Here’s another shot from the Beyond The Bookshelf festival in Connolly Books last month. This is The Former Soviet Republic aka Ian Wright playing in the bookshop. I had the camera rammed between Ian and the door with most of the audience wondering what the hell that weird contraption behind Ian was.

This seems as good a time as any to announce that I will be having an exhibition of these photographs down in Cork next month. It takes place in Plugd records which is located in the Triskel Arts Centre. It opens on Friday 7th of June and then runs until the 6th of July. Looking forward to hanging these things up on a wall once more. . More details will be forthcoming soon. Sure have a listen to The Former Soviet Republic in the meantime.

It’s been so long since I posted a picture up here. I have some really interesting ones that I have done recently but only very slowly getting around to processing, scanning and posting them. Last night I was shooting The Gloaming from the side of the stage in Vicar Street and two weeks ago I was down in Cork photographing The Spook Of The Thirteenth Lock in Triskel Christchurch. The one above though is from the beginning of April and is Si Schroeder playing at the Beyond The Bookshelf micro-festival which takes place behind Connolly Books on Essex Street in Temple Bar. Connolly Books was established by members of the Communist Party of Ireland (history of the bookshop here) and stocks the city’s widest selection of Marxist and left-leaning literature. As far as I can figure out, Essex Street was also the location of Dublin’s long-gone occult/sci-fi/comics bookshop The Alchemists Head. I have dim memories of venturing down there as a teenager trying to find Harlan Ellison books, long before Temple Bar was turned into the country’s largest entertainment complex.

Anyway, you would never know it from the street, or even from inside the shop, but out the back of Connolly Books is a fully equipped state-of-the-art professional theatre space, The New Theatre, built by Mick Wallace in 2007. The Beyond The Bookshelf festival runs here once a year and is really three nights of gigs – some of which are in the theatre space, and some in the bookshop itself. This year they had Duke Special, Si Schroeder, The Pale and many more. I went along the night that Si Schroeder was playing and as well as taking some of the usual balcony-position shots, I set up the camera on the side of the stage and took some from that angle too. The photograph above is one of these. Because I was sitting on the stage and consequently feeling self-conscious I wasn’t taking notes so I don’t know how long the exposure was or what song it was. But it’s obviously the one where Mark plays guitar. I have some others from the festival that I will post in due course so stay tuned …

Neil O’Connor and friends, aka the excellent Somadrone, playing in the Unitarian Church on Stephens Green a week or so ago. I had been meaning to try the photographs there for a while, and missed out on a couple of opportunties to do so over the last year, so thanks to Neil and the Skinny Wolves boys for facilitating it.

I’m not sure about gigs in Churches though. It’s certainly a break from the norm, and you get to sit in beautiful surroundings, but it encourages an excessively sombre and reverential atmosphere which is not really the kind of thing I would tend to be looking for on a Saturday night. There is a certain class of musician for whom such hushed reverence is almost their entire raison d’etre and therefore playing in Churches is right up their alley. You often hear people enthusing about ‘the atmosphere’ at their gigs and about how the audience were so enraptured with the music that during the quiet parts that  you could hear a pin drop. This is supposed to signify some sort of deep emotional, or even spiritual, connection between audience and performer – closed eyes, whispered vocals (or singing off-mike completely) – we all know the drill. Essentially they are bringing the atmosphere of the Church to the gig, so why not go directly to the Church and just do the gig there?

It’s probably not a particularly original notion to think of gigs in general as being a form of modern-day secular ritual, but to me it’s a very different ritual to the traditional Church one where people obediently and silently sit in pews. It’s a noisy, messy ritual where the audience are as important as the performers; where people can shout stuff, drink too much and behave badly; where antagonisms are not banished; where it’s about volume rather than silence, and where a potentially cathartic experience is communally created rather than dictated from the pulpit or the stage. Ok, so most gigs really aren’t like that anyway, but my point is that by taking the gig to the Church you remove the very possibility of it being like that. By making venues more like Churches, by employing the closed-eyes and hushed vocals so that pins can be heard dropping left right and centre, you reduce the possibility of it ever being like that.

Thankfully Somadrone do not engage in such shenanigans – I didn’t see Neil close his eyes once while singing. I couldn’t help feeling though, that were they not bound by the reverential atmosphere of the Church, some of the audience might have gotten up and shaken a leg now and again. The photograph above is an exposure of about 7 minutes. Thanks again to Neil and co. for setting this up for me. In spite of what it might sound like from my ramblings above, I really enjoyed the night.

My only consolation is that I am not alone in this sort of thing, it happens to the best of them too. Richard Mosse has an ongoing project where he travels out to the Congo and takes photographs using a very rare form of infra-red film. They are a mixture of landscapes and documentary style images, involving participants in the numerous conflicts going on in that country. The infra-red film alters the colour spectrum completely and gives an eerie feel to the pictures that is intended to set them apart from the lineage of documentary and landscape photographic traditions.

Photograph by Richard Mosse

Mosse uses a huge 8×10 camera and so goes to enormous trouble lugging this beast of a thing around one of the most dangerous and difficult countries on earth. There is also enormous expense involved, not just in in terms of the travel, but also in sourcing the 8×10 sheets of film that he uses. Anyway, some time last year, he spent two months out there and shot hundreds of sheets of film in various locations. When he got back to New York and started processing the film he realised he had made a terrible mistake. He had been carrying around two boxes of film. When he finished up one box he marked this as “exposed” and then moved on to the other box. Or so he thought. What actually happened is he got the boxes mixed up, leaving one completely untouched, and going through the first box again, accidentally making double exposures on every single sheet of film.

I can’t even begin to imagine the aggravation and despair involved when he realised that all that work and money was completely wasted. It really puts in perspective those times, familiar to all photographers who use film, when you expose a load of photos with the wrong ISO setting, or make a mess of loading the film into the camera and don’t realise until you reach the end of the roll. The shot above of mine was only one photo so it’s no big deal. In fact it’s more interesting than any of the other shots I have of either Caribou or Washed Out. It occurred to me that taking long exposure photographs is essentially breaking with the convention that photographs are supposed to correspond to discrete and coherent moments of time. Why not break with the convention that a photograph is supposed to capture a discrete and coherent portion of space as well?

Richard Mosse’s Infra exhibition, containing a selection of his photographs from the Congo, is currently on at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Co. Wicklow. Well worth a look. It runs until March 1st 2012.

On the Saturday night of ATP, while watching the fantastic Bitch Magnet in the Reds venue, I noticed a small wedge-shaped area on the right of the stage that wasn’t being used for anything. I started thinking about how good it would be to be taking photographs with the camera actually on the stage as opposed to from the audience’s point of view. I made some enquiries the next morning, and again thanks to some incredibly helpful folk who work at ATP, I found myself later that day setting up the 4×5 on the stage just as The Ex were getting ready to play.

I have a dim memory of seeing The Ex in Dublin a long, long time ago but have missed them every time they have played in recent years. Their gig at ATP was a collaboration with Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria. Anyone familiar with the Ethiopiques series of albums will know what an incredibly rich musical tradition there is there, but the whole history of European musicians collaborating with African ones is not a particularly inspiring one. Why do people assume that all you have to do is take something good, mix it with something else that’s good, and you get a result that’s even better? Usually it’s worse. Usually, far worse. Why do Western musicians think you can parachute in somewhere for a week, get some “local” musicians down to the studio to “jam”, and not end up with something that’s just garbage?

The Ex however are an entirely different story. These guys have put in the work. They have got in the van, several times, and toured Ethiopia, up and down the country, wherever they can find somewhere to play. They’ve studied this stuff intensely, collaborating with Ethiopian musicians both over there and back in Europe. They are not some fly-by-night act looking to add some exoticism to their recordings, they are deeply immersed in this music, and approach it with the respect and openness that it deserves. And they have hit upon an incredibly simple but smart way of approaching a collaboration with Mekuria. They haven’t concocted some sort of hybrid music, they are not playing their music and getting him to sprinkle some Ethiopian magic on top, they just basically play Ethiopian music. They don’t change their style all that much, they are still playing as a fairly intense punk group with a load of battered old guitars, but the actual songs they are playing are Ethiopian standards with Mekuria leading on sax (at least as far as I know, I’m no expert on this).  Happily, it really, really works – and the rawness and energy of it brings it much closer to what I imagine some band playing in a nightclub in Addis Adaba in the 1970s would have actually been like, if not exactly in sound, then certainly in spirit.

The photo at the top was taken while Mekuria was doing an instrumental duet with the drummer from The Ex. That’s why the other two lads are sitting down taking a breather. The intricate pattern of light trails you can see in the picture are caused by the movements of his saxophone over the course of the exposure, which was 5 minutes and 20 seconds long. You can see the faint outline of Mekuria himself in front of the mic on the left of the picture. Overall, an incredible gig and an incredible way to experience it. Big thanks to Deborah and Stone (that’s really his name) at ATP for facilitating this. My only regret is that I was in such a rush setting up that I didn’t get to speak to any of the guys from The Ex beforehand to let them know what I was doing. They were probably wondering what the weirdo with the improbably large camera was doing beside them on the stage ….

I love Les Savy Fav and even though have played Dublin several times over the years I had never seen them before. It’s easy to get distracted by Harrington’s onstage antics and forget what a great band they are. At different points in the set he was diving into the crowd, stripping off, hanging out of the metal girder above the stage, dragging a fan up and enacting a bizarre double act that ended with both of them jumping into the audience, and all sorts of other carry-on like that. It’s definitely more entertaining than someone rooted to a microphone and staring at the ground between verses, but if it wasn’t for the fact that they have such great songs it would become annoying fairly quickly.  The late night set was even better – with costumes, balloons, and the band in full-on party mode.

By the way, I have no idea what that white spike on the lower left side of the photograph is. It could have been someone carrying a phone or some other kind of light. If you look closely you’ll also see tons of dust spots on the image. I could spend hours in Lightroom getting rid of them but what the hell, I think it kind of suits the picture. It was a messy afternoon and an even messier night. Looking forward to seeing them again some time.

I’ve seen some amazing stuff there over the years – Boredoms, Melvins (for the first time ever), Sonic Youth, The Stooges, The Dead C, Slint, Melt Banana and countless others too numerous to mention. Myself and some cronies were tempted back before Christmas by the promise of a reformed Hot Snakes and various other attractions listed here. I sent some of my work to the organisers before going and asked them if they would be amenable to me doing some of my photography at the festival. To my surprise and delight they got right back to me and said yes (I say “surprise” because I am used to some small promoters in Ireland not even replying to my emails). So, after figuring out the awkward logistics of getting a load of bulky camera equipment from Dublin to Minehead, it was all go.

I have a bunch of pictures from the festival that I am going to post up over the next week or so. The one above is of Battles, who curated the Saturday (Les Savy Fav did the Friday and Caribou took care of business on the Sunday). I’ve seen Battles both with and without Tyondai Braxton now and you know what? I prefer the new three-piece version. The photo was taken in the main venue at Minehead during their afternoon set. It’s an exposure of 5 minutes and 48 seconds. They were playing the song Sweetie And Shag with guest singer Kazu Makino appearing on the two screens behind them. Drummer John Stanier is still a joy to watch. It looks like that symbol is about 10 feet above his head but he really can reach that far.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of the whole event. Many of the talks were of a dense philosophical nature that really required a background in various arcane branches of theory to properly get to grips with. I was also somewhat thrown by the fact that all of the talks consisted of the presenter reading out a prepared text, with no space for dialogue with the audience. After a while though, I realised that this had more in common with a literary reading than with the sorts of conferences that I would have attended in the past, and the texts themselves were so precisely and carefully constructed that it wouldn’t have made much sense to present them as improvised summations of the key ideas contained within them.

One talk I really enjoyed was by Karin Selberg who spoke about the performance artist Franko B and the parallels that can be drawn between the kind of ritualised self-mutilation he incorporated into his work and the antics of Dead, the deceased singer of Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, who used to regularly cut himself with knives onstage. While the art gallery and the metal concert are worlds apart, in this case what’s going on is strikingly similar. Allegedly after Dead killed himself, his fellow band members made necklaces out of pieces of his skull and handed them out as gifts to various people active in the black metal scene. It’s unclear whether this is actually true or not but if it is then no doubt one will pop up on eBay eventually (that is if Charles Saatchi or someone like that doesn’t get to it first).

They had various different things projected on to the screen behind them as they played – including a chunk of John Carpenter’s Dark Star. Usually that kind of thing just turns into a white rectangle during a long exposure photograph (like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters pictures). During the shot above there were some simple hand-drawn “hangman” style stuff on the screen that didn’t change too quickly, so it came out okay.

Here’s a nice Pinback video featuring some serious Aurora Borealis action.