Things I Enjoyed in 2024

 

Having made and successfully kept my New Years resolution of last year (which I’ll get onto) this years is to write more and actually use the blog. Even if at this point blogging is a dead art form and nobody is reading this stuff or likely to make me even a modicum of “internet-famous”, it’ll at least alleviate the mild guilt I feel about not having written. This is essentially just for me, but I hope it’ll be something at least a couple of people might get something out of. 

This is going to take the format of a SuperEyepatchWolf season roundup video. Maybe not as good (I wish I had the work ethic that guy has tbh). This is really more about cataloguing and recording where I am with certain things. It will contain a mixture of things that are brand new in the sense that they came out this year, as well as a few things that will be noted as such that came out in previous years but I only got to experience this year for the first time.

In No Order:

Gaming:

So I’ve kind of stopped playing new computer games. I got back into gaming over the pandemic, got a PS4, played everything I’d been hearing about and wanting to play for years. It was great, but before the start of last year I kind of ran right out of steam. All I want out of games now is something diverting I can do with my hands while I listen to the sort of podcasts I actually want to listen to beginning to end and not use as a sleep aid. I’m still playing Streets of Rage 4, always the Survival Mode from the DLC where you have one life and have to fight your way through increasing hordes of enemies in an enclosed environment while levelling up your core attributes or adding buffs to types of attacks. I’m also playing a cheap Pool simulator (its just Pool in an Unreal 4 engine) and Slay The Spire. To this I have very recently added Balatro, a game with Poker and making poker hands at its core. 

I did get back briefly into playing Magic The Gathering on Arena for a couple of months but that software is a piece of janky shit that after a certain update just became crash-y and unusable on both the devices I was using it on, and is basically unplayable on a mobile phone anyway, like how small the text is makes it functionally unusable unless you already know the cards by the cover art and don’t need to read what anything does. Yeah you fucked up there Wizards, you could have had me back suckling on your milky duds for the odd fix that beating up on people from across the world at Magic can give me, but you bollocksed it.

Podcasts:

Yeah I ought to say what podcasts I’ve been into listening to while gaming since I literally just mentioned they’re my entire reason for continuing to game. Chapo Trap House, I don’t agree 100% with everything they say but we hate a lot of the same things and they are genuinely good crack. They called the US election correctly and their coverage of the proceedings has been sterling in terms of making that whole mess explicable to someone like me over here with the rest of the world looking on at the absolute mess happening over there. TrashFuture, a podcast with a similar bent and humour but by queer Brits. The Only Podcast About Movies, slightly lighter fare but good analytical takes on mostly contemporary cinema. I also like, though don’t listen to quite as much as I did, RevLeftRadio – a Marxist podcast on a variety of subjects including; History, Current Affairs, Theory, Philosphy, Esoterica and hosted by a Canadian Maoist called Brett with a blessedly ecumenical approach to intra-left factionalism.

The ones I do listen to for sleep I do so not because they are boring or anything (it actually has to be interesting or it won’t hold my conscious attention, which is part of the trick I’m playing on myself), but because they are soothing and not likely to get me angry or excitable the way listening to stuff about politics generally will. These include; The Blindboy podcast - which I’ve been on since pretty early in the day, Ghibliotheque, A Podcast About Studio Ghibli - but has actually come to encompass all sorts of animated media and this year has covered the works of Makoto Shinkai, Linklaters animated films and the work of Nick Park, and The French Whisperer ASMR. Ghost Notes, a podcast broadly about music of all sorts from the two guys that do the Polyphonic and 12tone Youtube channels is the real best of both of those projects and the guys bounce off each other nicely.

YouTube:

This seems to follow on neatly from talking about Podcasts. Feels like I’m not coming across many new channels that are really grabbing my attention but I’ve got more than enough established favourites now to eat up as much of my spare time as I can throw at it. Novarra Media continues to be a good news resource. Iconic early video-essayist Every Frame a Painting returned after an 8 year hiatus with a whopping two new videos over four months, and it being an oldschool Youtube channel, these have been ten and five minutes respectively. Better than nothing, still great quality, one can hardly complain. 

Overly Sarcastic Productions and Extra Credits / Extra History continue to be an absolute joy in terms of delivering a weekly fix of good informative history and media-analysis. Red of OSP (the team don’t use real names, just colours like in Reservoir Dogs) is an absolute super-star, like if I could get to live in a house and hang out and just have the crack all day with anyone off the internet right now it would be Red by miles, hands down. 

Super Eyepatch Wolf, my distant cousin (maybe) whom I’ve already mentioned, continues to be one of the best things on the platform. I only saw his guest appearance on the Trash Taste Podast (not to be confused with Trash Future, a different trashy thing altogether) this year for the first time and it was an absolute joy and also got me into watching their stuff again which I had done in the past but bounced off for some reason. 

Fiq The Signifier's ongoing coverage of and eventual long form video essay on the Kendrick V Drake Beef that went on last spring and summer was absolutely magnificent. 

The Leftist Cooks, only managed 4 essays this year, fair enough considering they managed to conceive and birth a child between them and their essays are all feature length these days. Still killing it, really insightful and heartfelt with a lot of intellectual heft. This is maybe best exemplified in the video essay where they announce their good news itself, that sends Neil into a deep dive on the topic of anti-natalism to the point where he writes a book length refutation of David Benatar that you can buy from their patreon. Based.

Georg Rockall-Schmidt, the man is out here doing gods work. Some media analysis, just him talking movies or about stuff on TV with a reasonable amount of anti-corporate videos where he just goes ham on some particular set of capitalist bastards, be they Shein, Temu, The Sacklers, American Healthcare in general. I’m living for how snarky my boy is.

Less on the political side, the music channel Trash Theory (again, not to be confused with either Trash Future or Trash Taste) continues to be one of the most consistently entertaining and informative things on the platform. Its kind of a 90s nostalgia channel but he does cover other eras and some contemporary music. He always sounds genuinely enthused about whatever it is he's covering,  in a way that brings you along with him even if you're not mad into whatever the topic is yourself.

Music:

(Sigh). Y’know. I’ve not been on top of music at all. I’ve barely listened to anything new. I think when I stopped DJing or their being any prospect of me DJing much ever again, even for myself or to post online, that just lost my focus on finding new stuff. What I have been listening to, Cerys Matthews and Mark Radcliffe’s Blues and Folk shows on BBC Radio 2, Sherelle’s Saturday night shows on Radio 6 and other random bits and pieces on the BBC digital radio stations which I’ll generally have on as background when I’m doing my breakfast or dinner.

I loved the ØXN debut LP that came out in 2023. ØXN are a side project by Radie and the other non-Lynch member of Lankum that is if anything even darker and more Lankum-y than Lankum itself. I missed opportunities to get to see them play live this year, I literally didn’t make any festivals this year, to my shame.

What I did enjoy also that was actually from this year was Chelsea Wolfe’s latest album She Reaches Out to She where she’s still bringing the dark doom-metal-y goodness but has gone more industrial and a little trip-hop-y. She played Belfast on the tour for this one and I did get to see her, and she was great.

I did manage to get to a fair few nights and gigs about Belfast, and over to Glasgow with my sister to see Max Cooper’s big AV show. I think the best one might well have been getting to see Caribou live in the Telegraph building, which luckily for me has now been immortalised forever as it was a Boiler Room event.

TV: 

I’ve been on quite an animation tip this year. I’ve managed to finally get around to Star Vs The Forces of Evil and Amphibia on Disney as well as the masterful OK KO, Lets Be Heros!, of which I will not say too much other that they were really good since a couple of them may or may not feature on the return of a regular segment that has long been in hiatus on this corner of the internet. Arcane came through with a second and final season which while not quite up to the standard set by season one still fucking well kills dead near enough any other western animation series. 

I watched and mostly enjoyed The Dragon Prince, like I only started it this year not knowing that the final season was dropping in December. If I’d have known it was written by the Avatar The Last Airbender (which I did rewatch and loved all over again) team I probably would have got to it sooner tbh. If has what are for me some rough edges, the world is nowhere near as interesting or unique as Avatar, its just some guys DnD campaign – which is fine just not that original, I don’t like the occasional segues into goofy naturalistic dialogue. The tone shifts are jarring, to me at least, but not enough that I bounced off. It also falls for some ball achingly obvious tropes in storytelling. Its actually decent though and worth seeing. The animation style is really class, really pleasing to see something in 3d that is that old and doesn’t look like ass.

Speaking of tone shifts and a “some guys DnD campaign” setting, The Legend of Vox Machina was a whole heap of fun once again. The tone shifts were seamless and yes, this is literally a DnD Campaign turned into a series but they nailed the transition its just great fun.

Anime; I feel like I’ve rinsed the well of classics from the OVA era that I would care about. At least until Angel’s Egg makes it back to the big screens (maybe this year?). I have actually been enjoying some new stuff. NGL, those are some really basic picks for those in the know and will probably appear on most if not all anime commentators Best Of The Year lists. I will mostly just watch a small selection of the stuff I think sounds interesting from the handful of people I follow in the space and maybe see getting recommended on my socials. I’m not out here seeking out the really obscure stuff, I don’t think they still make much of the type of anime I like anymore, but the odd thing that filters through I get a lot of joy from.

Dan De Dan is one of the big anime series of this year and its not hard to see why. On paper the plot my make it appear to be more typical shonen weeb trash but it was done by Science Saru, the studio led by the guy that did Mind Game and who also did the Devilman Cry-Baby series a few years back. It scratches that itch for the genuinely unhinged shit that Anime has been lacking for a while. 

I really liked Frieren: Beyond The Journeys End, a very meditative and mostly glacially slowly paced fantasy series about an Elf mage who is, as elves are in fantasy, extremely long  lived, going on immortal that does have some great high fantasy magical combat in it but is mostly about the idea of human connections and what its like to live long enough to see your mates live and die while you stay essentially the same person. 

Less serious but equally good (better imo), Delicious In Dungeon. Like some of the other stuff I’ve been talking about it’s a very DnD-esque setting but it dares to ask questions that DnD players rarely ask in these last 50 odd years of the game, like what does dragon taste like? Does a gelatinous cube have any vitamins and minerals or is it just empty calories? Are the giant mushroom monsters that you have to fight some times going to kill you or get you high if you try to eat them or are they just a good source of zinc to the weary dungeon-crawling murder-hobo? You wouldn’t ear a person, probably not an Orc either but would Merefolk be more like fish or people, and is it ok to eat them? Its really just a good sprawling adventure fantasy with some great characters and also some interesting dissections of the notions of taboo and the value of good nutrition.

In terms of live TV, yeah there’s been some fire stuff out there. Something I only watched for the first time this year though it’s been out for a while; Wu Tang: An American Saga with the kid from the middle section of Moonlight as RZA I found and watched earlier in the year. Yeah it takes some liberties with the truth and leaves some stuff out for dramatic purposes (like RZA and ODB both had kids by the time the main plot starts, this does not come up at all) but it does their whole story and schtick really well. There’s three seasons, the third season isn’t quite as good just because the story itself IRL is less compelling than the coming together and coming up of these outsiders from Staten Island, seeing them get rich and famous and fall out with each other is not nearly as much fun. We are spared seeing Ason’s fall into madness and self destruction though that does somewhat hang over the narrative its not handled in a way that’s prurient or anything. 

Say Nothing, is yet another somewhat controversial take on actual historical events. This is about Sinn Fein / The Provos, the Finucane murders and the life of Dolours price. It managed to recreate the old Divis tower block accurately enough, down to the vibe, that it retraumatised my Mum who lived there during the events dramatized in the series. It’s good seeing something made about here with that sort of attention to detail and period accuracy, that also treats all sides reasonably fairly. Like there’s literal Gerry Adams in there as a low-key villain in the piece and he’s not some sort of moustache twirling cartoon. Shame that they blew a lot of the good will in a completely unnecessary plot point in the last episode that only seems to be in there for the sake of a Bad TV Writing climactic reveal involving one of the few players in the narrative that’s still alive and as I write is in the process of suing Disney. Worth watching in spite of all that.

The new series of Interview With A Vampire kept up the quality of the first and was if anything even better than the first. That show does a lot right, the fifth episode about the circumstances of the actual first interview that fills in a lot of Molloy’s character and story was just edge of the seat stuff from beginning to end. Like if you know the book or the film, you know exactly what happens to Claudia and Louis in Paris and you just spend the season waiting for the other shoe to drop, but this was unique to the series (afaik) and made for really gut-wrenching emotive TV. 

Books:

I was mostly using Duolingo to learn gaeilgé in my down time this year. I got the paid version after getting my first bit of paid work of the year and have finished the Irish course (standard Irish though, not Ulster unfortunately). That and The Mists Of Avalon being a long slog, and not just because of the length of the book or the writing style (see my review), I didn't really get reading nearly as much this year as usual. I did hit my years reading goals of finishing the three series I'd stated in the previous couple by reading the final books in the series. These were Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky (a good cap to the trilogy but the first book definitely rocks the others, okay to read on its own), Ancillary Mercy, which finishes the trilogy out well but doesn’t add a whole lot to the last ones in terms of world building and Emperor of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay which is the second of his books about Sarantium, the Byzantium of his fictional universe that runs analogous to our own medieval and ancient history but isn’t and so gives him license to tinker with the world building and throw in some magic and supernatural elements. It was pretty good, probably best read straight after part one Sailing To Sarantium and not a year-ish apart like I did it. 

Other things I read and liked included Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, the latest Blindboy Boatclub collection Topographia Hibernica which only came out 2023, and the collection of shorts by Norman Spinrad from the 1960s No Direction Home.

Comics / graphic novels, wise I read Bone for the first time. Its cool, like very a typical high fantasy that just happens to have three Fleischer Bros. / Old Disney cartoon characters as the Hobbits that bungle their way into the scenario. I also started Berserk, completed the first volume of the big over-sized collected editions just before the end of the year. I am already digging the vibe and we’re only just getting to what most people agree is The Good Bit, the first part of The Golden Age is what that edition finishes on.

Best book though was Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle. A new book from this year that is not his first non-Tingler as in actual proper novel but is the first one I’ve read and its incredibly good. Easily as good an exploration of Queer people’s relationship with certain types of media and place in that media as I Saw The TV Glow (which tbf I also liked a lot, even if it didn’t make my top 10). The prose is a constant pleasure, readable while also being wry and funny, scary or disturbing where it needs to be. It has a lot of heart in it too. Its also low-key based AF, as in the subtext is almost pure Marxism. I’m not sure if that’s exactly where Chuck is coming from but I see it and even if unconscious its definitely in there.

Movies:

I already have a top ten for the year up on my Letterboxd. Just to reiterate what I said there, Kneecap was my favourite of the year closely followed by The Substance. When I get to my favourites of this decade these will definitely both be in there. I am very much the target audience of Kneecap, or course I’m going to love it. I have been semi-adjacent to that life in my own city for parts of my own, some of the stuff in the film literally happened to my mates, I’ll not say what so as not to implicate anyone living or dead but it is very close to my heart, even if I know for a fact that they aren’t the complete spides they make themselves out to be or the best rappers on the local scene (though they are definitely the best at doing it bilingually and best at promoting themselves). The Substance gave me everything my body-horror loving degenerate arse could ever wish for in a film, a very straight-forwards feminist allegory that goes bat shit in the last act and is really gross, people were leaving. People left my showing like 20 minutes before the end, that never happens but they must have just been like “yeah I’m already two hours into this thing and we are close to the end but this is already way past my comfort zone and is just going to get worse from here – I’m out”. Normally I would decry such behaviour as weakness but in this case I say fair play to those people. It did just keep getting worse.

We had a lot of other great films this year, see the list. A few of the big Awards-bait movies from last year that dropped in January here were, right enough, some of the best most interesting, medium pushing and generally great films of the year, Poor Things, Zone of Interest, All Of Us Strangers, The Holdovers really had us spoiled. It was a good year for horror - Oddity, Longlegs, In A Violent Nature, Stop Motion. Big Popcorn actioners gave us Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, Dune 2 and Deadpool Vs Wolverine (which was essentially a Zucker Brothers screwball comedy set in the current Marvel comic book movie landscape). Not such a good year imo for animated features, 2022 and 2023 really had us spoiled, but The First Slam Dunk was very enjoyable, we got a new Wallace and Gromit film which was awesome and my favourite animated film of the year Robot Dreams was an absolute joy. It was though a good year for Irish cinema. I’ve already sung Kneecap’s praises (did I mention just how viscerally funny it all is? No? Well it’s hilarious), but we also did have Small Things Like These and That They May Face The Rising Sun, which was incredible and will hopefully bring John McGahern’s legacy and work to a new generation of people across the world.

 

I think that just about covers everything I feel it’s necessary to say. As I said up top I’m trying to get back into updating this thing a bit more regularly. I have a steady enough job now I could see going for a wee while that could give me the sort of schedule I could see myself building a decent routine around that might lead to me being able to do more writing. Here’s hoping anyway so watch this space. 

ArcTanGent 2023

 Ok, so to not bury the lead journo-style: main thing is ArcTanGent was great and I can indeed still hack a 3 day Camping festival. This is my first since Life 2014, I have broken both legs and swore off them since then, but when I saw the lineup for this I knew I had to make the effort to get over. So I did.

First thing I'll say that as festivals go, I thought it was fantastically well done. The production, curation, provision of site services and essentials, cleanslyness and usefulness of the bathroom facilties, the pre pitched tent I sprung for, and just the general vibe and atmosphere were all great. I was impressed with the dedication to being enviromentally conscious, it was weird buying tinned water (particularly since the design on the stuff at the bar was very Repo Man esque) but it was good that the place wasn't covered in plastic.

Also for a Metal festival, generally lefty AF, aside apparently a few boneheads who turned up for Heilung who I personally didn't see but heard about from a few people. Hielung themselves are conscsious by the nature of what they do inevitably attract a bit of that sort of thing but have distanced themselves from it publicly to the extent that they can. Other than that, I saw plenty of antifa patches on peoples stuff, lots of leftist, feminist, queer and trans artists and just people about the place in general. 

Pure family vibe too. Like there wasn't a play pen or stuff specifically for kids, but there was a good few babies and actual childer knocking about. Not many but enough that it all felt wierdly wholesome. I saw some folk with their kids (always with ear protectors) up on their shoulders at the main stage. Parenting goals tbf.

I found the way they ran the thing interesting. Everything started really early, first bands on 11ish, and everything runs up to 11pm, after which there is a "Silent Disco" where everyone who wants to can go to a stage and listen to DJ sets being played through headphones. Presumably this is to get around local sound rules and regs that dogged Boomtown the last couple of years I was there. Not the worst way to placate the NIMBYs if that's what you need to do, beats turning the sound down on the main stages after 11pm.

The stages were all pretty close together, had they all been on full time they'd have noise polluted each other out, but with this being basically all bands and stuff that required a set up they staggered the set times so at any given time one stage was on they'd be prepping for the next act on the other stage. I'm guess that's probably relatively normal for that type of festival but I'd personally not seen it before so yeah. Cool. Also made it easy to have a wee snoop about the different stages if you'd a mind to.

What I got up to: Thursday, flight got delayed getting from Belfast to Bristol and the coach into town took a bit longer than I had thought from the (admittedly somewhat rushed) research I had done into the transpot situ so I ended up getting charged dear for some of the camping equiptment I had to get from the last camp shop open in Brizzle by the time I got there (which means I need to do a few more of these things to get the use out of them, oh well....) and I didn't get to do some of the shopping I had planned which meant I had to rely on the then unknown quantity of making do with whatever I could get onsite. It also meant that by the time I got up to the site and got my shit together I had missed practically everything on the first day. No Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs for me unfortunately. If I'm back I reckon I'll need to look into arranging things a bit better with that in mind. It wasn't a complete washout, I did get to see a good bit of Converge who were headlining the mainstage and most of my first big discovery of the weekend Straight Girl who had played the wednesday and was covering for someone who had pulled out, apparently due to getting stuck on the UK border. I had literally just nipped out of Converge to have a quick snoop at the other stages to see what they were like, not intending to really be away for too long when I heard bass, breaks and beats coming from up the hill. Unreal, and short, enough that I caught the latter half of Converge. After that I was wrecked after all the running around so I booked and got my head down. 

Friday I had a pleasant morning catching up with the neighbors (a girl from here and her mate from down South, nice!). Made frieds with a bunch of sound lads from Cardiff, who I'll refer to as 'Jeff's Mates'. I got to see most or all of Joliette, Ashenspire and CLT DRP and really liked them. I saw And So I Watch You From Afar, actually for the first time live, now feel like a bit of a nob for not having done so before. I saw Pet Brick again who I'd had the absolute best time watching at Bangface and gave it absolute stacks, probably the most lively I was all weekend. I didn't get drawn into the mosh pit but I was sorely tempted. Big highlights from the friday tho, not unexpectedly as they were along with Igorrr the big draws for me of the whole thing; Swans and Hielung. Swans was just darkness,vibe and intensity. I got complete full-body frission. It was great. Hielung was just on another level. For those that don't know, they basically do a sort of reimagining of Norse/German pagan shamanic rituals using costumes, instruments etc based on the type of things they have in the historical record or found in Iron Age burial sites from Northern Europe and a good bit beyond (but that's not important and they're not going for full dilligent authenticity). The stage craft is really elaborate too. Off all the stuff I saw, they'd be the only thing that if someone put them on in the Waterfront or something I'd take my parents to see them.

That was the day of the really horrible weather (in the middle of f'ing August, this is what global warming is for the UK btw) and it blew me right into my tent past any feeling towards sociability on my part. And I was just knackered tbh. 

Saturday, having actually just had a really good rest I was intent on making the best of the last day. I caught A Burial At Sea, mathrock group Land Wars (Davitt / Parnell reference? one of the guys is from Cavan so maybe). After that I caught some nice queer, gothy-gazey act called Cultdreams and bumped into my mate Big Mike at the end. He took me to see Gggolddd, cracking dark, moody synth/trip-hop. We split and I had saw Grub Nap for a bit of a change of pace, 2 lads from Leeds doing aggy Sludge-core. Great stuff. Simmilarly the Callous Daoboys were a lot of fun and really heavy, Rolo Tomasi, Health and Loathe were all awesome in different ways and for different reasons. Deafhaven were great, aside from the technical difficulties which I didn't mind so much but I could see people who are more emotionally invested in them getting upset over, especially since they were doing their iconic Sunbather album beginning to end.

Absolute stand out of the day though, again predictably, was Igorrr. I love Igorrr, have been into them since back when he was releasing on NI's own Acroplane and Ad Noiseum. Saw him play a set at Bangface 2016. Seeing him blow up on the metal circuit and bring in more live elements to the shows since then has been an absolute pleasure. This time he had the full band, him on his hardware, his live drummer, guitarist and an opera singer providing vocals going through mostly stuff off the last two albums. he opened with a wee bit of breakcore and finished off again just by himself banging out the glitches, bass and drum breaks. 

I ended up only seeing a wee bit of Devin Townsend, actually bumped into a guy I met in his own house last week after Kneecap, ended up hanging with him, his brother and their mate who I'd been talking to earlier at the start of Igorrr, then finished the weekend hanging with Jeff's mates, and other people who came around, including two lads from Lambeg, one of who recognised me from activist stuff back in the day and grew up in the street opposite my house, and his mate who was at Lagan literally just as I left. This country is a village.

Silly crack was had. It was a good end to a good day and the festival in general. I had a great time, could see myself coming back if they pull out another lineup like this years that just has a lot of stuff on it I really like. Or that could prove to be a fluke, we'll see. Would be good to get a crowd up for it if I do go back.

If they made The Crow today.....

 

What bands and artists would you think would be on the soundtrack? That OST for The Crow is still just a great alternative music compilation album, some big acts and some slightly more obscure ones but all good repping different parts of what the scene was back in the mid 90s.  But if they were doing one now, with the dearth if not the death of MTV and alt radio its hard to really say whats big or current in underground music, unless you're in a major urban centre with a healthy live scene (or like, usually when the apocalypse lurghy isn't haunting us around every corner). I myself have a few ideas of what I'd like to see which I will share but I'd like to hear from other people (assuming anyone actualy reads these things which doesn't appeear to be the case :)).

What artists do you think would be a good representation of where the scene is at right now, or what alt music have you heard recently that you think would match any of the emotional beats of the comic(s) if you're familliar with the source material (O'Barr himself said the music he was listening to which fed into the vibe of the comic book as he was creating it was Iggy Pop, and all your classic 1st wave goth and alt rock groups, Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure)?

The following is my personal recreation of what I personally think would / should be on there.

1. 3Teeth

                                   

Yeah? I mean in terms of bands that have come up in the last decade or so are really flying the flag for our thing and doing it well 3Teeth have been at the forefront of a revivial of the old WaxTraxx sound and returning a bit of cred to a scene mired down in cheese.

2. She Wants Revenge

                                

This track has been used on AHS and is I think a recognised classic and their stuff is mostly pretty good (decent live too). Seems like a no-brainer. Probably the closest non-legacy band to the sounds that inspired O'Barr, mostly for the fact that they're just straight up doing the goth post-punk formula really well.

3. Chelsea Wolfe

Just as the original had some slower more emotional moments and some transcendently pretty female vocal led tracks to bring the punch of those moments out, if we're looking at contemporary artists I think a bit of Chelsea would do rightly for capturing the more melancholy emotional beats of the story.

4. Ghostemane

I feel like this is an artist that should be on there as much because he represents something genuinely new thats happened to the scene and something very current because he's fucking sick and has a range of tracks already that could be inserted into that narrative.

5. Adam X

 

Hearing some genuinely good contemporary techno during the nightclub scenes in The Batman when I went to see it last weekend is one of the things that had me on the train of thought that led to this post, like if there was something simmilar happening in The Crow, what would be appropriate? I was thinking some german EBM-Techno like this or some Ancient Methods, Vatican Shadow, Regis or something like that, or maybe something a bit harder like:

6. Paula Temple

which bangs a bit more, is more discordant, abstract and aggy in general.

7. Bob Vylan

Coming back around to more guitar led music, RATM had a track, as did the Henry Rollins band so you'd want some sort of punk represented and Bob Vylans grime inflected-punk, usually with very angry political messaging would seem like a good succesor

8. Turnstile

These lads dropped one of the big scene albums of last year and they've done some really interesting electronic crossover stuff with Mall Grab so you could go that way instead?

9. Spirit Box

Feels like this group could be part of the conversation here as well, since they blew up pretty big very recently and represent a more contemporary sound in Metal that feels very now

10. IDLES

Harking back one again to contemporary takes on the sounds of Post-Punk that inspired the comic. IDLES is one of the groups out now taking on and pushing that sound. 

11. Rein

Now, getting abck to the more traditionally Gothic. There's been an explosion of bands that have given this old genre a shot in the arm, Linea Aspera, Boy Harsher, Azar Swan, Drab Majesty, Perturbator, Riki and so on, but this girl, who's concept album is very much a cyber-punk conceptually oddessy about life and coming back from death. Sounds like our girl if you ask me.

12. Petbrick

Something that wouldn't have been on the original because it wasn't a thing at that point but could be now, I feel, would be the metal-fusion stuff in the far left field of the electronic music scene. Projects like Drumcorps, DJ SkullVomit and Igorrr have been leading the way but of all that sound the best thing I've come across recently was Petbrick, a side project of the drummer from Sepultura Iggor Caldera and Wayne Adams who's been doing simmilar music for years. This is good aggy fight scene music, perfect for a stand off with a major villain.

 

13. Roly Porter (for the score)

 

The original fampusly also had an excellent score even aside from the OST by Graeme Revell of the legendary pioneering Industrial Noise music group SPK. Few there are who would be a worthy successor, though one could make a case for Merzbow or maybe Orphyx, personally I think Mr Porter here, formally of the dubstep bassweights Vex'd who I personally feel have been responsible for some of the absolute best and most industrial music of the last couple of decades and Roly's ambient works could do absolure wonders on the film score.

14. Ice Nine Kills

And finally, this has all been pretty speculative so far, these guys already have one in the bag waiting to go. BTW the video starts with a bit of a skit and the actual track is about halfway through the video if you're watching the link. I dunno how much I like this band in general, feels a bit gimmicky because thats exactly what it is, but it also is kind of good, so....? eh. People do seem to like them though.

If we're talking about bringing anyone back, of the artists that were on there originally The Cure and Nine In Nails (or Trent paired back up with Atticus Ross) would be great. Trent would indeed be worthy and experienced candidate for just score duties.

You know its going to happen one day, in fact the latest seems to be that its on its way out of development hell and looking like a real prospect for some time before the middle of the decade (not that we haven't heard that one before, but still). Lets hope at least one of the producers will get to read this (Lily, or Lana, girls, I know at least one of yous got a secret account here, c'mon lets make this happen!), or at least that as much care is taken with the OST and score and any other musical content with the new one as was with the original.

If anyone reading this has suggstions, feel free to comment!

Blindboy Boatclub, the Left and New Media Celebrity Culture in Ireland

A long time ago I had intended to write an article about Russell Brand for this blog. This would have been about 2013/14 between the Jeremy Paxman interview and the 2015 General Election. We were at that stage more than half a decade into the crisis and while things hadn’t quite descended into the infernal quagmire we find ourselves in now they were certainly gearing up. During that time Russell emerged as a voice of a type of politics that is as old as power structures themselves, that has been around in something approximating its current form since modernity began and has always been there, though rarely articulated in the mainstream of political or social discourse. Also, the specifics of they way in which it blew up and other people reacted to it said something very interesting about the culture around politics and the media in general at this juncture in our history. As ever and to my own personal annoyance, in spite of the fact that I felt I had some unique insights to contribute to the conversation I never got around to laying those thoughts down in a coherent manner, which is inconveniencing me right now as there seems to be something similar happening right now in Ireland with two other public figures and I don’t have that previous work to refer back to.

So, failing that and without getting into the whole Russell Brand thing at length I’ll now sum up the salient points of this essay that never was, or as I see them the three features of what I’d call The Russell Brand Moment:

1) Revolutionary or even quite a lot of the time left-reformist politics are ruthlessly no-platformed by the gatekeepers of the mainstream media out of the general political discourse. On this occasion an individual circumvents the gatekeepers by already having access to a platform due to their celebrity status built in a long career elsewhere in the media as an entertainer.

2) This was assisted by a use of social media platforms as a way of bypassing said gatekeepers and reaching a wide audience in a way impossible just a decade ago and unthinkable in any other generation.

3) That said, there are limitations that we must understand, no point getting over enthusiastic. The individual at the centre of this is usually part of the movement and reasonably well informed, but about to the level of the average cadre, which is understandable, they already have a full-time occupation, i.e. whatever propelled them to their celebrity status in the first place and may hold contradictory positions; they may slip up on particular issues when called to voice opinions outside of their immediate span of knowledge. Added to that their no more free of any unreconstructed societal attitudes than the rest of us. It would be churlish of us to expect otherwise.

The 3rd point I had actually observed at the time and was bourn out by the trajectory the whole Brand thing took over the course of 2015. Essentially Brand fell at the first hurdle making the rookie error of seeing a modest shift leftwards on the part of the Labour Party as a new dawn in UK politics and backing David Milliband in the 2015 general election. In doing so he shot what credibility he had and retired temporarily from public life and the one man war against the media and political establishment he’d been on since the Paxman interview.  He’s been back since but that moment has tangibly passed. I’m sure he’s kicking himself now that the actual labour left has made a breakthrough, but maybe we’ll look back and see the Brand moment as a precursor to the ascension of Corbynism.

So with that in mind I’d like to talk about what’s going on with a public figure in Ireland; Blindboy Boatclub of The Rubberbandits.

The Rubberbandits

The Rubberbandits are two friends who grew up together in Limerick that go by the aliases of Blindboy Boatclub and Mr Chrome. They were early stars of Irish social media, making their name initially on Bebo and Myspace with a series of humorous prank phone calls. In 2007 they started making comedic hip hop and gigging a live show. In their music videos and while performing they both always wear a plastic shopping bag with eye and mouth holes cut out while their DJs dressed up as disgraced former government minister Willie O’Dea. Their first video Horse Outside went viral and took them from 'internet famous' to genuine notoriety. The humour of these songs has a certain off-the-wall sillyness and broadness to it, but like some of our best (O’Brien, Milligan etc.) it is belied by a fierce wit and satirical eye, the targets of which have ranged from the hyper-sexual machismo in hip-hop to ill informed armchair republicanism to hipsters.

By the beginning of this decade the Bandits were hot shit and have only gone from strength to strength, scoring TV work for RTÉ, The BBC, ITV, Channel 4. They had one of their songs featured in the new Trainspotting film and have played gigs and festival appearances up and down the island and internationally. Through all this they have managed a degree of relative anonymity for two people in the entertainment industry who are household names in a modern country. Their names are out there and can be accessed with a cursory Google but there’s only a single picture of Chrome’s face sans-plastic bag and none of Blindboy. Seriously, you can find a picture of what Burial looks like IRL easier.

More recently, Blindboy has authored and published a book of short stories, The Gospel According to Blindboy in October 2017 and started doing a podcast which was initially to promote the book but has taken on a life of its own, topping the iTunes podcast chart since its first episode continuing to do so through to the time of writing.

Through that time Blindboy has used his media presence to articulate the common sense perspective of his generation, using his platform to talk about pertinent issues if the day, mostly looking at them through the lense of mental health, sharing his own experiences to destigmatize something that’s still heavily taboo in Ireland. An early intervention was in 2006 when he spoke out against Bebo’s use of profile views, which he considered psychologically unhealthy to the point where it might lead to someone taking their own lives and called for the practice to be discontinued. This lead to his page being shut down without discussion by Bebo in spite of their popularity (the interview has now been reproduced in the feb 20th podcast God's Posture where he speaks about it at length). The evils of social media and potential deleterious effects on the psyche of the users and unconscionable business practices of the various platforms is something that we’re now all familiar with and has been discussed and analyzed to the point of cliché but in 2006 looking at that type of media through psychological theory was quite novel. He understood social media as only someone who grew up using it could.

He’s also used this as a way into the wider issues effecting Irish society, critiquing capitalism by looking at the socio-economic conditions which drive metal illness and talking about the psychological benefits for men of embracing feminism on the Late Late Show where he’s a frequent guest and expanding on these themes at length in the podcast. More recently he’s weighed in on the movement to repeal the 8th amendment. In a recent podcast he interviewed the film and TV star Cillian Murphy, who rarely gives interviews but had reached out to him to collaborate on some repeal propaganda, specifically orientated towards young men who the usual political discourse wouldn’t reach and might otherwise be apathetic on the issue. When the referendum was won by a substantial margin what most activists in the field have known for years was accepted, finally, by the establishment, i.e. that the pro-choice position had (in Gramscian terms) transcended good sense to become the common sense position. One can’t underestimate the role of pop-cultural figures in expressing and solidifying cultural turns like this.

Getting back to what I’ve proffered as the three features of the “Russell Brand moment”, the first two points seem to be fairly self evident based on what’s been outlined so far. There are differences though, he’s not been as confrontational or taken on the beast as directly as Brand had been doing, even now much later it still astounds me that Brand with his YouTube channel was in a running dialogue with the Murdock media empire and that he could goad them into responding to him on the nightly Fox news shows.

Also, Blindboy’s personal politics are quite different to Brand who consciously and overtly identified with the revolutionary tradition and specifically Anarchism (though a somewhat muddled and idiosyncratic one). Instead Blindboy talks about his family history in the West Cork IRA in the 1920s though he doesn’t identify with any contemporary Irish republican organisation. When he gets down to it he’s decidedly left-reformist, stopping a good way short of anti-capitalism though decidedly to the left of the Irish Labour Party. Which seems fair enough to me as it would put him about where most Irish people, and in particular those around the great social movements of recent history are at the moment, i.e. conscious and even proud of the republican revolutionary tradition, to the left of consensus politics on most issues and if not up for a full overthrow of the state, are certainly disillusioned with it as-is and yearning for change. 

Which brings me to the question of how should organisations of the left ought to relate to him? Is there a right way to respond to these figures that as they occur in the culture, especially since with the continuing prevalence of social media and the disintegration of the institutions that were traditionally the gatekeepers of the cultural discourse this sort of thing is liable to happen in the future.

Again, I’m sorry that I never managed the Russell Brand post because a lot that happened on the left in the wake of the Newsnight interview and subsequently is instructive. You had stuff like the “I Support Russell Brand’s Call for Revolution” facebook page. I will be generous and assume this was the work of one Brand fanboy who was an SP member rather than a party social-media initiative, but it struck me as a bit band-wagon jumpy and opportunist. Basically it was an SP member using the Brand moment to proselytise for his specific fraction by creating the page to share Brand content and SP content, often content specific to his local branch in Coventry. Now I wouldn’t want to pick on the guy unduly but I am singling him out as an example of people on the left getting overly enthusiastic and just being narrowly focused on how to further their sectional or even personal agenda without looking at the bigger picture, which ought to be inclusive.

Still, I prefer this approach to the churlishness and negativity that a lot of leftists and activists responded to Brand with. For those unfamiliar I’ll refer you to Mark Fisher, one of the few people on the left who at the time had what I’d call the correct take on Brand:

The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance (on newsnight) had produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn’t remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class ‘superior’ using intelligence and reason…. Brand had outwitted Paxman...

The moralising left quickly ensured that the story was not about Brand’s extraordinary breach of the bland conventions of mainstream media ‘debate’, nor about his claim that revolution was going to happen. (This last claim could only be heard by the cloth-eared petit-bourgeois narcissistic ‘left’ as Brand saying that he wanted to lead the revolution – something that they responded to with typical resentment: ‘I don’t need a jumped-up celebrity to lead me‘.) For the moralisers, the dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct – specifically his sexism.

Rather than be happy that our politics were suddenly being articulated in the mainstream he was lit on for past personal indiscretions and problematic material from his old stand up routines. Now I’m not going to defend any of that, just saying that when something like that happens that this was a lot of people’s first response does not speak well of them as individuals or the movement they inhabit. It felt to me at the time that after decades of defeat and retreat and so many years in the bunker that a lot of these activists just didn’t know how to take it when something good happens. There was also a tangible element of jealousy relating to the whole thing. These h8rs were people who had spent years or decades in the trenches being patently ignored by the media. Seeing someone from so far outside their club, who is a bit of a clown, doing what they could and would have done if only they’d been given the opportunity. I can only imagine how that smarted.

And I’ll reiterate, its not like he’d done nothing, a lot of the criticism was legit to some extent. Nobody should be afforded a pass for bad behaviour just because they’ve done some good work. But, again getting back to Mark Fisher’s peice:

It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”

So far though there seems little sign of anyone of any significance on the left doing that to Blindboy. Partly this is because of how he’s been handling himself. Also, I’d put that down to the political culture on the Irish left as not being so hostile, unlike Britain four years ago we’ve not had a series of defeats, disappointments, organisational schisms and wasted opportunities to build a culture of begrudgery out of. Far from it. The backlash might happen, some of the stuff from the Rubber Bandits is pretty off the wall and if one were so inclined one could go back through his work looking for stuff you could decontextualise and paint as problematic I dare say you could nitpick enough out of it to make whatever point you wanted if you were so inclined.

But then why would you?

Which brings me in a roundabout way to what I propose as the right and sensible thing to do in this instance and in general: constructive engagement. When the political discourse gets opened up beyond the usual quarters of the activist left we should be in there, not just to capitalise on it for our own benefit but to engage with the people coming to it from that direction with our ideas and the good sense we’ve acquired through decades of struggle and also to be open to what we can learn from them.

One thing that I’d also propose is to acknowledge the immense potential someone like Blindboy has in overcoming something that’s been a bit of an issue on the left. Again because we’ve been on the defensive for so long we’ve got to a point where we seem to spend a lot of time concentrating on telling people what to not do. I think that having a vision of how things could or should be is also important if we are to get anywhere. It’s particularly good to have this discourse directed towards men. With the cultural revolutions and progress towards gender equality a lot of the traditional role of men in society has come to be seen, quite rightly, as oppressive. The traditional narrative of patriarchy has been torn down but we should do more to provide something for men in its absence, if for no other reason than if we don’t somebody else will. Jordan Peterson has made a bit of a splash doing exactly this. That said, depending on your position in the movement that might not be prudent or appropriate, so when Blindboy talks on the podcast about physical exercise, mental exercise and how one relates to the other, that is what he’s providing. In fact since the early drafts of this piece when I wrote the last sentence he has basically said this on the podcast in response to a listeners query about the Jeepster.

It also means to an extent acknowledging that while he does have a part to play in the struggle he’s not an expert by any means in organising or experienced in the practical side of the movement. So, when he does drop the ball, as in his recent comments on the Trump protest or letting his podcast guest Vincent Browne rabbit on in an ill-informed and inaccurate manner about the organised left parties in Ireland (including mine), that we at least have that in mind when we engage him back on these issues.

For now though, I’m just looking forwards to enjoying the show. It is a part of a national conversation that people my age are having in public that isn’t going on anywhere else and I’ll be happy to see it continue. I am interested to see where he takes what he’s doing in the future.

Species 2015

Well, another month and another festival report. I’ll say straight off the bat that this is not going to be an objective review or anything, Species is now particularly special to me as it marks my first festival appearance DJing`(2nd + 3rd times doing it live in front of an audience). I had tremendous fun preparing the sets and got real buzz performing them. This was the first Species, indeed the first weekend-long festival by and for the Goth / Alternative subculture to be held in Ireland. Whitby, Infest etc. have been running successfully in Britain for some time, WGT is largest and best known of the various festivals of its type to run in Europe but up until now, in spite of small and reasonably active scenes in various parts of the country, nobody has attempted anything like this here. In the past the site has played host to the Alien Vibrations festival as well as various private gigs and parties, which have all run successfully and become fixtures of the scenes this events cater to. The promoters Illiocht and Harriet are both Goths of the old school and wanted to do something for their own subculture this time. Rather than just a straight up gig or rave of the sort the site has seen in the past this was meant to be an Arts Festival that would of course contain music as an important component but also be a showcase for different types of Art work, performance art, dance and poetry. As such I would say that it was a brave effort to do something new for the scene in this part of the world. While not everything went according to plan it was certainly fun to be a part of and observe and I reckon that a good few lessons have been learned for the next one.

Alright, before I get into it I’d like to get the few negatives out of the way first. There’s two types of weather that you get at camping festivals, the type you want and the type you definitely don’t want. The weekend of Species saw two solid days of the sort that you definitely don’t want, in fact it was some of the worst weather that the site had seen since the height of the winter. Rain-storms overnight, drizzle when it wasn’t lashing, high winds that knocked over the graffiti wall that had been erected for the festival and the Marquee that was intended for the Gothic tea-party on the Saturday afternoon. I’ve seen some bad festival weather in my time and this was up there with the worst. I was staying in the performers cabin so I luckily didn’t have to get wet but those camping were not so lucky and a lot of people left after the first night and a good few people who had been intending to come down on the Saturday ended up not coming. To be fair, it did give the extremely beautiful part of the Irish countryside we were in a bleak Wuthring Heights-esque ambience appropriate for a Gothic Arts festival, but picturesque though it was – that’s not what you want at a camping festival.

Aside from that the organises also had a bit of bad luck early on when Facebook’s fascistic algorithms that decide whether people are using their real names or not flagged the account of the co-organiser Harriet and decided that her facebook handle was too flamboyantly Welsh to be that of a real person. So aye, Facebook is essentially racist against the Welsh, either that or it thinks they’re a mythical race like Tolkien’s Eldar or the Riddlers. The upshot of this was that the events page which was in Harriet’s name ended up being shut down on the eve of the event which no doubt cost the organisers a few punters. The equipment on site was put fairly through its paces too. There were a few issues with the decks and some of the other hardware, which led to the schedule slipping a bit on the Saturday night.  That said, Ambrose the sound-tech struggled manfully with the various pieces of kit and kept everything pumping along almost single handedly all weekend and any sound problems that came up got resolved sharpish. So aside from what were essentially teething problems and things well beyond the reasonable control of the organisers it was a pretty good weekend.  The site itself was amazing. We were right up in the mountains in Leitrim and the few times the weather cleared up you could see for miles around you. The Great Hall of Illiocht - the converted barn that serves as the main stage - had a new wooden interior to stop the bass rattling the corrugated metal walls of the hall. Like rest of the site it was kitted out with artwork and served as a showcase for the artwork of the co-organiser Harriet as well as other local artists from amongst their crowd of friends such as Belfast underground art-scene veteran Andy Brown. The rest of the site was bedecked with wall paintings and objet d'art. Artwork was also provided by some of the attendees, aside from Harriet's paintings and Sculpture about the site, walls and surfaces were made available to artists to decorate for the occasion.
There was also a small market place from the Saturday afternoon onward with prints, stickers and books featuring original art by Harriet, cupcakes, and alternative clothing and apparel by Bella Muerte.

The music was a mixture of the various branches of the broad church of musical styles that come under the banner of Alternative. As such it was an eclectic and enjoyable mix. It all started off suitably weird with the first act I saw on the Friday, a Belfast based producer called Monty performing as BendingWrongs. The first thing I clocked as he was setting up was an Aphex Twin logo on the back of the laptop he was performing off, which I immediately took as a good sign. He played a set of industrial-y glitch IDM, all of which he’d producer himself. I found it very enjoyable, I particularly liked the last track which started with the vocals from Energy 106 classic Discoland that descended into chopped breakbeats and acid bleeps.
After him was more original productions, this time from festival organiser illiocht as his dark ambient / horror core musical project Kraven Brainz. That was good fun, all spooky noisey sounds and horror samples (and a few Adventure Time LSP ones in the last arrangement for the crack). The next act I saw were Sugarplum Suicide. Apparently they had a few technical issues at the beginning of their set with their laptop / drum machine. I didn’t catch any of that and what I saw of them was great. 
After was Venus de Vilo, Gothic singer songwriter. It was good fun like Amanda Palmer doing cabaret on a sort of tongue in cheek horror-pops tip. the tunes were quirky and amusing and she was very good at engaging the crowd. Would definitely go see her again if she played Belfast, just sorry didn’t get any better photos. There were a series of DJs playing old school synth classics and some club-industrial the ret of the night. One on the friday I particularly enjoyed was Alex who played a lot of industrial dubstep and a couple of Igorrr tunes. In terms of the DJing that was the highlight of the Friday for me. I didn’t stay up too late to see any of the DJs who were on later as I had some work of my own to do the next day.
Saturday was my day. I had two sets to perform, my 2nd and 3rd public appearance DJing. Prior to the event after being booked I messaged Illiocht through the events artists page on Facebook to ask what time they were thinking of putting me on at, saying I could play a relatively chill / ambient set if I was on early or a harder more rave one if I was on later on. Next thing the first schedule goes up and I have two sets, one on the saturday afternoon and another midnight Saturday night / Sunday morning. Well played.

I was actually in a little bit of a panic when I saw that at first because it was like twice the amount of prep to do. In the event it actually worked out well, I didn’t have time to meticulously plan every track progression and every mix like the last time I’d played out on Halloween. I just about had time to get together a collection of tunes that I wanted to play and I felt sounded good together. Which was good because that's really what you ought to be doing, and along with being able to beat match and read the mood of the room and play accordingly, what the art if DJing actually is. I knew with each set how I wanted to start, some tunes I’ve always wanted to hear through a proper sound system and a notion of how I wanted to finish. I also had a good idea of what to do with some of the harder tracks to mix out of and what would actually just mix well enough with anything else.

The early set at 3pm in the afternoon was a selection of tracks I felt would be appropriate for a civilised mid afternoon goth disco. I started with a little of what I would call Urban Gothic. Urban Gothic isn’t a genre of music that currently exists as such, Its just how I like to characterise a range of the stuff that I like and like to play when given the chance. Its anything fundamentally dark, moody and / or industrial thats also conspicuously based on 4/4 beats. It covers the darker more industrial ends of UK Bass music, some of the slower and more sombre ends of breakcore (i.e. End.users more hip-hop tempo stuff) and the breakbeat-y / Glitch / IDM music coming out of the industrial scene from lables like Hymen, Tympanic Audio etc. So the set started with a little of that (Ambient into industrial hip hop breaks into Gothic vocal-dubstep into a really deep sub-y Scorn remix of Glory Box) and followed into some 4/4 beats and kept it there. I played a few classics from some of the pioneers of the genre, dropped an acid techno-y danceable remix of LFO’s Industrial / EBM track Tied Up as a small personal tribute to the legend that was Mark Bell (sadly taken from us last year), some Gloomcore and some new stuff thats only been out in the last couple of years. This all went down extremely well, the crowd in the Great Hall that I could see were extremely appreciative and as it wasn’t particularly windy at that point the music was carried all over the festival so loads of people who weren’t actually there but did hear my set came up to me after to tell me how much they enjoyed it.

Spurred on by this initial success I was well in the mood for my later set, but that was hours away and I enjoyed catching some of the other stuff that was on in the meantime. Deathness Injection were properly class. They do industrial noise off live hardware while playing out a performance piece that is like a live Tool video. Thats about the closest I can come to describing it, you can check out some of their performances from their youtube but they don’t quite do the live experience justice.

Tragedy Vampires

Also awesome but completely different were the gothic rock outfit Tragedy Vampires. They were great, tight musicians, the lead singer clearly loving being able to smoke on stage. I had a great time bouncing around to their harder punk-y numbers, they were also good crack after, hang out and spoke to me and my mates and give us some of their CDs. They’ll be playing the Distortion Project in Belfast next month along with some Psychobilly and horror-pop bands, if that sounds like your cup of tea it’ll be well worth checking out.


It was at this point that hilarity ensued with the equipment, one of the decks malfunctioning and the proceeding were pushed forwards. Among those were the gorgeous Deby Discosue performing as DiScoSwitch who gave us an LED assisted dance routine to some dark industrial beats, which looked amazing.

Ambrose aka DJ Flesh the sound tech followed with an all vinyl set of old school electronic Post-Punk and New Beat. It was great to have an all to rare opportunity to hear this stuff on a decent rig and he finished on Joy Divisions Disorder which is a long standing personal favourite of mine.

After that it was time for my second set.

So having requested a late set if they wanted me to bring some heaviness and been given one I took that as leave to go for broke with my hardest stuff, which I did. I broke out a lot of powernoise tracks that I’ve personally been busting to hear over a rig since I started getting into that style of music, mixed it in with a lot of Industrial Techno, hardcore and breakcore. As with the last set I had a bit of an idea where I wanted to start but kept it loose enough and only decided the opening track going through the playlist I’d assembled about an hour before I went on. Appropriately enough since I was rocking one of his “Keep Industrial Weird” T Shirts it was a Caustic tune. Of the three times I’ve played live no this one was by far the most fun, I was able to get properly into it and I think that comes across in the recording. The very last track I actually threw in at random, the ending I had envisioned I came to a little ahead of time leaving me enough time for one more and it was just like ‘what do I want to hear, what could I just drop on here that would sound amazing?’

I was buzzing coming off stage, I felt like I’d one well and I got a lot of positive feedback from the people i spoke to after. One girl told me her brother is a hardcore producer and having a familiarity with both that and the industrial scene she had never heard anyone else mixing them together in the same set and really enjoyed it.

It was quite late by the time I was finishing but the nice thing about small festivals in the middle of nowhere is the informality of the proceedings, a lad from Dublin DJ Annatar came on after me and played a set of aggro tech and club industrial, haven’t really been into that stuff for a while but i liked a lot of the tunes he was playing, that Neuroticfish “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha Ha!” cover is another long standing personal favourite and hearing it actually gave me second wind and enough energy to power through into the next morning.

After that Ambrose had caught second wind and me and the last couple of people that were still knocking about at that time sat up and bopped about to him playing through some of the rest of his extensive vinyl collection into the wee hours.

My lift left early enough on the next morning and the event was only on until the Sunday afternoon so theres not much more to report. All I can say is that i had immense crack playing and enjoying the rest of the fun on offer. Illicit and Harriet have no illusions that this is going to mushroom into a Glastonbury or even much beyond the site capacity of a couple of hundred people but they will be doing it again next May bank holiday. I look forwards to this quite intimate arts festival for the goth community turning into a fixture of the Irish alternative scene and will be interested in seeing some of the plans for this one that had to be put aside due to the weather come to fruition and what it’ll be like after some of the lessons have been learned from this time around and teething issues have been ironed out. I’d recommend next years to anyone else in the scene who is interested in supporting something local and a bit different.  It’s a great opportunity to touch base with the scene on the rest of the island, we have such a diverse alternative scene here with such an array of very talented people who’re a part of it but it’s also so fragmented that it’ll be good to have something to draw it all together and that this has the potential to be just that.

So aye, Species 2015, amazing crack. Will be back next year, watch this space.

(Net stop, Forbidden Fruit)