My name’s George Watsky. I rap and perform poetry under the name Watsky. I’m originally from San Francisco, California, and I now live in Los Angeles.

Who are your favorite artists from home? What’s it really like touring?

Touring is incredibly fun and rewarding, but it’s a grind. I’ve been living out of a suitcase for three months. You operate on little sleep sometimes, stay in seedy hotels, eat a lot of gas-station food, but when you get to perform to great crowds with your friends on stage it’s more than worth it.

What’s your favourite city/town/venue to play?

It’s hard to say; there are so many towns that have been great to us. My top three might be New York, San Francisco and London, with many, many close seconds.

What’s your ideal festival line-up?

Stevie Wonder, Outkast, the Who, Jurassic 5, the Roots, Prince, Simon & Garfunkel, Louis CK hosting.

Tell us a tour story…

One time, on tour, the other act with us on the road kicked a water pipe in Seattle on the way to join us onstage and sprayed that whole backstage with water while we were performing. The venue didn’t charge us…

What has been your biggest achievement of the year?

Playing my dream venue, the Fillmore in San Francisco, was huge for me. That’s where I saw all of my favorite shows growing up in the city. I still have a dozen ticket stubs from shows I’ve seen there, and it was a very important milestone for me. All my family and friends were there, the house was packed and it lived up to every bit of expectation I had for it.

What was the worst piece of advice you were given?

To try to appeal to what I think kids want to hear musically — there are a lot of hacks in the music industry (mixed in with some creative geniuses) who don’t have any concept for what kind of art they want to create beyond what they think will be popular. These people brainstorm about hit-making after listening to what’s already on the radio to decide what derivative elements to pirate from those songs. All this leads to is watered-down and uninspired music. Better to figure out what you love and why you love it and let it inspire you to create something that is unique.

What do you do to relax?

When I’m truly relaxing I’m doing nothing at all. This doesn’t happen very often though.

What are you reading?

I just finished my friend Beau Sia’s new poetry collection The Undisputed Greatest Writer of All Time.

How about TV, anything good on the box?

I watched half of Breaking Bad and all of The Wire before I left on tour. I have to be careful not to get sucked into too many shows because I’ll watch them all at once at lose three days of time to a blackhole of TV.

Do you have a favourite YouTube video?

Maybe ‘Kick His Ask’ – it’s a little girl learning about swearing and monsters. Adorable factor is off the charts.

What website do you visit most? (discounting email, etc.)

New York Times for news. Some illegal European streaming site so I can watch Giants (baseball) games when I’m on the road.

What is your favourite:

Record?

There are a lot- I’ll put some favorites on: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below by Outkast, Rubber Soul by the Beatles, Joyful Rebellion by K-OS, Chronic 2001 by Dr. Dre.

Song?

Maybe ‘Blackbird’ by the Beatles.

Lost classic song?

‘The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald’ – folk song by Gordon Lightfoot.

Record label?

Quannum Projects. They put out a lot of my favorite independent hip hop in the early 2000s: Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, the Lifesavas and many more.

Who is your favourite current artist?

Digging Kendrick Lamar right now. good kid, m.A.A.d City is an incredibly creative and inspiring album, particularly for one that is a commercial success.

A new artist that you are most excited about?

Digging Chance the Rapper from Chicago. Great creative, honest, musical flow to his lyrics. Excellent wordplay.

What was the last great gig you have seen?

Saw a great comedy show by Bo Burnham. Super impressed by the detail that went into it.

Worst show?

I’ve seen a bunch of duds, don’t want to trash any other artists publicly though.

What should we expect from your Irish shows?

My live shows are a way different experience from watching my videos. I’m very proud of the musicians I play with and we work hard to make every night special. I hope people are surprised by the energy and the level of musicianship.

Watsky performs at the Academy, Dublin this Saturday, 25th May.

One of the sexiest and most arresting voices in American pop, plus Alicia Keys.

Luke Sital-Singh | Little Museum of Dublin, Dublin (7:30pm, 22nd May) | €11.50

Up-and-coming London folkie in the unfamiliar confines of a Dublin museum.

The Whileaways | Whelan’s (upstairs), Dublin (8pm, 22nd May) | €10

Galway Americana trio launch their debut album upstairs while…

Lucky Bones | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 22nd May) | €10

…Lucky Bones launch their second effort downstairs, with support from Edisons.

Spies | Button Factory, Dublin (7:30pm, 23rd May) | €8-10

The band launch their latest single, ‘Distant Shorelines’, and promise a good mix of old and new material.

Elder Roche | Odessa Club, Dublin (8:30pm, 23rd May) | €10

Rugged intimacy from the Dublin songwriter.

Nomeansno | Whelan’s, Dublin (7:30pm, 23rd May) | €16

Veteran Candian punks hit Wexford St.

David Kitt | Black Box, Belfast (8pm, 23rd May) | €15

The acoustic auteur continues a low-key national tour. I think I’m related to him somehow.

Todd Terje | Róisín Dubh, Galway (9pm, 23rd May)/Button Factory, Dublin (11pm, 25th May) | €20.90/€15

Him with the bouncy electro tunes and the perfectly sculpted moustache.

A$AP Rocky | Academy, Dublin (8pm, 24th May) | SOLD OUT

I don’t get why Rocky and Kendrick are dressed like they’re in a Westlife video here. Not a stool in sight.

Moscow Metro | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 24th May) | €9

Indie upstarts play the quays after their double bill with Little Bear earlier in the year.

Craig Charles | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 24th May) | €13.95

Coronation Street star and former Robot Wars host is now a funk and soul DJ.

The Riptide Movement | Olympia, Dublin (7pm, 24th May and 7:30pm, 25th May) | €16.85-19.50

I still see them about busking. Lads, protect your brand.

Enemies | Button Factory, Dublin (7:30pm, 25th May) | €10

The Embark, Embrace launch continues.

Tony Allen and Colours Afrobeat Foundation | Sugar Club, Dublin (7:30pm, 25th May) | €21.50

Afrobeat legend and Good, the Bad & the Queen drummer Allen is joined by Ireland’s best in the genre for one night only.

Haim | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 25th May) | SOLD OUT

They’re so hot right now.

Widowspeak | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 25th May) | €12

No widow’s peaks here. No hair styling of any sort, in fact. Hirsute band, sound like a country & western Cults.

Andrew Weatherall | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 25th May) | €17.65

Prolific, eclectic producer rocks up on Middle Abbey St for an evening with A Love from Outer Space cohort Sean Johnston.

Van Morrison | Castle Ward, Downpatrick, Co. Down (8pm, 26th May) | SOLD OUT

Mr Happy himself.

Lana Del Rey | Vicar St, Dublin (8:30pm, 26th May) | €44.05

Some morose glamour for your Sunday night.

Life Festival

Life Festival takes place this Friday, Saturday and Sunday (24th-26th May) at Belvedere House in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. Besides the likes of headliners Seth Troxler, Laurent Garnier, Modeselektor and Booka Shade, there’s a full line-up representing the best electronic and dance the Irish festival season has to offer as well as some fun anomalies. Unfortunately, Groove Armada had to cancel for medical reasons, but there is plenty to be discovered in their absence.

At the time of writing, tickets weren’t fully sold out yet. They range from €70 for a non-camping Sunday ticket to €160 for the full weekend plus camping. There are additional fees for campervans and such, and all can be bought at this address. You can see the full line-up below.

Tell us a bit about how Meltybrains? came together…

Fergus: It’s a little known fact that Meltybrains? were a mystery-solving team before we ever played music together. We only originally picked up our instruments in order to write our theme tune. In fact, the reason that the word Meltybrains? features in so many of our lyrics is that we are still trying to write that perfect theme song, and as soon as we do, we’ll give up making music and return to our true calling, mystery solving.

Seymour: It’s also the reason why the question mark is such a big part of our iconography.

Was the aim always to do things a bit differently?

Regis: Not really no, our aims were to have fun and to make music. Not necessarily in that order but not necessarily in any other order either. That last bit sounds like a tongue twister. Any other order either. Try it. Now try it while eating dry crackers. Good job.

Did you have any collective influences?

Seamus: When we first met, the amount of collective influences we had was probably not that great. However, we were all very open minded to what everyone around us was listening to and as a result our collective influences grew. In fact, a lot of the music that we listen to now, on our own, was probably introduced to us by other band members and by listening to the music that was playing in our original hideout, Meltybrook. Some things that have, resultantly, become collective influences on us include Snarky Puppy, The Heatwave, Talking Heads, Gorillaz, James Blake and The Weeknd, some of which are things that I, personally, never would have considered listening to before I became a Meltybrain?

Do you find that all the elements of the band have to go hand in hand – music, visuals, live show?

Fabien: Yeah, tying in a dizzying array of contrasting elements has always been crucial to our way of doing things. In fact we intend to really highlight this with a planned A/V show in the Unitarian Church, for the 10 Days in Dublin Festival in July.

Are you always looking for a new angle?

Raoul: Yes. Geometrically speaking, we are engaged in a never ending search for the point on the line between 360 degrees and 0 degrees. We will find it and then, Archimedes will be put in his place. YOU’RE WRONG ARCHIMEDES! INTO THE BOLD CHAIR WITH YOU!

Is it hard to step outside of the norm? Audiences can be quite conservative…

Tequan: Meltybrains? have never attempted to step outside of the norm. We just seem to have a very different definition for normal to everyone else.

What have you got planned next?

Sullivan: Well now, things have been set in motion for a while and the wheel will never stop spinning, and spinning, and spinning. Our future was written for us the day we decided to do what we have to be forever what we will and are, you know? That and wearing no pants while hallucinating audiences ask themselves how they got into the same room as these apparently deluded individuals. That’s always good, but not as good as piecing together the endlessly flawless greatest album ever made, in the world, ever, of all time, and then literally setting it on fire, destroying every last part of it, recording the sound of it being on fire for 60 minutes and then putting that out as our debut album. Big plans, big, big plans.

We have five of the limited edition T-shirts to giveaway. To enter just let us know what you think Meltybrains? should do next and send your ideas to giveaway@state.ie by 6pm on Friday 17th. Remember to include your address. The band play The Workman’s Club with The Notas on 29th May.

Meat Loaf | Odyssey, Belfast (6:30pm, 14th May)/O2, Dublin (6:30pm, 17th May) | £49.50-200/€58.70-250

The tour is named Last at Bat. Get it? It’s ’cause he’s retiring and he had an album (or three) called Bat Out of Hell…

Who’da thunk a cricket pun would fall flat?

And So I Watch You from Afar | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 15th and 16th May) | €14.50

ASIWYFA present two nights of the Stay Golden to launch their insta-classic All Hail Bright Futures.

Journey, Whitesnake | Odyssey, Belfast (6:30pm, 16th May) | €44-49

Old men sing a Glee song.

Evening Songs, featuring Young Wonder, Ham Sandwich, Heathers | Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin (7:30pm, 16th May) | €22.50

State and DIT have teamed up to bring you Evening Songs, with performances from Heathers, Young Wonder and Ham Sandwich, who are all set to perform with help from the UCD Choral Scholars, so expect something different and a little bit special in the rather beautiful confines of Dublin’s Christchurch Cathedral. All in aid of Temple Street Children’s Hospital. Get your tickets here.

Enemies | Róisín Dubh, Galway (9pm, 16th May) | €10

Another band riding the wave of Irish instrumental rock is Enemies, they play in support of their new album, Embark, Embrace.

Suuns | Grand Social (8pm, 16th May) | €16

The indie-drone Canadians are still learning to spell. Tickets to be won, see above.

DJ Hype | Bentley, Galway (10pm, 16th May)/Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 17th May) | €9.30/€17.65

Don’t believe DJ Hype, he’s a terrible liar.

DJ Rashad and Spinn | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 16th May) | €9.80

The two DJs continue their team-up on Middle Abbey St.

Senakah | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 17th May) | €10

Energetic indie-pop for your Friday night.

David Kitt | Róisín Dubh, Galway (9pm, 17th May) | €16.35

The somewhat reclusive singer-songwriter ventures into the Galway spotlight.

Fliptrix, Verb T | Stiff Kitten, Belfast (9pm, 17th May) | £8

London emcee will bring his boundless energy to the northern capital.

Rebekka Karijord | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8:30pm, 18th May) | €16

Norwegian songstress makes a return to the Workman’s after her January appearance.

Purling Hiss | Whelan’s (Upstairs), Dublin (8pm, 18th May) | €12.50

Dyslexic naughty boys.

Ulrich Schnauss | Button Factory, Dublin (7:30pm, 18th May) | €15

German electronic maestro, not like there’s many of those about. Tickets to be won, see above.

The Chapters | Smock Alley, Dublin (8pm, 18th May) | €10

The band launch their second album at the quayside theatre.

The Lost Brothers | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 18th May) | €12

The Liverpool-based expats take the Trails of the Lonely back home.

Mac DeMarco | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 19th May) | €12

Hazy power pop from Montreal to end the gigging week.

Altar of Plagues – Teethed Glory and Injury.

The third opus from Ireland’s Altar of Plagues, Teethed Glory and Injury, has earned them the prestigious title of album of the month in Terroriser magazine – something they don’t dish out lightly, especially twice. 2011’s sophomore album Mammal also earned them the title.

Despite their young age, Altar of Plagues have been pushing the boundaries of the black metal genre since their debut album White Tomb, influencing reputable up-and-coming acts such as Deafheaven. Originally from Cork, 25-year-old frontman James Kelly is now based in London; and when he isn’t working on Altar of Plagues, he’s building up his critically-acclaimed electronic solo project WIFE.

There’s so much to say about Altar of Plagues, and it’s hard to fit it all in this brief piece, but it should be pointed out that their achievements often fall through the cracks of the Irish music scene. We really don’t see enough of them on home turf, but hopefully that will change with this release. Teethed Glory and Injury is a challenging but stunning listen. It’s a convergence of interesting time signatures, elaborate textures, epic percussion and relentlessly raw vocals. It emanates the kind of musicality you would expect from someone with a few more years experience behind them, it’s an awesome achievement.

Mylets – Retcon

Mylets aka Henry Kohen is a one-man band/force to be reckoned with as well as the latest addition to Sargent House. His live performance video entitled ‘Ampersand’ (below) for the Sargent House ‘Glassroom Sessions’ clocked up 67k views in just two months, all via word of mouth. Retcon is his enthralling debut album and we can expect it on vinyl from 25th January.

He’ll make his Irish debut on 2nd August at Indiependence in Cork along with label mates Bosnian Rainbows and And So I Watch You from Afar. Kohen is also the latest poster boy for Digitech pedals, and no wonder: it’s the most innovative use of their products in a long time. Sit back, shut your eyes and listen to the album. It’s hard to believe it’s just one man and his pedal board, immensely inspirational and exciting.

So if you’re curious about his pedal selection check it out here or just catch him live in action at Indiependence this summer.

The Altered Hours – ‘Sweet Jelly Roll’

A definite highlight of the weekend at the Camden Crawl, the Altered Hours took to the stage at the Mercantile on Saturday night. With buckets of potential to offer, the most inspiring aspect of the Altered Hours has to be the confidence they display on stage. They’re utterly fearless and exude the kind of self-belief that only commands the same in their audience.

They’re currently touring the country promoting their latest single ‘Sweet Jelly Roll’. Aside from the Camden Crawl, Sunday saw them support And So I Watch You from Afar at their Castlebar album launch. Catch them next on 23rd May at Bourke’s Bar in Limerick or on the 24th May at the Pavilion Bar in Belfast.

Built on the frustration of major labels’ restraints and a burgeoning desire to explore the relatively undisturbed world of the underground, Ninja Tune first bloomed at the hands of Coldcut duo Matt Black and Jonathon More. Emerging in 1987, Coldcut quickly established themselves as bona fide rhythm wizards, employing rudimentary cut & paste techniques and heavy use of sampling when the term was mostly still associated with free supermarket snacks. While many artists fall into the category ‘genre-spanning’ because of their eclecticism over careers or albums, Coldcut are one of the few who manage to satisfy the description within single tracks.

Despite working prolifically throughout the dawn of Ninja Tune, Coldcut were tightly fastened to Arista Records and therefore had to resort to a number of aliases such as Bogus Order, Euphoreal, and most notably DJ Food. Aside from More and Black, Patrick Carpenter and Strictly Kev held the reigns throughout the early ’90s,where the group released the now dated but hugely foundational Jazz Brakes series and paved the way for a slew of classic breakbeat releases that singed the label’s imprint into the minds of many.

Flying the flag through this gestation period were the likes of the Herbaliser, DJ Vadim, Funki Porcini, the Irresistible Force, and cavernous Brazilian beat-welder Amon Tobin, all of whom are responsible for releases that managed to grow from the seeds that were planted before them, while remaining hugely influential on what was to follow. While all the aforementioned applied jazz to breaks in funky splendour, it wasn’t until the Cinematic Orchestra came along that the jazzy elements took centre stage and added new weight to the label with three mammoth releases in the space of four years – Motion, Everyday and Man with a Movie Camera.

It’s also around this period where we enter the era of Fink, possibly the only downtempo beat producer to successfully turn singer-songwriter without losing his moniker or his record label. From lone producing to leading a three-piece band, to putting on an illuminated stage show and a full orchestral concert, Fink has progressed in leaps and shows no real sign of slowing down, as he comments: “We gotta keep taking big steps, and we put out enough albums to kinda warrant the steps, y’know. It’s all interlinked from the album to the stage to the writing … we’re just writing and jamming and kinda demo-ing the set at the moment – just kinda finding a way … If the music needs it, we’ll go the extra mile onstage – and we loved our light rig/projections thing from the Perfect Darkness tours – it was fun to set it up every night to kinda get you in the mood (it would take eight of us 20 minutes every night).

“So – so far – sure, the next album is definitely sounding ambitious and big, but also dark and intimate too … we’re just laying down what we’re into right now and seeing what sticks out as good … so far we’ve jammed in LA, London, and next week we’re off to Amsterdam just searching for our mojo, and recording the journey too.”

Listening to Fink’s latest LP, Perfect Darkness, it’s hard to imagine the same man recording 2000’s Fresh Produce, but when we ask about his introductory piece he’s only too happy to reminisce: “Fresh Produce and the DJ days were so great. Just the other night, I went out to Hoxton Square to see [Ninja Tune stablemate and regular collaborator] Andreya Triana and right next door was the Blue Note, where we used to hold Ninja parties and I DJ’d so many times back then …

“I think, in the beginning, it was difficult to be a different kind of artist, and neither me nor Ninja Tune had really done it before, I don’t think, to some extent, so our learning curve was learnt together – and also the nature of how we do the business part of the music business has changed radically since 2000 when Fresh Produce came out … we marketed that with a sticker campaign. The gig with the orchestra on the Perfect Darkness tour was app’d to stream live on your Apple TV with a 360 camera option! So yeah, times have changed.”

Despite being surrounded by underground breaks, Fink still doesn’t feel alienated on Ninja Tune at all. In fact, he feels they’re much more congruous than people would think. “Ninja Tune have always been proud of their underground heritage and reputation and at first I think they saw jumping on the singer-songwriter bandwagon possibly felt a little commercial, but as I was already signed, it didn’t count as jumping on the bandwagon, I was already on the wagon. Now it’s different. As well as Bonobo and J Swinscoe having always used singers as well, Andreya, Jono McCleery, the Heavy [and] the new breed like Machine-Drum, Raffertie, Actress, and the Brainfeeder stable are really challenging.

“As it’s turned into a kinda ‘live’ thing for a lot of modern music, I guess the live acts have kinda thrived a little, and Fink has definitely transformed from a studio act going live to a live act in the studio. For sure … the bigger the gigs the bigger the songs have to be – even if bigger just means better … at the end of the day, Fink just loves writing, recording and touring music … and Ninja Tune love putting out records and getting syncs and stuff … perfect harmony, man.”

Regardless of whether or not Fink fits in or sticks out on the label, one overshadowing element is the fact that, for him, Ninja Tune is the best there is. “If I was signed to a major and not an indie, would I have sold more records? I honestly believe that the answer is no – no way … not in a million years. I’m on my fifth studio album as a singer-songwriter for Ninja Tune now, and on a major, I would have probably been dropped after my second, for sure.

“Distance and Time – lost classic … Ninja Tune don’t stress you out for the singles [but] give you loads of freedom creatively. Sure, the mega-budgets aren’t there, but that forces its artists to be creative and, above all, musical. It can’t be about the money… Ninja Tune is one of the best labels in the world – 20-years-old with no hidden investors or Sonyversal secretly owning anything – Matt and Jon turned an advance from Virgin into a groundbreaking label after they were dropped, and Peter has steered it since rubber stamps on White Labels and records with scratched horn samples over stolen breakbeats to a global beacon of alternative music, and so the label has a real kinda survivalist mentality as well as being a record company. And as an artist, I’m proud to be associated with that … Ninja Tune’s patience and long-term vision is why I’m probably still in love with the music industry … freedom and applause … the independent dream.”

It’s around Fink’s first release and the label’s halfway point that proceedings simmer down to a leisurely bobbing of heads. The couch-friendly rhythms of this period made living room listening the optimum format for beat digestion. Where all you really needed to enjoy Ninja records throughout this chapter was a fine set of speakers, an adjacent bass amp, and some meager rays of sunshine reflecting off your two day old cans of Devil’s Bit. This is possibly the golden age of Ninja Tune, where the label rockets through a fully stocked buffet of timeless imperishables, the list of which is too detailed to tackle but what the hell, here’s the crème de la crème as we see it:

Excluding the masterful Xen Cuts compilation (because that’s just cheating), we have Mr Scruff’s Trouser Jazz, Musipal by Wagon Christ, Blockhead’s first LP Music by Cavelight, off-kilter scratchathon Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from Kid Koala, as well as forgotten beasts like Talkatif and Verbal Remixes & Collaborations, and finally Bonobo’s on-the-map debut Animal Magic.

While all of the former have continued to keep things fresh, it’s only the latter that has evolved in tandem with Ninja Tune over the past few years. With the release of 2010’s Black Sands, Bonobo, aka Simon Green, took one step towards the nightclub while still bearing the threads of nostalgic folk rhythms from his previous works. Now, with his most recent album, The North Borders, Green has continued in the same direction to produce one of the most poignant electronic dance records to date.

Clutching his lapels through this evolutionary transition is Ninja Tune, who’ve mirrored Green’s approach by moving away from the safety of the sofa and into the club. They’ve accomplished this via their new vanguard of producers – FaltyDL, Floating Points, Letherette, King Midas Sound and Raffertie, whom we managed to grab a few words from. Despite being wholly different artists, Raffertie reads from the same page as Fink with regards to Ninja Tune’s positive influence.

“It is essential to have people around that you can trust with your work, and people you respect the opinion of, mostly because, as a creator, you get too close to your work and often lose sight of what’s good or bad about it. Those trusted people help regain a little perspective on what you are doing. Ninja Tune have given time, critique, support and guidance, and we have built a strong relationship over the time we have been working together, and I think my work is all the better for it.”

Simply refusing to be pigeonholed, Raffertie has moved from producing garishly ravey dub squelchers to alabaster house tracks with perfectly-chosen compact vocal loops in a very short time and with minimum fuss. As the release of his most contemporary EP, Build Me Up, draws near, it’s now become apparent that he’s metamorphosed yet again. His latest work comes across as more sentimental than its predecessors, which could be seen as a maturing style but is really just Raffertie exercising his given right to swim in music’s many waters.

“Production is, and should be, an ever changing process. I think it’s quite hard for creative minds to stay in one place for very long. By learning something new, there is a desire to implement it. When inspired by something fresh, it needs to be captured. This is reflected in the process I have been through over the two years writing the album and this new EP. Certainly the EP is full of emotion; that’s definitely something which I wanted to bring more to the fore in my music, but the beats are still present, just presented in a different way. Compared to previous productions, they are now stark and focused.”

The aforementioned album is said to be released on Ninja Tune in the latter half of 2013 and should contain the same delicate elements as Build Me Up in what Raffertie considers a fine-tuning of the skills he’s acquired over the years. “Writing this album has been about distilling and refining the way I work with my medium. It feels to me that this is some of my most assured work to date, and I am really excited for the album to be heard.

“Conceptually, it is an intensely personal and exploratory record, which takes snapshots of places around my seaside home town, dreams, imagining things from other people’s perspectives and generally coping with things that happen. It’s not what I would describe as a club-friendly album, but it acknowledges where it has come from, which is a predominantly electronic sphere. It’s gone far beyond its roots, however, and is much more tangible music with sounds developed using instruments, my voice and a lot of recordings made while walking around. Listen out for things like the bell tower in the church near my home, parts of conversations and lots more.”

Even though they are carving new musical trails with artists like Raffertie, this just doesn’t seem to cut it with regards to Ninja Tune, which is why they’ve also laid the groundwork for technological leaps and an online rescue mission for lost vinyl.

First in line is Ninja Jamm, a new digital instrument and beat-tampering app. While there are plenty of similar apps on the market, the concept behind Ninja Jamm has one key difference in that it lets you tinker with music from Ninja Tune artists, as Matt Black comments on the app: “There aren’t any other labels that have really put out apps that let you mess with the music that’s on the label – it’s artist-driven, basically. When you get a pack on Ninja Jamm, you’re starting off with some sounds from a Ninja Tune artist – Amon Tobin, Bonobo, Mr Scruff, people that our fans already know. With a lot of apps out there, the content’s not very good, because it’s just kind of generic stuff, ours comes with the Ninja hallmark of dope audio.”

While the app is free, the ‘packs’ – featuring loops and samples from songs or entire albums – range between 80c and €2.50 but are presented in lossless HD audio and, once downloaded, can be played through in their original format for when you just want to listen.

Upon first opening Ninja Jamm, it’s almost like being handed over the controls to a warp-speed mothership when you’re only used to driving an old Ford Fiesta. After watching the tutorial and exploring the app a little, however, it’s surprisingly easy to use but not – and this is the key part – so much so that you feel unrewarded after a serious bout. As well as sauntering along the fine line between vast and accessible, the app offers a smorgasbord of functions. Everything from the classic DJ effects like filter, delay, reverb, etc. – all of which can be combined on an XY axis using two fingers for multiple manipulation – to a gyroscope function which can be controlled by tilting the phone.

Seeing as this app is heavily reliant on which tunepacks you have at your disposal, Ninja Tune have assured us that they’ll keep adding artists to the pile and perhaps eventually songs from artists that they haven’t even signed.

Second in the race for innovative label-based ideas is Beat Delete. After the 2011 fire at the Sony DADC warehouse, many independent labels lost a huge chunk of their back catalogues. While popular albums can simply be re-released, any label affected by the fire would be re-pressing their lesser-known material at a considerable loss, which is bad news for anyone who’s fond of the niche side of things. On the cusp of this problem, Ninja Tune employee Martin Dobson has come up with a system where fans of a specific release can pre-order the album, just like on any other site, and once a certain threshold of orders has been reached, the album gets re-pressed and sent to the customers. Apart from Ninja Tune itself, independent labels Domino, Beggars, Tru Thoughts, Sunday Best, Accidental, Catskills and Brainfeeder are all on board for the project.

So, from formative breakbeat to plush house with joint salvage operations and innovative apps riding sidecar, Ninja Tune has glided through the bumpy terrain of independent record labels, seemingly covered in some kind of unstoppable glaze. From the offset, they’ve churned out high-calibre, jaw-widening music and earned untold respect among their peers, but what have they learned throughout this 23-year marathon? Well, in the words of managing director Peter Quicke: “I have learned nothing!! Er … um … except … that you have to keep going, and keep putting out good music, applying higher standards all the time to the quality of music and the quality of the work we do to release it, and get it into as many places as possible.”

Amateur Historians – The Globe, Sunday

Given the unfamiliar nature of some of the names on the bill, often the best approach for an act is just to give it socks. Take Amateur Historians for example. Opening up the second night at the State curated venue, the trio plug in and blast off. It proves hard not to go along for the ride, as catchy tune follows catchy tune and they charm all and sundry with their cheery disposition. The set ends with the bassist stripping to the waste and hurling his instrument to the floor – not the kind of activity you see in The Globe every night. (PU)

Cloud Castle Lake – Against The Grain, Sunday

Having been talked about in hushed tones a couple of years back, Cloud Castle Lake find themselves making their Crawl debut upstairs in a pub rather than in one of the larger, main venues. It does, however, prove to be the perfect combination. With the street lights glowing behind them, there’s a special atmosphere as those straining to see quickly cotton onto the fact that this could be rather memorable. The band seem to feel it too, turning in a performance that sees them produce a noise more suited to a room ten times the size. Confined by these four walls, Cloud Castle Lake sound as if they could explode at any second. (PU)

Croupier – Button Factory, Sunday

Back home after an extended European jaunt in the company of Enemies, it’s clear from their second show of the weekend that Croupier have moved up a gear. Given that they were a pretty startling live act already, that means that they hit the Crawl with a serious rocket up their collective backsides. There’s a splash of new material that sees them continue to develop their sound too, finding their own identity more and more with every show. (PU)

Fight Like Apes – The Globe, Saturday

FLA’s relationship with hometown shows has sometimes been a tricky one. Of all of the times we’ve seen them live, it’s when they’ve been playing away that they’ve been at their best. Maybe it’s a pressure thing and thus, with their presumably crucial Fundit campaign reaching a conclusion, you fear that perhaps history may repeat itself. Fat chance. The Globe is rammed, the queue to get in snakes down the street and the quartet are in the form of their lives. There’s a healthy amount of new songs (all excellent, so get funding), proof that they’re ready to head off in yet another direction after the deliciously dark second record. Some things don’t change, however, and when Mary dives into the crowd for ‘Jake Summers’ (swiftly followed by Jamie, via the speaker stack), carnage ensues. Incredible stuff. (PU)

Fionn Regan – Workman’s Club, Saturday

From the little boy lost that first emerged with the Mercury-nominated End of History, Fionn Regan has grown into a brooding hippie. Here is a rapturous crowd who cheer wildly in appreciation of each song played before a unanimous shushing as Regan launches into the next without fanfare, milking their devotion. He strutted on the small stage, unfussily picking out the intros to his most well-known songs with a smirk on his face, and ill-considered bandanna tied around his head. Regan has always been praised for the literary nature of his songs (who else recommends Paul Auster in their lyrics?), but live there is much more to it than clever phrasings, there’s a bit of magic in the atmosphere. (AR)

Heathers – Unitarian Church, Saturday

It’s been a long while since many of these arses graced a church pew, but the promise of an acoustic set from Heathers is more than enough to entice. The Macnamara twins brilliantly filled out their sound on second album, Kingdom, but stripped back to the original two voices and an acoustic guitar, with only an electric guitar for texture, the songs really hit home. ‘Forget Me Knots’ in particular is even more uplifting than on record, and the acrobatic vocal interplay that makes up so much of their appeal is sharper than ever. The small room out of the way, they’ll play Christ Church Cathedral on 16th May as part of the Evening Songs show in aid of Temple Street Hospital. Presumably their tour manager is then lining up a date in St Peter’s Basilica. (AR)

Inni-K – The Globe, Saturday

There’s quite an array of instruments with one Kildare lady sitting amidst them, but almost all of them get an airing tonight. Inni-K creates loops from her piano, plays pizzicato violin and brings a ukulele in to create a warm and experimental folk sound in the corner of the Globe. Like a less wayward Joanna Newsom, and with a strong, clear voice, the musical layers create a beautiful and simple sonic texture. It is a pity that this texture is roughened by the babbling at the bar which only grows as the gig goes on and the next act’s (Fight Like Apes) crowd drips in. Her valiant fight against the din is lost at the end. Currently planning a range of gigs in homes across Ireland, it sounds like a fireside in Drumshambo could be just the place to fully appreciate Inni-K. (SR)

Kool Thing – 4 Dame Lane, Sunday

Despite having only released their debut album in March, Kool Thing are old hands at this stage. Jon Dark and Julie Chance patter about tonight, setting up and chatting with audience members as they prepare for a set that will prove both slick and professional. The nails-on-a-chalkboard riff of ‘The Sign’ alerts everybody as Dark digs under each string in search of unpalatable noise. Drummer and recent addition Valentin Plessy is consistent in his pummeling stoicism as Dark and Chance move about, swapping instruments freely. There may be a hint of complacency from the band as parts that could be played live are merely looped, but after playing the same songs for three years, it would difficult not to be a bit jaded. Such cynicism is easily dispelled by the likes of ‘TV Tower’, ‘Light Games’ and the marvelous ‘Line Drive’, all packing a sizeable punch, but it looks as if Kool Thing are ready to move on from Kool Thing. They’re dying to see what’s next, and you should be too. (GM)

Now 33, Murry has lived in San Francisco since moving there for graduate school from his native Mississippi, a place where he felt even less at home. So why the antipathy, and why live there?

“It’s mostly to do with the individualism, and the competitiveness. But I’ve never felt at home anywhere.” Indeed, it transpires that Murry’s gripe might well not be with California per se, but with the modern world, thus the album title. “Because of the rise of individualism, people naturally distrust each other now, and don’t communicate properly. But it’s not just that, it’s like: why are we sitting in a tiny glass room 4ft by 6ft in the Paradiso in Amsterdam?”

So it’s an aesthetic dislike?

“Not just aesthetic. Places are ugly, but relationships between people are ugly too.”

Murry has a tight coterie of a support group in San Francisco, and doesn’t see himself as part of any wider scene. Probably because of the aforementioned wariness of competition, he doesn’t feel he has ‘indie rock’ peers, either locally or nationally. He is ploughing his own furrow. One of those few trusted friends and collaborators was the now sadly passed on Tim Mooney, former American Music Club drummer and renowned studio owner and producer, who recorded and mixed The Graceless Age with Murry. John describes Tim as “the closest thing I’ve ever had to a father figure.” Another stalwart in Murry’s artistic evolution has been Chuck Prophet, also on the bill at Kilkenny Rhythm ’n’ Roots this year, where they expect to jam together, including a Chuck Berry song.

“Tim never said this to me, but I’ve heard it from other people since he passed, that although he wasn’t a lyricist or composer, he needed to have a songwriter he could work with. After American Music Club split up, I became that to him.”

Has he discussed that with Mark Eitzel? Eh, no.

‘Lyricist and composer’ seem like much more appropriate epithets to attach to John Murry than ‘singer-songwriter’. The latter term has been devalued, due to the presence of the standing army of ten thousand and counting, which is unfortunate, as true singer-songwriters are the poets of popular music. But it’s important to stress that, on the evidence of The Graceless Age, Murry is up there with the best of the breed, whatever you choose to call them, in recent memory: think Mark Linkous; or Elliott Smith.

Part of what marks Murry apart, and one of the reasons for this hyperbole, is that The Graceless Age is both opulent and raw at the same time. In other words, it has affinities with what used to be called, John laughs, ‘alt. country’, but is also the product of someone just as steeped in My Bloody Valentine and Spiritualized.

“Kevin Shields is one of my favourite guitarists of all time. With Spiritualized, it’s the layering I like. I must have listened to Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space a hundred times non-stop when it came out.” I’d also suggest that it’s because, like Jason Pierce, Murry is interested in the appropriation and personalisation of traditional and contemporary genres – gospel, blues, country and soul on the one hand, garage rock and even free jazz on the other – for his own ends. Of course, it was Tim Mooney who helped John achieve the fuzz guitar soundscapes which populate The Graceless Age, so is he looking for another producer now?

“No, because I learned so much from Tim, I feel I can do it myself now. People forget, he recorded what I played, but I had to record everything he played.”

Murry comes across as someone just as interested in and informed by literature, specifically contemporary American literature since the Moderns, as he is by music. Perhaps this is no surprise, as he is second cousin to chronicler of the south’s darkest secrets, William Faulkner. How big a part does the Faulkner lineage play in his psyche?

“Well, he’s a good model for someone who was not accepted. Round where I’m from they still call him Count No Account. In Ireland, you celebrate your great writers, like Joyce. There’s a blue plaque outside the house where Leopold Bloom was supposed to have been born. I went looking for it the last time I was there. In the south, people are still suspicious of Faulkner. My father made me read all his books, which was a good thing. But my father wasn’t too happy when I started playing guitar. He wanted me to be a literature professor.”

So he’s disappointed in you?

“Well, when I got written up in the Wall Street Journal, he took me more seriously.”

We discuss Pynchon, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace. Murry speaks of his desire to write a novella, although he is conscious of the pitfalls in crossing over from music to fiction. There are precedents, however.

“I really like Willy Vlautin’s novels. He’s coming into his own, finding his own voice. It’s not just Raymond Carver all over again.”

How does he feel about playing live? Does he still get nervous? Does he worry about the reaction?

“I love playing with these guys. Sean Coleman, who’s married to an Irish girl, is a great guitarist. I worry less than I used to. As long as I feel I’ve done my best, then it’s up to people whether they like it or not.”

What are his expectations of Ireland this time? Well, it turns out that aside from the mini tour he’s doing, he’s scheduled to do some recording in Ireland over the summer. He clearly finds the ‘less competitive’ atmosphere in Ireland more conducive to productivity. He even jokes about moving over, if his wife, who works with autistic children, can find a job.

“In Ireland, I feel like, if we needed some girls to do backing vocals, I could just go out into the street, maybe outside Whelan’s, and we’d find four or five girls who’d do the job perfectly. That doesn’t happen so much in the States, when you’re looking to hire someone. It goes back to singing in church, I think. In Ireland and Scotland, the audience joining in always sounds great. It didn’t sound so good in London, though.”

Catching the show later, I can testify that the songs on the album are done full justice live. Murry and Coleman are Telecaster kings, between them coaxing all kinds of arresting and complementary sounds from their guitars, amps and pedals. The rhythm section are spot on too. In fact, it’s quite amazing to hear such a full and yet detailed mix in a relatively small room, and guarantees that the Workman’s Club on 9th May will be the hottest ticket in Dublin town.

It may be true what they say: the dope over here in the ‘Dam is awful strong, ‘cos I’m baked already. But from where I’m standing, John Murry might just be the future of rock ’n’ roll.

John Murry plays at the Workman’s Club on 9th May (Thursday). Tickets are priced at €15.

Reformed ska legends break out the hits for two dates on Dame St.

Why? | Whelan’s, Dublin (7:30pm, 6th May) | €18.50

Yoni Wolf, the Woody Allen of American hip-hop.

British Sea Power | Academy, Dublin (7:30pm, 7th May) | €20

Brighton’s finest purveyors of epic indie rock.

Gregory Porter | Sugar Club, Dublin (9pm, 7th May) | €30.40

The smooth jazz vocalist that you just want to hug. It’d probably feel great. And check out them threads!

Tronix | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (8pm, 8th May) | TBA

American dubsteppers launch their latest EP.

Shovels and Rope | Whelan’s, Dublin (8:30pm, 8th May) | €15

The shopping list of a serial killer or a Carolina folk duo? You decide.

Fight Like Apes | Limelight 2, Belfast (9pm, 8th May)/Cyprus Avenue, Cork (9pm, 11th May) | £6/€11.75

The backlash to the backlash continues.

Mountains | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (8pm 9th May) | €20

Ambient electronica with support from Mossy Nolan.

Eric Clapton | O2, Dublin (6:30pm, 9th May)/Odyssey, Belfast (7:30pm, 10th May) | €55-81/£38-60

The Ken Barlow of rock.

RDGLDGRN | Academy 2, Dublin (7pm, 10th May) | €12

Red Gold Green, that’s how you pronounce that name. Kids and their disdain for vowels, eh?

John Murry | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 10th May)/Róisín Dubh, Dublin (9pm, 10th May)/Crane Lane, Cork (8pm, 11th May) | €15/€11.75/€12.75

Confessional American straight from William Faulkner’s grandson. The sound and the fury, indeed.

Fang Island | Róisín Dubh, Galway (9pm, 9th May)/Grand Social (8pm, 10th May) | €11.75/€14

Fang Island is actually a peninsula/fun-loving indie-rock band.

Peripheral Visionaries | Cyprus Avenue, Cork (8pm, 10th May)/Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 11th May) | €14.85/€12.50

Being a peripheral visionary must be tough. Everything in focus must be a bit shit compared with the amazing revelations that you can barely glimpse.

Oneman | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 10th May) | €13.95

Rescheduled date for the Rinse DJ.

Tierannisesaur | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 10th May) | €12.50

The DIYSCO makers get the party started once more.

Frank Turner | Academy, Dublin (7pm, 11th May)/Limelight, Belfast (8pm, 12th May) | €15/£19

The would-be Billy Bragg, if Bragg had thought The Fountainhead was a real page-turner.

Little Green Cars | Vicar St, Dublin (7:30pm, 11th May) | €17

My mum had a Vauxhall Astra. It was a horrible pea green colour. Her next car was also small and green. She eventually got a a non-green Skoda, and that was fine.

Beyoncé | O2, Dublin (8pm, 11th and 12th May) | €74-94

Stop writing feminist think-pieces about Queen B for an evening and go watch her move her thighs in ways that will make you rethink physics as a largely knowable concept.

Surgeon | Stiff Kitten, Belfast (10pm, 11th May) | £9

Exacting rhythmic ecstasy with unseemly precision.

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Cromwell | Waterfront, Belfast (7:30pm, 12th May) | £29-32.50

A country legend and a lesser country legend tour their new collaborative album.

Lucinda Williams | Vicar St (7:30pm, 12th May) | €44.05

I’ve just confused Lucinda Williams with Liz Phair. Carry on.

Friday

One of the new developments this year is a stand alone opening night party (weekend tickets won’t get you in), taking place at Whelan’s this evening. There’s an early start (Windings kick off at 7pm) but with five acts in total it’s a packed night. Pick of the bunch has to be Montreal’s Dirty Beaches but we’ll also be seen to see if Big Deal (pictured) can live up to the hype. Tropics and New Young Pony Club complete the bill.

Saturday

Day one of the festival proper and the individual nature of the curated venues is clear to see. The way the Crawl works means that some of the more prominent names play early slots, with Heathers launching a Rubyworks night at the Unitarian Church that includes the likes of Gavin James and Orla Gartland. Nialler9 takes over two floors of Sweeney’s for his own mini-festival of mainly electronica (White Collar Boy, Adultrock), with Owensie keeping it more organic.

As with last year, State will be hosting The Globe and we’re more than delighted with our guests. Unwinding Cables caught our eye at the end of last year with their passionate afro-punk and made the Faces of 2013 list, as did solo multi-instrumentalist Inni-K. Fight Like Apes, meanwhile, are old friends with a State history that goes back to our earliest days and we’re proud to host their first Dublin show of a busy summer. We’re also running a second Saturday show at 4 Dame Lane, with Leanne Harte and I’m Your Vinyl live, followed by a DJ set from Le Galaxie.

Elsewhere, there’s much to whet the appetite – from the Echo & The Bunnymen / PVT combination in the Button Factory, French indie pop outfit We Were Evergreen in the Grand Social, Altar Of Plagues offshoot Wife at the Village and the, shall we say, lively Kid Karate in the intimate surroundings of JJ Smyths. At that’s only day one.

Sunday

Without the inconvenience of the camping experience, there’s no excuse not to get going early on the second day of the Crawl and there are some nice names on offer first up. Croupier play their second show of the weekend at the Button Factory, Overhead, The Albatross are at The Workman’s and there’s a double helping of the Fence Collective at Whelan’s from The Pictish Trail and Kid Canaveral. Over in the cozy environs of the Stag’s Head, Aoife Barry of Sweet Oblivion presents a night of suitably intimate music from Peter Delaney, Holy Roman Army and Soil Creep. State’s guests for the second night at the Globe are another mixed bunch – Belfast’s Amateur Historians, Owensie moving around the corner from Sweeney’s and the ever developing Notas.

There’s a strong international flavour to the Button Factory, with Lanterns On The Lake, Prince Rama and The Black Lips closing out the night. Upstairs At Whelan’s sees the brutal sound of Eagulls, while next door at The Village there’s the heavily fancied No Ceremony/// and recent State interviewees Three Trapped Tigers. Not to be outdone, the Irish scene is more than capable of holding its own and we’re especially looking forward to Come On Live Long, Liza Flume and Hunk at Sweeney’s, The Spook Of The Thirteenth Lock getting dark for Young Hearts Run Free in the Unitarian Church and Kool Thing teaming up with Mother Club in 4 Dame Lane.

See you over the weekend…

Martin Noble from British Sea Power. Born in Bury, Lancashire, grew a bit bigger in Leeds, Yorkshire.

Who are your favorite artists from home?

Arthur Brown went to my school in Leeds, and also attended the same Uni as me. He had a song about Fire. We have four songs with Water in the title. Elbow are the only band i know from Bury. My family are from Castleford, the home on sculptor Henry Moore. There’s one of his sculptures outside the college there, and it’s a testament to Castlefords honesty, that even after the demise of Castlefords mining industry, no-one has nicked his sculpture for scrap. Our new album was mixing in Castleford too.

What’s it really like touring?

It’s like being an alcoholic for a few weeks. You get to see the evolution of the motorway service stations. Some have Waitrose or Greggs pasties in them now.

What’s your favourite city/town/venue to play?

The Tan Hill Inn in the Yorkshire Dales. It’s where we hold our festival. Or rather, where we held it. Also, I remember a show in Taipei that was particularly joyous.

What’s your ideal festival line-up?

Early Incarnation of the Stooges. Lord Kitchener. The Velvet Underground. Can. Teenage Fanclub. Charlie Kunz. Shostakovich. David Bowie & Brian Eno. Sunn O))). The Pixies. Queen.

Tell us a tour story…

This is a personal and idiotic story. In 2003, we played Stockholm and we got hammered. I spent the night walking through the old quarter of the city amazed at the old buildings there. Me and our sound engineer Joe found a ladder that lay on the partly frozen estuary. We stupidly crawled across the ladder, testing the ice. Then i tried to break into a boat to get more booze and couldn’t get in. I then tried to monkey across the mooring rope to the harbour and fell in the freezing sea with all my heavy winter clothes on. Joe had snuck off to bed, so i was left to try and get out of the freezing sea on my own. I climbed up the harbour wall via a rope, took all my clothes off, and boarded the tour bus. Pretty stupid really, shouldn’t brag about things like that, but I am happy to only have lost one of my cat lives, and glad I din’t actually break into the boat.

What has been your biggest achievement of the year?

Teaching my puppy lots of funny tricks.

What was the worst piece of advice you were given?

That outfit makes you like like the guy from Kick-Ass. You should definitely wear it on stage. Stick some fruit down there as well.

What do you do to relax?

Walk, run, drink, crown green bowls, music, read, wildlife, grow things in the garden.

What are you reading?

The Rough Guide to Britain and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

How about TV, anything good on the box?

Have just been watching the Sopranos box set. I’m a bit late on the uptake, but what’s the rush!

Do you have a favourite YouTube video?

At the moment it’s that Welsh fella, Andrew Cassidy doing Keepie Uppies.

What website do you visit most? (discounting email, etc.)

Outside of social media, it’s BBC News and ’52 tricks to teach your dog’.

What is your favourite:

Record?

My grandad’s Nat King Cole one.

Song?

Can’t do this…sorry!

Lost classic song?

‘I Get Ideas’ Dottie Miles.

Record label?

Rough Trade, innit.

Who is your favourite current artist?

John Grant, Cat Power, Unknown Mortal Orchestra…

A new artist that you are most excited about?

Savages.

What was the last great gig you have seen?

Bo Ningen at our club night, and ‘Queer’ a Japanese Queen covers band who also played our club night.

Worst show?

Any new folkie stuff that is full of cliches.

What should we expect from your Irish shows?

Something for the higher and lower self. Some fun, some melancholy, some grace, some frenetic mayhem, and a giant Polar Bear. And probably a very beautifully decorated stage.

British Sea Power play the Academy on Tuesday, 7th May.

Tieranniesaur was received pretty well by critics and record-buying folks alike, was there any of that cliché second-album-fear that most bands fall victim to?

While we were writing it we didn’t feel that way, and then it was only the last fortnight of making it that we realised how weird this record is and that it’s a pretty big possibility that the people who enjoyed the first record might not like it. We went with our instincts and realised towards the end that it was a bit strange in parts and it’s made us a little bit nervous.

This album is a little less fun time party-themed, it’s all the sparkles tinged with gloom. Is this the sound of Tieranniesaur getting a bit serious?

Yeah, not intentionally though, I think that initially when you’re writing something you’re just getting it out of your system, but as it goes on, when you’re finishing it up you start reflecting on it and when you hear it altogether, then you realise what it’s become. I guess it’s a bit moodier and darker than the first one, I think with the first album, there was a lot more silliness, the new one is still upbeat and dance-y though.

There are parts of DIYSCO that sound a little DFA (cowbell abuse!) and a little Arthur Russell, were you conscious of trying to push your natural pop sensibilities into more avant-garde areas?

I think it’s just a natural thing. When we made the first record, we did it without thinking about it too much. It’s just further into our sound, this time we were trying things we’d never done before. We had stuff we didn’t physically have the first time around, and I guess we’re a bit of a mad band, our sound is a bit mad. You find with a lot of bands when they start out say they want to be a mix between say Suicide and the Go! Team or something and they take those references and make something in the middle but with Tieranniesaur it just a little bit more ‘out there’ and we’ve just got more into whatever that is.

The last track ‘You’re Doing it Wrong’ sounds like an ode to just getting off your arse and trying to make something and coupled with the title DIYSCO is this your new manifesto for bands?

[The song] is really about people in general who, when you’re making music and expressing yourself, say to you “No, you’re doing it wrong”, y’know? You’re not playing by the rules, you haven’t stuck to the grid. These people, that are almost terrified that you’re doing what you are doing and enjoying yourself and that song goes all out of time, it sounds weird but it’s still beautiful, y’know? It’s about making something that maybe is wrong but it works.

There’s been a lot of talk about the tribulations of making albums recently (the Fight Like Apes Fundit backlash, etc.), were there any hesitations or difficulties with putting out this album?

Well, me and Padraig both work, so in a way, it’s like a giant hobby to us.  We don’t have to worry about whether the songs are going to be played on the radio or not which definitely frees you up as an artist but of course we’re aware and it upsets me that full-time musicians are effectively paid last after everybody gets their cut.

I don’t have a problem with ‘crowd sourcing’, per se, but I guess I’d personally feel slightly awkward doing it. I think if you want us to make a new record, buy our album, y’know?  You don’t need a crazy amount of money to make music.  I think with the Fight Like Apes argument it was probably the fact that they said they needed some of the money for PR, so essentially they’re asking their fans to pay that money to go towards getting on the radio, to get gigs, etc. … and that’s a more difficult argument, it’s a little bit more complicated than just getting money to just put a record out.

You’re a lady that loves to collaborate and you’re involved in various other bands like the Yeh Deadlies and Jonny Fun and the … Hesitations, is it just a nice way to help mates out or does it satisfy a creative itch?

It is nice when you’re in a couple of bands at once, it’s nice to balance out the emotions that go with playing in the main one and particularly if they’re quite different. It’s a chance to rock out in one or be mellow in another. I like being in more than one band because everybody is complicated, everyone has another side of themselves and you get to express that.  I love a lot of music that influences Tieranniesaur but it wouldn’t necessarily be my favourite type of music, so I love being able to try other things.

Is there a song on DIYSCO that you’re most excited for people to hear?

I think a couple of the weirder ones like ‘You’re Doing it Wrong’ or ‘Maro Rides the Wave’, but I’m really proud of them all. It’s definitely a heavier album, and there’s more for people to get into.

You’re heading out on a little tour soon and you’ll be sampling the delights of the road obviously, so what’s the best chipper in Ireland?

Well … the Fingal Cafe always does it for me.

DIYSCO is released on Popical Island on May 10th, with a launch gig at Whelan’s that night.

Kate Stables, born in Winchester. Lived in Bristol, currently living in Paris.

Who are your favourite artists from your hometown?

Rozi Plain! Rachael Dadd!

What’s it really like touring?

Like living and learning and being in a car all day every day with the same four other people.

What’s your favourite city/town/venue to play?

The Cube Cinema, Bristol

What’s your ideal festival line-up?

It’d go a little like this:

Rozi Plain
Francois and the Atlas Mountains
Rachael Dadd
Tame Impala
Jamie Harrison
Ichi
Richard Dawson
Hyperclean
Soy in Caballo (sadly no longer in existence, but while I’m here day dreaming, why the Hell not?)
The Liftmen
Viking Moses
Rev Galen
Sam Amidon
Babe
Aquaserge
Zun Zun Egui
Arlt
V.O.
David Thomas Braughton

Tell us a tour story…

Once we were on tour with Jamie Harrison in Germany and his iPod did an impossible flip and slid into the thin gap under the car stereo and has never been seen since. We took the stereo out and quite a lot of the car was removed in an attempt to retrieve the aforementioned iPod, but it was no where to be found and had not been seen since. Gobbled up into the black void that is the space behind the dashboard in a Citroën Xantia. Poor old iPod. RiPod.

What has been your biggest achievement of the last year?

Last year. Let me see. It was a treat to perform at Cité de la Musique in Paris doing backing vocals for Herman Dune as part of the season they had on there about Bob Dylan. We performed the whole of the album Shot of Love, and it was an excellent evening indeed.

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What do you do to relax?

Knit.

What are you reading?

Norse myths, The Wizard of Earthsea series by Ursula Le Guin, anything by Jerome K. Jerome, and For Esmé – with Love and Squalor by JD Salinger. I generally rotate around those few books all the time. Chances are I’ll always have at least one of them about my person.

How about TV, anything good on the box?

The only thing I have ever enjoyed enough to merit having a TV is Northern Exposure. I could watch it ’til I die.

What’s the last thing you bought online?

Wild Fermentation, a cook book by Sandor Ellix Katz about making your own fermented foods. Sauerkraut, sour dough, miso, kimchi, etc.

Who would you most like to collaborate with if you got the chance?

Oh Lordy, there’s a long list. But off the top of my head:

Alisadair Roberts
Boris Gronemberger from V.O.
Fabio Viscogliosi
Beyoncé
Dominique A
Will Oldham
Sam Amidon

I’ll stop there for now.

What is the worst cover your band has ever performed?

Only ever good covers. But sometimes the performance could have been better. At ATP last December we did a version of
‘Mehbooba’ by RD Burman as it’s a song the whole band is particularly fond of and we’d been inspired by seeing the Kronos quartet do a version of it. Needless to say, there version was a lot more polished than ours.

Have you ever trashed your equipment? When and why?

Yes. Songwriting frustration tantrum. Not proud of it.

What website do you visit most? (discounting email, etc)

The BBC. Living over here in France, its a grand thing to be able to listen to the BBC radio stations. The French stations are pretty good here though, I must say. Fair play,France.

What is your favourite…

…album of the last year?

Not sure if it counts as it was released before last year but I listened a lot and a lot to
Obstacles by the Belgian band V.O..

…Song?

‘I Am Oeba’ by Blake Rumfit

…Lost classic song?

‘Boy in the Bubble’ by Paul Simon

… Record label?

Mississippi Records from Portland

…current artist?

V.O.

…YouTube video?

‘Jumpin’ Jive’ performed by Cab Calloway with the Nicholas Brothers

A new artist that you are most excited about?

Richard Dawson. He’s been at it for a little while, but I’m still very excited about him.

What was the last great gig you have seen?

Richard Dawson in Glasgow. Bone-crumbling beauty.

What should we expect from your Irish shows?

A few new songs. A few older ones played in a new way. And a few older songs played in the same old way. We’ve never toured in Ireland before, so who knows what adventures we’ll have and how they’ll weasel their way into the live shows. I’m hoping for pyrotechnics and choral extravaganzas, but we’ll just have to wait and see who we bump into out the back of the venues before the show. You never know, we could get lucky and bump into a choir.

Nor should they. Call it math rock, call it IDM, call it niche, whatever. Three Trapped Tigers are worthy of your attention. Having first come to prominence via a string of EPs, the band released their debut album Route One or Die in 2011. A typically frenetic effort, the only apparent compromise appeared to be track titles in place of their previous affinity for numbers. Ahead of their upcoming Meteor Camden Crawl Dublin appearance, State caught up with keyboardist Tom Rogerson to talk potential new material, the importance of the album and, er, Roy Keane…

It’s been two years since Route One or Die. Should we expect a new album soon?

We’re not really working on an album direction right now, it’s more of what we try to say to each other all the time which is to have fun and make music, all those things that you tend to forget about when you become a professional musician. You know, trying to get back to why the hell we started this thing in the first place. I think it became, not a struggle, but we did a lot of gigs and it had its own momentum but i think it’s beneficial to step back sometimes and think, ‘Well, why are we doing this?’. We’d rather make music and not worry about it being some professional thing but eventually a time comes when you need to get on with it and get something out to fans, A) to reflect what we’re up to, B) for our own artistic satisfaction and C) for the obvious professional reason that people get sick of hearing the same songs.

Are you leaning towards an LP rather than another EP, though?

I really love EPs. I think they’re totally underrated by everyone because 20 minutes is a really good amount of time for music. The problem is there’s a kind of industrial logic to the album. The press doesn’t care unless you’re doing an album, they don’t report on EPs unless you’re a massive band. And no matter how much the Internet has supposedly changed everything and shortened people’s attention spans; that particular aspect doesn’t seem to have changed very much. We personally all feel a bit sick every time someone mentions the album! It becomes this totemic, monolithic ‘thing’ that is now kind of hanging around our necks and we’d rather just write music and wake up one day and discover that we’ve got 40 minutes that we can put together. We’ve got a bit of a funny modus operandi which is that unlike a lot of bands, we’ve always written to order, to commission as it were.

No real pressure then…

We haven’t had much pressure for the past two years, no. We’re on our own label and it’s not like there are any tracks or B-sides kicking around. We get in a room and we jam loads or we have ideas but it just takes ages to flesh it all out. Plus, there’s no singing. With us, it’s a completely blank canvas, like, ‘Wow, we can do anything’ and we want to go in a million different directions at once and we’re desperate to not repeat ourselves. It will be an album though! If you’re being ambitious, an album is preferable.

It’s strange that the album still has so much currency given that we now live in what seems to be a very track-oriented culture.

Yeah. It’s true, and I don’t know how long it will take for that change. Back in the day, it was obviously the 7″ and a lot of people now say it’s all about tracks, it’s all about mp3s and you get artists who only do tracks or they do mix tapes, but in our particular tiny world it seems that albums are still the way to go and i think it’s because there’s so much supply, there’s so many artists making music. There’s always people who break out with a track and make an album off the back of it and often nobody cares because it’s nine filler tracks to bolster the single – I’m talking about the really, really big artists here – but at our level for some reason it’s still, as you say, currency. That’s just something that the press and the labels are going to have to resolve at some point.

From our point of view, the album is still an incredibly flexible thing. A lot of records these days are only 30 minutes so it’s debatable whether they even qualify but I always think, because I’m from a kind of composition background, that an album is normally about 40 minutes which is about the length of a Beethoven symphony, so for 300 years that’s been a good length of time for something. It’s also the length of a half of football or rugby, roughly, so it’s a good length for people to sit through before they get antsy about stuff. I always notice if it’s a gig, doesn’t matter who it is, after an hour I start to get restless.

Speaking of that, you’re known for your raucous live presence. Is that hard to live up to?

It’s not a choice, really. We can’t help but play the way we play. I play a lot of classical music in private but I always notice that I play it very hard and very loud and I’m still banging my head and my foot when I play. I’m just a bit of an unsubtle musician and I think that goes for all three of us, really. I think, looking at the second album, we do feel a bit of pressure, more of a personal will to change it up a bit because I think we’ve got this reputation but at the same time you can get stuck in a particular mode and when you’ve got a drummer like ours [Adam Betts], you know what will sound good and you know what the audience will love and it can be a temptation just to give them what you want. Betts himself will tell you that he doesn’t like the reputation of being this notorious and loud shredder, he wants to be able to show that he can do all sorts of other things.

Also, we’ve always had this polarising interest between rock and electronic music. I feel like the last album was very rock-heavy, actually. There was a lot of guitar, a lot of live drums and I don’t regret that at all because i think it completely nailed that side of us but going ahead, I think we want to focus on a more electronic style which means, inevitably, that Betts will be playing slightly less energetically because he’ll be concentrating more on technical and technological things that he has to do. That’s true for all of us so there’ll be slightly less guitar and it will sound more textured and detailed which will be less easy for the audience to go mental and start moshing. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

You mentioned football earlier. Do you follow a particular team?

I’m a sports fan in general. I support Ipswich Town.

I can only apologise on behalf of Roy Keane…

Ha! I thought it was awesome when he came because I think he’s a really hilarious character and Ipswich and Roy Keane was just not an appropriate match in the first place. I think the year we got relegated from the Premier League with the record lowest points total we also won ‘Ground of the Year’ and ‘Best Behaved Fans’ which is nice, because it’s a sleepy agricultural town and Roy Keane, y’know, notoriously semi-schizophrenic psychopath. My sister did get to see him once, she stood behind him in a cake shop and he was apparently very nice to his daughters, so there you go. That was the highlight of her year.

He might be a hardcore Three Trapped Tigers fan, for all we know.

Well, that would make sense in some ways.

What would you do if you saw him in the front row mid-set?

I’d probably give him a shout out, but I’ve got a bad pedigree with football shout outs. When we played in Newcastle for the first time, Bobby Robson had just died. Obviously, he was a proud Geordie but also a great Ipswich manager and I foolishly, with my plummy tones, thought that it would be a way of befriending the audience by saying I just wanted to mourn the passing of Bobby Robson. There was a Sunderland fan in the crowd who didn’t appreciate that at all and thought I was being a patronising sod, which I guess I was. He just kept heckling me for the rest of the gig and at the end, he got up on the mic while we were still onstage and went, ‘I just wanna say I think it’s a fucking disgrace the way you people from the South come up here and think you can patronise us!’. One guy tried to stop him and a fight eventually broke out which didn’t do the whole stereotyping thing any good. So there was a massive brawl all over the place and the promoter tried to claim that he’d lost our fee in the melee. That was a nice introduction to the North.

Three Trapped Tigers sometimes get labeled as ‘difficult’ or ‘inaccessible’ but surely it’s all about provoking a reaction if nothing else?

Yes, definitely. I’ve said that many times. That’s the most important thing, honestly. It sounds a bit throwaway but you have to unpack it a bit. It’s not provocative for the sake of being provocative. It’s not provocative at all, actually, I don’t think, but it’s about eliciting a reaction. It’s about communicating something to somebody else to get a response in the way that they respond. That’s why we always had numbers on the EPs. I didn’t want titles because I didn’t want it to be, ‘This song is about X, Y or Z or contains this emotion’, it’s purely for everyone else to respond to as they see fit. But then of course every journalist started asking me why we didn’t have song titles…

I deliberately left that one off the list…

Right, please! It’s been three years! But yeah, I totally agree. In terms of labels and categorisation, it’s completely none of my business how people describe it. I don’t really describe it as anything. It depends who asks me. If it’s one of my parents’ friends then you tangle yourself up in knots trying to be like, ‘Well, it’s, you know, rock music…’, but you can’t worry about it really. I don’t really look at the Internet in relation to Three Trapped Tigers so I don’t know how we’re described. I would imagine people think we’re difficult and inaccessible but I really insist that we’re not. I really think that you just have to come to the gig and experience it.

Maybe it’s not ‘accessible’ but I don’t think it’s difficult. It’s volume, it’s energy and you can always engage with the performance and the rush of emotion and the virtuosity of it all. There are always things you can admire even if you don’t like the music itself. It’s difficult to play and difficult to transcribe and learn, unless you’re a music student, but why on earth you’d want to do that in the first place I have no idea. The important thing is just to listen to it and enjoy it. It’s like what T.S. Eliot said about The Waste Land; it doesn’t matter what it means. Stop worrying about what it means and just read it and enjoy it.

We’re seeing a lot of musicians move into soundtrack work. Would Three Trapped Tigers ever be up for scoring a film?

Yeah, of course. Three Trapped Tigers is extremely soundtrack-y, I think. I’ve done a bit of TV work in my time, piano stuff and composing things or whatever. I think we’d all be into that, both as a band and separately. We’re always doing different things.

What about giving up control? Anthony Gonzalez of M83 recently spoke quite candidly of how frustrating he found working on the Oblivion soundtrack…

You’ve got to be confident enough that all you’re doing is completing the director’s vision and that’s your role. You’re secondary to it. Obviously directors like the idea of getting certain people in – and it worked so well with Trent Reznor on The Social Network – because it gives their film a cachet or whatever, but the truth is there’s people in Hollywood who are real specialists in that area and if you want to do something for a sci-fi movie like Oblivion, then they’ll probably be slightly better suited to it. It’s silly to have the guy going around complaining about how his control has been stepped on because is it a Tom Cruise movie or is it a music video for M83?

In my tiny experience of working with directors and whoever, you do get some hilarious power struggles and you get some hilarious things because often directors don’t actually know too much about music, or producers don’t. And so they’ll be saying things like, ‘We need it to happen at seven seconds and it’s currently happening at eight seconds’, but you can’t just push it back by a second because obviously it’s a bar of four and that’s two seconds, so it’s all those kind of things that they can’t exactly understand. And they always have a brief, like ‘We want it to sound like this band’, which is normally a band that’s racked up five million YouTube hits in the last month and then you do that and then it’s, ‘Oh no, no, it just sounds a bit too aggressive, a bit too indie’, and it’s like, ‘Well, you did play me an aggressive indie track…’ or you try and put your own spin on it and then it’s too original and doesn’t sound like the type of thing you’re trying to rip off. That’s the frustrating situation I’ve dealt with, but then again, normally, they’re giving you a hell of a lot of money for the amount of work you’re putting in so you’ve always got to think of that and just be like, ‘Right… suck it up.’.

Finally, given that you’ve now been trapped for several years, what’s your take on household cats and the relationships they have with their owners?

Well, I’ve got no witty riposte to that other than to say that I really love cats. I think all three of us do. I really love them. In fact, my girlfriend is always going on at me to get one but I don’t really feel like I’m ready for it as a musician travelling around… God I’d love it, though. I’d love to be a cat…

Route One or Die is available now on Blood and Biscuits Records. Three Trapped Tigers play The Village on Sunday May 5 as part of the Meteor Camden Crawl Dublin.

Accompanying the increased availability of all genres of new music is a liberating indifference to genre itself. You don’t have to go far back in time to find strict battle lines between, say, punk and prog; you were not allowed to not like both. By law. Now, interviewed for this piece, the composer, multi-instrumentalist and Ergodos collaborator Seán Mac Erlaine says: “At a gig, in the moment, there is no such thing as genre. Musicians and listeners know this. Genre is really a marketing tool.” For me, reared in the aftermath of the punk wars, Mac Erlaine’s declaration still sounds a little unnerving – and I am still not listening to Pink Floyd. But I’m getting there.

Ergodos is a music company in existence since 2006 that is dedicated to releasing records and staging performances and dedicated to dismantling illusory barriers between different types of music. Founders Garrett Sholdice and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly (pictured) are both composers from a contemporary music tradition, but Ergodos’ last two releases are I Call To You, an album-length reconfiguring of a 17th century Bach choral prelude, and Seán Mac Erlaine’s Long After The Music Is Gone, which is spacious, modern, meditative woodwind music rooted in improvisational jazz.

Ergodos, along with the like-minded Journal of Music (edited, as it happens, by Benedict Schlepper-Connolly) exemplifies an attitude that is joyously present in new Irish music: that the spirit of the music, rather than the strictures of style, is what matters. So, they release a Bach album and a Séan Mac Erlaine album; Mac Erlaine plays in This Is How We Fly with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh; Caoimhín works both with Peadar Ó Riada, of Cúil Aodha, and Doveman, who produces the albums of half of hipster New York. And we get from 400-year old German baroque to Séan Ó Riada or David Byrne in about four moves, and seamlessly; without even blinking. This, I would suggest, is the genius of new Irish music.

For this piece, I spoke with the following Ergodos alumni: Benedict Schlepper-Connolly; Garrett Sholdice; Seán Mac Erlaine; Michael McHale (pianist on I Call To You); and Kate Ellis (prolific cellist, co-artistic director of the Crash Ensemble, and curator of the monthly Kaleidoscope Night of new music). I also got a comment from Donnacha Dennehy, composer among other works of the acclaimed Grá Agus Bás, who is also co-founder of the Crash Ensemble and a mentor of some years’ standing to both Garrett and Benedict. We discussed the origins of Ergodos, the state of contemporary music in Ireland, the DIY attitude required of musicians today, and the sacred and secular beauty of Bach.

I Call To You is a record of instrumental music and songs inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. More specifically, it’s an album of music inspired by Bach’s piece ‘Ich ruf’ zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ’ (‘I Call To Thee, Lord Jesus Christ’); the tracks that are not actually interpretations of that piece are named for lines in the German text of the song.

Garrett Sholdice: The text of the song actually pre-dates Bach’s music. Bach often used Lutheran hymns such as ‘Ich ruf’ zu Dir’ as basic material for his compositions. So Bach’s organ chorale prelude ‘Ich ruf’ zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ’ — the piece we based our album around — is an elaboration of a hymn of the same name, the words and music of which were written by a Lutheran minister named Johann Agricola around 200 years prior to Bach’s composition.

I wondered what it was about that particular piece by Bach that led you to choose it as a starting point for this project.

GS: It’s an incredibly beautiful piece — it just hits you. For me, it’s like a place you can get inside. The music is constructed such that there are three voices singing — a high voice singing the original hymn tune by Agricola very slowly, a middle voice simultaneously singing these more fleeting quasi-arabesque figures, and a low voice propelling everything along steadily. Each voice is constructed with such elegance, and the way in which the voices combine is so perfect, that you feel like the piece contains endless nourishment.

The album eases the listener in with a relatively straight reading of ‘Ich ruf’ zu dir’ by Michael McHale, although less ornate than you expect from Bach keyboard music; then moves away to somewhere more abstract and unfamiliar over the following pieces, then back to Michael’s beautiful, stark, hollowed out rendition at the end.

GS: Yes, my transcription of the Bach that opens the album is consciously restrained. I wanted to present the music that I love as vividly as possible — although there are a few subtle personal touches. And my “hollowed out” arrangement at the end was an attempt to present what I hear (feel) as the essential elements of the music nothing more.

Michael McHale: I was very impressed by [Ergodos’] work for the I Call To You album – the way in which the tracks all link and unite creates an expressive arc that is most impressive, and as a result the album as a whole adds up to much more of the sum of its parts. The Bach chorale prelude is most touching, tinged with melancholy. I simply wanted to perform it as simply and as naturally as possible, allowing the music to breathe and to create a background atmosphere of absolute stillness, which I felt served the music well.

I hadn’t heard it to my knowledge till I Call To You, but ‘Ich ruf’ zu Dir’ is actually quite a famous piece — used recently in Michael Haneke’s Amour, and not so recently in Tarkovsky’s Solaris and the 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Hr Hyde.

Benedict Schlepper-Connolly: Interesting that you mention Jekyll & Hyde. I haven’t seen it and didn’t know ‘Ich ruf’ zu Dir’ was used in that. However, the Tarkovsky film is where we first encountered the tune and I think a lot of our association with it is tied up with some of the images used in it (that wonderful floating scene with the close-ups of the Breughel painting, for instance). Amour came out after we recorded the album, but it’s a beautiful film. There’s certainly something timeless in the tune itself that has caught the ear of Bach, ourselves and these various film directors.

Ich ruf’ zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ from Jonathan Nangle on Vimeo.

Rap/punk/pneumatic drill ambient.

Michael Rother | Village, Dublin (8pm, 29th April) | €22

Fewer loud noises next door from the NEU! kingpin and motorik pioneer.

Passenger | Vicar St, Dublin (8:30pm, 29th April and 8pm, 1st May)/Róisín Dubh, Galway (7pm, 2nd May)/Pavilion, Cork (7pm, 3rd May) | €12

Well, he’s definitely not driving modern music forward. I’m here all week.

Lordi | Button Factory, Dublin (6pm, 2nd May)/Limelight, Belfast (6:30pm, 4th May) | €25/£23.50

Thankfully, Lordi aren’t into CGI; they use proper prsopehtics, like a real band. Didn’t they win Eurovision one year? The answer is yes.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra | Academy, Dublin (7pm, 2nd May) | €14

The Portland-via-New Zealand indie band are on hand to promote II, their rather great second album with a creative title.

Angel Olsen | Whelan’s, Dublin (7:30pm, 2nd May) | €10

Damn, that voice.

Dexys | Olympia, Dublin (7:30pm, 2nd May) | €34.50

Beyoncé. Cher. Dexys. Not everyone needs a surname, nor do they need to possess Midnight Runners.

Fionn Regan | Cyprus Avenue, Cork (8pm, 2nd May) | €17.35

When are you gonna drop another album on us, Fionn? The one thing Bray can be moderately proud of apart from Dara Ó’Briain, Katie Taylor and our town hall/McDonald’s.

Hudson Mohawke | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10pm, 2nd May) | €27.90

Lunice was there a couple of months back, so now it’s HudMo’s turn to fly the TNGHT flag in Twisted Pepper.

Alt-J | Olympia, Dublin (8pm, 3rd May) | €22.90

Winners of the Mercury Prize and creators of State‘s album of 2012. We know which one they truly value more.

(The Mercury, of course. You get 20 grand for that shit.)

Fight Like Apes | Dolans (Upstairs), Limerick (8pm, 3rd May) | €8.30

May Kay and the lads go on their fundraising mission for album no. 3.

Typesun | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (8pm, 3rd May) | €11.95

Something a bit more soulful and analogous than the Pepper may be used to.

John Grant | Vicar St, Dublin (8:30pm, 3rd May) | €23

Self-lacerating American singer-songwriter.

Gilles Peterson | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 3rd May) | €22.90

BBC Radio 1 DJ and Brownswood label founder is on the decks this Friday.

Shit Robot | Róisín Dubh, Galway (9pm, 3rd May)/Cyrpus Avenue, Cork (9pm, 4th May)/Button Factory (with the Field (11:30pm, 5th May) | €14/€15/€22.50

DFA’s Irish faction.

Cyril Hahn | Stiff Kitten, Belfast (10:30pm, 4th May) | €9

Remember MTV’s Becoming, in which teenagers got the chance to reenact their favourite music videos? Well, my favourite one was when some girls got to do ‘Say My Name’ in all its severe head-snapping glory.

Wow, that’s barely connected to Cyril Hahn’s gig in Belfast this week. Um, maybe it was his favourite episode too. Nice save.

Adam Ant | Vicar St, Dublin (8:30pm, 5th May) | €30

Surely inevitable that this comeback would happen, right?

A-Track vs. Tiga | Limelight, Belfast (9pm, 5th May) | £18

A-Trak’s latest B2B set as part of his A-Trak vs the World tour.

Tensnake | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 5th May) | €17.65

Imagine, like, 90s chart house but NOW.

The Field | Button Factory, Dublin (11:30pm, 5th May) | €22.50

With support from Shit Robot, the Swedish producer brings the gigging week to an end.

Meteor Camden Crawl

The Meteor Camden Crawl is also taking place this week in various venues in and around Dublin’s Camden St this weekend. Rest assured, State will be previewing the festival in gory detail later this week, but until then, here’s the full running order and line-up for your viewing pleasure.

It appears that the queen of hip hop soul, Mary J Blige really is just like the rest of us – she’s broke! According to news sources Stateside, despite selling 50 million records, Blige can’t pay her rent and has been slapped with an eviction notice. It doesn’t look likely that she’ll go home any time soon as she also owes the tax man a reported $900,000 and is said to have defaulted on a loan of $500,000. The ‘No More Drama’ singer is also involved in a lawsuit with Signature Bank over a $2.2 million loan. As Mary’s old friend Biggie Smalls once said, “The more money you have, the more problems you get”. In this case, it looks like he was right.

2001 Kanye demo goes online

Kanye West super fans will no doubt be frantically searching the internet for a full-length demo from 2001 that has recently surfaced online. The demo entitled The Prerequisite, contains early versions of tracks including ‘Jesus Walks’ and ‘Family Business’ as well as renamed version of his massive hit single ‘All Falls Down’. Many tracks from the demo were eventually included on West’s critically acclaimed debut album, The College Dropout. The Prerequisite is available to stream from DatPiff.

Eve prepares new album

The first lady of Ruff Ryders is back with her very long-awaited new album, Lip Lock. The album, which is due for release on 14th May, is her first studio album in 11 years and features collaborations with old friends including Snoop Dogg, Swizz Beats and Missy Elliot. The sound of the new project has been described as “urban grit mixed with bubble gum pop vibes”. Speaking about her new music, Eve recently said “It’s exciting to let people hear where I am musically, artistically, and as a woman.” You will recognize me from Ruff Ryders. Lyrically, I’m still that girl.”

Esoheol impresses with Styles P, Cam’ron collaboration

New music this month comes courtesy of emerging MC Esohel. With numerous releases in his discography, he has the opportunity to tour with the likes of Styles P of the Lox and Cam’ron. In his latest video, Esohel links up with Chicago’s very own Add-2 on ‘Silence Is Golden’, a socially conscientious track taken from their full length project On Purpose with a Purpose which is due for release this autumn.

T.I. ropes in Kendrick for trip down memory lane

T.I. presents us the first single and music video from upcoming record label compilation Hustle Gang: G.D.O.D. (Get Dough or Die), ‘Memories Back Then’ featuring Kendrick Lamar, B.o.B and Kris Stephens. The track was originally set to appear on Tip’s eighth studio album Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head but didn’t make the cut due to sample clearance issues. Now it is reborn with a slightly different beat. The compilation mixtape will actually be serving as a prequel to a Hustle Gang album due for release later this year.

City of Derry Jazz & Big Band Festival: 2 – 6 May

Some of the biggest stars and newest names on the jazz scene.

Radio 1′s Big Weekend, Ebrington Square & The Venue: 24 – 26 May

The UK’s biggest free ticketed event returns to Northern Ireland with two days of big name acts including Two Door Cinema Club and Olly Murs and fresh new music plus a day focused on dance music.

Phil Coulter & Friends Live with the Ulster Orchestra, Ebrington Square: 14 – 15 Jun

A one-off chance to hear Coulter with the Ulster Orchestra and special guests.

Columba Canticles – Four Centuries of Song, Londonderry/Belfast: 9/10 June

Celebrating 400 years of Derry’s richly joyous, yet turbulent history featuring the choirs of the Universities of Ulster and Aberdeen combined with the London Southbank Sinfonia.

9 June, St Columb’s Cathedral, Londonderry
10 June, Parliament Buildings, Stormont, Belfast

Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club featuring Omara Portuondo & Eliades Ochoa: 21 June

Finale event as part of the ‘Music City!’ with the debut of Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club.

Status Quo at The Venue 2013: 22 June

Rock legends return to the city.

Celtronic, Citywide: 26 – 30 June

Ireland’s premier electronic music festival, showcasing the best in all forms of electronic music and including a series of special events connecting electronic music worldwide.

Elvis Costello & The Imposters: 27 June

The debut of Costello and his latest band.

All Ireland Pipe Band Championship, St. Columbs Park & Ebrington: 06 July

Superb family day out.

Walled City Music Festival, Citywide: 19 – 28 Jul

Ten days of classical concerts by internationally renowned virtuoso musicians.

Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann: 11 – 18 August

The biggest festival of Irish culture in the world.

The Walled City Tattoo, Derry~Londonderry: 28 – 30 August

A 600-strong cast use music, song, dance and theatre to create a celebration of the city’s history.

City of Song Singer/Songwriter Festival: 1 September – 31 October

Singer/songwriters from throughout Ireland, Britain and beyond converge on the City of Song.

Roctober Metal Fest, Various Locations: 30 September – 05 October

A showcase the best of the city’s talent alongside national and international acts.

City of Derry International Choral Festival Citywide: 24 – 27 October

A four-day celebration of choral activities.

Teenage Kicks – A Punk Musical, Millennium Forum: 01 – 09 November

A musical about teenage lust and love featuring classic songs from the punk era. Written by award-winning novelist and screenwriter Colin Bateman.

In addition there are plenty of festivals taking place across the region, including Open House Festival, Belfast (19 – 23 June), Glasgowbury, Draperstown (19 – 20 July), Fiddler’s Green International Music Festival, Rostrevor (21 – 28 July), Tennents Vital, Belfast (14 August), Belsonic, Belfast (16 – 26 August) and many more. For all the details visit Discover Northern Ireland.

Thursday, 2nd May

John Grant | 8pm, Festival Marquee | £12-14

Confessional to the point of masochism, the American singer-songwriter comes to the Belfast in support of his sublime Pale Green Ghosts.

Low Leaf | 8pm, McHugh’s Basement | £5

Experimental electronic producer with a taste for the harp, proving that Joanna Newsom isn’t, in fact, the only one allowed to play it.

SOAK | 8pm, Oh Yeah Music Centre | FREE (e-mail info@ohyeahbelfast.com to reserve a place)

Derry’s Bridie Monds-Watson has been making waves since last year’s Sea Creatures EP, and will be celebrated with an evening of music and conversation tonight.

Friday, 3rd May

Dexys | 8pm, Festival Marquee | £15

Kevin Rowland stopped cross-dressing, dropped the Midnight Runners and went back to Dexys. They’ll be playing latest album One Day I’m Going to Soar and may do ‘Come on, Eileen’ if you heckle them enough.

Chuck Prophet | 9pm, Black Box | £10

Old-fashioned rock music from Californian Prophet, always has a story to tell and and rolling guitar licks aplenty.

Saturday, 4th May

Nathan Fake | 9pm, Black Box | £10

Trippy, maximal electronic producer from Norfolk; last year’s Steam Days is worth a listen or five.

Adam Ant | 8pm, Festival Marquee | £20

The dandy of 80s pop may be getting up there in years, but he has a new moustache, face-paint and few new-romantic gems up his sleeve.

Sunday, 5th May

Rachel Sermanni | 2pm, Black Box | £5

Some lovely acoustic folk to help wile away your afternoon from the young Scottish songstress.

Thee Oh Sees | 8pm, Black Box | £5

The San Franciscan burnouts return with their brand of mumbling, vaguely psychadelic garage-punk.

Monday, 6th May

Angel Olsen | 8pm, Black Box | £6

The distinct and emotionally fraught voice of Angel Olsen is really something. With little in the way of musical backing, it quavers and yelps in a way that will resonate and attract many to the Black Box.

Alana Henderson | 8pm, Black Box (Green Room) | FREE

The Tyrone singer-songwriter/cellist is sure to impress with her alternately eerie/sweet songs that blend folk and classical in a rather intriguing manner.

Tuesday, 7th May

Hiss Golden Messenger & William Tyler | 8pm, McHugh’s Basement | £5

Easy-going indie/Americana highlights a fairly quiet day, music-wise.

Wednesday, 8th May

The Fall | 8pm, Festival Marquee | £12

The Father Jack of post-punk, Mark E. Smith, and his revolving cast of band members will play a set cherry-picking from the band’s 37 years and 30 albums.

British Sea Power | 8pm, Black Box | £12.50

The forgotten men of widescreen indie are on hand to tout their sixth album, Machineries of Joy, and hopefully some stuff off Do You Like Rock Music?. Easy, easy, easy…

Thursday, 9th May

Amadou & Mariam | 8pm, Festival Marquee | £12

Nothing says ‘world music’ like Amadou and Mariam, besides maybe Youssou N’Dour and Graceland.

Lucy Rose | 7pm, Oh Yeah Music Centre | £12

Former Bombay Bicycle Club collaborator and very much part of the Britain’s youth folk movement.

Friday, 10th May

Edwyn Collins | 8pm, Festival Marquee | £12

Despite suffering two debilitating cerebral hemorrhages, the former Orange Juice frontman powers on, surveying brassy poer pop and reflective acoustic standards.

DJ Yoda | 9pm, Black Box | £12

A full A/V set from the master Jedi/hyper hip-hop DJ.

Saturday, 11th May

And So I Watch You from Afar | 8pm, Festival Marquee | £8-10

The Stay Golden tour as curated by ASIWYFA begins in the Cathedral Quarter before heading nationwide – a victory lap for All Hail Bright Futures.

Nick Drake: An Illustrated Lecture by Joe Boyd | 2pm, Black Box | £4

Nick Drake is one of the few mysteries that remain in British pop, and with the recent release of The Daily Swarm – an album by his mother, Molly Drake – being heralded as the missing piece in the Nick Drake puzzle, Joe Boyd’s presentation on 60s folk artist should endlessly illuminating.

Sunday, 12th May

Cedric Watson | 8pm, Black Box | £10

Texan Cedric Watson follows in a long line of Cajun musicians and his violin-playing is specifically of the creole culture. Transporting, harkens back to a time before the Louisiana Purchase.

I’m Ruban Nielson (above, centre) from Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Not sure where I’m from. My mum is Hawaiian, my Dad is a Kiwi. Raised in New Zealand and I live in Portland, Oregon in the US.

Who are your favourite artists from your hometown?

I love a band called Fetus Productions. They were released on Flying Nun Records in the 80′s. They’re from Auckland, New Zealand. I live in Portland, Oregon and one of my favorite bands from here was the Wipers.

What’s it really like touring?

It’s amazing for some people, and it’s too hard for others. If you’re playing music you love playing (which we do) and the band is growing and being appreciated (which it is), it’s just a matter of doing your favourite thing for a living and travelling the world, which is a dream come true for us. It can be very tiring and overwhelming, and also there’s a lot of travel time, which you have to fill up with video games or reading or whatever you do, but there’s nothing like the feeling of writing an album and then playing it in front of people who like it. Also, when you enjoy hanging out with the people you’re touring with it can be a non-stop party.

What’s your favourite city/town/venue to play?

I’ve enjoyed playing the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. We sold it out a couple of months ago and it was magic. The other show we loved playing was the homecoming show. We played the Aladdin Theater here in Portland. It’s this beautiful old place that used to be a vaudeville theater in the 20s. Ever since I moved here from New Zealand I’d always thought it’d be an amazing place to play. Austin, Texas always treats us well too. Maybe too well haha.

What’s your ideal festival line-up?

Miles Davis hahaha.

Tell us a tour story…

I could, but then I’d have to kill you.

What has been your biggest achievement of the last year?

I think getting the band onto the next stage was a big deal. A lot had to change, and there were a lot of little spanners that were thrown into the works, but the band is the best it’s ever been and the people around us are incredible now.

What do you do to relax?

Vicodin.

What are you reading?

Oh man, I’m starting so much and finishing so little. I’m halfway through Thee Psychick Bible by Genesis P-Orridge, The Way of the Tarot by Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, The Magick of Aleister Crowley by Lon Milo DuQuette, Supernatural Strategies for Forming a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group by Ian Svenonius.

How about TV, anything good on the box?

I just watch a few shows on my laptop. The same ones everybody is freaking out about: Mad Men and Breaking Bad and that kind of thing. TV drama is better than film these days I think. I’ll watch a film and often think that it would have been better as a series on tv. Like imagine if Looper was a show!

What’s the last thing you bought online?

Just bought a Mu-Tron II Phasor, like literally just won it on eBay while I was typing this.

Who would you most like to collaborate with if you got the chance? What is the worst cover your band has ever performed?

Beck Hanson‘s dad writes the best string arrangements. I’m desperate to work with Russell Elevado. Gabrielle Roth is another hero of mine.

Have you ever trashed your equipment? When and why?

I’ve trashed quite a bit, last time I trashed something was in a carpark. I was on mushrooms and I asked a girl what guitar I should use and she dared me to destroy whatever guitar I wasn’t going to use and like an idiot I did whatever she told me to do.

What website do you visit most? (discounting email, etc.)

Probably Twitter. Or Reddit. I have my own front page on there and it’s adjusted to my interests perfectly.

What is your favourite…

…album of the last year?

I suppose I like Kendrick Lamar quite a bit. That Foxygen record still sounds good. The last Grizzly Bear is great. The last Dirty Projectors. It’s hard to pick one thing when it comes to music. I’m really quite immersed.

…Song?

There’s this song that Amber Coffman did with Diplo that’s really great. Dave Longstreth is playing guitar on it as well, I think.

…Lost classic song?

I don’t know how lost it is, but this morning I’ve listened to ‘The Root’ by D’Angelo probably seven times already. It’s playing right now.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra play the Academy 2 on Thursday, 2nd May and we have two pairs of tickets to be won. To enter, e-mail us at giveaway@state.ie by 5pm this Friday (26th April). A winner will be selected in good time, probably.

The closest we’ll ever come to a two-person production of Fiddler on the Roof? Gira-approved folk with plenty of accordion to go around.

Duke Special | Empire, Belfast (7:30pm, 24th April) | £15

Those trademark dreadlocks and heavily kohled eyes will be making a return to the Belfast stage this week, and with a full band for the first time since 2008.

Birds of Chicago | Whelan’s (Upstairs), Dublin (8pm, 24th April)/Clonmel World Music, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary (8pm, 25th April)/Róisín Dubh, Galway (9pm, 27th April) | €14.35/€15/€15

For any budding ornithologists out there, this harmony-loving acousitc duo are ready to leave their Chi Town nest and head across the Atlantic for a few days.

Chelsea Wolfe | Sugar Club, Dublin (8pm, 24th April)/Auntie Annie’s, Belfast (8pm, 25th April) | €13/£11.75

‘Hauntingly beautiful’ is a phase I have little time for, but I’m sure you could apply it to Ms Wolfe here without forcing me into an exaggerated eyeroll.

The Hard Ground | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 25th April) | €8

Cork’s answer to Gunnar and Scarlett. Look it up.

KXP | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 25th April) | €12.50

Arty enough to be written about by The Quietus, tuneful enough that you might still want to listen to them.

Solar Bears | Button Facotry, Dublin (8pm, 26th April) | €12

The Dublin/Wicklow duo take time to give Supermigration a proper send off.

Fingersmith | Cyrpus Avenue, Cork (8pm, 26th April) | €6.30

Crunching hard rockers with a sideline in digital carpentry. They make fingers, is what I’m getting at; they’re not assembling digital appliances – we have machines and child/underpaid factory workers for that.

King Charles | Stiff Kitten, Belfast (8pm, 26th April)/Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 27th April) | £11.25/€13

Outlandish, Adam Ant-aping pop musician who apparently takes up the dress of King Charles. I or II, you decide. He certainly doesn’t look like III, anyway.

Disclosure | Limelight, Belfast (9pm, 26th April) | €18

It’s shit when talented people are younger than you.

Egyptian Lover | Sugar Club, Dublin (11pm, 26th April) | €14.85

The below video is pure hilarity up until the lyric “I’m kinda crazy, just like my dad”. Egyptian Lover is far from being just a vapid cassanova with great hair, he’s got some battle scars too.

Passenger | Mandela Hall, Belfast (7pm, 27th and 28th April)/Vicar St, Dublin (8:30pm, 29th April) | £9.50/£9.50/€12

Ed Sheeran, Ben Howard, Passenger. These things tend to happen in threes.

Trócaire Live | Grand Social (5pm, 27th April) | €10

Mini festival for a good cause, featuring Irish and African talent, and it goes all night.

Kíla | Button Factory, Dublin (7:30pm, 27th April) | €17.35

Trad titans in Temple Bar.

SBTRKT | Stiff Kitten, Belfast (10pm, 27th April) | €18

Aaron Foulds dons the mask once more and gets back into his soulful brand of dubstep and electronica.

Juan Atkins, Gerry Read | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 27th April) | €18.65

Veteran American producer and young British upstart: the odd couple of niche techno will be in the Pepper this Saturday. What a treat!

Art Department | Button Factory, Dublin (11pm, 27th April) | €20

Mournful deep house from Candian pair Kenny Glasgow and Johnny White.

Big Country | Academy, Dublin (7pm, 27th April)| Limelight, Belfast (8pm, 28th April) | €28.50/£24.50

Scottish veterans realise Ireland’s actually pretty small and they’ll be able to hit two cities and play two gigs within 24 hours, sweet!

One Republic | Limelight, Belast (7pm, 28th April) | €27.50-117.50

Ryan Tedder takes a break from rolling in money for an evening to give his band mates some work.

Kinky Friedman | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 28th April) | €28

Dude christened himself Kinky, I think that’s all you need (and maybe even want) to know.

In 2009, arguably France’s most notable musical export since Daft Punk found themselves in a world of celebrity elites and Hollywood dynasties. Newly crowned darlings of the American ‘alternative’ music scene Phoenix watched as their stock rose to unrecognisable heights. Something which came as something as a surprise to a band who had never really expected to have fans.

Speaking to State, bass player Deck D’Arcy explains that “being from Versailles, which is a very aristocratic place and very wealthy … we felt marginalised in so many ways. And that came from feeling like we had absolutely no audience to play to.” The response to the albums two lead singles, ‘Lisztomania’ and ‘1901’, made sure that was not to remain the case.

Despite Wolfgang being the band’s fourth studio release, success had always been slow to build for the four-piece. But it had been incrementally showing itself nonetheless, “it is really hard to be definitive about success, but I think we have always looked at any success we have had as progressive rather than sudden, do you know what I mean? After the first album, we moved up a step and had some success, then repeated that with Alphabetical.”

When asked if the slow rate of recognition and lack of audiences was a reflection of the incumbent local music scene, D’Arcy is quick to point out that it wasn’t necessarily a problem for them either way. “I don’t think it had much to do with the people or society we lived in. This was because our music was not what most people expected to find in a place like Versailles. We grew up in this mindset of writing music we wanted to hear and we have been making music like that since then.” Equally as quick to distance the band from any talk of developing an esoteric whim or hiding their music in plain sight, he adds “our music is for us but that is not to say it is not for other people too, yeah? Obviously we want people to hear it and hope people that they enjoy it, otherwise we probably wouldn’t bother.”

Clearly not derailed by what was ostensibly an overnight jump into the sphere of arena-grade bands – and the engine of the inevitable superstar bandwagon turning over – Phoenix have stayed true to their ethos of making music that they find interesting.

Having won a Grammy for Best Alternative Album for Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix the band now face an expectant public for perhaps the first time. Can their adherence to making music they want hold out while still maintaining momentum? Well, it would appear so. Over the last few months snippets of information regarding the impending release of Bankrupt!, their fifth album proper, have been appearing on their website along with other social media outlets. Comments from their label owner Daniel Glass have added to the intrigue as Glass has publically heralded the arrival of the album as a potentially a career-defining moment, “It is very hard to beat Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, but this could be revolutionary.”

And this theme of revolution can be found coming from the band themselves too. Terms synonymous with the French Revolution appeared on their website over the last year. Not that this seems to hold and value for D’arcy or the rest of the band, his reply when asked about the revolutionary element, “Well… we are from a revolutionary place but it is about something else.” Departure? “Yes, maybe departure. Maybe just different, and we take different as a compliment.” The band and their label claim that the album makes no attempt to right the world’s ills or even comment on the state of the first world’s finances. Something which might be a bit hard to believe with track names such as ‘Bourgeois’, ‘SOS in Bel Air’ and ‘Bankrupt!’. But, musically speaking at least, if different is what D’Arcy and his bandmates Tomas Mars, Laurent Brancowtz and Christian Mazzalai were after they certainly achieved it.

Having made the video for their first single taken from Bankrupt! available online last month, ‘Entertainment’ may seem to take up where Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix left off. But the similarities end there. The rest of the album is, as was the band’s mission for it, an exercise in colour, texture and sound. The band decamped to New York’s Oscilloscope Laboratory in late 2010, straight after the last gig of their tour, the band set out reinventing their sound and the resulting work is possibly the most assured and interesting of their albums to date. When asked about their approach to writing the material the band has a very systematic and rigid methodology. “We try to keep songwriting pure and without the effects of touring”, explains D’Arcy, “we were quite slow though [writing the album], for sure. We had nothing written during the last tour and even if, like our first ever tour, we have some parts or ideas, we want to fully develop them in order to hear what the whole song is like. At least, that is the feeling we have.”

Does that explain the four year gap between albums? “Yes but we were busy in that four years, it was half touring, half writing and recording. We never write on tour; we try to keep the two separate as much as possible.” Does this approach ever present a risk of burnout? “Not at all, we did take some time off after touring but it wasn’t a four-year writing process or a four-year break or anything. But we were quite slow though, for sure.” Asked what they feel are the benefits of such a demarcated system of working, D’Arcy explains that “when you give people a chance to discover your music it actually brings something new to us in terms of how we work. This is not always about success or awards, it is about us seeing the response to the music before we create even more.” Surely winning a Grammy counts as a response? “Yes, it was nice, for sure. But winning it didn’t really change anything. We still wanted to go and make something different then. Recently we have been working it out live and have really been pushing things and we are very happy with it. We knew it was a challenge and wanted to be challenged also, that is never a problem. But we have just worked on the lines and the sounds we aim to create something that shows that effort. We are looking forward to playing it live and it will be nice to come back to Dublin after five years away”.

Bankrupt! is out on Glassnote Records on 23rd April, and Phoenix will be headlining Dublin’s Longitude Festival on Friday, 19th July.

Eclectic singer-songwriter from Down Under.

Africa Unite | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 16th April)/Cyprus Avenue, Cork (9pm, 17th April) | €15/€17.35

A call for Sub-Saharan federalisation? No, but an Italian musical hybrid set up in honour of the late Bob Marley. Dub, funk and reggae for everyone!

Hypocrisy | Button Factory, Dublin (6:30pm, 17th April) | €22.50

Swedish heavy metal in Temple Bar.

John Smith | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 17th April) | €9.80

Very easy to find on the internet. John Smith is a rare beast indeed.

Twilight Sad | Auntie Annies, Belfast (8pm, 17th April)/Cyprus Avenue, Cork (9pm, 19th April) | £10.25/€16.35

Scottish indie curiosity being shown off in Cork and Belfast this week.

Colin Smith | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 18th April) | €14.35

Another Smith comes to play in Dublin, this one in support of new EP, It Only Took a War.

Container | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (8pm, 18th April) | €11.95

American techno “contained” on Middle Abbey St. This is getting tiring now, that was just poor.

Veronica Falls | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 18th April)/Voodoo, Belfast (8:30pm, 19th April) | €15/£10

Sweet British indie-pop and the latest 90s fetishists to hit these shores.

Randomer | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 18th April) | €9.50

No, that’s this producers actual name. You can’t just stand behind the decks and hope no one notices, nay encourages, yo.

Mark Geary | Grand Social, Dublin (8pm, 19th April) | €13

Troubadour in the capital this week.

Night Beds | Workman’s Club, Dublin (8pm, 19th April) | €13

Preferable to day beds, but it’s close.

DR Alban | Savoy, Cork (10pm, 19th April)/Turk’s Head, Dublin (10pm, 20th April) | €30/€30

90s Swedish Eurodance man rears his head this twice this week.

George FitzGerald | Twisted Pepper, Dublin (10:30pm, 19th April)/Stiff Kitten, Belfast (10pm, 20th April) | €11.75/£9

Long dead former Trinity philosophy professor decides the afterlife just isn’t for him and turns his hand to electronic music.

Little Comets | Academy 2, Dublin (7:30pm, 20th April) | €12

Indie starlets not going supernova anytime soon, they’re stuck in the Academy 2.

Archive | Village, Dublin (8pm, 20th April) | €17.35

Trip-hop veterans in town for one night only.

Hot Sprockets | Whelan’s, Dublin (8pm, 20th April) | €10

Much tipped blues rockers from Dublin hit up Whelan’s.

Hornets | Sub, Belfast (9pm, 20th April) | £6

Hard punks get angry in Belfast.

Public Enemy | Button Factory, Dublin (7:30pm, 21st April) | €32.50

Fiercely intelligent, partly ridiculous and they always have the time. NY rap legends play their only Irish date this year.

Fang Island

Despite a torrential night in Cork City, Fang Island draw the masses out, launching into their European tour with a packed out show. In fact, it’s so grim out that even this cheerful Brooklyn trio seem a bit taken a back, perhaps a little wary about the turnout to the first date of their European tour. Hailing from Rhode Island, guitarists Chris and Jason describe growing up surrounded by quite a dark experimental music community with dark undertones. The duo met in school and for them, starting a project as upbeat and uplifting as Fang Island was the “most punk thing you could do” they tell State.

Signed to revered independent label Sargent House, as much as this may baffle their legions of fans, they feel they didn’t quite impress label owner Cathy Pellow initially, it was their track ‘Daisy’ that won her over. Monday night at the Pavilion sees their first time in Cork and No Spill Blood are on support with Lar Kaye (Adebisi Shank) providing the beats. Not only is Lar on drum duties in No Spill Blood he’s also been enlisted by Fang Island to play bass and fits right in. This tour sees them promoting their second album Major, which they describe as “verbal high fives”. In comparison to their self titled debut, the album features more vocals and overall has a slightly more anthemic feel. They’re about to embark around Europe but we’ll see them close their tour in Dublin on the 10th of May at the Grand Social. Not to be missed.

We Arrive Alive

Hailing from Dublin, the members of We Arrive Alive (pictured) are rarely off the scene, rotating duties between Spies and Girl Band. The seven piece are about to release their debut album as four very special, limited edition graphic novels. Intrigued? So are we. These very limited editions will offer an interactive feel to their debut. “We started the band with the idea to do a lot of sound tracking stuff for film and video games so we jumped on this idea” guitarist Andy McGurk tells us, he adds “a story was written and wonderful illustrations were done so you’ll find as you look at the images that the mood of the music will very much depict the image and vice versa”. Art Ensemble are the design team behind the graphic novel while Storm Studio are behind the production and release.

Get your own very limited copy here.

The Vincent(s)

From the Deep South of Ireland, The Vincent(s) describe themselves as ‘Death Pop’. Signed with FIFA Records, they are easily one of the most exciting new acts in Ireland, reminding us of what a strong music community Cork has. If you haven’t heard these guys yet then check out their single ‘Asked Her to Dance’. They’re playing with Ladydoll at Cyprus Avenue, Cork this Friday the 12th of April. You can catch them at Dublin at the Hard Rock Café, Temple Bar on Thursday the 18th of April with the newly formed ‘Forming’, which features members of Cave Ghosts.

With regards to essential viewing it’s hard to look past Naoko Ogigami’s Rent-a-Cat, the comedic tale of Sayoko, a girl who travels the city everyday renting cats to lonely people from her handcart. Given its heartwarming subject matter, Rent-a-Cat seems like a good bet for international success.

Anime as one would expect is well represented, opening with From Up On Poppy Hill the latest animation from those peerless folk at Studio Ghibli. Goro Miyazaki’s debut feature Tales From Earthsea was always going to get a cold reception given the footsteps it had to follow in, but his latest has proven a favourite in Japan and may come to rank alongside the likes of studio classics Grave of the Fireflies or Spirited Away.

Other Anime offerings include the fantastically left-field Wolf Children, Mamoru Hosoda’s award winning tale of a couple, one human, one werewolf, and the prejudice their children encounter. There’s also the tale of super warriors fighting mysterious terrorists in 009 Re: Cyborg from the creators of fanboy favourite Ghost in the Shell: SAC and two helpings of Toshiyuki Kubooka’s absurdly violent romp Berserk, set in Europe during the middle ages.

There is surely an unwritten law somewhere that any Japanese film festival should feature the work of Takeshi Miike, and it’s a law that’s hard to contest considering the uniqueness of his work. Most famous internationally for the likes of Ichi the Killer or Audition, there is more to his work than simple ultra-violence. Within the festival programme alone the diversity of Miike’s work is evident, with two of his films up for your consideration; video game adaptation Ace Attorney and his own unique slant on Romeo & Juliet, For Love’s Sake (Limerick only).

The highlight of the festival is the rare chance to see Paul Joyce’s documentary Nagisa Oshima: The Man Who Left his Soul on Film. A prolific and experimental filmmaker, Oshima is rightfully recognised as one of the greats of world cinema; who else can boast a filmography that includes working with David Bowie, winning Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival and a film that features a ménage-trois with a chimpanzee? He was a filmmaker of great conscience and principal and one who took great efforts to combat the strict censorship rules imposed on early Japanese cinema.

If after all that you still have some time to spare then it’s worth checking out Yamashita Nobuhiro’s My Back Pages. Based on a true story, it tells the tale of a journalist naively covering and eventually becoming converted to student activism only for the movement’s darker side to raise its head.

The festival ends just as the Hollywood summer blockbuster season takes over, with its formulaic cash cows and big budget sequels. You should try the offerings of the Japanese Film Festival if for no other reason than it may be your last chance to see something genuinely refreshing and new before Oscar season rolls round again in December.