Podcasts from the RTE Lyric FM series, Culture File, the essential daily dose of arts, culture and play. Listen live, 5.40pm, weekdays, RTELyricFM
What’s that you’re watching? Philip Barrett’s finished comix take on The Vision Service, a radio fairy tale of the arrival of television in Ireland. The new Drama on One producion is broadcast tonight, Sunday, December 30th, 8pm, RTE Radio 1.
And online here.
Above is Philip Barrett’s comix “trailer” for radio drama, The Vision Service, an alternative history of the arrival of television in Ireland, written by Luke Clancy and produced by Kevin Brew. It stars Sue Collins, as the storyteller, alongside Aoife Duffin, Caoilfhionn Dunne, Amy Conroy, Steve Blount, Mikel Murfi, Enda Oates, Rory Nolan, Pádraic Delaney and Joe Taylor.
You can hear/download it here: http://www.rte.ie/drama/radio/genres-comedy-thevisionservice.html
Among the legacies of 20th century American composer Alfred Burt are a set of 15 carols, currently being revived by The Cork Chamber Choir. Nicki Ffrench Davis who sings with the choir, tells us of the short but productive life of the composer, who died when just 33.
Conquered in a car seat. We go for a ride with Stuart Bailey, head of Belfast’s Oh Yeah music centre — and an oracle of the city’s geography as seen through the songs of Van Morrison. (part 1 of 2)
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This here is the brilliant Phil Barrett’s comix take on our “When Hitch Met O’Casey” feature by Liam Geraghty, which you can listen to here. Now, look over there (on the right of the page) and click to follow us, then to win Phil’s original artwrk, just tweet this link: pic.twitter.com/y8pkX8xI
This time on Culture File the long lost story of what happened when Hitch met O’Casey. When Alfred Hitchcock came to Sean O’Casey’s place for dinner, it was not the start of a beautiful friendship. But their meeting may have sown the seeds of something more important.
"I’m only know two places: Dublin and the Internet" says our guest this time, Mumblin Deaf Ro, who has released one of the most beautifully poignant, soulful and sweet albums of 2012 in Dictionary Crimes.
"I’m only known two places: Dublin and the Internet" says our guest this time, Mumblin Deaf Ro, who has released one of the most beautifully poignant, soulful and sweet albums of 2012 in Dictionary Crimes
Unpretentious, anonymous, and without monetary value - everything the world of contemporary art isn’t. The Douglas Hyde Gallery ‘s John Hutchinson explains the charms of the gallery’s current show of some 200 handcrafted bags from Iran.
Lars Von Trier’s latest bizarre movie premise involves creating a “social network” film, enlisting hundreds of directors around the world to contribute short sections to a film now showing in Copenhagen.
The strange case of Fr. Conefrey and the war on jazz, is part of the story of the music’s troubled past in Ireland, told in a new documentary, Out with Paganism… and all that Jazz, presented by jazz vocalist, Christine Tobin. The documentary airs in the Lyric Feature on RTE lyricfm Friday 7th December at 7.00pm
Even iTunes can’t give us the definitive insight into what has tweens and pre-tweens on their feet in 2012. That job rests with the Panto. Claire Tighe and Aidan Mannion of Theatreworx tell us about song selection and their “panto boot camp”.
How much faith should we put in “studies” of “Millennials”? Prof Aisling Kelliher on generational markers and markets. And if you are looking for Eric Hoover’s terrific article mentioned in the piece, The Millennial Muddle, there it is.
Michael Haneke’s latest film Amour? Do I really have to see it? If the prospect is simply too much for you, give us 5 minutes and we’ll save you the trouble. (NB: It’s actually more like 7, but you’re still saving hours!)
19-year-old multi-instrumentalist and video blogger, Ronan Dikker, who runs the thisisprojectrebirth vlog. Which may or may not relate to percussion. And those are his rice filled balloons.
He talks to us about the art of the percussionist here.
And plays them rice-filled balloons here.
In the third part of our Shetland visit, we take the ferry further North still this time, to Whalsay, one of the smaller islands, to meet the two Whalsay natives who guard the memory of poet, Hugh MacDiarmid’s escape to their island. (3 of 3)
For more about Shetland, visit http://www.visitscotland.com/creative
Cerys Matthews flies her explosively eclectic new project to 60 degrees North* (That’s Lerwick, in Shetland, by the way) (2 of 3).
For more about Shetland, visit http://www.visitscotland.com/creative
Northwards ho, for the opening of the Mareel Arts Centre, on Shetland, a shimmering harbour-side venue that holds the title of these island’s most Northerly arts centre. (1 of 3).
For more about Shetland, visit http://www.visitscotland.com/creative
Culture File travels to 1960s San Francisco to uncover the story of Compton Cafeteria Riot, a tiny rising often eclipsed in LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgender) culture by the more famous, but later, Stonewall Riot.
Say ‘hi!’ to 18 year old cellist, Sinead O’Halloran, winner of Ireland’s largest classical music scholarship for post-primary schools, the Fr Frank Maher Music Awards sponsored by Top Security.
Since its earliest days, Black Metal has been as adept at generating lurid myths as making music. But, according to Nick Richardson, one of the contributors to Beyond The Darkness, a new study of the music and its aesthetic, the genre’s visual sophistication is often overlooked.
Do women design differently from men? A Design Week event in Dublin brings together three prominent design world women to attempt some answers to this question — while also bigging up women in design.
If Don Draper existed, American Modernist designer Paul Rand would be on his rollerdex. We visit a Dublin exhibition of “the designer’s designer” who gave everybody from IBM to Enron their logos.
Thomas Edison called it “The Eighth Wonder of the World” It completed the revolution that Gutenberg started. But now you can hardly pay someone to take one off your hands! Doug Wilson, director of Linotype: The Film tells us about the machine that kickstarted the Information Age.
Bone up on the reproductive life of snails and Greek gods tonight — as well as the hidden connections between Domenico Ghirlandaio and the Thomson Twins — as we tour Alice Maher’s current IMMA exhibition in the company of the artist.
"So I says to her ‘straighten them pots, or you’re out on your ear,’ and she says to me if you think I’m going to…"
"Ssssssh! Watchit, Jesus, I think she’s listening.."
More/better readings of Velázquez @RTELyricFM, 6.40pm, October 31st, 2012. Or, failing that, just listen here!
Each year the European Broadcasting Festival, the Prix Europa takes place in Berlin where awards are given to the best European Television, Radio and Online productions. This year Culture File has been nominated in the Radio Music category. All this week we feature extracts from the compilation submitted to the awards that have been broadcast on Classic Drive over the past 12 months.
If you were totally/a bit curious to see Monotype Corporation Series 121 Colm Cille (after you’d heard this) then, here ya go!
A little bit Xtra from our interview with type historian, Dermot McGuinne, curator of a new exhibition on Irish typography and the rise and fall of Colm Cille. Here, he tells the story of how Elizabeth I may have commissioned the first type for use in Irish language printing.
Another “Call Me Maybe” parody? HAHAHA YOU THOUGHT IT WAS OVER! But actually, it’s exactly what we wanted! To watch Carly Rae Jepsen roll off a car and get a concussion without any of that pesky music in the way. And maybe also to watch Tattoo Guy take off his shirt (with sound effects!).
These just get better and better. See also: the bizarre, hilarious “Gangnam Style” Without Music.
without a song, what would life be? Slightly improved?
Wanna come play in the “Spectrum Playground”? Filling The White Spaces, a conference at Dublin’s Science Gallery, gathers pioneers who want encourage clever uses of soon to be freed-up radio frequencies in Ireland.
In Tromluí Phinocchio / Pinocchio’s Nightmare, Galway’s Moonfish theatre company lay on a bilingual and thoroughly unplugged version of the fibber classic, with the tale stripped back to its dark and scary basics.
How do you follow a show involving reading aloud F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby over the course of 8 hours? By taking from the shelf a copy of The Sun Also Rises, of course. John Collins of Elevator Repair Company explains.
One or two things you didn’t know about putting on Wagner, including the importance of the pee-plot, with stage manager, Julia Carson-Sims, of Wide Open Opera’s production of Tristan und Isolde
Violinist Lara St John is mystified about the ongoing problems musicians have getting their (often extremely expensive) instruments on board aeroplanes.
The full interview with Lara, about her concert debut (aged 4!) her love of polka, and the importance of the motto “If all else fails, lower your standards” is on Culture File, 6.40pm, Thursday, 20th September, 2012, on RTE Lyric FM at 6pm. And on this tumblr ever after.
Can a composer possibly be pleased when someone says their music works very well in the background? Possibly, maybe, says Sam Jackson, a composer best known for his work with Druid Theatre Company.
Follow us to Finglas, where we sniff out the National Theatre’s Costume Hire department, where garments from scores of previous productions are cared for; and where we find a rather becoming hat.
As hundreds of green theatrical talents are getting their first tastes of crappy reviews and stagefright at Dublin Fringe Festival, we meet some who are taking a slightly less extreme-sport route to stagecraft, via community theatre.
Made this list a little while back in response to an RTE Guide request for Culture File’s favourite tunes. Surely it’s time to put it up here
1 Don Rendell & Ian Carr Quintet – Blue Mosque - Shades of Blue
Rather than wondering what my favourite tunes were, I looked them up on last.fm, which is a great service for telling you what you really like, ie, keeping track of which songs you actually play the most. And apparently, best of all I like this piece of 1960s British jazz, originally crate-crawled by Giles Peterson.
2 Iron & Wine – Sunset Soon Forgotten - Our Endless Numbered Days
What these songs mostly have in common is that they are slow and easy enough to be on my random go-to-sleep playlist. Actually that playlist often turns up some possibly unsetting tunes, like this one, which seems to be about death and grief. But is lovely for all that.
Van Morrison did it, and so have Pixies. Latest to commit to performing an album in its entirety is Kíla singer and songwriter, Rónán Ó Snodaigh, who is set to perform all of five of his solo albums in a series of concerts in Dublin’s Whelan’s.
'Shut up And Play The Hits' is a concert documentary of a now famous night when the ultimate cool kids band, the LCD Soundsytem, played their farewell gig at Madison Square Garden, New York City. We relive the night of the greatest gig ever…
They move in mysterious ways. Dana Mackenzie explains how financial derivatives resemble gas molecules, and the mistake at the heart of the financial world’s most important formula. (Part 3 of 3)
Cork French Film Festival’s Paul Callanan edited some images to go with our episode on The Passion of Joan of Arc. Wonder who’ll take up the challenge…
What do you do with other hand? Ivan Ilic, who has followed a tiny elite of pianists who have recorded Leopold Godowsky’s Chopin studies for left-handed piano, talks about that eccentric, yet persistent genre. (part 1 of 2)
It’s never simple to sort out the proportions of serious v comic content in the work of Belfast artist, John Byrne; and it doesn’t get any easier in his latest, an art church service — with art hymns — for Cavan Cathedral.
In this report, Elaine Agnew is mentioned in connection with the music. Her part was in scoring the music for John Byrne, who wrote both music and lyrics for the art hymns.
The art of going to church: Artists, Alanna O’Kelly and John Byrne (soloists) with the Palestrina Choir, under conductor, Blanaid Murphy, in rehearsals for ‘Good Works’ Art Mass, singing Enlightenment, with words by Byrne and music by Elaine Agnew.
What’s this? A Celtic supergroup that doesn’t feature Martin Hayes or Caoimhin O Raghallaigh? Scottish Mouth music specialist, Alyth McCormack on her part as one of the 14 musicians in a new collective, Dán.
Drone-shot video from Loitering Theatre* by Caroline Campbell and Nina McGowan.
*The work is named after a ‘next generation’ drone which has the wherewithal to ‘loiter’ in ‘theatre’ carrying out missions for five years without needing to take on fuel. And we’re not talking about The Abbey here.
WOMAD is having a 30 birthday party this year in a field in Wiltshire. And once more, the event has been programmed by Paula Henderson, the woman whose job is to scour the planet all year long to fill the festival’s program of music and culture from around the world.
Tenderness, sleep and ecstasy, the frugality of needs and the pleasure of the senses are the prescription for “After The Future”. Italian critic and activist, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi on life on a dying planet.
Does it matter if the workshop window looks out on rolling hills or a car park, or even the main road from Limerick to Tralee? These and other questions answered in a new exhibition of Irish craft, My Place, in Liverpool.
Which would you rather be in an ideal free market, a goat or a human? Julian Gough’s neoliberal satire, The Great Goat Bubble, at Galway Arts Festival will possibly not help with your decision. But it could make you laugh.
After a hiatus in which Rufus Wainwright wrote his first opera and performed a Judy Garland tribute show at Carnegie Hall, the Canadian singer, songwriter composer — and Garland impersonator — is back in pop game.
A disappointment at Blackheath prompts Gabriel Prokofiev, founder of the London-based Nonclassical organisation, to think again about where classical music should be played, and heard. (Part 2 of 3)
What a theatre artist might bring to - or indeed, take away from - the place where daily activity involved the search for ‘the god particle’, with That’s About The Size of It performer, Niamh Shaw.
JELLY: Turns out, Beyonce was right. You can’t handle it. At least, not unless you do so with the kind of care for which 5 year olds are not known. Kids at the Jellytown event at the 2012 Kinsale Arts Week.
Hear the sound of breaking jelly, here on our Jellytown podcast.
Photos: Peter Carroll
Musician, Liam Ó Maonlaí, choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan, along with composer, Donnacha Dennehy, discuss the musical powers of Sean O’Riada, who inspired the globetrotting dance show, Rian.
If you listen to the end of our report on the Serendipitor app, you’ll hear mention of a sketch of our reporter, Louise Williams, created by some eight year olds in Smithfield, Dublin. Well, this is that sketch. And this is exactly what Louise Williams look like.
Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! Mick Minogue’s real life (sorta) model of the Nyan Cat. He explains himself here (audio, 7mins). Although, Nyan cat still keeps schtum.
Prof Henry Jenkins on how the The Harry Potter Alliance challenged the studio behind the film, The Hunger Games to fight real hunger. And why it would be safer for schools to open up access to Facebook and Twitter. (Part 2 of 2) Part 1
Why might fans of Harry Potter be the future of politics? Prof Henry Jenkins, author of Spreadable Media, explains. (Part 1 of 2) Part 2
Enjoyed that? There’s an odds on chance you’d like to listen to Prof Aisling Kelliher decode Klout. (And give the whole social rating scene a good kicking!)
A man walks into a pub…and sees a performance of National Theatre of Scotland’s supernatural exploration of folk songs,The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, then talks to the show’s Madeleine Worrall.
Architect, Christopher Whyms-Stone on on his Culture Yard project to restore and celebrate a very special 20th century housing project in the Kingston suburb of Trenchtown, Jamaica. (Part 2 of 2)
Some photos to browse, while you listen to our two part interview with Jamaican architect and Culture Yard conservationist, Christopher Whyms-Stone, about his project to restore and celebrate a very special few square yards of Trench Town that inpired among other things, Bob Marley to write No Woman, No Cry.
Jamaican architect, Christopher Whyms-Stone, helps tell the story of Trenchtown and an historical Irishman without whom Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry couldn’t have been written. (Part 1 of 2)
What does the Christchurch, Triskel, Cork, look like when Dreyer’s Joan of Arc is being projected? A bit like this.
In a bonus part of our conversation with Martin Lindstrom (which we saved specially for podcast fans) the author of Brandwashed tells us why “nostalgia” in marketing isn’t what it used to be. (Part 4 of 3! Haha!)
Culture File’s Golden Great No 1
Does Margaret Thatcher retain the power to stir deep emotions? Culture File takes an exit poll at Dublin screening of The Iron Lady
For all those who wanted to *see* the tech marvel that is Robo-Gershwin playing Rhapsody In Blue with the Dallas Wind Symphony, here it is, recorded Feb 14th 2012. Luv in particular for the bit near the end when conductor, Jeff Helmer, looks casually over to see how his soloist is getting on…
Thanks to the Zenph.com crew for the video!
Rachmaninoff was quite a pianist! But don’t take our word for us, have a listen to a tech that’s letting long gone performers play again, with Dr John Q Walker of Zenph. (part 1 of 2)
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be talking to composers in the Horizons 2012 Contemporary Music Series at the NCH. This week we talk to Karen Power, who will premier her new work, no chaos: only organised panic for orchestra and live electronics.
Feeling open to an empathic response? First Fortnight Festival might just be for you! We meet director,Una McKevitt and retired schoolteacher-turned-performer, Marie ORourke, who are reviving their collaborative show, 565+ for First Fortnight 2012.
Hugh Tinney talks Luke Clancy through one of the most difficult piano pieces ever written, Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, as well as the pianist’s dreams of emulating Freddie Mercury. (repeat from April 2011)
