MUSIC CURRENT is back bigger and better for 2019. Returning to Smock Alley Theatre this April, Dublin’s annual contemporary music festival expands its run dates and events this year, to showcase more of the best of new Irish and international contemporary electronic music, to Irish audiences. Hosting a four-day festival of concerts, panel discussions, composer talks, and a music commission, this unique four-day event runs from 10–13 April.

Produced in collaboration with the Contemporary Music Centre and supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council, MUSIC CURRENT is now established in its fourth year, and the festival offers a unique blend of electronic performance and provides a much-needed platform for the newest contemporary electronic music rarely seen in Ireland.

This year’s festival has a decidedly theatrical flavour featuring Steven Takasugi’s hilarious and unnerving ‘Sideshow’, a concert-length masterwork for ensemble and electronics, in which the players, Ensemble Tzara from Switzerland, ‘perform’ in a decidedly giddy theatrical sense. Sideshow is a humorousand eerie meditation on virtuosity, freak shows, entertainment, and spectacle, and after sold-out shows and critical acclaim across America and Europe, Music Current is delighted to present the Irish premiere of what will surely become one the defining works of early 21st century music. The theatrical theme continues with Swiss trio Retro Disco who take inspiration from Dadaist aesthetics and create absurdist performances, and perform a new commission by Irish composer Karen Power.

The festival opens with a double-bill programme: Sweeney Lives! featuring three major ‘radiophonic’ work by Irish electronic music pioneer Frank Corcoran; and German music collective Stock11, one of the most thought provoking music groups performing today.

Retro Disco will also perform a new commission by Argentinian composer Patricia Martinez in a special concert of new international works developed during the festival by participating composers, one of whom will receive this year’s Music Current Commission of €2,500.

Welcoming many new international artists who will perform in Ireland for the first time, and curating this exciting experimental mix of new music, Dublin Sound Lab is delighted to host another cutting edge MUSIC CURRENT for 2019:

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SWEENEY LIVES! by Irish composer Frank Corcoran offers three 'tape' music masterworks that will be presented in Ireland for the first time in surround sound and as a complete body of work, in a single concert. Each of these works reveals Corcoran's far-reaching vision of a distant, multi-layered, mythic past which is rendered so deftly here in late 20th century technology.

Written in the years spanning the peak of Corcoran's creative output, these pieces are in a consciously radiophonic style and, when heard together in a seamless concert performance, they accumulate a coherence and forcefulness of argument, and bring to life Corcoran's mythological landscape, littered with visual metaphors, in a true 'cinema for the ear'.

“Corcoran’s Musical Mass is a furious symbiosis of polyphonic liturgical sound”– Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung