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Oregon-based songwriter Anna Tivel’s newest album Outsiders starts with a lens so wide that we have left the planet to look back from a great distance at the turmoil and beauty of our shared humanity. From there, the lens pulls close and unfolds in a gripping collection of stories so often ignored. Tivel’s flawed and honest characters move through a landscape of hurt and loss, of small triumph and big love. In 11 songs full of recognition, veracity and hope, Tivel’s watchful and empathetic eye details the undeniable ache of living.

Outsiders, look up / The night is dark but brilliant and it turns out we are not so different

Recorded almost entirely live to tape in Rock Island, IL with producer and multi-instrumentalist Shane Leonard and engineer Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens), the album is a truly collaborative exploration. Tivel gathered the same vibrant group of friends from her acclaimed record, The Question, which NPR heralded as “one of the most ambitious folk records of 2019.”

“We holed up together in a little house a few miles from the studio,” she says, “walked there every day to sink deep into the music. No one had heard the songs beforehand, and I would play each one sitting on the floor trying to convey the gut feeling. Then we’d face each other in a circle and feel our way through, working to find the heart of each song in a few takes. Shane brings this layer of uninhibited magic to every session, setting the stage for everyone to listen deep and react with open doors. He gives himself as fully to sonic atmosphere as I do to words and I have a great amount of trust in his vision and admiration for the care he takes with the world of each song.”

The constraints of analog recording fostered a rawness and immediacy in the final tracks. The arrangements on Outsiders are spacious and full of intrigue, drawing you into the cinema of Tivel’s lyrics. The title track opens the album with a meditation on the first moon landing. “I wrote it sitting on the floor in front of the TV between fragments of an Apollo 11 documentary,” she recalls. “The news was feeling especially dark, full of pain and distorted truths, and watching all that incredible footage of human hope and achievement hit me so hard. For just that one moment in the great upheaval of the times, everyone paused together to witness something new and full of wonder.”

The second track “Black Umbrella” is a winding story that follows a small-town robbery and a bystander who tries to help only to fall under the weight of misconception and old, broken systems. “It’s a song about all the ways we fail to really see each other,” Tivel shares, “about poverty and desperation, race and power, history, opportunity, and otherness.”

While writing the album in 2019-20, Tivel found herself circling back again and again to this idea of otherness. “The deep division and ugly rhetoric being amplified–especially in the US–seeped into everything I wrote. I kept wanting to explore this feeling of being unseen, profoundly lonely and disconnected, and how it affects our perception of the world and our place in it,” she says. “Outsiders is an album about looking more deeply into ourselves and each other, really trying to see and examine the internal and external forces that keep us from connecting in real ways and the forces that draw us together.”

Throughout her work, Tivel has emphasized storytelling and this album is no exception, building on the strength of her ability to observe and reflect with a clear-eyed empathy. Inspired by authors from Steinbeck to Morrison, Didion to Dubus, she imbues her songs with attentive detail and a dreamlike quality that leaves the ordinary feeling both palpable and poetic. “Tivel’s characters are common but unforgettable,” NPR’s Ann Powers writes, “Her images linger, and become populated with the energy of the real.”

Outsiders will be released by Mama Bird Recording Co. on August 19th.

Hundreds of thousands of miles away, the endless expanse of a dream / Pausing the burning of cities to say we are beautiful when we believe

TEKE::TEKE is a Montreal-based Japanese psych-rock group composed of guitarists Serge Nakauchi Pelletier and Hidetaka Yoneyama, bass player Mishka Stein, drummer Ian Lettre, flutist Yuki Isami, trombone player Etienne Lebel, and visual artist and vocalist Maya Kuroki.

Featuring traditional Japanese instruments, flute and trombone alongside raging guitars and a pulsing rhythm section, TEKE::TEKE creates a sound reminiscent of 1960’s and 70’s era psychedelic Japanese soundtracks, with a frenetic, modern twist.

THIS SHOW IS SOLD OUT

A critically acclaimed performer, as well as a member of King Kong Company, SON – aka Susan O’Neill –  is one of Ireland’s brightest emerging talents. The basis of her first album ‘Found Myself Lost’ saw SON find her voice amongst her peers, introducing her unique and otherworldly style.

The album was one of Hot Press magazine’s ‘Albums of the Year’ and garnered her a number of opportunities, including joining Sharon Shannon on her sold out tour of Australia and New Zealand.

The enigmatic singer-songwriter honed her musical skills as one of the youngest members of the Ennis Brass Band and gained her first gospel influences with the ‘Really Truly Joyful Gospel Choir.’ SON has recently been collaborating with multi-platinum, award winning artist, Mick Flannery, whom she recently released a duet, “Baby Talk,” to rave reviews. In promotion of the song,

SON and Flannery have made several late night talk-show appearances as well as having announced joint tour dates. Her solo career as SON has begun to pique critical and industry interest. Eclectically fusing traditional Irish folk with rock, soul, gospel and blues, her live performances are quite simply electrifying. Her husky vocals combined with her superb guitar technique, loop pedals and trumpet, have wowed audiences everywhere from Stradbally to Sydney, Glasgow to Glastonbury, Manhattan to Milwaukee, and many places beyond.

Xylouris White is firmly rooted in the past and future. Playing Cretan music of original and traditional composition, the band consists of Georgios Xylouris on Cretan laouto and vocals and Jim White on drum kit. Xylouris is known and loved by Cretans and Greeks at home and abroad and has been playing professionally from age 12.

Jim White is an Australian drummer known and loved throughout the world as the drummer of Dirty Three, Venom P Stinger and now Xylouris White.

For the last four years these two men have been performing as Xylouris White, the culmination of 25 years of friendship forged through music and place.

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Andy Irvine is one of the great Irish singers, his voice one of a handful of truly great ones that gets to the very soul of Ireland. He has been hailed as “a tradition in himself”.

Musician, singer, songwriter, Andy has maintained his highly individual performing skills throughout his over 50-year career.

Andy has been at the helm of legendary bands like Sweeney’s Men in the mid 60s, to the enormous success of Planxty in the 70s, and then Patrick Street, Mozaik, LAPD and recently Usher’s Island. Andy has been a world music pioneer and an icon for traditional music and musicians.

As a soloist, Andy fills the role of the archetypal troubadour with a show and a travelling lifestyle that reflect his lifelong influence, Woody Guthrie. To quote the Irish Times, “Often copied, never equalled”, his repertoire consists of Irish traditional songs, dexterous Balkan dance tunes and a compelling canon of his own self-penned songs.

Eoin Stan O’Sullivan: I  thought I was a reformed guitarist. I gave up rock’n’roll to play the traditional Sliabh Luachra music on my fiddle. I only kept strings on my guitar to teach basic chords to some local students.

That was until the first lockdown when I found it hard to find the space to practice fiddle. I resorted to staying up late picking out my traditional tunes on an unplugged electric guitar. To my surprise the tunes started to find a whole new life with six strings instead of four.

Over the last year I’ve come up with some arrangements for my favourite fiddle tunes on electric guitar. The few people who’ve heard my new music have compared it to the guitar stylings of Ali Farka Touré or Tinariwen so I suppose it’s like “Desert Blues” meets “Sliabh Luachra” or maybe it’s just a whole new genre called “Bog Jazz” – who knows? I’m really looking forward to unleashing my new sound at the Clonakilty International Guitar Festival this September.

Naive Ted’s going to Clonakilty for a 3 night residency for CGF 2021!

Last seen in Clon back in the heady days of 2018, Ted is back as resident DJ for the weekend, dropping rock science on the turntables on both Friday (after Pretty Happy) AND Saturday (after Windings). Sure, the buzz is up already but wait there’s more!

For the finale on Sunday, Ted has enlisted multi-instrumentalist polymath Dan Walsh AKA Fixity for a never seen before improvised collaboration! What this will entail is hard to envisage, not sure Ted or Dan could tell ya either. But Ted plays turntables and Dan plays drums so there’ll definitely be lots of that.

Ted’s excited.

John Francis Flynn is a singer and multi-instrumentalist whose work centres around traditional and folk material from Ireland.

He is a founding member of the band Skipper’s Alley, with whom he has toured extensively throughout Europe and America. While supporting Lankum on their 2019 UK tour he caught the eye of Geoff Travis and Jeanette Lee who quickly signed John to Rough Trade imprint label, River Lea. River Lea will release John’s debut album “I Would Not Live Always” in Spring 2021.

Produced by highly regarded producer, Brendan Jenkinson, this release looks to continue where River Lea last left off; highlighting the enormous talent hidden away in the corners of Ireland’s folk scene.

“Human experience burns ferociously on this extraordinary debut from the uncompromising Irish artist John Francis Flynn. An extraordinary debut” The Guardian

“Double Tin Whistle and Tape-Loops. Revelatory new takes on English and Irish folk songs in the manner of Sam Amidon. A singular and striking clarity of vision” Uncut Magazine

Little John Nee is a writer/performer based in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland. A prolific creator of work for theatre he was recently elected to Aosdána (established by the Irish Arts Council in 1981 to honour artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the creative arts in Ireland)

His style of storytelling theatre with music has won him international recognition and his play “Sparkplug” won an Irish Times Theatre Award for his sound design while the RTE radio version won a Special Mention Prize at the Prix Italia 2013.

He has recently published a book of Haiku “The Apocalypse came on a Friday” and previously his “A Donegal Trilogy” was published by An Grianan Theatre. He has released an album of songs from his theatre shows recorded with The Caledonia Highly strung Orchestra. “Songs from the Lough Swilly Delta”  

Little John Nee has been commissioned to write plays for Barabbas Theatre Company, Axis Ballymun, Scottish Touring Theatre Consortium, An Grianan Theatre,  Earagail Arts Festival, Donegal Co. Council, Leitrim Co. Council, children’s plays for Galway Arts Festival and a radio play for RTE Radio Drama on One.