Crows: Taken one day on the way to work (right) and the way from work (left) in Newbridge, last year, using a Golden Half

This week’s Sweet Oblivion is up for your listening pleasure right now - just click here.

Here’s what to expect on the show…

Artist//Track//Album

Kings of Convenience – I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From – Quiet is the New Loud

Perfume Genius –  DIRGE – Put Your Back in 2 It

Low – Like a Forest – Things We Lost in the Fire

Windings- The Space I Ooccupy

“The Space I Occupy/ The Hassle” is the new double A-sided 7” Single fromwindings, released this February 2010 on Out On A Limb Records. Both tracks on the single are available to stream at www.windings.bandcamp.com. The 7”, complete with download code, will be available in independent record stores and online. This month, windings will launch a Fundit campaign to raise funds for the recording of their new album, to be recorded by Efrim Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) in Hotel2Tango Studios, Montreal.

Songs of Green Pheasant – Teenwolf – Soft Wounds

Katie Kim – Your Mountains My Mountains – Cover and Flood

Plugd/We Are Noise listening party for Cover & Flood on 1 March 

Laura Sheeran – Oh, How The World Changed – Murderous Love

Twin Terrace – To Belong

mynameisjOhn – Sweaty Dreams of Bate Kush- ‘The Thinker & The Prover’ EP -

Kim V Porcelli - I Want Your Love

Shlomo – wen uuu (Teebs Remix)

Anenon – Acquiescence

Chromatics – Into the Black

Lindstrom – Déjà Vu

Hey folks, here’s a little update on the most recent Sweet Oblivion shows.

You can listen to them all on the RTÉ Radio Player, which is a really handy addition to the site.

Here’s the link to the most recent show – if you click through to this, you will then be given the option to listen to even more Sweet Oblivion shows. Just click on ‘Listen Back Further’.

As always, thanks to everyone who listens in, I couldn’t do the show without you.

Here are the playlists for the most recent shows:

[Artist - Track - Album]

9 February 2012 (click)

Jens Lekman – 17 Maple Leaves [7' Version]

Cloud Nothings – Fall In – Attack on Memory

Wild Nothing – Nowhere

Sharon Van Etten – Serpents  – Tramp

PJ Harvey  – This Mess We’re In – Stories from the city, stories from the sea

Ghost Estates – October

mynameisjOhn –  The Cumulative Recorder – The Thinker & The Prover EP

Twin Terrace –  You Keep Coming Back – Twin Terrace

Kim V Porcelli – I Want Your Love – Chic

Mark Lanegan – Harborview Hospital – Funeral Blues

Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day – Come on Feel the Illinoise

Benoit Pioulard – Ailleurs – Lyon

Olafur Arnalds – Film Credits – Living Room Songs

Deadball Specialists – Trapatoni’s Men – Wingnut Fundraiser EP

2 February 2012 (click)

Kayfabe – Bicycle Day In The Cosmos

Peaking Lights –  All the Sun That Shines – 936

Logikparty – Anti Omerta

ESG – Erase You

Fela Kuti – Everything Scatter (Toby’s Indigo Edit)

Arthur Russell – See Through Love

Blonde Redhead – Melody – Misery is a Butterfly

Bill Ryder-Jones  - Leaning From The Steep Slope – If

Sharon Van Etten – Serpents  – Tramp

Wild Nothing – Nowhere

07-Perfume Genius – Dark Parts – Put Your Back N 2 It

Perfume Genius – Put Your Back N 2 It - Put Your Back N 2 It

Songs of Green Pheasant – Deaf Sarah – Soft Wounds

26 January 2012 (click)

Perfume Genius – All Waters –  Put Your Back N 2 it

Kayfabe – Bicycle in the Cosmos

Nicolas Jaar – And I Say (ft. Scou Larue and Will Epstein)

Come on Live Long – White Horses  (REID Remix)

Simon Bird – Nightcall (Kavinsky Cover) - Quompilation #2 

Slow Place Like Home – Carte Blanche – Coastal Hubs for Chivalry

Bantum – Elephants and Time – Come on Live Long Remix

Mark Lanegan-  Ode to Sad Disco – Funeral Blues

Lower Dens – Brains

Perfume Genius – Hood – Put Your Back N 2 it

Perfume Genius – Normal Song – Put Your Back N 2 it

Elliott Smith – Rose Parade – Either Or

Orcas – Carrion

19 January 2012 (click)

Yawning Chasm – Stars are Going Out

Peter Delaney – If You Become Impossible – Duck Egg Blue

Marisa Nadler –  Box of Cedar – Ballads of living and dying

Sharon Van Etten – Love More – Serpents

The Unthanks – Nobody Knew She Was There – Here’s the Tender Coming

Orcas – Carrion

Band of Clouds – No Maps No Compass – Outside Broadcast

A Winged Victory for the Sullen – We Played Some Open Chords and Rejoiced, for the Earth Had Circled the Sun Yet Another Year

The Caretaker – Tiny Gradiations Of Loss (excerpt)

Brigid Power Ryce – Wild Grin

Gillian Welch – Everything is Free –  Time (The Revelator)

Mary Margaret O’Hara – Body’s in Trouble – Miss America

12 January 2012

Songs of Green Pheasant – Teen Wolf – Soft Wounds

Songs of Green Pheasant – For People – Soft Wounds

Seamus O Muineachain – Down I Go – Between Islands

Band of Clouds – So Long Bitter Root Hill – Outside Broadcast

INTERVIEW – GIB CASSIDY

The Lives of Millionaires – Chrysalis

The Star Department – Antlers

Logik Party – Anti Omerta

Slow Place Like Home – More Chlorine in the Gene Pool – Coastal Hubs for Chivalry EP

Toby Kaar – Fela Kuti – Everything Scatter (Toby’s Indigo Edit)

Faws – Camille – Antonym

5 January 2012

Mitten – Similar Sense- See You Bye

Toro y Moi – New Beat – Underneath the Pine

M83 –  Midnight City – Hurry Up We’re Dreaming

Kuedo – Ant City – Kuedo

THEESatisfaction –  Do You Have Time – Transitions

Hauschka – TwoAM – Salon Des Amateurs

A Winged Victory for the Sullen – Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears – s/t

Olafur Arnalds – Fyrsta – Living Room Songs

Dirty Beaches –  True Blue – Badlands

Widowspeak – In the Pines – Widowspeak

Arborea – Phantasmagoria in Two

Low – Especially Me – C’mon

Meg Baird – Share – Seasons On Earth

Gillian Welch – Tennessee – The Harrow and the Harvest

I go with gut feeling a lot when it comes to music. In a weird way, I often get a sense about whether I’ll enjoy a band before I even listen to them. It’s like I’m driven to seek them out and just know I’m meant to hear their work. This isn’t the same as hearing a new band’s name bandied about blogs; this usually happens to me with older or established bands.

In the case of Wipers, the cult Portland post-punk/pre-grunge-era three-piece, when I first heard their name I knew they were a band I needed to investigate. And almost immediately I started seeing them mentioned in different places, like a little flag saying ‘Hey! We’re waiting!’.

So I got stuck in.

And if you’ve ever listened to them, you’ll know where this goes.

The ironic thing is that their music wasn’t what I was really seeking out at the time – isn’t that always the way? But this… well, this was pretty special.

Pitchfork recently featured a comprehensive and passionate article about the band written by Nick Sylvester, which focuses on the band’s first three albums (Is This Real?, Youth of America and Over the Edge), the ones which I personally am most familiar with.

It’s a great read and a look at why people find Greg Sage, Sam Henry and Dave Koupal so fascinating. Some of the bands Wipers influenced – like Melvins, Dinosaur Jr, Pavement – went on to become more famous than their idols could have dreamed of. But there’s always something that bit more interesting about the bands whose names are only rarely scribbled on teenagers’ notebooks, I find.

I love this quote from the Pitchfork piece:

 A lot of bands, my own included, claim Wipers as an influence, but it’s a tough one to back up. At best it’s spiritual. At worst you’re ripping these guys off and hoping no one catches you.

Wipers have a rough, angry edge to their music – it’s unpolished, uncompromising and unapologetic. But it’s melodic, too, with its punch-the-air, sing-along choruses. The relationship between the vocals and music can even seem discordant at times.

Sage’s lyrics have a depth to them that takes a while to be seen. He’s singing of alienation, of suicide, of darkness, of war, real and imagined, and of no-longer-giving-a-fuck; of roaming a boring American suburban town and teetering on the edge of a metaphoric cliff.

This music is vital and thrilling. Delving even further into their back catalogue excites me, but based on what I have already heard of their later releases, I don’t know if they ever topped those first three albums.

Here’s a clip from a documentary on Portland’s DIY scene – I love Sage’s comment at the very beginning:

And my personal favourite, the Sonic Youth-esque Doom Town from Over the Edge:

Vivian Maier - click for the website

Last Friday, I bundled myself up, tucked myself into bright red hat, scarf and gloves, and went into town, to meet a lovely friend, chat, eat, and then seek out something I have been waiting exactly a year to own.

I never got my hands on it. It was a book about Vivian Maier – ‘Vivian Maier: Street Photographer’, carefully put together by John Maloof, the man who now owns hundreds of thousands of the late Vivian’s incredible street photographs.

The Gallery of Photography, where I was  determined to buy this book, was unexpectedly closed, and so I left, just a little dejected. To tell the truth, I had wanted to buy the book as a present for a friend, and though I couldn’t really afford two copies, I just knew in my heart that once I had one in my hand, I’d need another.

On the way out of the building, I saw a man standing in the doorway to the women’s bathroom, turning around, slowly touching the wooden doors. In his hand was a stick, perched on his nose was a pair of dark glasses. I reached for his arm and asked him where he wanted to go. The men’s bathroom? ‘The main door,’ he told me, and off we went, me awkwardly explaining where we were – “There’s nothing in the way… Here’s the door… Here we are, now: Temple Bar’. He left silently.

When I’m out, I always have a camera in my bag, but I realised recently that I am often too self-conscious to use it. I’m not a ‘photographer’, and I feel self-conscious taking out a camera and capturing a moment.

Vivian Maier seemed to have no such worries – but then again, she had an incredible secret talent. We are not alike except that we are two women with the mechanical ability to capture an image we find pleasing, but she helps to encourage me to just pick up a camera and go with it. In this age where everything is documented online, where people put up their photos for others to see on Flickr or blogs, sometimes it’s impossible for you to know your own ability. You scrutinise your work – whatever the medium – because you can compare it so easily to others’.

But Vivian Maier’s maxim appeared to be ‘No one will see this, except you, so just take the photo’. No matter if she thought anything like this at all or not, these are words that are inspiring, words that show that you don’t have to create something in order to prove you are the best or most talented photographer/writer/singer/insert-profession-here.

You can create just for you, for your enjoyment. For the feeling of reading back your own words, and knowing that only you will be satisfied by them; for the knowledge that only you will know the difference between the image you pictured in your head when you pressed the shutter button and the image that appeared, like magic, on the photographic paper in your hands. It’s not for anyone else; it’s just for you. So if people see it, or read it, or listen to it, and they don’t enjoy it, that’s fine. It’s just for you.

Here is a blog post I wrote about Vivian Maier last year, for the Anti Room blog. 

And here is what encouraged me to write this: a lovely blog post about Vivian by Laurence Mackin of The Irish Times that is more up-to-date than my one, and a piece on RTÉ Arena, also about Vivian. Enjoy! 

www.vivianmaier.com

The past two years have seen a huge rise in the amount of young electronic musicians emerging from their bedrooms and plonking themselves onto blogs, radio shows and into the ears of many.

The gig will take place in Cork on Saturday, February 4 and admission so far is TBC but I will update as soon as it is confirmed.

This is instrumental rockers Rest and Ten Past Seven first co-headlining bill since 2006 (I feel a bit old reading that!).

They say that the capacity for the show will be very limited, so you can expect to get up close and personal with Corkonians on the night. I expect it will be intense!

Rest:

Ten Past Seven:

To find out more, visit:

http://www.facebook.com/wearerest

http://www.facebook.com/tenpastseven

http://sample-studios.com/category/cork/

Daniel Rossen

Finally, here’s the new tune from Daniel Rossen,  he of Grizzly Bear/Department of Eagles fame. It’s sweet, it’s piano-based, and it’s suitably minor-key-mournful for all us Grizzly Bear fans out there.

You’ll find it on his solo debut Silent Hour/Golden Mile, which will be released on 16 March this year.

There’s nothing like releasing an album as intriguing, unusual and gut-twisting as Miss America and then not doing what people expect you to, which is go and release another damn album.  This has helped O’Hara – who is the sister of actress Catherine O’Hara – maintain an air of mystery about herself that is further cultivated by her endearingly offbeat appearance during her gigs (which don’t take place very regularly) and her unique style of self expression (check out the video below for evidence of the latter – her facial expressions and movements are unlike anything I’ve seen in a music video before).

There really is no one else who sounds and performs like Mary Margaret O’Hara, and with a voice that could shatter the hardest of hearts, and songs that explore the deep ache of love, Miss America is an album that will remain a classic.

Here’s a great interview by Jude Rogers with O’Hara about her 2008 gig in London’s Barbican venue.

The beach at Minehead, Bristol, during this year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ festival.

It’s Friday, so how about a little catch up on what’s been going on this week? Music, radio, juicing (!) and more are included here.

Choice Music Prize

By now, we all know that The Choice Music Prize nominees have been announced – was your pick in there? I have to say that I’m delighted to see Tieranniesaur and Patrick Kelleher and His Cold Dead Hands in there, and overall the list is really solid. It’s never going to satisfy everyone, and it’s nigh on impossible to put together a list of 10 nominees that every single person will be happy with.

I did have fears based on the new sponsors, Meteor, given how disconnected the old Meteor Awards were from the Irish independent music scene, but overall the decisions here are down to the judges, a very trustworthy and knowledgeable gang.

That said, it is perhaps inevitable that the music would all come from one corner of the Irish music scene – I wonder how this could be remedied, or should it be up to other awards ceremonies to reward the best albums in Irish hip hop, metal, trad, etc?

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Free music: Out on a Limb Records

Out on a Limb Records have been giving away free downloads of albums from their back catalogue all during the week. So far, Owensie, Windings and Giveamanakick have been featured. Who is on offer today? Check out their website and twitter for more info.

Free music: Orcas

Orcas is the new musical project by duo Rafael Anton Irisarri (The Sight Below) and Benoit Pioulard. The first inklings that they were working together came when they released a haunting cover of the Broadcast song Until Then, in tribute to the late Broadcast musician Trish Keenan. Now they’re back with their first original release, which is available for free download (see below). Combining their ambient sensibilities and love for layered, ghostly sounds, Carrion is both stark and beautiful. Expect a full album later this year.

via Self-Titled Mag

Katie Kim

Fancy listening to some incredible old Katie Kim songs? Check out VAULTS Vol 1, which is only available to buy on tape during her forthcoming tour, and is on Bandcamp now for your listening pleasure.

Walpurgis Family

I achieved one of my dreams a few months ago when I got to sing as part of a small ‘choir’ for a song on the Walpurgis Family album. The album, Dawn, is released this month and it has already gotten a rave review from Patrick Freyne in Hotpress, who really knows his stuff.  Here’s Let’s Go Camping from the album – listen closely and you might hear me (ha!). Congrats to Jeroen and Popical Island on the release!

Accessible venues

Is your favourite venue fully accessible to all people of all abilities? You might be surprised to hear the truth about whether wheelchair-users can get to gigs in their favourite haunts, as this fantastic article by Louise Bruton in The Ticket in the Irish Times shows today. Good on Louise for highlighting this!

Many venues tick the boxes but do not go further than the token requirements. The wheelchair area often has a restricted view or limits you to having one mate with you, even if you’re with a gaggle of mates.

First Fortnight

This great event, which aims to challenge mental health prejudice through creative arts, brings Royseven, Cashier No9, Le Galaxie and dREA together at The Button Factory at 8.30pm on Saturday night. More info here.

Whelan’s: Ones to Watch

What homegrown acts should you be listening to in 2012? Whelan’s have put on a showcase aiming to tell you just that. The gigs have been going since Wednesday, and run until tomorrow (Saturday), when the following bands play:

Depravations

Bouts

Spies

Alarmist

Redwoods

Dying Seconds

CFIT

Holy Roman Army

The Gandhis

Come On Live Long

Nanu Nanu

Trap Door

Futures Apart

Raglans

Gypsies OnThe Autobahn

Hush War Cry

My tips are Nanu Nanu, Depravations, Alarmist, Bouts, and Come On Live Long – but heck, it’s a bloody great list of bands.

Radiolab

I love Radiolab in a big way – it’s like the younger, more rambunctious sibling of This American Life. Its latest show is about the bad things that people do, like, er, commit murder. Expect to feel very informed (and a bit wary of humanity) after listening to this.

Elastic Witch

Gib from the independent record store Elastic Witch had a chat with me for this week’s Sweet Oblivion. You can listen to it by following the link here.

Gig of the Week

My gig of the week next week is definitely going to be A Winged Victory for the Sullen. They play the Sugar Club on Thursday 19 January and it’s going to be a guddun’. Tickets are just €13.50 and you can find out more here.

Drink yr Juice

Courtesy of the great Home Organics, a blog post about juicing for all you vegaholics out there.

Instant Love

This looks great – it’s a book about taking photos with Polaroid cameras, and it comes out in May. I’m doing one of Susannah Conway‘s photography e-courses at the moment and loving it.  It’s really changing the way I see things, even if I’ll never be the next Cartier-Bresson

Jon Cohen interview

Montreal-based musician Jon Cohen is playing Ireland next week – Dublin’s Grand Social on Friday 20 January to be exact. If you’re a fan of Brendan Benson, The Dears, and Broken Social Scene, I think you’ll really dig his stuff.

Here’s a link to the interview I did with him for Thumped.

Dirty Beaches

Finally, I’ll leave you with this video from Dirty Beaches. I really love his stuff and so does Cohen – we had a chat about how he really wears his influences on his shirt sleeve, and yet manages to maintain his own originality.

His album Badlands and other releases can be found on Bandcamp.

Here’s the video for his song True Blue:

What have you been enjoying this week?