding a rainbow coloured stallion, and hanging out with his own miscarried sister. The film based on a purportedly non-fiction new york times best seller, as been labelled ‘heaven tourism’. Its 12 million dollar budget (huge in Christian cinema terms), grossed over 100, 000, 000 world wide. Heaven is for real doubtless owes part of its success to its promotion by media titan, Sony Pictures. Signalling increased investment in the segment by mainstream studios. But also to it’s marketing as a chilling M Night Shyamalan style mystery.

Whats concerning about the rise of such films is not their proselytisation of a belief system, but rather their sanctification of prosperity, their replacement of the vacuity of consumerism, with a kind of sinister conformity – predicated on a just world in which pain proceeds according to a plan. If there is a more malicious machine than the cynical dream factory of hollywood, it’s the the Christian Industrial complex. A hope franchise, with thousands of branches, that ensures capitalist conformity across the economically blighted flyover states. The evangelical block, wilfully courted by post Goldwater Republicans, upheld by Conservative Christian radio, televangelism, Christian publishers, Christian rock, and increasingly Jeebus movies, are selling a very particular kind of celluloid opium. One that appeals to the vulnerable, even as it forestalls any effort to challenge their circumstances.

Download: ‘Jeebus Movies’

 
The ‘Death Cafe‘ movement invites us to discuss death over tea and cakes. For Culture File, I visited the death cafe at The Irish Hospice Foundations’ Forum on End of Life. Chatting with people approaching the end of life, and others working to make its passing less painful, inevitably made death for a moment more difficult to ignore. It’s almost a year since a close friend of mine, a wonderful charismatic, hilarious, talented man, took his own life; and with it a kind of innocence amongst our group in college. A kind of certainty that we were immune from futile injury. My childhood was shaped by the death of the woman closest to me, my nana Kate. Shortly after school I lost two friends, one to a still unsolved murder, and another to a still incurable illness. Death is something I think about often, but rarely discuss. In a sense, whats the point? But perhaps there is a reason to talk about it after all. ‘Think Ahead‘ is a pen and paper form that lets us write down how we’d like our send off, what our wishes are around our treatment at the end of life. While Irish law still criminalises assisted dying, thinking about how we want our lives to be celebrated, and how we want to be taken care of when we cannot express our wishes, can perhaps insure we live our lives a little more, while we still have them.

Voices include Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness and Sarah Murphy of Think Ahead
Download: ‘Death Cafe’

A few months ago, Irish company Immersive VR education ran a successful kickstarter to create a virtual reality simulation of the Apollo 11 journey to the moon. Put like that it sound kind unbelievable – we actually built a craft that travelled to the moon! Sure, we haven’t gone back in forty three years, but it’s damned impressive all the same.

If you’re lucky enough to own one of the oculus rift developer kits (consumer versions still haven’t hit the market), you can download a demo of the experience at Immersive VR’s site.

I sat down with Immersive’s founder David Whelan to try out this epic voyage, all from the comfort of a swivel chair in his Waterford based home office.

Download: ‘Immersive VR Education’

Kino is an international filmmaking movement that’s been running in cities around the world since 1999. The concept is simple – aspiring filmmakers of all levels of experience, meet over a weekend; write, direct, edit and screen films all in a two day blitz. Over time the movement has expanded to included week long ‘international kabaret’ events. The next of these is planned from July 12th – 19th in Dublin. I’ve participated in two Kino events, doing everything from writing / directing to sound, acting and even craft services. What’s unique about the event is the openness to filmmakers of all levels of experience and none. Camera people who work professionally in the industry, rub shoulders with first time actors and vice versa. It’s a full immersion introduction to the minimum viable product of a film. If you’re interested in taking part, you’ll find all the info you need at Kino’s facebook page. Back in March I attended one of the Dublin Kino D weekends, and spoke to Kino D founder George Hooker, as well as a bunch of enthusiastic attendees. Take a listen.

Download: ‘Kino D’

Tracks used

Xiu Xiu – Clowne Town
Jason Shaw – Thingamajig

Meg’s Moorley’s ‘artist led archive‘ is a wonderful storehouse of the wisdom and work of numerous art collectives over the last four decades. The archive, which tours as a series of exhibitions and discussion events, is part of the permanent collection at the National Arts Visual Library at NCAD. I spoke with curator and artist Megs Morley, at the recent Artist Led Archive exhibition at IMMA.

All tracks used in this piece were from CD’s included in the Artist Led Archive (complete list below). Many of these works were included on the incredible ‘The Sound We Are Now‘ release from 2007, featuring some of the most beautiful and evocative sound artists working in the last decade. The Sound We Are Now is available from Farpoint Recordings, the label which curates a panoply of incredible sound artists and experimental musicians.

Download: ‘The Artist Led Archive’

Tracks used

The Sound We Are Now – Anthony Kelly & David Stalling – Powerstation 3
The Sound We Are Now – Thea Herold – Same Same but different
Gary Phelan & Mark McLoughlin – Random Access Soundworks – Kevlar Second Chants
The Sound We Are Now – Johannes S. Sistermanns – to disappear / appear
The Sound We Are Now – Alan Lambert South Shore
David Stalling and Anthony Kelly – Urban Utopias – Ghost Signal
The Sound We Are Now – Jürgen Simpson – Kepler
Alan Lambert – The Man Who Cycled To The Moon – Tiny Tiny

Perhaps you’ve seen it. One of those instantly recognisable meme images, that neatly confirm our prejudices with a concise and tweet ready bon mot. The image shows a young man, trendily emaciated and nebbish, Brooklyn casual in navy and white stripped boaters, below his aquamarine shorts and Warby Parker goggles. He sits on a park bench, oblivious to his anachronism, pecking away at an analogue typewriter. ‘You’re not a real hipster’, the text smugly asserts, ‘until you take your typewriter to the park’.

Quoth another readily shared bon mot, ‘Christ what an asshole’.

As with so many pieces of received wisdom, this one is a primary source only about the beliefs of those who spread it. Look we say, as we reblog, tweet and post it to Facebook, ‘I spurn the ironic adoption of outmoded technologies, for I am unpretentious’. Unhappily for the hipster cliche, it turns out that our sartorially stereotyped analogue aficionado is in reality a writer ‘The Roving Typist’, making what must be an agonisingly modest living selling custom hand typed short stories, written one at a time.

I came of age, just as the typewriter was becoming obsolete. Say what you will about the destructive impact on concentration, artistry and erudition the computer hath wrought. For me, the spellchecker made writing possible. I remember the sinking feeling, just before my junior cert, on being instructed by a particularly pernicious crone, only ever to use words that I could spell. Well thats it, I thought. I’ll be handing up a blank English paper. I’m not actually dyslexic, the technical term is subclinical auditory working memory difficulties. But without the smooth forgiving inline recommendations of autocorrect, I’d be at sea with two es.

But that doesn’t make me immune to the allure of ageing technology – the pleasing hum of a vinyl record enticing you to listen all the way through. The pen gliding over paper, devoid of the distractions of the internet. Working with clay, or paint, in a tactile medium, making things that exist even when the power goes out.

The typewriter is something different, a tool that attained a mythology inseparable from it’s use. The iconic silhouette and the clammer of it’s chattering teeth are endlessly evocative – inseparable from the toiling writer, the sweating journalist, the bun mopped ladies of the secretarial pool. It is at once feminine and brutish. A tool which cracked open the workplace for women as it subjugated them into mere transcribers. As Friedrich Kittler, in his meditation on technological media ‘Gramophone Film Typewriter’, called the typewriter a ‘discursive machine gun’, ‘Typescript’ he wrote ‘amounts to the desexualization of writing, sacrificing its metaphysics and turning it into word processing.’

The permanence of typing, the ink spilled like blood, the trees felled and boiled to make the paper – has the quality of murder. Typing prose is a kind of creative destruction – connected to our colonisation of nature. The writer as a one man printing press, a wild egoist making permanent his thoughts. How strange that this machine, with it’s digital keys, engineered to bureaucratise and mechanise the act of writing, seems romantic to us. Will future generations eulogise the laptop, collecting battery heavy early models, propping them up on park benches to pay homage? I doubt it. There is something unique about mechanical machinery – something at once unearthly and comforting. The typewriter a beast that comes to life, only at our touch – magnifying our strength and dexterity. It is vulnerable to injury – clogging with paper, teeth knotting together. It hungers for ribbon.

It is not purely analogue. Florian Cramer in his essay ‘What is Post digital’ argues that the type writer, with it’s keys chopping information into ‘discrete units’ can be considered digital. And yet, each tap bears the mark of our fingers varying pressure. As a child I used to practice typing without ink. The slalom of my dancing fingers, marking the paper like footprints in snow. Hidden messages that could be uncovered like grave rubbings.

For some writers this physical connection, the hypnotic rhythm of words on paper, is a self conscious escape from the ferocious intangible. Words become real, only when spoken or written. And it’s here that the digital realm is a deadly peril. The computer lets us to reedit at a moments notice. The internet leaks endless accelerating accretions of material – reference and competition, distraction and response. So many voices, drowning out our own. So many screaming certainties, making certainty suspicious. The world becoming software dissolves our words.

The typewriter is a cathect, a storehouse for our feelings about the past. If the act of writing changes what is said, then writing on a machine purpose built and laden with history cannot help but shape our words. Taking the trouble to type, mastering the mechanical spider, binds our ideas in paper. A single vulnerable edition, peppered with human mistakes. A naturalised piece of the world, ready to blow away in a slapstick breeze. Perhaps it’s this image, the loose leaves of a novels single copy escaping it’s author, colliding comically with a street full of machinery, that captures something of the draw of the typewriter today. For a writer, the maelstrom of words which pours from the screens around us, can be overwhelming. A break is needed, a discontinuity, writing as retrograde amnesia. One word at a time.

Download: ‘Typewriter’

Tracks used

Eric Satie – Parade – Performed by Griffyn Ensemble
Leroy Anderson – The Typewriter
Kishore Kumar, Asha Bhosle – Typewriter Tip Tip Tip
Liars – They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top – The Garden Was Crowded and Outside
Billy Fury – Gonna Type a Letter
Alicia Keys – Typewriter
Type of Music (featuring a typewriter) – Jon Brooks

‘White Cane Audio Theatre is a group of blind and visually impaired participants (aged 20’s to 80’s) led by theatre director Ciarán Taylor of Carpet Theatre with radio programme maker and composer Rachel Ni Chuinn (The Shape of Sounds to Come –Lyric Fm), and facilitated by the National Council for the Blind in Ireland with the support of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Arts Office. The group has been meeting for nine months exploring audio as a means of shared expression. Sightless Cinema is a presentation of some of the work generated during the project.’

I spoke to the group last week as they were finishing up recordings for the soap opera episodes based on their real life experiences, that serve as part of the project.

Sightless cinema, a live event showcasing the groups work, takes place this Thursday at UCD’s student centre cinema at 6.30PM. Contact: carpettheatre@gmail.com for ticket details.

Download: ‘Sightless Cinema’

Download: ‘William Morris in Dublin’

William Morris, considered the founder of the late Victorian Arts & Crafts movement in architecture and design, twice visited Ireland. He toured the country, delivering lectures on art and socialism. The influence of Morris’s design philosophy, and to a lesser extent his political leanings, can be seen to this day in a number of Arts & Crafts buildings in Dublin, including Clondalkin library, Charlveille Castle Dining Room, and Senior College Rathmines. I visited Whitechurch Library (a 1911 building designed by legendary Irish architect John Byrne), in the company of art historian, Dr Eimear O’Connor, to discuss the enduring influence of Arts & Crafts in Ireland.

Special thanks to Librarian Breda Bollard for allowing us use of the library and providing a tour of the space.

Tracks used

Herman Finck Medley – The K-Nuts Medley: Gilbert the Filbert – I’ll
Make a Man of You Yet” by Kelli Uustani
The Mosquito’s Parade (studio) – Ian Whitcomb
John McCormack – Dear Little Shamrock
Andrew Grumman – Ralph VAUGHAN WILLIAMS- Five Variants of Dives & Lazarus

Pigtown Scratchings is an occasional multidisciplinary event in Limerick, created by science and music collaboration Softday. Last week I headed down for Lyric’s Culture File, to speak to some of the multidisciplinary artists featured in this years event.

Featuring: performance poet Roger Gregg, musician and sonic artist Günter Berkus, contemporary dance artist Angie Smalis, storyteller Steve Lally, and audiovisual artist Leon McCarthy.

Download: ‘Pigtown Scratchings’

Download: ‘Notes from a performance art piece’

Notes from a performance piece

Phase 1 – Destroyed by Life

NO EXPRESSION, EYES OPEN, SLOW
NO FEELING, EMPTY, SLAVE
EXHAUSTION

1 – Electric awaken
2 – Rise, slowly painfully
3 – Crawl to feet
4 – Splash alive
5 – Trudging walk
6 – Slow pickup case
7 – Ride invisible train
5 – Smash with hammer
6 – Knocked back by an invisble wave
7 – Collapse
8 – REPEAT 1 to 7
9 – Hanging / rope break
10 – death

When Sebastian Dooris asked me to help him with one of his ‘projects’, it couldn’t have come at a better time. I had recently been knocked down, pushed off a forty story building and shot through the heart.

Seb and Emma Injection make up the experimental musical duo ‘Deathness Injection’. Improvising each ferocious new performance, the pair don outrageous costumes, dual theramins, and fuse industrial beats with pedalled improvisation. They perform on beeches, in art centres or abandoned space, sometimes with fellow noise makers like Luxury Mollusc, occassionally with hundreds of passers by. Now me, I’m about as musical as a puppys snore. Luckily Deathness Injection didn’t want me to play with them, they wanted me to dance.

I didn’t let my lack of formal training, or the fact that I’ve never danced in public slow me for a second. I realised I had everything needed for such a performance. Cycling thighs, a house mate with a bachelors degree in special effects make up, and no shame what so ever.

My inspirations – Beckett’s Catastrophe, Bob From Twin Peaks, and Oliverier de Saganzan, whose 2008 piece ‘surmodelage du crâne et de la face’ is the number one hit when you google ‘French performance artist’. The obvious ridiculousness of a middle aged man wigging and twitching to improvised industrial noise music, only increased the appeal. regieme

I begin to craft a skull cap, a waxy nub to keep my hair clean during my on stage transformation. I ordered a silver one piece suit from the internet, that would faile to arrive in time – decreasing the shiny strippyness of my planned denoutement. I began a regieme of physical training, cycling daily around the Pheonix park, dilligently entering all meals into MSN diet tracker.

Phase 2 – Transformation and rejection

1 – Rise with new life
2 – Discover brief case
3 – Worship / find solace in case
4 – Meet audience eyes
5 – Open case – HANGING OVER (pushup, crawling in)
6 – Build face – hiding in case – ORGASMIC – SLOW – MOVING and crawling
7 – Start with beak – rolling eyes
8 – Moaning / uncovering
8 – PAINT face – with hands
9 – Self discovery / celebration – BEND BACK – RISE with awkwardness
10 – New Body – Animation dance
11 – REJECTION – quivering fear walk – Tormented by music
12 – Cowering – invisible box
12 – collapse
13 – On back limb writhing
14 – Fight to rise – stand
15 – Cruicified

In the video of our first rehearsal, I’m visibly nervous, pacing about in a Trinity FM hoody, awkwardly making shapes. Little did I realise how a mere month of rehearsals will build from this quivering flesh a transfiguring artist.

Private parties, crustie hippies in their water logged mountain idyls growing vegetables, juice and credibility – not so much bugging out as tuning out, turning off and plugging out. Their music an ironic mix of 90’s hardcore, high BPM industrial techno and Bauhasian baroque retro classics.

Somewhere between a large house party and a small festival, Species Gothic Arts and Culture Gathering – wilfully hidden in the Leitrim mountains, is part of a new breed of curated parties. Not quite the debauched bacchanal of the 90’s rave scene, neither the security heavy Disnified boutique festivals that have sprung up on the wake of the death of Oxygen: Vantastival, bestival, Knock * Stocking – for every one of these mini festivals there are a douzen events like this. New age hippies, crusties and outsiders coming together to make psychedelic art, play their music ear bleedingly loud abd wear their freakiest clobber. Performers include Tragedy Vampires, Sugarplum Suicide, Kraven Brainz, DJ Fracture, Burden, DJ Flesh, Venus De Vilo, Last Bus to Nowhere, Bending Wrongs, Fallen Demon.

Phase 3 – Persecution and Assimilation

GRADUALLY BECOME MONSTER

1 – Shake off / break off face
2 – Sliding feet leg invert
3 – Hand across face to reveal expressions
4 – Lapping and suckling / abjection
5 – Feet together move top waving plant – Bob
6 – Lick and creep forward in one place – predated to predator
8 – Trusting legs in place
9 – Slow lurking walk – Pappa Lazaru
10 – Hands over head – Guermo Del Toro
11 – Shit on case
12 – Molest and consume case
13 – Engage audience
14 – Start to suffer
15 – Calcify
16 – Breaking and slowing and crumpling
17 – Can’t reach the case – fighting the seizure
18 – Horrible realisation and standing – this is real

We are deluged of course – what else in early May Ireland. Everywhere tents collapse like soufflés or blowing away all together in the gale force wind. We congregate in a corrugated shed plastered with Halloween themed folk art. A shrine to Wednesday Adams & Cthulhu shares wall-space with a Rubenesque blacklight water nymph and a two tone skull gobbling Laverne wood cut.

After civilisation collapses we’ll all live like this – small clumps of sustainable humanity hammering club thumpers into the encroaching night. The rolling hills of Leitrim are an ideal location for this kind of escapist awakening. The moss eroded walls of ancient small holdings climbing erosion rent hills of gorse and bracken. Old polymorphous woods concealing fairy secrets and freudian sins.

The outskirts of Leitrim are one of those places, like Waterford and Kinvara, where Britain’s new age travellers settled in large numbers as the UK grew rabbidly intolerant of their wandering ways. All across Ireland little enclaves of second and third generation hippie kids have grown up, fertilising the local arts scene.

King of the mountain is Illiocht O’Brainz, a dread locked Irish American clad in a kilt, Dennis the Menace jumper with a storm cape thrust over his shoulders like a lord of Winterfell.

Along with his wife, artist Harriet Myfanwy Nia Tahany, they serve as a nexus for local artists. Their property is a haunted mansion dotted with ram skulls, soft core fairy pinups, a bottles of potions with names Life Renewal Potion. The grounds have been prepared by a corps of young artists, dotted with decomposing corpses, miniature graveyards and alien sculptures.

Armed with a vague familiarity with the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky and the instruction to create a physical interpretation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, I set out to make a holy fool of myself. I don my skin wig and paint my face with clay in the portaloo. Hurrying back to the performance shed I swaddle my head in a rain coat to stop it melting off. I lie on a hemp tarp in this overly bright room. The music begins. Time slows. I am the tormented man, struck down by the weight of society. I smash my mime hammer against the rocks of social obligation. As the first act reaches it’s titanic crescendo I bend down to pick up an invisible noose, and end my futile existence.

I rise again in act two, crawling desperately towards a case containing what? Some salvation? Some dream of a better existence? I paw and lap the case with ferocious need. Finally it springs open in my hands and I bury my face within. The audience crane forward, what’s he building in there? Finally, after an eternity of thrusting and heaving I emerge from the case, a hideous creature of clay transfigured by their disapproving eyes. I stumble about, screaming and twitching, like a fawn born wrong. Finally I am crucified – my arms hammering themselves into the air, as my breath collects in great simpering clouds. A one man allegory for lots of deep things.

Act three, I am born again – a sexy rapacious beast, revelling in the horror. I shake off my latex skull cap – unashamed of my human hairThey have made me one of them, and they shall suffer for it. I crawl about on hands and knees, lapping at them, in a display of terrifying eros. Seb climbs from the stage and I rise to twitch with him. But it’s too much for me, I turn to the audience in horrendous revelation. This is what I have become. I look down at my hands, drenched in clay, my suit, a mix of the white and black paint I previously poured over my head. I turn to them as if to say – see, see I am a man after all. I assume a pose at once proud and abject. I wait for the music to finish. It doesn’t… I’ve horribly mistimed my big finish. Think fast, I think… I could stand like this for a bit, or wait, no, the old faithful foetal position. That’s the ticket. I shrink into a ball and wait for the end, as we all do, ultimately. It is magnificent.

Tracks used

Live recording, ‘Deathness Injection at Species 2015’
Deathness Injection – Deathness Before the Storm
Deathness Injection – Testament
Deathness Inection – Sexy Veil of Shame
Deathness Injection – Clangwarp

Ed Devane, featured in part six of ‘Mad Scientists of Music‘, is one of Ireland’s most innovative musicians. Having moved away from producing rigid programatic electronic music, Ed is at the forefront of combining electronic sounds and analogue instrumentation. For his recent Dodeca Cycle piece in Dublin’s coach house exhibition space. Ed constructed an installation that allowed up to twelve people to collaboratively construct or accompany a performance. His work is centred around this opening up of musical collaboration, building on rather than escaping from the ubiquity and accessibility of electronic music. I spoke to Ed for Culture File.

Download: ‘Dodeca Cycle’

Last week saw the first ever iDig music festival arrive at Dublin’s Convention Centre. I spoke to videogame composer and festival organiser, Craig Stuart Garfinkle, about videogame music and his work composing for world of warcraft.

Download: ‘Craig Stuart Garfinkle Interview’

Tracks used

Warlords of Draenor – Shadowmoon Sunset
Warlords of Dranor – Grinspiration
Warlords of Draenor – Ethereal Essence
Balders Gate 2: The Dark Alliance – The Battle Rages

WWC music from – Sneak Peek: iDIG Music – Dublin International Game Music Festival

All pieces composed by Craig Stuart Garfinkle.

Photo by Isabel Thomas

The tradition of artists creating provocative performance dinners, extends back at least to Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook. The Futurists delighted in inedible meals, celebrating their love of speed, violence, and technology. The Domestic Godless, with their wilfully obscure ingredients, their exploration of culinary alternative histories, and their satirical recipes provide a more palatable, if no less creative dining experience. For my latest report for Culture File I visited Broadstone Studios, where delectable monstrosities were being served. What happens when you cross ice-cream with the contents of an Edwardian vanity cabinet? What did the stuffing from the seats of a 1974 Ford Cortina actually taste like? Truth and fiction stir into a potent mix when a godless chef table.

Download: ‘Domestic Godless’ (Extended Cut)

Photos: Jamie Thornton

Sounds:
Living Pages
What You Should Know About Biological Warfare
Cooking Terms and What They Mean
My Little Margie – Episode 14, Series 3 – What’s Cooking

I caught up with the crew of Little Gem Records, a new record shop – yes you read that right, a new record shop – beneath Dublin’s Cavendish Row. Little Gem are a tryptic: A record store, recording studio and an indie label. They specialise in releases from local bands, folks whose music you can’t get anywhere else. Little Gem pride themselves on not screwing over the people who make the music. Something some of the city’s remaining big brand stores are apparently notorious for. They’ve also invented their own music format, a tiny cassette tape MP3 player containing a single album. If you’re indie Dublin, knock in for indie nostalgia, indie beards, indie tapes, indie vinyl and genuinely independent recommendations.

Download: ‘Little Gem’

Tracks used

Arbour by Soil Creep
Little Gem by I heart the Monster Hero
Chambers by Biggles flys Again
Heir Apparent by Sea Pinks

Spoken word nights in Dublin follow a predictable recipe: an unpalatable mishmash of weepy bildungsroman, irate slam and colouring book political commentary. Bluebottle Collective‘s events are different. The group hosts intimate experimental affairs, as likely to feature performance art or avant garde comedy as poetry and prose. Now Bluebottle are expanding into internet art, with a month of radio pieces, commissioned from a variety of mixed media artists. Here’s how they describe the project…

Hibernation Radio exploits the uninhabitable nature of Irish winters through rising internet speeds. Irish winters are: manky, silvery, filthy, dank, dreary, sodden, soft. There is no drama – no ice storms, hurricanes, landslide – just a gradual sogging of the country. Hibernation Radio nurtures aural curiosity and socialisation, as all other senses dim. Hibernation Radio is a meeting point. Rising mpbs allow weatherless intimacy- we welcome avatars and all-weather identities.

Hibernation Radio pivots the usual complaints about Irish weather into unconditional hero worship. We want to explore scientific (botanical, biological, zoological), artistic and emotional responses to thriving amongst the mank. Hibernation Radio does not see these categories as mutually exclusive. Every night for a month, listeners will find a cocoon of music, science, and spoken word; the mank is good and great.

The first episode, featuring a spoken word performance by Roisin Kiberd, music from n___________v and an experimental sound piece from yours truly, is available at the Hibernation Radio site.

You can also download my contribution below.

Download: Paraudiolia 1 [It’s not that way it’s over here]

A look back on what I’ve been up to in 2014.

This is the year I wrote my first stage plays, finished an award winning documentary series ‘Mad Scientists of Music‘, and released my latest radio sitcom ‘Choices‘.

I’ve also been lucky enough to make a bunch of podcasts with super smart rising talent James Van De Waal, for Radiomade.

This is the year I started making reports for RTE Lyric FM’s Culture File. Through Culture File I got to meet inspiring artists like Kevin Barry and Amanda Coogan, and had life changing experiences at the Happy Days Beckett Festival in Enniskillen.

This was the year I joined the A4 Arts Collective. The year of the inaugural Hearsay Audio Festival in Kilfinane, and the year I told a story at the legendary Moth!

I talk a little about some projects hitting early in the new year. My first short film Spaghetti Dick, and two radio art pieces created for Bluebottle Collective’s ‘Hibernation Radio‘ project.

Finally, I remember two people closed to me who passed away this year. My uncle Frank Stack, and college friend Trevor Murtagh.

Download: Episode 2

A podcast journal, questioning the creative life. I delayed posting this for a long time. It was recorded at a moment when I felt very emotionally vulnerable. A time when I was questioning the assumptions underlying the life I’ve chosen – the penurious road of the struggling writer. Maybe the open vein is the best to drink from. Take a listen.

Download: Episode 1

From the primitivist pederasty of Henry Darger’s ‘Realms of the Unreal‘, to Mark Hogancamp’s theraputic Marwencol dioramas, recent years have seen an ironic mainstreaming of ‘outsider art’. In a culture obsessed with commodifying novelty, a secretive graffiti tagger, self taught architect or precocious infant painter can be instantly thrown into the limelight. All that’s needed is novelty, and of course the imprimatur of cash.

Nowhere is this more evident than in comedy. Dedicated fans ensure the celebration of the most original and obtuse comedic nuggets. Over time a paradoxical popularity can grow – and the most underground comedic talents gain mainstream acclaim. British satirists have spent two decades remixing and restaging news footage and subverting advertising with wilfully crude CG. The Situationists called this detournement, turning the expressions of capitalist media culture against itself. Brits like Chris Morris, Adam Buxton & Joe Cornish, and of course the Pythons, laid the groundwork for this often bleak, but always surreal Frankenstein reconstruction of television.

In America, experimental comedy has always been less avowedly political, more nihilistic and well, silly. A generation of media production graduates have applied skills honed making adverts to the creation of nightmarish cartoons, youtube skits and ironically terrible television. The centre of the visual comedy renaissance is cable network called Adult Swim. In the tradition of all things American, the channel is ultimately owned by global media colossus Time Warner. That hasn’t stopped Adult Swim from broadcasting some of the most subversive programs of recent years, from the gratuitously grotesque Super Jail, to Dan Harmon’s critically acclaimed Rick and Morty.

Which brings us to the darlings of Adult Swim: Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. The pair got their break a decade ago with animated sitcom Tom Goes To the Mayor, but it was their second show Tim & Eric: Totally Awesome Show Great Job, that saw the pair becoming, well if not household, then certainly dorm room names.

Tim & Eric’s world can seem initially impenetrable. Sketches fly by at a break neck pace, mixing absurdism and grotesquery in equal measure. Characters are often played by unconventionally attractive performers, seemingly recruited from some disused rolodex of fame thirsty freaks. It can feel exploitative, and it certainly isn’t always clear whether we’re laughing with or at these unselfconscious oddballs, numbly reciting the tag lines to faux late night infomercials. Watching Awesome Show is (quite intentionally) like stumbling across a medley of awful late night television, populated by preening madmen and unnecessary graphics. As though the VHS camcorder effects of the 1990’s had kept evolving, their capabilities becoming ever more garish, crude and hallucinogenic.

Awesome Show has drawn guest appearances from the illuminati of American comedy – everyone from Will Ferrell to Ben Stiller queuing up to gain kudos satirising exactly the kind of staid fodder that made them millionaires. Their work remains divisive. A 2012 movie version Awesome Show led to a mass walk out at Sundance – pleasing the two no end. The films dismal box office might have had a slightly less amusing irony. Despite this, the duos influence continues to grow. You may have simultaneously enjoyed or been horrified by the recent Tim & Eric influenced viral ‘Too Many Cooks‘, in which an endless sitcom opening sequence becomes a grizzly bloodbath.

Solo projects have been more successful. Heidecker’s dark film ‘‘The Comedy’ was perhaps the best of the recent spate of autobiographical pictures about wealthy, psychologically distressed, middle aged white men. The film serves as a critique both of the little princes of American hipsterdom, and ironic distance as a value. His comic songs have expertly skewered fringe presidential candidates: Culminating in 2011’s most niche record, the Herman Cain themed ‘Cainthology‘. Meanwhile Wareheim has directed visually inventive music videos for artists as diverse as MGMT, Major Laser and Depeche Mode. Notably the pair have shown little reluctance to lend their ironic hyperawareness to advertising campaigns for everything from video games to pizza rolls.

Their work is a product of the age of narrowcasting, beautifully intricate, wilfully awkward and designed to annoy anyone over thirty. By focusing on the techniques, rather than the content of bad commercials and TV, they can seem culpable and cruelly patronising, violating the golden comic rule – always aim up. Yet their fixation on weirdoes and tragic misfits speaks to an affection and camaraderie with outsiders, all too often missing from conventional comedy. Underlying their cruelty, condescension and cynicism may be a kind of disappointed love. A love for the noble ignominy of bad television, kitsch advertisements and above all failures. An acknowledgment of emptiness. The kind of laughter Beckett called ‘the laugh laughing at the laugh’. But it really doesn’t matter what you think. Smug cynics or wickedly original geniuses, Tim and Eric continue to redefine television comedy.

Download: Tim & Eric

My final piece for Culture File’s series on ‘Silence‘, is an interview with performance artist Amanda Coogan. I don’t want to preempt the piece by writing too much about it. I will say that of all the conversations I’ve had this year, both on mic and off, this was perhaps the most personally meaningful. Amanda is an unusually sincere person who seems truly present in the moment. There are people I occasionally meet, whom I feel honoured to send time with, because they are present without pretence or defence. Perhaps those moments are why I’ve gravitated towards jobs that involve attempting real conversation – psychotherapy, music journalism, whatever the heck I do now. In those moments I’m reminded that life can be more engaged and meaningful than our fears and shibboleths usually allow.

Download: Amanda Coogan on Silence

Below is a transcript of the Culture File piece, and I’ve also made available a largely unedited recording of our interview. Our discussion spanned a variety of topics from the relationship of performance art to shamanic practice, to Irish societies treatment of the other, the evolution of performance art, as well as embodiment, the abject, and the phenomenology of performance.

Download: Amanda Coogan Interview (unedited)

Amanda Coogan Interview Transcript

(IN THE KITCHEN OF AMANDA COOGANS STUDIO AT THE
SCHOOL FOR DEAF BOYS, CABRA. SOME KITCHEN NOISES)

GARETH
I love your shopping trolley.

AMANDA
I know, I’m like an old lady!

GARETH
I think we always think of em, performance art as so
glamorous.

AMANDA
Oh yeah it’s super glamorous (LAUGHS)!

MUSIC: FROM AMANDA COOGAN VIDEO ’WE SHALL GLORIFY’ (VIDEO
AVAILABLE AT AMANDACOOGAN.COM

GARETH (VOICE OVER)
I met Amanda Coogan at her studio, on the grounds of
saint Joesph’s school for deaf boys. Her work over the
past two decades has explored the body, femininity and
the relationship between artist and audience, viewer
and participant. Amanda began by giving me a crash
course in what makes Irish performance art and her work
in particular, unique.

(AMANDA COOGANS STUDIO – QUIET SPACE, NO NOTICABLE
BACKGROUND NOISE)

AMANDA
Performance art is a relatively new form of practice.
It’s about a hundred years old. But really came into
it’s own in the sixities and seventies. Irish
performance art practice is very much based on the
psychological self, the psychological body going
through actual experiences, real experiences. I work in
whats called durational performance. Durational
performance for me is anything over three hours. And
what happens in long extended periods of time (and I’ve
done up to twenty four hour performances), is that the
body is taxed. The body has to go through some
endurance. It is difficult, physically, emotionally,
psychologically, and that is what you are presenting.
And that is what the audience are enabling you to do by
being there.

GARETH (VOICE OVER)
Amanda’s work is notably free of the spoken word, and I
asked her why she’d chosen to exclude this most direct
mode of communication.

AMANDA
It’s a very particular choice that I’ve made in my
work, not to use speech. Not to use words. I am asking
the audience to come into a very particular embodied
experience with me. So consider the body. When you’re
looking at a body who’s presenting itself publically,
(as an audience memeber) you feel that empathy, you
feel that sympathy, you feel that communion with that
body. The body is the filter that we read the whole
world through, so your bodily experience informs every
way that you understand and concieve the world and
experience the world. It’s a radically different
experience to just the head, so for example I have an
older piece of mine called yellow, where I scrub the
dress that I’m wearing. And the audience members would
often rock in the same rthymn as my scrubbing. Simply
letting it wash over them. I strongly believe that if I
utter a sentence or a word, that brings people out of
the embodied experience, and brings them into the
rational self. I think there’s place for both of those,
but I ask my audience very much to be in the moment, in
the present moment, of the embodied experience with me.

GARETH (VOICE OVER)
Amanda Coogan isn’t just a notable performance artist.
She’s also one of the only people in the country to
have been a hearing person, raised through Irish Sign
Language, and this unique perspective has had an
inevitable impact on her work.

AMANDA
Irish sign language is my first language. Both my
parents are deaf and activists in the community. So I
suppose it makes pretty simple sence that as an artist
I’m very much engaged with embodied practice: Physical,
visual, manual practice. To utter something in sign
language, you must use your body, and to recieve
something in sign language you must use your eyes. Not
that it isn’t a rational language either, of course we
have vocabulary, of course we have sentence structures,
we have thoughts, it’s as rich and deep a language as
English or any other spoken language. It’s manifest in
a radically different way. The body and our bodily
consitution and experience is the major filter to how
we experience and live in the world. So the deaf body,
or the body that uses Irish Sign Language or any other
sign language, has a radically different filter onto
the world.

GARETH (VOICE OVER)
A hearing person, finding out about Amanda’s unique
background, might almost inevitable ask themselves the
question, what it must have been like to grow up with
’voiceless’ parents, in a presumably quiet home.

AMANDA
…People would often say that I would have come from a
silent world, it couldn’t be more opposite. Actually
deaf people are super noisey. But it’s really
interesting noisey, because it’s not a noisey that is
communicating. It is an accidental noisey. I was just
working with 42 deaf people in the Project Arts Centre,
a couple of weeks ago, on a piece called ’You Told Me
To Wash & Clean My Ears’, and they’re so noisey! You
know walking up the stairs, slamming the door, even
using sign language is noisey… Or they ’utter’ the
most beautiful sounds. That are not indicators of
communication, they’re literally the body making
sounds, because there’s no filter to stop doing that.
So sound for me I suppose has never been related
directly to communication. But it’s almost a musical
phenonena. In my familial home, when I was growing up
was very noisey. And even now when I return to my
parents house, the cooker makes noise, the fridge makes
noise… There’s often an alarm going off, when you
come into the house, and it could have been going off
for days (LAUGHS). It doesn’t make any odds to them. So
sound, as we understand it as hearing people was very
different to me when I was growing up. There’s no
silence, you go to Achill looking for silence. It’s a
different quality of sound that we hear. John Cage’s
famous four minute piece actually makes us as the
audience, hear the world.

MUSIC: THE END OF ’WE SHALL GLORIFY’ RISES GRADUALLY UNDER
AMANDA’S VOICE

AMANDA
We don’t hear the instruments not being played, what we
hear is the atmosphere. All the people gathered in that
particular concert hall, different bodies breathing,
shuffling, there is sound. There is always some kind of
quality of sound. I very much realise, our kind of
adventure to look for silence, is a fools gold. There
is no such thing as silence.

In this penultimate episode of my series of interviews on silence, I speak to Trevor Agus of SARC. Belfast’s Sonic Arts Research Centre is a world class facility for the study of sound. I’d met some SARC staff at the Happy Days Beckett Festival in Eniskillen, including the composer and sound designer David Bird. So it was an enormous privilege to visit in person.

SARC was also recently the subject of an incredible binaural documentary by Clare Cronin, for RTE Lyric.

Trevor Agus’s interest in sound goes back to an adolescence composing computer music. This led to the study of human perception, and his current research – how humans recognise and differentiate sounds. We spoke about the adaptive utility of quiet, the possibility of silence and the pain of tinnitus.

Speaking of silence, Anand Jagatia, one of the attendees at the recent Hearsay Festival in Limerick, has a fantastic piece about silence and tinnitus. Paolo Pietropaolo also produced an incredible piece about his own tinnitus, which Brendan Baker (of Love & Radio) included in his ‘Ears Forward’ listening evening in Brooklyn last year.

Download: Trevor Agus at SARC

Silence, it can be an elusive experience in a modern world dominated by cities, and illuminated by technology. Silence is not only a product of our environment, but also of our perceptual system. In this second in a series for Culture File, I speak to Professor Fiona Newell of Trinity College Dublin, about sound and silence. Fiona was my lecturer at college for a number of courses on sensation and perception. More recently she’s become the go to scientific expert for discussions about how we perceive beauty (neuroaesthetics). Including the fascinating talk below, given last year at TEDxDublin.

Download: Fiona Newell on Silence

My latest report for Culture File is a discussion with Irish author Kevin Barry, about the role of silence in his work. Kevin joined Sara Maitland (author of ‘A Book of Silence‘) on a panel about silence at the recent Happy Days Beckett festival. He was a joy to talk with, and this discussion became the first of a series Culture File are running where I talk to artists and scientists about how silence impacts their work.

Download: Kevin Barry on Silence

Perhaps the most famous line in Portrait of the Artist goes like this: ‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her own farrow’. Some things never change. The ‘peace dividend’ of Brian Lenihan’s attack on the Irish economy, was a fall in rents. Dublin got something it had never had before, cheap unused buildings. This meant that artists, historically an embarrassment in the way of progress (see The City Arts Centre, the Temple Bar redevelopment, etc, ad nauseam), took an active unmediated part in the life of the city. Visitors to this years ‘Culture Night’ attractions, will have discovered that all that is done for. We have lost so much, so quickly. So much hope that the city could be a place for people, not merely a venue for business. A creative community, not just a pop-up cash register for green dollars. So many of my generation, and the cohort after me, have left. There was no room for us. This city killed the spaces we created, one after another.

Exchange Dublin, Mabos, Subground 43, Space 54, Dublin City TV, Supafast, Bluebottle Collective, the Factory, Moxie Studios, the Joinery. All going, going, gone. These were spaces where anyone could take part in making things. Art as expression and community, not just commodity. Each was systematically defunded, ejected, and shuttered. There are still arts spaces in Dublin, of course. Commercial galleries, artists studios, and the kind of businesses that don’t promise or threaten social change. I wanted to know why. Why have so many spaces that offered hope, connection, ingenuity and freedom gone? Is it a combination of rising rents, and unsustainable commercial rates? Or is this city and those who govern it, actively hostile to anything that doesn’t draw a buck.

I spoke with all the volunteers and founders I could find. Some of those interviews are compiled in the piece above for Culture File. Some I’m sitting on, waiting for the right outlet to tell this story. Because it’s my story too.

After I finished college in 2008, I found myself footloose and penniless. Ireland didn’t seem to offer anything in the way of meaningful, ethical work, and I couldn’t afford to emigrate. I discovered a place called Seomra Spraoi. A collectively organised space, for communities united by a rejection of capitalist realism: The dismal view that this is as good as it gets, and if you want more you’d better clamber over the guy in front. A few months later, I visited a new space, a friend from college was helping to create, Exchange Dublin. Volunteering at Exchange was to occupy three of the most creative, rewarding years of my life. Exchange was a collaborative community, like Seomra Spraoi run through consensus meetings anyone could join. It offered space, most often for free, to literally hundreds of groups, for exhibitions, meetings, performances and artistic expression of all sorts. But this space was in the heart of the city, with glass walls that invited visitors in. And in they poured, from all over the world, visitors of every age and ethnicity. They’d arrive, on a Saturday afternoon, stepping in for a tea, or to escape the rain, or to take part in a dance class they’d glimpsed through the window. Often they’d be back, volunteering the next day, and the day after. The openness of the space, it’s lack of walls, whether of glass, class, education, or appearance, made it utterly unique.

It was meeting so many marvellous strangers and artists, entering a world I’d never had access to, that gave me the courage to pursue comedy, performances, radio, theatre, video and performance art. Exchange Dublin gave birth to the education collective I co-founded, Open Learning Ireland.
All the marvellous adventures I’d admired, but never imagined myself doing. All of the things that make life more than series of days occupied by work and distraction. Exchange kickstarted the careers of dozens of comedians, visual artists, dancers, and activists. This January, the space was forced to close, accused by DCC of nebulous ‘anti-social behaviour’. Seomra still ticks on, just about covering it’s rent and rates from month to month. Day by day, week by week, more and more of my friends leave. Not because we loathe Ireland, or lack the courage to stay through a recession. But because every flower we plant is plucked out, and the soil that’s left behind is salted barren.

Download: Unlikely Spaces

My latest report for RTE Lyric FM’s Culture File, took me ‘upstairs’ to the week long ‘Happy Days‘ Samuel Beckett festival in Enniskillen. The festival organisers and tourism board of Northern Ireland were wildly hospitable (many thanks especially to Cathy Kapande, Kirstin Smith, Allie Crehan, and Sean Doran). Little did they know I’m but a lowly scribbler, not some slick skinned journo-critter full of Celtic catnip. The festival was genuinely wonderful, and I hope my brief report goes some way to conveying why. Listen above. Scattered impressions below.

I remember watching a BBC production of Happy Days in the wee hours of the 1980s. Reading Godot in secondary school and finding it hilarious. Finally attending the play in college, only to find the staging dull as dishwater. Beckett’s name evokes the grim surrealness of his imagery, seized upon by Woody Allen, parodied by the manically incongruous Pythons. I haven’t seen nearly enough Beckett, but I’ve seen Beckett in everything. In the savage mysticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, in the relentless self dissecting voice of Wallace Shawn’s Fever, in the humane grotesquery of The Singing Detective, in the domineering monsters so beloved of the Mighty Boosh.

Irony, the keen inversion of pain, the honest lie, is somehow key to Irishness, in Beckett’s time as today. Call it rebellious post-colonialism, call it rain-drenched nihilism, few cultures delight more in black comedy. I could say that ‘like Beckett I write for radio’, but that would be ludicrous. No one writes like Beckett, his work is so readily identifiable, so iconic in popular culture, trivial to parody yet impossible to imitate.

I’ve always been quite afraid of Beckett. It’s hard to empathise with a man who helped Joyce finish Finnegan’s Wake. Beckett’s rejection of character in favour of the universal, of narrative in favour of the indeterminate, and of epiphany in favour of negative capability, are all off-putting. But there’s no denying just how emotional the plays are, an aspect sometimes lost in onerously respectful staging.

I’m in Enniskillen, where the annual Happy Days festival has brought hundreds of performers together to celebrate the great man’s work, on stage, through music and readings, in exhibitions, installations, lectures and performances. Somewhere, hidden behind an enormous platinum edifice of craggy cheeked, ice cropped late Beckett, there’s probably a Krapp’s Last Cronut stand. You have to admire the moxy of a festival featuring productions of Godot in French and Yiddish, but none in English. Beckett was educated here, in Portora Royal School, where Oscar Wilde had earlier attended. I’m hoping a little of that learning will wear off on me, as I make my first foray into Beckett Land.

I descend into the Marble arch caves, where an octophonic John Cage piece has been set up on hidden speakers, winding it’s way through the rocky depths. Around us stalagmites rear up like molten candles. We pass under honey glazed ceilings dripping deliciously onto the puckered dragon hide skins of chitinous crenellated monstrosities. Walk through monument valley, boulders piled above us threatening to tumble. Cross foot bridges above blood red streams, fringed by dunes of dun sand, where our contorted shadows pour over whalebone walls. Roaratorio follows a method Cage devised for creating music from any book. These fright noises, snatches of music and voice, fusing with the caves own eerie song, were composed from Finnegan’s Wake.

Early morning Saturday and I’m off across the loch a schoolboy Beckett would have rowed, to hear Donal O’Kelly read on a golf course by the waters edge. Later Donal tells me how fracking threatens to split this community once again along sectarian lines. At the centre of Enniskillan is a memorial to those who fought in the Great War: Impossible to pass without being reminded of the Remembrance Day Bombing. It’s a hundred years now since that war, and the rebellion it sparked. This square remains a reminder of the wanton violence spilling down through this countries history ever since.

I encounter a freelance reporter Ian Patterson, who writes for the Belfast Telegraph and a host of other publications. Ian tells me about his journalistic travels. Visiting Loas, writing about Laotian minority Hmong people. During the Vietnam war the Hmong fought a proxy war in Laos for the Americans on the promise of a homeland secured by the CIA. After the Americans lost in Vietnam, the Hmong were persecuted. The Laotian government promised genocide and many fled, to the forests, to the united state. Today, in exchange for foreign aid, the Laotians have built towns for the Hmong to encourage them to return from jungle and reintegrate into society. Some of those who travelled to the US suffered from a ‘culture bound syndrome’ of unexplained adult deaths. They were visited by the spirits of their ancestors sitting on their chests as they slept: The dead pursuing the living into the new world.

Beckett’s school is Wes Anderson nostalgic. We sit in the parish hall style school gymnasium. Around us are blackboards embossed with the names of sporting heroes, patrician busts of headmasters, turning their noses up to meet stray basketballs. Dressed like gypsy geniuses in odd assorted hats, Yurodny appear. Sweet melancholic scratches of divine fiddles, mysterious and plaintive, klezmer somewhere between Turkish & trad.

We’re here to see the New Yiddish Rep and their earthy human Yiddish Godot. There’s so much weight of humor and history in this performance. Vladamir & Estragon are Laurel and Hardy, a tragi-comic vaudevillian duo, almost romantically doomed. The text, translated from French, German and English translations, almost inevitably evokes the Shoah.

This is a production that says – we can each let go of our bonds and yet we continue to hold them, drawn towards our own nature, irredeemably, hilariously, tragically. Moche Yassur, the company’s artistic director, laments the dying of Yiddish, his native language, even as he works to give it new life.

After the interval, Yurodny return. We wait in pregnant silence for them to begin. A minute passes, two… I’ve never seen Cage’s 4’33’ performed like this. So as to emphasise not the noise of silence, but the music lost.

Through Tattygare roiled with union jacks. Over hills past window scratching branches to a mysterious location. I’ve travelled through the Fermanagh countryside to Adrian Dunbar’s production of Beckett’s catastrophe. Dusty pews and damp flaked green walled alter form a stage. Three figures – a capo / bossman / king some tyrant anyway (the director), his nurse / wife / lacky (the assistant) constantly reigniting his cigar and manipulating a figure posed on a plinth (the protagonist). Under his guidance she moves the figure, making notes to whiten the limbs, expose the flesh. Perhaps we are observing the subject of an experiment, perhaps their child, a living statue anyway, an exhibit. At one point horror strikes the director. Something is wrong with his subject, something awful. He flees to the stalls to inspect the scene. They’re preparing a play.

The morning before I leave two communities audibly collide – the Enniskillan of literary festivals and the prosperous working class town still riven by sectarian conflict. An enormous flotilla of tractors trundle through, some driven by rascal boys honking horns and making heavy-metal hand signs. The mass conspiring against capital.

Perhaps what appeals today about Beckett is his tasteful reserve. Modern concerns framed with a restraint that feels classical, universal and terse. Theatre emerging from silence and darkness. As our world becomes more noisy, and confused, we’re drawn towards Beckett’s quiet, his ambiguities, his acceptance of impossible contradictions.

Download: A Writer In Beckettland

So last night I was lucky enough to see the incredibly talented radio producer Roman Mars perform a live episode of his show 99% Invisible, at the ever creepy Freemasons Hall in Molesworth St. The event was a part of the inaugural Sounds Alive festival, which brought together a bunch of radio folks like legendary storytelling collective the Moth, and Belfast’s Sonic Arts Research Centre, as well as curating several rooms of world class radio around the bizarre magical landscape of the Freemason’s Dublin Command Centre.

I had genuinely forgotten that Sounds Alive was also running a competition, called ‘Your Story Your Sound‘, curated in part by Roman Mars himself. So it’s with enormously still disbelieving bejaysusment that I report that a segment from my recent doc series ‘Mad Scientists of Music‘ (created for Dublin community station Near FM) took home the award. The piece takes us on a musical journey into the hills above Brighton, where avant-garde music finds a home in an ancient landscape.

If you like what you hear, we’re running a live show to promote some of the artists featured in the documentary. It’s on 16th September in Dublin’s Twisted Pepper, and tickets are only 5 euro! You can also download or stream to the whole series at this website, or on itunes.

Update: Luke at Culturefile was kind enough to rebroadcast the piece yesterday.

Download: Hiding Music in the Mountains

Hiding Music in the Mountains

Irish electronic musician Ewan Hennelly (HERV / ZPG), has developed a way to combine his two passions; hiking and electronic music. Climbing the hills and valleys of the South Downs, Ewan takes part in geocaching. Tracking down geocaches (tiny boxes for marked on an online map) with his GPS, Ewan leaves cassettes of his experimental music albums for curious travellers to encounter.

I’ve long been enamoured of the sheer fun of Popical Island‘s albums and gigs. The label come collective feature numerous highly regarded Irish bands like Groom, Tieranniesaur, Squarehead, Big Monster Love and No Monster Club. This indy rock (I’d go as far as to say twee-pop, but I mean that as a compliment!) gang have moved to a new home on Little Brighton St, ‘The Pop Inn’. There they cook up new albums galore and cobble together gigs that have an atmosphere reminiscent of a beech boys video, without the hindsight about Brian Wilson later becoming a drug mental. I visited this cosy corner of the world earlier in the week, and spoke to the islanders about what makes them unique, and to No Monster Club’s Bobby Ahern about his upcoming booky wook, ‘D’You Remember Yer Man‘. Results above!

Music featured:
Cave Ghosts – ‘La Concha‘, No Monster Club – ‘Rock ‘N Roll Kids‘, Groom – ‘Golden Age‘.

Download: Popical Island

I can’t quite believe it, they let me do it again! Recently the producers of Lyric FM’s daily culture programme ‘Culture File‘ took an interest in my documentary series Mad Scientists of Music, asking me to adapt a report on brilliant Northern Irish chiptune musician Chipzel for their show.

Last week they commissioned me to meet Irish mentalist Shane Gillen. Shane’s new show, which brilliantly combines stagecraft and magic is currently on in Smock Alley. Rather unbelievably, they allowed me to make this bonkers report about Shane and his journey into ‘mentalism’. I’m seriously amazed this went out on RTE radio. I actually got a call from a close friend right after it broadcast to tell me I’m crazy. Victory!

Shane’s show ‘Lapse‘ is running until July 12th, tickets here. I’d heartily recommend it.

The music used in this piece is all stolen / adapted from Simon Kenny’s brilliant Bitwise Operator release ‘Translation’. You can download the whole EP for free from bandcamp. Simon is also the creator of the incredible sound synthesiser ‘Oscar‘ , coming soon to iPad / Android, featured in the final episode of Mad Scientists.

Download: The Mentalist

Chuffed to be able to present my first piece for RTE Lyric FM’s ‘Culture File‘ programme. It’s a short on Chipzel, the Chiptune artist profiled in Episode 2 of Mad Scientists of Music. The piece features much of the same material from that report, but presented in a more straightforward way, which was an interesting challenge. I grew up religiously listening to the incredible BBC Radio 4 arts programme Kaleidoscope, and Luke Clancy’s Culture File is a sort of modern day descendent of that show.

Download: Chipzel

Footnotes was a one off student media award shortlisted show that ran on Trinity FM in the late 2000s.

Footnotes – Americana (63 Megs)

Thrust Us was a sex and relationship advice show that ran on Trinity FM in the late 2000s.

Thrust Us – Episode One (Best Of) (42 megs)

In which three Irish gentlemen with English accents discuss…

Jibberhoof, Episode 1 (75mins, 65megs)

Shownotes

News Stories of the Year – Wikileaks, Acts of God

TV of the Year – Boardwalk Empire, Walking Dead, Spartacus Blood and Sand,

Movies of the year – A Profit, The Social Network, Network (1976), Scott Pilgrim

Games of the Year – Minecraft, Sleep is Death, Pixeljunk Eden (2008) * Dylan Cuthbert

Person of the year – Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Justin Hall, Plato, Why the Lucky Stiff

Personal Highlights of the year – Andrews trip to America, Johns trip to Italy, Marshmallow Ladyboy Jesus, Cheaper Than Therapy

A mini-documentary about my first trip to America in 2006.

Download: East Coast / West Coast

While I was at the anti DRM demonstration at Apples 5th avenue store, I also interviewed a member of New Yorker’s for Fair Use, Jay Sulzberger. The interview was too long to include in the program, but if you’re interested in issues surrounding DRM, net neutrality or wiretapping, check it out below.

Interview – Jay Sulzberger, 96k, 12megs.

Show Notes:

00.00 – Introduction
00.52 – Car to airport
02.33 – LAX
04.30 – Inglewood
07.15 – Backpackers Paradise Hostel LA
09.42 – UCLA Campus
10.40 – Hollywood Hills
12.15 – LA Hostel Morning
15.37 – Yosemite Bug Hostel
16.31 – Yosemite Bug (contd) – Talking about LA and SF
24.29 – Yosemite Bug (contd) – Dave’s Story
30.36 – Verner Falls Yosemite
31:40 – Half Dome Yosemite
33:45 – Central Park, NY – Talking about Vegas
44:22 – 57th and 5th, NY
46.28 – 5th Avenue Apple Store – Interview with Free culture NYU
48:58 – End

I’m releasing this under a Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

All music included comes from the album Bad Things Happen Every Day, by John Jackson, available from kick ass CC record label Magnatune.com.