To celebrate St Paddy’s we put together this collection of new Irish music we loved! 30+ tracks with no fixation on any specific genre, so everyone is bound to find a favorite (or two, or three).
Feel free to suggest any of the tracks we missed in comments and/or see our 2016 St. Paddy’s playlist. Happy listening!
Larry – Cocker Spaniel (Pizza Pizza Records)
Larry is a three piece band from Dundalk. A combination of lofi alt-rock with raw emotive lyrics & pop sensibilities stemsfrom the likes of Sparklehorse, Pixies and Wilco. Larry recorded their debut album w/ Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies, Shellac) in September 18.
Further Reading: Breaking Tunes
O Emperor – Effort (Big Skin Records)
Music band of awesomeness
Further Reading: Irish Examiner
Donnacha Costello – Yokoso
Music, Design, Cognitive Neuroscience.
Further Reading: A Strangely Isolated Place
DJ and producer from Ireland. He is the co-founder of Feel Music.
Further Reading: Stamp the Wax
Hidden Highways – Empire of Old
Quiet Americana-inflected folk duo: Carol Anne McGowan and Tim V. Smyth.
Further Reading: Fractured Air
Landless – The Trees They Grow Tall
Landless are Lily Power, Meabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinead Lynch. Formed in 2013 and based in Dublin and Belfast, they sing unaccompanied traditional songs in four-part harmony.
Further Reading: Golden Plec
Recalling the Fall’s abrasive, minimalist approach to the rock’n’roll palette, ‘The Way You Look’ was one of 11 tracks captured in 6 hours with Stephen Quinn in a room on North Frederick Lane, Dublin in 2017 – and it sounds it, in the most immediate, alchemical fashion.
The Thin Air
Lee Kelly, formerly Sage, is ditching the moniker and has released a preview of what will be roughly an hour of his own written and produced material with a new project. The 12 track cassette is part of a project by wherethetimegoes, a digital mixtape collective based in Dublin.
Four Four Mag
In appraising Jamie xx’s In Colour in the New Yorker in 2015, Hua Hsu wrote that the Londoner was “tracing the contours of someone else’s memories”, regarding Jamie Smith’s vivid but touristic references to a rave scene that had dissipated before Smith and his band had composed the notes to Intro.
Another Smith, Kevin (aka Kojaque) has constructed a different sort of hauntology that seems less concerned with history and more with identity. Kojaque’s nostalgia is not for lost futures, but for lost selves.
The Last Sound – Outer Raidio 2A
Barry Murphy aka The Last Sound started writing music very early on and does not intend to stop.
Acquiring a computer, sequencer, and sampler in 1992, the next four years involved producing over 100 tracks across several genres under many pseudonyms. Just three live performances were given during this period, each time under a different name and with up to six performers on stage, variously adding live drums, live synths, and dancers (it was the 90s after all) to the lo-fi techno backdrop. Up to 1996 three demo cassette albums were made, nothing was officially released.
Though still based around sequencing, sometime between 1996 and 2001 the music style gradually shifted to a more organic, ethereal and psychedelic plain – and The Last Sound was born.
Breaking Tunes
Eomac is an artist, musician, producer, DJ, label owner, and radio host. He has released music with Stroboscopic Artefacts, Bedouin Records, Trilogy Tapes, Killekill and more. Alongside his solo output he is one half of duo Lakker (with Dara Smith aka Arad) on R&S Records, and noeverything with producer / vocalist Laura Kilty.
Resident Advisor
Chequerboard is Irish musician John Lambert.
Further Reading: Beat Surrender
Avian Attak is Fergus O’Farrell and James O’Leary from Interference with Hyper[borea]’s David Bickley. The band formed around an improv jam session in Winstanley Studios down in West County Cork. Another three sessions evolved a large catalogue of strange and interesting tracks. These were sent to ex-Orb member Tom Green in his Brixton studio where he remixed the original parts. We then took these to the famed Lettercollum Studios and painstakingly edited the material and added a little “special something” with the expert help of John Fitzgerald before loving mastering by Dan Dan.
Further Reading: St. John’s Central College
Colm K draws from a wealth of knowledge in soulful sounds, which sees perform at many reputable clubs and festivals around Ireland and abroad. He has played and supported many of the globes most respected names including Run Dmc, De La Soul, Jazzy Jeff, Afrika Bambaattaa, Kenny Dope, Mr. Scruff, and many more besides. Spinning records lead to a natural progression in the production realm and since being part of the Red Bull Music Academy in Rome, 2004, he’s been busy with international collaborations and producing studio projects for the likes of Hypnotic Brass Ensemble and release music via Brownswood/FYE amongst others. 2009 saw him release music with the electronic outfit FreezerRoom and he produced much of Irish Soul sensation Brian Deady’s debut album Interview.
Bastard Jazz
Tuath – What Do You Want Me to Be
Tuath is a bilingual psychedelic rock band from Donegal/Mayo, Éire consisting of several meat bags floating through space who need not be named because they are only relevant until the last person who utters their name does so for the last time, erasing their memory from history to be replaced only by something bigger and better.
Further Reading: PureMzine
ARTHURITIS is a pan-dimensional being from one of the fruitful moons orbiting Lukon 5. He was first sighted by humans in 2013; caught on camera as he tried to escape Earth’s atmosphere on a piece of gym equipment with an AA battery in each ear.
His cryptic lyrics lend themselves less to storytelling and more so to abstraction. As a result more complex mosaic-like narratives form, teetering over the listener like a bejewelled sonic totem pole. Their placement and importance lies in the listener’s individual connection to the meaning of each word.While this goes on, layered organs and synthesizers drift over rugged rhythmic landscapes in a shimmering fog. Melodies bump and creep along like scuttling creatures on the ocean floor.
Further Reading: Merakindie
Dublin post-punk.
Further Reading: Scatalogik
Hailing from Dublin, Ron Elliot is a DJ and producer synonymous with the house and techno scene in the Irish capital
He’s cut his teeth in Dublin’s well-known institutions such as District 8, Opium Rooms, Button Factory, and the now demolished Hangar, and can be seen hosting his own shows in Wigwam under the Shed Sessions brand.
His productions and mixes reveal a clear influence from genres such as disco, house, breakbeat, and jazz, and nowhere is this more evident than his release of the UFO EP in July of last year.
BATS are a group of mammals comprised of various molecules based mainly on carbon. They began their musical quest in 2006, releasing an EP ‘Cruel Sea Scientist’ in 2007 and their debut LP ‘Red In Tooth & Claw’, produced by Converge’s Kurt Ballou, in 2009. Sporting their own brand of science inspired post-hardcore and danceable post-punk, they’ve played support to such big-name acts as The Locust, These Arms Are Snakes, Gang Gang Dance, Sebadoh and Chrome Hoof. With the forthcoming release of their sophmore album ‘The Sleep of Reason’ , produced by These Arms Are Snakes’ Chris Common, BATS seek to continue their ongoing quest of promoting science and reason while combating superstition and pseudoscience with blastable riffage and erudite hookage. Watch this space-time.
Irish Chamber Music
“Edgy, daring and sparky, Dublin band Cap Pas Cap play a hugely alluring post-everything game. There has only been a handful of releases to date, but each one has seen them pulling new shapes from the bag. Their best moment to date was last year’s hypnotic and spacey We Are Men single on the Skinny Wolves label, a pointer to the new-wave-no-wave-what-wave terrain they’re calling their own. Cap Pas Cap’s debut album should be one of this year’s highlights.” – Irish Times ’09
Arvo Party – L I L a C a R C H
Electronic/ambient artist based in Belfast, N. Ireland.
Autre Monde are a band from Dublin featuring Paddy Hanna on vocals, Mark Chester on guitar, Padraig Cooney on bass and Eoghan O’Brien on drums.
The Altered Hours – Way of Sorrow
Five-piece group based in Cork city, Ireland.
synth explorations byRuadhan O’Meara (No Spill Blood)
Directions in Music by Dan Walsh.
Woven Skull – Crucified on a Tesseract in Rotation about a Plane
Minimal Repetitions Made Inside of Haunted Woods & Burning Bogs
“Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh.”
See also – Natalia Beylis / Sunken Hum
And So I Watch You From Afar – Gang (Starting Never Stopping)
greedily trying to fit everything we love into one song
Ghost Signs – Before This All Comes Down
Tape Loops and Guitar Drones.
Haunted dreams of a dying civilization.
See also – Transpacifica
Sunken Foal – How Much is a Lot and How Long is Lately?
Dunk Murphy has been writing, performing and producing all manner of electronic music for the past ten years. As Sunken Foal and a member Ambulance, he has had releases on Planet-Mu, Black Acre, the Fear, Acroplane, Front End Synthetics to name but a few.
Championed by BBC1/XFM DJ Mary Anne Hobbs, his music covers a large area between vocal, plucked string folk and glitching, tumbling beats. While completing an MA in Music Technology in the University of Limerick, he furthered his research into generative audio techniques which he now fuses with more traditional compositional structures.
Breaking Tunes
Disc Hockey / Tune Maker Based in Dublin’s fair city.
SurgeryHead / DJ Rozwell – Hoodie
A malformed creature raised on a diet of 1980s horror movies, industrial EBM and slick french electro, SurgeryHead is music that you can mosh too as easily as it’ll make you shake that which your putrid mother cursed you with.
Musician / Researcher (Behavioral Neuroscience & Addiction)
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