![]() The German sound artist, who played alongside Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter and members of Popol Vuh, moved to Cork in 1981, and became a linchpin of the county’s avant-garde music scene, which has enjoyed a healthy creative boom in recent years.īerkus – who died in September 2020 after years of living with MS – has a subtle influence over Still, Life, which was curated by the IndieCork festival team to help support and motivate local artists in the early stages of the pandemic. Still, Life is dedicated to the memory of Günther Berkus, whose piece ‘Autumn Came Gently To Shandon This Year’ closes this 17-track lockdown compilation with a luminescent, droning flourish. Here’s hoping we can hear some of these sounds together by the time Imbolc rolls around next year. ![]() ![]() Notions of shared release, coping, collaboration and re-constellation crop up again and again in this month’s column, which features feverish noise rock, “intelligent frog music”, fictional audio tours, field recordings, folk songs and more. The mixtape premiered as a continuous mix on Dublin Digital Radio on 1 February, finding its home on a station that has proved to be a central hub for the Irish music scene in the past year, and which itself released a sprawling compilation to celebrate its fourth anniversary in December. Lee Lines (Landscape Mixtape) by The Department of Energy “Like the mixtape, there won't be much time spent on refinement,” says Callanan. Visual research, screenshots and photographs assembled for the project will be processed through a “chaos code” created by designer Kylièn Sarino Bergh, and placed alongside written notes, poems and messages from contributors. The mixtape comes paired with a 36-page zine, which the DOE are in the process of finalising. Contributors were encouraged to dig into their archives for raw materials, or create new pieces with their imperfections embraced. “I'm interested in ideas in their rawest state – the instinctive moment before rationality creeps in and sucks the life out of something,” says the DOE’s Dan Callanan, who reached out to as many artists as he could at the start of January via WhatsApp voice message, wanting to curate the project with as few emails as possible to make it feel “less like work and more like an organic process”. With the Irish landscape as its backdrop, and the immovable deadline of Saint Brigid’s day as its aesthetic prompt, Lee Lines (Landscape Mixtape) proved to be the perfect soundtrack for the start of 2021: one composed by a countrywide community, summoning its own rebirth after a year of uncertainty and separation. Featuring contributions from Irish artists at home and abroad, the release loosely explores themes of “the rural, the riparian and the gothic”, and comprises everything from field recordings, spoken word pieces and raw one-take instrumentals into droning electronics, dewy beats, and all manner of combinations in between.Īssembled quickly, and intentionally left unpolished and unrefined, the mixtape captures the Irish experimental music community in a chrysalis state, transitioning from one year into the next with an act of shared creativity and consciousness. This year, Imbolc also marked the release of the Lee Lines (Landscape Mixtape), a 47-track collection from the Department of Energy label. ![]() Celebrated on 1 February, the festival – also known as Saint Brigid’s Day – symbolises the hope for good luck in the year ahead, and the promise of spring peering through the winter fog. The Gaelic festival of Imbolc signifies the emergence of light from the darkness, and the natural restoration of the landscape. ![]()
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