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Selection of articles written between 2005 and today.
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Calexico
Interviews with high plains drifters Calexico are ten a penny at the moment, ahead of their European tour and the release of their sixth studio album. You can find Irish inquisitions of the band on Drop-d, Entertainment.ie and Connected, so what’s the point of reading another? I spoke to lead singer Joey Burns on the… Read more
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State fails to find a paying market
Ireland’s other new national music magazine has announced it is to take a months break from active production, relaunching as a freesheet. Before I get to an analysis of the change, I’d like to point out a little something from States’s press release (reprinted in full below), which sticks in my craw. The phrase is… Read more
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DJ for your friends with Blip.fm
New music sharing service Blip.fm bills itself as Twitter for music. Really it’s not. Like twitter it allows brief posts to be quickly shared between friends. Unlike twitter the service doesn’t provide for posting (or receiving posts) via SMS. That’s sort of immaterial, because what Blip does do is freaking awesome. Once you’ve created an… Read more
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The Composer Seduced into Carpentry
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccu9O-zhPA] Outsider composer Harry Partch abandoned a university musical education, lived as a hobo for ten years in depression era America, and wrote an opera based on Yeat’s translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. At an early age Partch forsook the ‘dead, white, middle class musical tradition’ and the Western system of musical notation; developing… Read more
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8 Easy Pieces
The pitched fork has pronged another prize with the fantastic documentary, Reformat the Planet on the emerging Chiptune scene. Chiptune (as distinct from 8bit music per say) has been around for about a decade, and is finally garnering some critical acclaim. Not content with inventing punk music, Malcolm McLaren hopped on the bandwagon early, writing… Read more
Gareth Stack 