FRIDAY
Spike Cello Festival 2017
The Workman's Club 8pm €15 spikecellofest.com Also Sat/Sun, Dublin
Proving that there is always room for something new, the inaugural Spike Cello Festival (devised by cellists Lioba Petrie and Mary Barnecutt) focuses on the diversity of the instrument across non-classical music areas such as folk, rock, pop, traditional and jazz. Performers include Petrie, Barnecutt, Úna Ní Chanainn (RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra), Kate Ellis (Crash Ensemble), Kevin Murphy (Slow Moving Clouds, Seti the 1st), and Vyvienne Long. Full details of events were not available for our deadlines, so please visit spikecellofest.com for further information.
Oscar Molero
Cyprus Avenue Cork 11pm €20/€15 oscarmolero.com
If you want to see a DJ at the top of his game, check out some footage online of Oscar Molero working it for Boiler Room at Dekmantel and in Berlin. The Madrid native is a techno selector who has done all the spadework required when it comes to his trade behind the decks. In addition, he's marshalled the Warm Up and Pole labels with great elan, as well as releasing well-received cuts in the past for Theory and Tresor. Besides this Cork date, he also plays Dublin's Button Factory on Saturday night.
Melodic
Bar Tengu, Dublin 10.30pm €12/€10/€8 facebook.com/thisismelodic
Ian Pooley has been a regular visitor to these shores for as long as he has been making music. The German producer's albums like Souvenirs, Since Then and What I Do have shown him to be an exquisite craftsman when it comes to house and techno grooves, while his Pooledmusic and Montage have allowed him showcase such new talents as Show-B and Indira Paganotto. Support from Miniminds, Adam Tsan and Chinooq.
Ban Bam: Inni-K/Ríona Sally Hartman/SELK
Whelans, Dublin, 8pm, €15, whelanslive.com
If there is one thing that unites the three acts on BAN BAM's enlightened triple bill, it's their determined individuality: Inni-K is fast-rising sean-nós singer Eithne Ní Chatháin's unique take on indie-folk; singer-songwriter Ríona Sally Hartman spins her own surreal web of language and sound; and SELK, with Mixtapes from the Underground drummer Dennis Cassidy and pianist and singer Anna Jordan, cook up hypnotic, serialist grooves under dark, unsettling vocals. Good value for any money.
Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh
Ionad Cultúrtha, Ballyvourney 8.30pm €15/€10 ionadculturtha.ie
He's a man of many parts: a founding member of trad supergroup The Gloaming, a close collaborator of Peadar Ó Riada and Cormac Ó Beaglaíoch and a lover of the interplay between the wide open sounds of his Hardangar d'Amore fiddle and dance, as we've seen in his work with This Is How We Fly. Tonight, Ó Raghallaigh gives himself the space to let the fiddle tell its own story. Expect much by way of delicious idiosyncracy and precious little by way of predictability.
Arlington
Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Feb 10th-25th 7.30pm €12-€45 abbeytheatre.ie
Written quickly, after a year full of personal grief, Arlington may be Enda Walsh's most despairing and angry work, even turning on itself with well-worn tropes that come close to self-cannibalism: here we are again, another room, another trap. This one is a gargantuan waiting room, where Isla (Charlie Murphy) is monitored via camera by an anxious young attendant – Hugh O'Conor, the new guy. Composed of discrete, disjointed elements, Walsh's play (which he directs for Landmark and Galway International Arts Festival's production) is a study in isolation: sound and image judders, a second act is given over to the dancer Oona Doherty, and the tone becomes almost self-lacerating with possessed appliances, performance cues and an ample supply of biscuits. There is no greater tragedy in Walsh's theatre than lost childhood, though, and for all the allusions to displaced people, that is what is being most conspicuously mourned here, the loss of innocence. Erratic, despairing and finally accepting, this is not a play about grief. This is grief.
SATURDAY
Keaton Henson
Olympia Theatre, Dublin 8pm €34.50 ticketmaster.ie
If there was one music video released last year that grabbed your heart and wrung all of the blood out of it, then it was Alright by London folk-rocker Keaton Henson – and if there was one album then it was Henson's Kindly Now. Prepare, then, for a quiet, reflective evening of emotional intensity. NB: keep crisp bags tucked away until after the gig.
Tw!tch
The Bunatee Belfast 10pm £8 twitchbelfast.com
The Tw!tch gang give over the controls tonight to the Whities label, with label boss Nik Tasker and rising star Avalon Emerson making the journey to Belfast. Tasker comes to this venture via stints with Boiler Room and Young Turks and his ear for new talent has meant an elevated profile for new gun Emerson. The Arizona producer's 2016 release The Frontier was a fresh blast of melancholic big sky techno and marked her out as one to watch.
HTBX
The Cellar Galway 9pm €10/€8 facebook.com/hotboxpromotionsirl
The Hotbox crew marks a year of top nights in the wild west with Jerome Hill at the top of the bill. The London DJ has been in club and dance music business for decades, boasting stints with sound systems, record shops, labels and club nights. Currently, he runs the Don't night in Dalston and operates the label of the same name as well as the Fat Hop (old-skool hip-hop), Super Rhythm Trax (acid house) and Hornsey Hardcore (1992 rave stylings) imprints. Support from Prun, Patrick Harney and Danyl.
B.Traits
Opium Rooms Dublin 11pm €12 facebook.com/BTraits
These are busy times for Brianna Price. She's a rising star at BBC Radio One, where she's gone up, up and away since debuting as one of the In New DJs We Trust intake in 2012. Her tracks and productions for the likes of Digital Soundboy continue to gain kudos and attention, with Fever in particular pulling applause from all quarters. The Canadian has also moved in documentary-making with How Safe Are My Drugs? for BBC3. Support from Eve, with the When We Dip crew at large in the Garden.
SUNDAY
The Painting Show
Limerick City Gallery of Art, Carnegie Building, Pery Square, Limerick Until April 16 gallery.limerick.ie
In their book of crime fiction stories Unlawful Assembly (2013), artists Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael equate the manipulations of the crime genre with the strategies of contemporary painters as they approach their art with "a lighter touch, more conceptual, sometimes ironic and even funny" methods. This British Council touring show takes the idea as its starting point. With Merlin Carpenter, Stuart Cumberland, Michael Fullerton, Celia Hempton, Neal Jones, Morag Keil, Fiona MacKay, Lucy McKenzie, Dawn Mellor, Alan Michael, Michael Simpson, Sue Tompkins and Padraig Timoney.
Len Graham
Cork Singers' Club, An Spailpín Fánach 9.30pm Adm free 021-4277949 Also Mon, Waterford; Tues, Wexford; Thurs, Belfast
Graham is a soulful singer, with a songbook as voluminous as the tradition itself. His unforced, spacious style suggests that he just might be the musical equivalent of Seamus Heaney: burrowing into the unexplored corners of our consciousness and illuminating them with subtle grace. This week he embarks on a four-night tour.
MONDAY
The Typographic Dante
Barrie Tullett, co-ordinated with Brenda Dermody. National Print Museum, Beggars Bush Barracks, Haddington R, Dublin Until April 2 nationalprintmuseum.ie
Some years back, graphic designer Barrie Tullett hatched an ambitious plan to illustrate each of the 100 Cantos of Dante's Divine Comedy, using a different obsolete technology for each of the three books. He applies letterpress type to the Inferno, a manual typewriter to Purgatory and Letraset to Paradise. This is the first showing of the completed images he's made to date.
TUESDAY
Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris
Gate Theatre. Ends Feb 25 7.30pm Mon-Wed €27, Thurs-Sat €30, Sat Mat 2.30pm €27 gate-theatre.ie
Jacques Brel is neither alive, well, nor living in Paris, and the Gate theatre has decided that it is the end of the world. Craters in its plaster walls expose crumbling brickwork, familiar columns are falling away and a yawning hole in the ceiling looks like a bomb has torn through the place. The effect Alyson Cummins' set has on this staging of Eric Blau and Mort Schuman's 1968 revue of Brel's songs, though, is to create a sense of distance. That's a shame, as Brel's combination of passion, comment and acid thrives on immediacy. The result is something peculiarly time-warped. Under Cathal Synnott's more lively musical direction, four performers – Risteárd Cooper, Stephanie McKeon, Karen McCartney and Rory Nolan - share songs that give unvarnished reports of sailors, prostitutes, soldiers or strivers. Brel's signature is a spinning waltz time where verses escalate into frenzy and the world keeps turning faster. Given a staging idea bold enough to match its performers, these songs of life and death would feel better realised; not as nostalgia pieces, but for all time.
WEDNESDAY
Band of Horses
Vicar St Dublin 7.30pm €33.50 ticketmaster.ie
There is definitely an Americana/roots bias to the music of Band of Horses, but when you take into consideration that they also rock like the proverbial you-know-what, you might just forget that. A bit of Neil Young? A hint of Iron & Wine? A dash of Wilco? All these and more, you lucky people.
Redneck Manifesto
Whelan's, Dublin 8pm €18 whelanslive.com Also Thurs, Dublin (sold out)
For an Irish band that has been on the receiving end of so much praise and so little commercial success, it's a wonder that Redneck Manifesto still has the will to occasionally regroup. Yet here they are (again), as they raise their brainy heads and increase the volume knob on their amplifiers to deliver some of the best instrumental post-rock music you'll ever hear. Fact!
Enemy/Disquietude
Arthurs, Dublin (Wednesday); Billy Byrnes, Kilkenny (Thursday)
Kit Downes is one of the rising stars of the London jazz scene, a pianist with one ear on the tradition but the other strained to new sonic and rhythmic horizons. Enemy, his powerful new trio with bassist Peter Eldh and drummer James Maddren, is boldly (and often loudly) going where no piano trio has gone before. With support from fresh-as-a-daisy duo Disquietude featuring Dublin bassist Cormac O Brien and South African saxophonist Chris Engel. Their short Irish tour concludes in Belfast next Friday.
THURSDAY
Word Up Collective
Bello Bar Dublin 7.30pm €5
There's little doubt in anyone's mind that the Irish hip-hop scene is developing at an impressive rate, and Dublin-based Word Up Collective can take some of the kudos for that. WUC's first showcase night of 2017 features Tebi Rex – who launch their new single Everything You Say is a Poem, Super Silly, JyellowL, and King David. Catch 'em now before they move to bigger venues.
Deepdrippings
Philip Allen. Kerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane, South Anne St, Dublin Until March 25 kerlin.ie
Phillip Allen is fascinated "with the sculptural qualities of paint", the way it can be both a substance and a surface. The paintings in Deepdrippings have been made incrementally over long periods, "in some cases several years," built up in many layers. They possess a packed, dense intensity but also a fizzing, joyful energy and lightness.
