The Dublin Community Blog

If you are around Temple Bar on Sunday make sure to check out events at Meeting House Square where Dublin’s first Ukulele Festival takes place.

Along with the main Ukulele Hooley gigs, which will cost €15 to attend, there are musical workshops planned for Saturday 15th in the Odessa Club, an Open Mic session that same night in Shebeen Chic restaurant on Georges St.

Further details about the Hooley can be found here.

In the second instalment of Discovered in Dublin we are featuring a young lady with a little house in her tummy: Riona Hartman. This lady is an emerging songwriter from Dublin, who contributes vocals to Sami Moukaddem’s live band and also sings on his album “The facts of life for the Palestinian”; and has performed on the balcony of Balcony TV Dublin. Her songs tell little stories in their own right, reminding of early Tori Amos but with a more definite hint of jazz in there (listen to “Sea Snail”). And she’s not afraid to use the right language – this is definitevely no polished accoustic-pop.

Here’s what Riona has to say:

Read the rest of this entry »

One advantage of the festival season in Ireland is that most bands booked for these events include a stopover in Dublin in their touring schedule; so we can all avail of this without leaving the city boundaries and heading for the country. After last week’s visit of the Hot 8 Brass band in Whelan’s and Emmy the Great‘s show in Crawdaddy this Wednesday (both acts appearing at the Galway Art’s Festival), I’m especially looking forward to next week’s performance of O’Death from Brooklyn (again in Whelan’s).These five guys use fiddles, guitars, banjos and trombones to create an extremely interesting sound, fittingly titled “Folk Metal” on their Myspace page. Stay tuned to see if the Dublinblog can obtain a photo pass for this show What was Oxegen again?

O’Death – Legs To Sin – Live @ Bowery Ballroom from Kemado Records on Vimeo.

For the 4th time, the “Let’s French”-festival will be happening in selected venues all over Dublin next week. To give Dubliners an overview of French music (and culture) and to celebrate this year’s Fete de la Musique,  the Alliance Francaise of Dublin has invited some interesting contemporary French artists, and there are also screenings of French music movies at the Denzille Cinema and an open mic day.

Kick-off will be a show of Parisian HipHop-three piece DSL at the Andrews Lane theatre on Thursday, 18.06., and my personal highlight of the festival, a show of Housse de Racket at the Twisted Pepper on Abbey Street follows up on Saturday 20th. Concluding all the events will be a free (! – its the Fete de la Musique) show of Singer/Songwriter Marie Cherrier at the Village on Wexford Street Sunday evening. Alors, on y va, dear Frankophiles. And watch out for reviews here on the Dublinblog.

SYNTHE TEASER Р(( Housse de Racket РSynth̩tiseur )) from Housse De Racket on Vimeo.

And did I mention that there’s a free Henessy-cocktail included when you purchase a ticket for one of the shows?

“Discovered in Dublin” is the new regular feature on the Dublinblog, were we present the newest and freshest up-and coming bands and musicians from the dirty old town. With no limits concerning genre, style, or age; featuring signed and unsigned artists – the main purpose is to show you that the Dublin music scene is alive and kicking, and that there’s more to it than Beyonce at the O2 or fake trad-sessions in Temple Bar.

The first band we allow us to introduce are: Friend?

Hailing from north Dublin, this extraordinary outfit combines different musical backgrounds (post rock, -hardcore and downtempo) into an outstanding instrumental  soundtrack for the times we live in. Having won the “Demo of the month” of Phantom 105.2 and Connected magazine in April, the 4 lads and 1 lass also played the Sibin Festival in May.

Dublinblog asked, guitarist Josh answered:

Tell us sth. about the band – how you got together, how you write your tunes and how do you plan to achieve world domination?

Well, myself, Colm and Sean started writing bits and pieces of music together around May of last year, and eventually decided that we would try and arrange them together in some conceiveable order. Having lost our previous drummer to the film industry (he will now be making our first video for us) we subsequently realized we quite liked the sound of various pots and pans being assaulted by a deranged young man named Dave… so we all moved into a dilapidated house together. Then, because most of us need a female in the room in order to behave (dynamically)… we were then joined by Margie, our lovely violinista. With regards to the writing process, Myself, Colm and Dave are the only ones without full time jobs so we spend a lot of time in the house working out rhythms and arrangements. Myself and Sean then generally separate the guitars from the rest of the mix and work on them together to find the right frequency balances, and then Margie comes over and adds a thick, translucent layer of class over everything. I think it might be better for everyone if we didn’t achieve world domination… we’re very silly people.

Do you think it is an advantage to hail from Dublin (or at least being labelled so)?

We’ve only ever played in Dublin, so i’ll let you know when we play Galway if they’re throwing bottles of piss or bottles of compliments written on tiny bits of paper.

How important is the liveshow for the band and your sound?
Crucial. Recordings can be so static, it’s really tough (especially on our budget of fuck all) to properly convey the energy and dynamic of a live show. Being in a band isn’t what I thought it was when I was 14, it’s 50 hours of playing the same 32 bars of music to get it tight during rehearsals, 150 hours to record one song because your mixing desk insists on shitting the bed every 20 minutes, 300 hours of giving out to each other and 45 minutes of bliss and adrenaline on stage. The live show is the real reason for the band at the end of all the repetetive tiresome bullshit.

What do you think about the current discussion about downloading, filesharing and copyrights? Is the web an advantage for new bands (without deal)?

Keep stealing music. Everybody. It’s pushing the industry in new directions, keeping bands on their toes. It’s forcing us all to produce something you can’t reproduce on some shitty mp3 that fell off the back of a truck! A small example… we gave free cakes out and had an art and photography expo during our last gig. Why? Because we’re just cool… but also because we know we will make little or no money on our recordings, we all need to do something different for our audiences now, it’s time for a shift in the way people think and I really believe that filesharing and downloading will spur this change in new and exciting directions. The web is obviously an excellent tool for new bands, it enables them to become the type of bands who don’t need a label. Of course, these will be the bands that the labels will want to sign…

Where can we find more information about your band? And, is there anything the world needs to know about you?

You can find us at myspace.com/weshouldbefriends, our demo, “Take A Bath In Public” is available for download… steal, steal , steal away. I suppose the world should know that we’re playing Andrew’s Lane Theatre on Saturday the 6th of June and we’ll also be setting up our own mini festival during the summer, the details will be on the myspace… Toodles x

As statet above, Friend? will be playing at the Andrews Lane Theatre tomorrow evening – see you there!

If you are an artist/musician/band/busker who wants to be featured on “Discovered in Dublin”, please send an email to authors@dublinblog.ie

As the line-up of this year’s Electric Picnic was announced last week, Oxegen tickets are already getting sparse and Castlepalooza is trying to be nominated for “Best European Festival” again this year, I thought this to be a good opportunity to draw your attention to the one festival that marks the start of the Irish festival season: Sibin, kicking it of next Saturday, 2nd of May.

The word Sibín, or Sheebeen, is of Irish origin and has been used in Ireland, Scotland, Southern Africa and the Carribbean for centuries to describe various kinds of illicit and after hours establishments. Places where alcohol was consumed, music played and merriment had. In the sixties and seventies the word was commonly used among the West Indian community in the UK to describe the kind of after hours sessions often held in private houses where reggae sound system played, chalice blazed, and man and woman danced till the early hours.

2009 it may be, and yes we are fully licensed, but we intend to recapture the magic and spirit of the late night sessions of yore with our Sibín. Musically we want to promote both new and old sounds, electronic and acoustic alike. It will also be a celebration of artistic creativity and expression of all kinds, with the venue being transformed into a visual and auditory wonderland for the day.

Located only 30 minutes North of Dublin (and easily reachable via public transport), this year’s line-up features loads of up-and coming bands from genres that you won’t find in bigger festivals – techno, salsa, reggae, hip-hop or drum and bass amongst other. All this is cramped into a one-day festival with six stages and 50 acts altogether, and with a capacity of 2000 festival visitors this promises to be one nice & cosy Saturday afternoon (and night). Personally, I am really looking forward to the performance of Dublin instrumental outfit Friend?.

PS: Connected magazine still has some discounted tickets available. But you better hurry.

THANKS to Pixie a gang of us had great viewing spots on the parade route yesterday, needless to say such a vantage point meant I took about 1,000 pics which will take me a good few days to sort through. In the meantime here’s a taster of some the pics, with more being uploaded to the St Patrick’s Festival group on Pixie as as when I finish them.

Hope you all had a great day, it was absolute bedlam in Dublin, crazy, I have never seen so many people hanging about the streets after a parade, mostly due to the wonderful weather I suppose. Anyway it is my intention to write more about the parade when I get a chance but for now here’s some images from the day.

I’m so sad to hear that Road Records is closing its shop on Fade St after 11 years. Well known as an outlet for independent musicians and local Irish releases, it also hosted many single launches and live performances. Many of which I attended. According to the statement on their website downloading (legal and illegal), online below cost sellers, decrease in footfall, increase in rent, insurance etc, are some of the reasons for the closure decision.

The reasons for the downturn are many and varied and if there was just one then we could try overcome that in some way but its no longer possible to pinpoint just one.

I will try list some of the reasons I see for the death of the small shop and I really do hope I am not right in thinking that many more will go the same way, I have always been optimistic that this city can sustain a couple of smaller indie shops but I no longer believe that to be true, again, I really hope I am wrong with this opinion but the way people go about buying their music these days does not instill me with too much confidence.

It really is the end of an era. I’m not even sure if there are any remaining Indie music stores open in Dublin.