Hooks you could land a blue whale with

The Dublin Electronic Arts Festival.

Various venues, Dublin, 25-30 October 2006

Now in its fifth year, DEAF once again used the week leading up to the October bank holiday to spotlight its own take on the best and brightest in electronic music. However, this year there was a big difference: all of the featured artists were Irish. Now, the more cynically-minded might take this as a sign that electronic dance music is in as bad a shape as many writers and pundits seem to think it is. Or that after running the festival at a loss over the previous four years, a little belt-tightening was in order, and what’s cheaper than local artists? But a more optimistic spin might be that Ireland has quite a few very good, even world-class, electronic acts, and this was the year to finally give them their 15 minutes of fame.

Whatever the reason, the overall atmosphere throughout this DEAF was much more subdued than in years past. Even though the line-up was impressive enough, the all-Irish aspect meant that the acts playing were mostly ones you could see just about anytime during the year. And since having a large number of gigs in a short period of time is (thankfully) no longer a novelty in Dublin, there really wasn’t much of a sense that DEAF this year was all that big of an ‘event’. Sadly, it seems that the presence of an international act or five is still required to give something like DEAF an air of legitimacy.

Although the first night of the festival was officially Wednesday the 25th, I wasn’t able to make it to anything that night. Instead, my own DEAF began in Anseo (on Camden Street) on Thursday the 26th, where promoters Sound & Pressure presented DJ Ray Ruddle and the live musical debut of Alan Butler. Butler is a member of the Black Leather art collective, and together with Lola Rayne Booth, was one of the people behind the Vending Machine Art installations around town during this year’s Fringe Festival, but has also been making electronic music for the past few years. Although his set had the slightly shambolic feel of a debut performance, it had a nice dubbiness to it and pretty clever beat construction. A cover of the Foo Fighters’ ‘Everlong’ also showed a refreshing lack of po-facedness that’s still all too common in electronic music. Friday was one of the more-hyped events, a joint showcase between Dublin-based labels D1 and SeedyR. The folks in D1 have always been the main force behind DEAF, and so certainly deserve to give themselves a bit of the spotlight each year. However, the choice of venue, 4 Dame Lane, left a lot to be desired, as it’s one of the places in Dublin that enforces a dress code, meaning that quite a few punters weren’t initially let in (since the t-shirts/runners/jeans combo is pretty common in electronic music fandom).

Despite the unpleasantness of the location, what I saw of the music was pretty good. Rob Rowland started off DJ-ing a good mix of techno and electro before Eoghan McGragh came on with a live set of the Detroity techno that has always been D1’s bread and butter. SeedyR’s LMD64, who’s always tended to be slightly too poppy for my own tastes, overcame a few initial sound problems to play a surprisingly chunky and hard-hitting set, but without sacrificing his considerable talent at writing hooks you could land a blue whale with. Americhord followed and showed that she continues to be one of Ireland’s best producers of techno and funky electronica. Corrugated Tunnel then went into the acid techno that’s been getting him a lot of favourable international press this year, and D1 old-timer David Donohoe followed with a set that mixed glam-rock schaffel stomp, glitchy microhouse and Detroit techno. At that point I had to leave, but I heard afterward from several sources that Waterford-born Ikeaboy played a blistering set to finish off the night.

Saturday and Sunday daytime featured what I thought was easily the best part of this year’s DEAF, a sort of two-day micro-festival in the basement of the Uki Yo restaurant/karaoke club on Exchequer Street. The four tiny rooms downstairs hosted a variety of acts on each day, and since each was at most two metres from the others, attendees could go back and forth among acts as they wished. This intimacy gave Uki Yo the best atmosphere of any of the events during DEAF this year.

On the first day, a foursome calling themselves Mission Creep spent all afternoon in one of the rooms, creating weird, squiggly, watery sounds using a couple of laptops, some effects and a minidisc player. Slightly creepy, but quite good. Rollers/Sparkers, who in my opinion have been one of the best musical acts in Ireland for a few years now, had another room to themselves, alternating throbbing drones, highly processed vocals and witty banter. Three acts from the previous night’s gig also showed up: Corrugated Tunnel made an appearance, as did Asciinoid, LMD64’s more electronica-orientated alter ego. Best of the bunch was Bird on Wire, Americhord’s more experimental side project, who, together with visual accompaniment from Pixelcorps, started off in austere Raster.Noton territory and ended up with a cover of Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’.

The POD on Harcourt Street hosted the main event of Saturday night, with a variety of music to be found in the three rooms of the complex. Here, promoters Ice9 were behind one of the better ideas of the festival: get two solo producers to collaborate together for a one-off live set on the night. Somewhat successful was the pairing of Rob Rowland and Ikeaboy. Although the techno/electro mash-up was fast and energetic, it never really seemed to take off. However, the partnership of Magnetize and The Last Sound worked wonderfully. Although the set favoured the former’s hard electro over the latter’s lush electronica, there was definitely input from both throughout. Not a lot of people were there to see it (the place never really filled up), but an excellent performance nonetheless. Also excellent were Decal and David Lacey, who were slightly more dancefloor-friendly than the usual slow, dark, grinding they’ve been doing for the past few years. Finishing up the night in the CrawDaddy part of the venue was Colin Lindo, who combined bits and pieces from both his Alpha Omega and Nubian Mindz aliases and ended up with a good mix of techno, hip-hop and drum’n’bass.

Back at Uki Yo on Sunday afternoon, there was even more variety than on Saturday. One room was given over to veteran label Frontend Synthetics: left-field house from Educution, ambient from Rod Morris and The Last Sound doing his usual textured electronica. Another room had Unit 731 and Lowtek’s Garvan Power pounding out industrial gabba (not exactly the right venue for that type of music, but the onslaught was impressive nonetheless). And another was programmed by avant-garde collective Lazybird: cyclical acid rock guitar sounds from Mahood; Seán Óg (known to JMI readers perhaps for his jazz work) playing his bike; noiseniks Tremors whipping up their patented guitar/electronic ruckus; Gavin Prior and Tulla Voutilainen with a dark, brooding, sinister and highly theatrical electronic/vocal combo (think Throbbing Gristle); and Dr Polly Fibre creating harsh, unpleasant noises (a description, not a judgment) using miked-up scissors and cellotape.

And even though DEAF was touting the gig in the Sugar Club on Sunday night as their main event of the festival, with performances from Chequerboard, Decal, Dry County, Ambulance and others, I went to the International Bar, where Lazybird brought along Mahood, Tremors, Prior and Voutilainen for a collaborative session that pretty much combined what had been heard in Uki Yo with a very occult Wicker Man feel to the music.

On Monday the 30th, I was hoping to make it along to see the last of the gigs in sound artist Dennis McNulty’s living-room tour of Dublin. Basically, on each night of DEAF (well, he took one night off), he’d play in a different person’s apartment, leaving it up to the host to bring in the audience. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to find out in time where that night’s performance was, and so don’t know how it might have gone. But reports from some of the other nights were very positive.

And that was it for DEAF number five. Too early, obviously, to predict what’s going to happen next year, but no doubt the organisers will find a successful solution to the international versus local issue that will work for everyone.

Published on 1 January 2007

Paul Watts is a DJ, promoter and radio host. He lectures in theoretical physics at UCD.

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