There's a slew of high-profile gigs taking place around Ireland in the week ahead, including two shows from legendary boyband Take That, plus a festival in Dublin focusing on innovation in music and sound art.
Adrianne Lenker
Black Box, Galway - Friday, €31.50;
Vicar Street, Dublin - Saturday, SOLD OUT
There’s always been a cultish reverence around albums recorded in the moment, straight to tape. Bruce Springsteen’s solo acoustic record Nebraska is the obvious example — a recording story so iconic in rock mythology that it’s being turned into a film starring Jeremy 'The Bear' Allen White.
Big Thief singer Adrianne Lenker’s latest album Bright Future shares a similar intimate and vulnerable atmosphere. You can hear the whirrs of the tape machine and her voice changing direction as she turns away from the mic, and you can hear the physical plucking of guitars along with the notes.
READ MORE: First act confirmed for Electric Picnic 2024 as line-up set to be revealed 'soon'
On Bright Future, Lenker crafts a loose take on acoustic folk-rock with piano and violin, with unadorned vocal harmonies and instrument swapping with her band, co-producer Philip Weinrobe, singer-songwriter Mat Davidson, violinist Josefin Runsteen and neo soul artist Nick Hakim.
On this tour she’s opening with a full solo set, then introducing her album collaborators on stage to capture and evolve the essence of the recordings.
The Galway and Dublin gigs are both sold out but resale tickets to both shows are available on Ticketmaster.
Beans
Workman’s Cellar, Dublin - Saturday, €23
Antipop Consortium is one of underground hip-hop’s most treasured collectives, with a selection of hall-of-famer records and a trail of lyrical and electronic experimentation.
But even among APC’s out-there ethos, MC Beans has always been a brilliant outlier, squeezing out more syllables and abstract thought than most beats could handle, and — live especially — stringing together the most far-out electronic shapes from drum machines and synths. He’s been taking it further into the outer limits on all of his solo work since 2003, fusing off-the-grid abstract jazz with industrial noise, electronica and weirdo funk.
A former performance poet, Beans’ rhymes veer between heady surrealism to hammered-home political takes, to straight-up absurdism.
His new album Zwaard is a collaboration with Finnish abstract dub techno producer Vladislav Delay, and it’s one of his most frantic and thrilling experiments yet.
Who knows how you’re gonna bounce to it, though.
Tickets to Beans' Dublin are still available on Ticketmaster.
Take That
3Arena, Dublin - Monday & Tuesday, €91-126;
Everything Changes, as the song goes, and that’s been the case with Take That’s line-up over the years, which has been reshuffled many times since Robbie Williams first left in 1995.
Robbie and Jason Orange finally officially left in 2014 after a few temporary comebacks, meaning the current trio of Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard Donald is the longest-running iteration of the band, after a full split from 1997 to 2007.
In the past year, Gary and Robbie have both had solo stage shows filled with spoken word interludes, but for Gary at least, it’s time to get the band back together.
The giddy excitement of the original 2007 comeback (when the term ‘manband’ was officially coined) has faded somewhat, and they’re unlikely to be playing Croke Park again.
But the current tour has been a triumph so far, distilling 30 years of chart pop, cheesy disco, boyband balladry and karaoke anthems into a stacked setlist.
Leaning into nostalgia, the production features a giant retro TV flicking through all the best bits of their career, singing together and performing individual solo sets.
There are still a handful of resale tickets to Monday and Tuesday's gig via Ticketmaster.
Ryoji Ikeda
Button Factory, Dublin - Thursday, €33.65
Japanese electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda is a fiercely future-facing artist, pushing the boundaries of sound, noise, glitch and immersive audio-visual presentation.
He’s one of electronic music’s most notable conceptualists too — touching on themes of data in genetics, quantum physics and astronomy. I recall an afternoon of mindf**k discombobulation in a car park in London at his ‘Supersymmetry’ installation, with flickering lights and computerised glitches piercing the deep darkness, and the quantum mechanics going over my head.
His latest project is a collection of music pieces he recorded between 1989 and 1999, but Ikeda does nostalgia differently. It’s not the comfort blanket sound of electronic music crossing over, but the chattering bleeps under the surface. There’s a Kraftwerkian, sci-fi swing to some tracks here, but really it’s out-there music for the head rather than the raved-up heart.
Tickets for Ryoji Ikeda's gig at The Button Factory are available on Ticketmaster.
New Music Dublin festival
National Concert Hall, Dublin - Thursday to Sunday 28th, Various prices
This year’s New Music Dublin festival is a marathon four-day celebration of the wildly eclectic range of modern composition in Ireland and further afield.
This year’s event features 23 events in various rooms at the National Concert Hall, from just after noon to near midnight.
One notable showcase is an inspired double feature, with ambient masters A Winged Victory for the Sullen playing a live set after a performance of the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s final symphony, by the acclaimed National Symphony Orchestra.
Other highlights include the cutting-edge turntablism of Mariam Rezaei; Aoife Ní Bhriain and Liam Byrne’s ancient music reimagined in The Harmonic Labyrinth, Laura Bowler’s contemporary exploration in Advert, and the youthful ensembles of Cór Linn and Cór na nÓg presenting Everyday Wonders.
Festivals like NMD are made for collectives like Crash Ensemble, who’ve been avant-garde leaders in Ireland for years. Their piece with Anne Cleare, Terrarium, delves into the concept of deep time, and the concept might be drilled into your head if you do go the whole hog with all the mind-expanding music on offer over the four days.
If you’re up for really digging deep, NMD 24 has a few multi-ticket package deals, so the more you explore, the more you save.
Tickets to New Music Dublin 2024 are available via the National Concert Hall website here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the latest news direct to your inbox
Join the Irish Mirror’s breaking news service on WhatsApp. Click this link to receive breaking news and the latest headlines direct to your phone. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don’t like our community, you can check out any time you like. If you’re curious, you can read our Privacy Notice.
