On the back of 42 songs over the five volumes of Songs for Christmas (2006), Indie Folk singer Sufjan Stevens released last month Silver and Gold: Songs for Christmas – Vol. 6-10, adding 58 more songs to the collection. Like the previous opus, Silver and Gold is a miscellany of old carols, hymns and new songs. The […]
Contemporary
Jon Hopkins: Monsters theme
Monsters is a 2010 British independent science fiction film written and directed by Gareth Edwards with a wonderful soundtrack by Jon Hopkins. Monsters chronicles the journey of an American journalist and her fellow citizen from alien-infected and quarantined Mexico to the American border. Filmed on a shoestring budget with only two professional actors, Monsters was entirely […]
The Gloaming: Live in Dublin
The Gloaming is a new Irish “supergroup” composed of Sean Nós singer Iarla Ó Lionaird, pianist Thomas Bartlett, hardanger fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, fiddler Martin Hayes and guitarist Dennis Cahill. A 21mn live track recorded in August 2011 at the National Concert Hall is available to listen to & download on Bandcamp and an album is due in the […]
Sam Jackson: The Gramophone
Sam Jackson is a Dublin based pianist, but when I heard “The Gramophone” for the first time on the radio, I mistook it for what could have been a track from an early recording from the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Sam Jackson’s music is of the same calibre. “The feeling I have something to say, the great difficulty […]
Gerry Diver: Music for tape loop
Multi-instrumentalist Gerry Diver based the “Speech Project” on several interviews of Irish musicians and singers such as Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, Damian Dempsey, Martin Hayes and Danny Meehan. It also features archival recordings of Galway accordion player Joe Cooley. The various musical pitches of the musicians’ voices formed the basis for subtle musical arrangements. “Music […]
John Cage: In a landscape
Referring to classical Indian thought and influenced by Gita Sarabhai, the Indian musician he was tutoring in the mid-1940s, John Cage formulated the idea that the purpose of music was to “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences”. Written as a clear homage to Erik Satie, “In a landscape” […]
