Kill Krinkle Club released their debut album ‘Abandon’ back in September of last year. After listening to the album Producer/Director Greg Corcoran instantly got a feeling that he’d like to work with the band. The result is a pretty nifty music video for Handwritten Novel shot on location in Venice. It’s a beautiful piece of work that nicely compliments the pensive mood and flow of the song.

The Analogue Hour
Wednesdays 7-8pm on RTE 2XM

Playlist:
Probably – Ginnels – Ginnels
Herdwick Bonez – Ginnels – Ginnels
For Real – Okkervil River – Black Sheep Boy
The Mending of the Gown – Sunset Rubdown – Random Spirit Lover
New Beat – Toro Y Moi – Underneath the Pines
Excuse Me (Memory Tapes remix) – Gucci Mane – Diplo presents: Free Gucci Mane
Yonkers – Tyler the creator – Goblin
Rolling in the Deep (Jamie XX shuffle remix) – Adele – 21
Desire Lines – Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
Try to Sleep – Low – C’Mon
French Navy – Camera Obscura- My Maudlin Career
Arthur’s Bird – Teebs – Ardour

Bodytonic Present…
SKREAM (MAGNETIC MAN/TEMPA RECORDS)
+ MC CRAZY
MO-FO HOBO

Friday 03 December @ The Button Factory
Doors: 11.00pm
Adv Tickets e15: www.bodytonicmusic.com/store and www.ticketmaster.ie

On Sunday I made my 2FM debut as part of the effort to create wider awareness of 2XM and RTE’s digital stations in general. It was short and sweet, a twenty minute concentrated dose of the Analogue Hour. I decided to pick a playlist that would most appeal to the existing 2FM listeners while also capturing what the Analogue Hour is all about. I have to say it was a bit of a personal achievement as I’ve been involved in radio for 6 years. Starting out in Trinity FM back in Freshers week of 2004 I never dreamed I would end up on a national radio station. I know it was only a brief slot but it’s something I’ll remember for a long while.

The Analogue Hour on 2FM
11.40PM 10/10/10

Sleigh Bells – Rill Rill – Treats
Glasser – Home – Ring
Caribou – Odessa – Swim
The Antlers – Bear – Hospice

The Analogue Hour normally goes out Wednesday 7-8pm on RTE 2XM. Tune in online, on the iphone app, on DAB and on UPC channel 944.

After hearing the new track from Deerhoof, The Merry Barracks I’m quite excited. The new album ‘Deerhoof vs. Evil’ is due out January 2011 on Polyvinyl in the States and ATP Records in UK/Europe. The Merry Barracks kind of gives me the feeling that the new album will hark back to the sounds of ‘The Runners four’ but ya never know what Deerhoof will come out with next. Either way I’m quite happy with the loose sound of this and am excited for January.

You can download The Merry Barracks here.

ZOMBY

Never one to be tied down by the boundaries of any scene or genre, Zomby’s catalogue so far has unfurled in all sorts of weird and remarkable directions. From the dark bubbling atmospherics of his early Dubstep releases on the influential Hyperdub label, through the twisted, molten klaxons of his hardcore-influenced “Where were you in ‘92” album on Werk, to the serpentine psychedelic chip-tunes woven through his recent output on Ramp, Zomby has defiantly marched to the two-step beat of his own drum.

While Zomby chooses to cloak himself in anonymity – notably obscuring his face with the pyramid eye of providence in his most used publicity shot – his musical output has created serious ripples both inside and outside of Dubstep circles. His album and EPs garnered rave reviews on websites such as Pitchfork (who describe him as “one of those crucial producers who can trace his lineage back though a youth of garage, jungle and rave”) and Resident Advisor (who proclaim that he “blew the bloody and stumped doors off the dubstep rule book”). It’s no surprise that every forward-looking new release from the influential producer is leapt on by a legion of DJs and dance music fans alike.

It’s not only critics who’ve taken notice of Zomby’s singular talents. Sharp-eared festival goers would have heard the unmistakeable bomb-scare sirens of ‘Euphoria’ dropped into Aphex Twin’s live sets last summer, and, more recently, none other than a certain Lady Gaga has blasted a cut or two during the interlude of her recent ‘Monster Ball’ tour.

In spite of the white-hot hype surrounding his musical output, Zomby only rarely makes live appearances. ‘Where were you in ’92?’ Zomby asks in his giddy love-letter to the mashed up days of hardcore; where will you be on Friday March 19th?

Analogue Episode 2 from Analogue on Vimeo.

Analogue is proud to announce the launch of Analogue Episode 2, the second installment in a bi-monthly web series that brings together interviews, music videos, short documentaries and live performances. Following the successful release of Episode 1(Kronos Quartet, Patrick Kelleher, So Cow) in 2009, Analogue returns with a brand new episode featuring the dark electronica of Irish artist Angkorwat, a short mini documentary style piece on fishing in Ireland soundtracked by the brooding music of Irish electronic enigma Hunter-Gatherer and an interview with recent Matador Records signee, psychedelic rocker Kurt Vile.

With each episode Analogue aspires to use an innovative visual aesthetic to explore the diverse spectrum of music we love (from indie and folk to classical and electronic) from both local and international talents. Analogue’s aim is to break from the traditional approach to music television and starts afresh with a progressive format applying diverse cinematic techniques.

The Analogue web series is Directed by Graham Seely & Tim Gannon and produced by Brendan McGuirk.

The Analogue Hour on 2XM
Wed 7 – 8pm, repeated Sunday 12 – 1pm

16/12/09 Show no. 53 Playlist

1. Norway – Beach House – Teen Dream
2. Islands – The XX – The XX
3. Chase the Tear – Portishead
4. Cryptograms – Deerhunter – Cryptograms
5. Left For Dead – Hunter-Gatherer – I dreamed I was a footstep in the trail of a murderer
6. Fostercare – Burial – 5:5 years of Hyperdub
7. The Splendour – Pantha Du Prince – Black Noise
8. Down is Up – Moondog – The Viking of Sixth Avenue
9. Stick to my side (ft. Panda Bear) – Pantha Du Prince – Black Noise
10. Love Cry – Four Tet – There is Love in You
11. Hyph Mngo – Joy Orbison

The number of venues for experimental music in Dublin has always been limited, and with the demise of what once were regular Lazybird events in the International it became more limited still. Celebrating their first birthday on the 20th of December, the Second Square to None collective – who run monthly events in Twisted Pepper – aim to plug that gap by providing a forum for experimental and noise music – as well as ambient, downbeat, and electronica – in the city. To my mind, probably SSTN’s most exciting function lies in its offering a space for genres of sound that would otherwise languish unheard on the Dublin scene – one of those being noise.

Noise music’s first manifesto came from Luigi Russolo in 1913, who argued that ‘The limited circle of pure sounds [as produced by orchestral and other traditional instruments] must be broken, and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered’. This ‘infinite variety’ was explored in the twentieth century by artists from John Cage to Lou Reed to Merzbow (and many many more inbetween), but as the twentieth century bled into the twenty-first, and computers became ubiquitous, the ‘infinite variety’ has morphed into something more like ‘infinity squared’. Not that the genre was growing tired, in need of a shot in the arm, as it were, but the ubiquity of both the hard and software needed to mangle and mash audio meant that more and more artists began to play around at the boundaries of pure sound.

‘Noise music’ is a term that, while not quite defying explanation, certainly makes it difficult. The frequent ducking into parantheses and juxtaposition of binaries in essays on the subject suggests that the same inability to describe the sublime that has plagued theorists for decades (not that that’s ever stopped them) inheres to theories of noise too. As an example: ‘If noise is process, is always a becoming-noise – or, alternatively, (not) coming into (not) being as noise, this exclusion (what we take to be in the exclusion) is undone when noise ‘is’ as noise is the coming undone of noise/organised sound’. Which is a terribly erudite way of saying ‘Jezzus, I dunno’.

This difficulty in describing, or explaining, in a broad sense, what noise artists do was apparent when I sat down with noise duo FYED last week and made the mistake of opening the interview with the question ‘So what is it that ye do?’. The pause that follows is fully fifteen seconds long, according to my iTunes, and then Ed, in answering the question, elides it entirely.

FYED are Ed Devane (founder member of the Second Square to None collective) and Fyodor, or Fionn Wallace, militant noise merchant and one time drummer with the now defunct John and Mary Trilogy. As Ed Devane, Ed makes ‘a lot of dancefloor music’, but for Second Square to None, and as half of FYED, he welcomes the chance to play with abstract, noisey (sic) improvisation: ‘To improvise droney noisescape stuff is a welcome change from that, ‘cos that stuff is very unspontaneous’.

Noise music need not necessarily be improvised, but improvisation lies at the heart of much of it. There is a sense that, in rehearsing and recording, the anarchic, experimental impulse that lies behind it is lost, or at the very least tamed. For this reason, the flowering of noise music throughout the noughties can be seen both as a function of hardware ubiquity, as aforementioned, and the power of the internet to allow links between local scenes to expand exponentially, meaning the potential for live collaboration, and the experimentation that goes with that, has mushroomed. As Marc Masters writes on Pitchfork: ‘Often improvisational and rarely repeatable, noise depends on live performance, and local venues and communities remain its most fertile audio labs’.

Which is where Second Square to None comes in. It offers both the venue (The Twisted Pepper) and the social hub (both online at secondsquaretonone.com and in the real world) for experimental/noise artists to come together. There’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ noise artist, but Ed’s comment that, ‘We’re using machines in a way that they’re not really meant to be used’ is instructive. From Sonic Youth through My Bloody Valentine through Merzbow right up to Animal Collective, a fundamental guiding premise of noise music is that, first, anything can be an ‘instrument’, and second, any ‘instrument’ can be used any damn well way you please. This can have its pitfalls, as Fionn says, ‘With the noisier stuff it’s hard to know who’s making what sounds…sometimes we don’t know’. Ed continues: ‘Yeah, sometimes like there’ll be feedback noise and I’ll be like (to Fionn) ‘Make it stop!’ and then I’ll realise it’s me who’s making the sound’. Fionn: ‘He’s always quick to blame me’. Ed: ‘That’s cos it usually is you’.

Similarly, the boys go on, ‘(At our first gig) There was this buzz that was going all the way through that was a dodgy cable going ‘bzzzzzz”. ‘And nobody could tell we weren’t making it like’. Says Ed, ‘They were like ‘that’s good I guess”. Which leads to a possible charge against noise music: only the initiated could possibly understand it, and, equally, if not even the artists know what’s going on, then what’s the point?

To which charges I would point to what some writers have called the ‘ecstatic’ effect of noise music. All music has an ‘effect’, or, rather, is affecting (if we can rescue that word from its nineteenth century rosemantic connotations). We need not be connoiseurs to be moved by (some would say manipulated by) a John Williams piece. Similarly, one need not be a conoisseur to be moved by a noisescape. The difference, perhaps, is that the movement may be toward the commonly understood form of ecstasy (joyous, literally ecstatic) or toward a darker, more unsettling kind, or even some combination of the two. Use of the word ‘sublime’ is dangerous (not least because it makes one think of a campy woman describing a cocktail), but we’ll take our chances here and quote Torben Sangild: ‘One of the reasons for the ecstatic effect of noise is its sublime character. The sublime is that which exceeds the limits of the senses, perceived as chaos or vastness. Despite our ability to put these words to it, the sublime goes beyond making sense – we never really understand it. The complexity of noise (in the acoustic sense) overloads the ears and the nervous system and is perceived as an amorphous mass, incomprehensible yet stirring. The delight of the sublime is the satisfaction of confronting the unfathomable’.

The magic of noise music is that it does not dictate a direction for our feelings – it doesn’t seek to make us happy, or sad, or excited, or anything else. It’s non-manipulative of our emotions. Because of this open ended nature, you don’t need to ‘understand’ what’s going on; to clock that there’s a broken cable creating a buzzy noise is fine if you do, but if you’re busily getting lost in the noisescape and don’t notice, that’s fair enough.

Many people hear the phrase ‘noise music’ and shy away (I know I certainly did, for a long time). Its Greek root is the word ‘nausea’, after all. But there’s nothing in the noise handbook that says it has to make you sick, or uncomfortable; nor does it have to break your ears. Ed points out something that did indeed put me off noise music for a long time: ‘That’s something that I’ve actually read a good few times, that noise..it’s this big macho thing, y’know, ‘I’m so hard I’m gonna go deaf in the next year or so”. He goes on, ‘That’s a load of bollocks really…that’s pointless’.

Which probably explains why I’ve yet to be to a Second Square to None event (all of which are in part curated by Ed) that makes my ears and nose bleed. Post-gig tinnitus has been thin on the ground. The noise – by artists like Ventolyn & Becotyde, Push Move Click, Keith Lindsay, Fyed, Boys of Summer, Uninerves, Magnetize and more – may be noisy, it may be loud, but it’s not macho posturing or undifferentiated aggression. And it does take you off to wide open spaces in your head. Plans are afoot to fill the dancefloor of Twisted Pepper with Buddha Bags for the next Second Square to None in mid-December so people can sit back, close their eyes, and float away, transported to (or at least near) that place, the sublime.

Second Square to None runs monthly, on Sunday afternoons, in the Twisted Pepper. The next event is Sunday 20th December; 3-7pm. The live stage will feature Legion of Two, Cignol and Ilex while the DJ room will see Fran Hartnett, Thatboytim and Swarm Intelligence doing their various things. Admission is always free. For more details, and to hear live-sets from previous SSTN events check secondsquaretonone.com

8 bands and 2 DJs for €10 with all proceeds going to the Peter McVerry Trust, sounds good to me! As per the PMV website. “The Peter McVerry Trust supports young homeless people to break the cycle of homelessness and move towards independent living through the provision of a continuum of care services.” So needless to say, it’s a very worthwhile cause.

I’m particularly looking forward to catching Cap Pas Cap as hopefully they’ll be playing some new material from their as yet unreleased album, which is due out early next year I think. So pop along this saturday, enjoy some great music and support a worthy cause.