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Posts Tagged ‘whelans’

Low

This is Low playing in Whelans a few weeks ago. I’ve always liked Low – one of those rare bands who have a unique sound and are utterly in control of what they’re doing. I liked them even more when I heard they did a 30 minute drone version of one of their songs at a festival in the US earlier this year. The gig in Whelans was a more conventional affair but still great. My Bloody Valentine should take a leaf out of their book and just do one solid hour of the noise section in You Made Me Realise at Electric Picnic on Friday night.

As usual this photograph was created with a single exposure: shutter opened at the start of the song and closed at the end. This was the second song of their set and is an exposure of 3 minutes and 19 seconds in length. I was pretty sure that the photograph would not work out because of the film footage being projected on to the back of the stage (that usually messes things up) but it did. First gig photograph done with my lovely spanking new Toyo 4×5 camera and scanned on my equally lovely new Epson V700 scanner.

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Next weekend a very strange event is taking place in Dublin. The world’s third Black Metal Theory Symposium will happen in the Pint Bar on Eden Quay, during the afternoon of Sunday 20th of November. There is going to be a series of talks with titles like On the Mystical Love of Black MetalFolding a Cadaverous Scream: The Disharmonious Flesh of Recombinant Horror, and “The Hopeless Soul Keeps Mating”: Notes on Black Metal and Contemporary Fiction. Scanning through the abstracts you will find references to thinkers like Deleuze, Kant and Bataille, and to concepts like speculative realism, queer theology, and medieval mystical discourse. After this series of talks, which include breaks for “refreshments”, there will be performances from Eternal Helcaraxe and Wound Upon Wound. Seriously, I can’t think of a better way of spending a Sunday afternoon and evening. (more…)

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The other day I was reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1961 essay on phenomenology, Eye And Mind (I’ve recently started doing an MA in Art In The Contemporary World at NCAD so you can probably expect more of this kind of thing in the future – those of you who just want to know who the band is are free to skip right to the end). There’s a section in it where he talks about the representation of time and movement within both painting and photography. He argues that artists such as Cezanne and Matisse provide more faithful renditions of our actual perceptual experience of being in the world than those provided by objective scientific accounts and the Cartesian perspective-based art inspired by them. At one point, he discusses photography, and argues that it also falls short of capturing our real experience of the world because it cannot capture movement in the way that a painter can, shackled as it is to capturing frozen, instantaneous snapshots. Painting, on the other hand …. (more…)

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This is the brilliant Tieranniesaur playing at the Alliance benefit gig last night. I had a busy night. First off I was up in Collins Barracks photographing the big Macnas show for Absolut Fringe (more on this soon). Then I pegged it over to Whelans to catch the second half of the all-day gig that Leagues O’Toole organised to raise money for Concern. (more…)

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This is the European Sensoria Band (sometimes known as e+S=B, formerly known as Electronic Sensoria Band) playing in Whelans a while ago. These days every band has a website, a facebook page, a twitter account, a bandcamp page, an electronic press kit, and Christ knows what else, constantly spewing out information about their every coming and going. Not e+S=B. Google any of the variations of their name and you’ll probably stumble across a sporadically updated blog, references to limited edition CD-R releases (but no apparent means of buying them), and occasional videos of them playing in various art galleries and performance spaces around Dublin. I don’t know if the concept of underground music has much meaning anymore but if it does, then e+S=B surely fit that bill. (more…)

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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…)

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The PhotoIreland 2011 festival kicks off tomorrow and there’s a whole host of photographic events and exhibitions happening around Dublin over the coming weeks. I missed all of last year’s inaugural festival, due to being away on holidays, but thankfully they have extended this year’s one to the entire month of July so I’ll be able to catch most of it this time. I have been browsing through the programme and found many things that look like they are worth catching. (more…)

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This is Spook Of The Thirteenth Lock playing in Whelans at the weekend. Last Saturday was the first time I have been out photographing since my exhibition opened and it felt good to be out doing it once more. Several people have asked me recently what I am going to do next, and while I have a few other projects bubbling under, I don’t really regard this long exposure gig photography one to be finished just because it has now been exhibited. I’ve got a fair bit to go with it yet – there are several venues that I only have one or two decent shots from, and several more that I haven’t really broached yet at all. (more…)

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Mail Order Messiahs playing in Whelans

Here’s a photo I took ages ago that kind of slipped through the net a bit. It’s a band called Mail Order Messiahs playing in Whelans last year, supporting Sleep Thieves. I don’t know why I disregarded it back then as when I look at it now I realise it’s one of the more interesting ones I’ve done in Whelans. As usual it’s an exposure of over 4 minutes but in spite of this the singer on the right is not all blur. He’s been caught multiple times by someone’s flash in the front row and hence several faint but sharp impressions of his head and body ended up on my film. There were a lot of photographers at this gig so this was happening quite a lot. (more…)

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song exposure [sawng ek-spoh-zher]: a photograph created by opening the shutter at the start of a song and closing it at the end

A friend of mine recently suggested that I use the term song exposure to refer to these photographs. At first I wasn’t sure about this, but the more I thought about it, the more I began to like it. It encapsulates pretty neatly what the basic concept is – in that these are in a sense photographs of songs, given that the shutter is opened at the start of the song and closed at the end. It also makes reference to the idea of the long exposure, which all these photographs also are. (more…)

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