Steve Pyke takes astounding photos of faces and hands, landscapes and astronauts. He has pictured war veterans, roadside shrines, monumental thinkers and the countenance of Shane MacGowan.
An artist and an agent of mischief, he takes most of his portraits on a Rolleiflex TLR that was engineered in 1957 and still delivers detail, skin tones and fine poetry on silver halide. For many sittings, he spends a lot of the scheduled time talking with his subjects, finding a sympathetic rhythm. Then he gets in tight with close-up lenses and aims for the moment of transference when his sitters reveal a piece of their soul. Continue Reading…
Ram, bam, thank you man. Huartan play Irish trad music with rave dynamics, masks and pagan intent. They attach meaning to pre-Christian spirits, especially the hawthorn tree, a species you don’t want to mess with. Just to make the point clear, there are two dancers on stage, representing the fairy folk – alternately good and evil, light and dark. They are denizens of the hawthorn manor and they have assembled at the Black Box to enact síogaí magic. 
GUB is a parcel of poems, alive with Belfast vernacular and spitball zen. It sees heaven in a gravy chip. It is wise to Captain Beefheart, Snap! and Roxy Music. The guy in the ice cream van serves up Embassy Regal on the sly until he is shopped by a tout. But hey, he was once a boss feature of the Lower Shankill and he made a classy entrance: 
Elaine Howley first came to my attention (writes Timmy Stewart) via the heartbreakingly good The Distance Between Heart and Mouth on the always on point Irish imprint, Touch Sensitive. It’s a beautifully emotive collection of work that shifts between ethereal folk, hazy psyche and otherworldly electronics. An album I return to time and time again and know it’s got a classic yet unique sound that will have me coming back forever. I managed to catch Elaine’s live show at the Courthouse in Bangor last Summer and exactly like the album, it’s impressive how she builds layers of such rich warm audio tapestry while flying solo. What makes the album so incredible, also truly carries over to the live experience.
Fancy the greatest commission? Stuart Bailie took the call in 1987 to meet The Pogues in NYC, preparing for their breakthrough moment, ‘Fairytale of New York’. What follows is a remembrance of that visit, with some pictures from his personal archive plus an extract from the original Record Mirror cover story…
In a local electronic music landscape often dominated by house and techno, Emma Hart stands out as an electronic artist ploughing a different kind of groove. Whether pushing more laidback tempos and textures fusing elements of hip-hop and jazz as HART (check her excellent, choppy audio collage Moon Jazz album, for some hazy summer soul) or as Nyphaea, where she ups the energy level with faster UK garage influences. Timmy Stewart caught up with Emma to give Dig With It the overview, in five. 
They’ve been dropping bombs on libraries, they’ve destroyed the university and many thousands of homes. The death toll in Gaza for the month is currently 15,000. Whole families have been obliterated from the civil registry. This IDF response to the Hamas killings is horrendous, vengeful and at times, gloating. We know there’s a whole other narrative, a twisted back story and there’s even nuance below the dust of those sickening craters. But in the now, the analysis is simple: this is wrong. 
You hear the crackle of a Palestinian ambulance driver, reporting from the worst of it. There are voices from Ukraine and Afghanistan. Later, a French speaker will ask you to chose a direction – “Enfer ou paradis?” Will you tolerate this very hell, or struggle for a higher position? In response, the new David Holmes record is reaching for love and transcendence in the face of unrelenting dread. 
*Dial tone*
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