The Underground of Happiness

Photo: Bríd O'Donovan This weekend one of my favourite bands, Beach House , played at the Opera House in Cork, as part of the city's Guinness-sponsored Jazz Festival . The Jazz Festival is something of an institution in the city, taking place over the Irish October bank holiday weekend. Over recent years, the festival has broadened to take in both a wider definition of jazz, and also a greater variety of programme. So for example, the Opera House had Balkan big band Taraf de Haidouks, Beach House and De La Soul , while across town in The Pavilion you could find Hypnotic Brass Ensemble and Toby Kaar , among others. This review originally appeared on We Are Noise , at this link, where you'll also find more great pics by Bríd O'Donovan - http://wearenoise.com/index.php/2012/10/beach-house-w-holy-other-cork-opera-house-27-10-12/ In passing through Ireland last weekend for three dates ( Mandela Hall Belfast, Vicar Street Dublin and Cork Opera House ), Bea...

We had a couple of excerpts on the show this week of an interview with Conor Devlin of dream-pop trio (The) Caseworker . (Notice I haven't specified where they're from, because it's hard to say exactly, being that each member is resident in a different part of the world. You could argue their spiritual home is the U.S. west coast, where at least two of the band were based for a good number of years, due to a certain burnished guitar sound, although they are from Dublin originally.) You can listen to the whole interview now here, in which Conor talks about... ...listening to Radio Luxembourg on Tuesdays as a child, older sisters with Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd records, travel, Pro Tools, Ethiopian athlete Miruts Yifter, the process of making music together/apart in the internet age, the love of 7-inch vinyl, The Undertones, random brackets, ska, late Byrds, a West Coast Sound, and more. It's interesting, at a time when Irish people are leaving the motherland in ...

A few years ago, I came to a conclusion. I decided that the world was divided into two types of people. Not doctors and nurses, as Brendan Behan (quoting the English painter Constable , I think it was) once famously told Eamonn Andrews in an early Irish tv interview. The two types of people I'm talking about are those who love Ennio Morricone and those who don't. I decided that anyone who didn't appreciate the music of this man was a philistine, could not be trusted and could not be my friend. This radical division of humanity was brought on by immersing myself in More Mondo Morricone , a compilation brought out by the German Colosseum label in 1996. The subtitle on the album gives you key information about the content - " more mindblowing film themes by Ennio Morricone from Italian cult movies ". (If ever a product description perfectly matched the contents, that is it.) This was the second in the Mondo Morricone series . There's a great review of the...