This is a long exposure photograph of Cian Nugent and his band playing in Whelans last Saturday night. Cian is a guitar player and composer from Dublin who has recently released his debut album, Doubles. His playing playing falls very much into the John Fahey tradition and he combines this with elaborate instrumentation and arrangements to produce long instrumental pieces that have a lot in common with some of Jim O’Rourke’s work. It’s great stuff and recently scored a rave review on the massively influential US website Pitchfork. Such things don’t necessarily translate into audience numbers though as Whelans was pretty quiet last Saturday – then again, it’s pretty hard to compete when Prince is playing across town. (more…)
Traces Of The Real 