- Music
- 31 May 16
With just three days to go here's a look at some of the country's most exiting acts who are set to descend on Kilmainahm for Forbidden Fruit.
On Saturday you can see five of the country's biggest buzz acts play Forbidden Fruit, find out a bit about them and what to expect below.
KORMAC: Producer and DJ Kormac can boast an ever-expanding circle of cheerleaders, including Annie Mac and DJ Yoda. His 2014 album Doorsteps was a delightfully oddball affair with contributions by Irvine Welsh, Speech Debelle (winner of the Mercury Prize a million years ago) and Texas songwriter Micah P Hinson. In his alternate guise of big band leader, Kormac dabbles in funk and strings. In stripped down form, however, he manipulates twinkling beats into innovative new shapes.
WHITE COLLAR BOY: The electro two-piece of Gavin White and Mark Cummins met up in the most appropriate location possible, Catalan electro festival Primavera Sound. Since forming in 2011, they’ve supported artists such as Factory Floor and Com Truise and released a well regarded debut EP, Suu/Tide, in 2013. Not to be confused with the Belle and Sebastian song from 2006 (but you knew that already, obviously).
MMOTHS: After early buzz – and an endorsement from electronica father figure Flying Lotus – Newbridge’s Jack Colleran has taken his time putting together a debut album under his Mmoths moniker. But the delay didn’t worry him. Acclaim or media love never factored into his decision to make music full time.
“I don’t do this project for anyone but myself,” he told Hot Press earlier this year. “I don’t worry whether it is going to sell a lot of records. It’s a really selfish thing, I ‘m using it as a means of expression. It helps me get through things. I guess you could say it is semi-therapeutic.
“At the time it was weird,” he said of the early hype. “I wasn’t doing what everyone else was doing. It was quite lonely – in the sense that I was doing this on my own and didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.
“Was it overwhelming? I guess it may have seemed overwhelming from the outside. When you are experiencing it, you see the highs and the lulls too. So in that sense it doesn’t feel as overwhelming as people might think. There are plenty of quiet days.”
Luneworks, which will receive its live debut at Forbidden Fruit, isn’t a break up record per se – but it is informed by romantic pain. Feeling he needed to temporarily get away from Ireland, a recently heartbroken Colleran left the old country for a sojourn in Los Angeles, staying at the apartment of his manager Jimmy Flemming. Here, he devoted countless nights to assembling the album, a working method which imbued the record with a fever-dream sensibility.
“I didn’t leave the house that much,” he said. “When I have a lot of work to do my sleeping patterns go crazy. I’ll sleep during the day and stay up all night working. I’d see Jimmy in the morning and at night. When he was going to bed I’d be getting stuck in.”
CLU: This duo blend quirky grooves and an innovative live visual show. The results are thrilling, esoteric and, in the best sense, impossible to pin down. They’ve been compared to SBTRKT, while single ‘Moonrunner’, featuring vocals from Liverpool-based Dubliner Gemma Donlovely, is a woozy dubstep symphony which has racked up some 50,000 hits
on YouTube.
VOXXThis Dublin three-piece bring a love of ’70s glam and a thoroughly 21st century passion for splicing genres. Hot Press namechecked them as one of the most influential new Irish groups of 2015. Their early track ‘Stuck On My Mind’ quickly became a live favourite, while an exclusive HP Storeroom session further raised their profile. All of that and they are surely just getting started. Check out their single Glamour Puss here.