A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Mar 14, 2010, 5:26 am
In 1990, a college classmate gave me a tape of an album by a new Dublin band which he had bought but did not think much of; I gave it a listen and it blew me away. It was 'Immigrants, emigrants an...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Feb 28, 2010, 2:44 pm
There was a time (the late 1980s) where Michael Stipe of REM popped up on all sorts of albums, usually to give an up-and-coming or unknown band some help or publicity. This was of course at the time w...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Feb 21, 2010, 4:47 am
You sometimes forget what riches are to be found on Youtube (scant roses scattered among the many turds, with a good nose or a trusty map needed to steer you right), and it was only recently that I th...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Feb 7, 2010, 2:20 pm
A few nights ago, I was channel-surfing when I came across a show on Irish TV called 'Other voices', in which musical acts, national and international, play in a church in a (lovely) small tow...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Feb 6, 2010, 2:17 pm
Finally downloaded Florence and the Machine from iTunes; there have been a lot of female acts in the last year or so which have sort of blended in my head into something which did not fill me with ent...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Feb 4, 2010, 2:09 pm
Just a quick post to show what I love about the internet and how it has really revolutionised the way we can access music. I was watching Grey's Anatomy (or at least it was on while I was reading...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Jan 22, 2010, 3:09 pm
Last Saturday night I went to a very very late show of 'The road', in a state of some anticipation. I read the book last summer in practically a single sitting, in fact sitting on a train when...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Jan 16, 2010, 12:35 pm
... the album (which I don't love as much at extremes like 'Paco de Renaldo's dream' and 'Her') does come across very effectively in the film noir menace of 'Jism': I...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Jan 3, 2010, 5:29 pm
I have blogged recently about how 2009 was not (in my own opinion) a particularly great year for music, but it was probably a much better year for movies and TV than several of the last few have been....
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Dec 31, 2009, 2:59 pm
It feels like someone famous always dies around Christmas (although James Brown is the only one who springs to mind right now), and today I was saddened to hear (from an Uncut email newsletter) that V...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Dec 27, 2009, 3:16 pm
As well as albums of the year, the fact that the year itself has a '9' in it has inevitably resulted in a slew of lists of best albums of the decade; this time 10 years ago we were worried abo...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Dec 19, 2009, 3:26 pm
It is close to that time of year again where multiple lists of the best albums of the year appear. In fact, I am being bombarded with two sets of lists, with one for the decade appearing also, but I w...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Dec 10, 2009, 4:10 pm
In my last post about Christmas music, somehow I forgot Mick Flannery's 'Christmas pas', re-released recently (after being on his first EP originally) with Kate Walsh guesting. Can't ...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Dec 6, 2009, 3:36 pm
I guess it is that time of year where I am allowed to think of Christmas music, after my December 1 moratorium deadline on the matter has passed. In fact, I quite like Christmas music, for exactly 5 w...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Nov 29, 2009, 2:40 pm
Return to the new west (part 5) For various reasons I have been quiet of late (mainly busy at work) but want to get back to blog business, so thought I would start with something else I have been slo...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Oct 23, 2009, 3:21 pm
My last post below was about Editors and the way in which thay have gradually won me over from initial enthusiasm to slight suspicion to general adminration over the course of three albums. I ended t...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Oct 19, 2009, 2:56 pm
The Editors have been on my mind and in my ears a lot recently. I bought 'The back room' when first released based on very positive reviews, and my usual attention-grabbing keywords (Joy Divis...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Oct 15, 2009, 2:38 pm
As mentioned at length in my last post, I have been listening to David Berkeley a lot, and one of the tracks I really like from his album 'Strange light' is 'Hurricane', which can be s...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Oct 7, 2009, 4:19 pm
As I have said before, no matter how many albums you get, there is still an essentially infinite ocean of music out there; sometimes, this can fill you with the kind of existential dispair that you ca...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Oct 5, 2009, 2:02 pm
I have written on several occasions on this blog about how there has been no single greater influence on my musical taste in the last decade than 'Uncut' magazine, and how this magazine has co...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Sep 24, 2009, 10:15 am
Okay, so this is my first book review, so I couldn't be expected to get the hang of it right away, could I? Anyway, I liked Nick Hornby's 'Juliet, naked', quite a bit in fact (consider...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Sep 23, 2009, 3:40 pm
A few years ago, I bought a CD of cover versions of songs by Alejandro Escovedo (Por Vida) which some musician friends had organised to try and (I think) pay for his medical bills when he caught hepat...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Sep 15, 2009, 3:59 pm
In the early or mid-1990s, I read a review of a music festival in Hot Press, an Irish music magazine, which nearly made me cry. It is not often you say that about a concert review for a band I had nev...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Sep 12, 2009, 3:10 pm
I got to see 'District 9' this week and thought it was very good, after being as usual partly expecting a disappointment after the hype. It was a good gritty thriller, and moved very interesti...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Sep 12, 2009, 2:30 pm
September is when Apple traditionally launches new hardware and software, and this year one of the unvelied products was an upgrade to iTunes, version 9, which I downloaded, along with the correspondi...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Sep 10, 2009, 2:22 pm
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I switched on the TV in a house I was renting and saw a performance on MTV Unplugged by a band I could not immediately identify, some of whose songs sounded ...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Sep 3, 2009, 2:30 am
On Wedneday night, 2nd September, I went to see Mick Flannery for the second time in a month, in another tiny venue called the Blackbird, a pub in Ballycotton, around 30 miles from Cork, which has a s...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Aug 29, 2009, 1:16 pm
As Nice Guy Eddie so eloquently put it, 'first things f**king last'; I am going to spell it right, I'm afraid. Firstly (the admittedly pretenious reason), this is because as an erswtwhile ...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Aug 23, 2009, 2:28 pm
Give or take, I have 10,000 songs on my PC, which I think is a reasonably sized music collection. I can't claim to love or even know all of them, but I have stretched my quest for music quite far,...
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A K. posted an article on The culture collection - Aug 20, 2009, 1:38 pm
I had bloody high hopes for 'Public enemies'; I had it built up into a cross between 'The untouchables' (the era, the suits, the guns) and 'Heat' (Michael Mann, bank robberies,...
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