Culture
19 Sep 02

Sound and vision

Donal Dineen launches his latest exhibition at the Galway Arts Festival this month. as we've come to expect from the DJ, TV presenter, filmmaker and photographer, music plays a big part in the new work

Today FM DJ/photographer/filmmaker Donal Dineen continues his adventures in audio-visual symbiosis at the forthcoming Galway Arts Festival with an event entitled Up The Country, a combination of live music and images that will take place on the afternoon of Sunday, July 21 in the Town Hall Theatre.

The music comes from three sources: Scottish singer-songwriter James Yorkston, plus Irish acts The Tycho Brahe and The Uptown Racket Club, while the visuals are the result of some six months of hunter-gathering by Dineen.

“Effectively it’s just going to be scenery for a music show,” Dineen explains. “The Tycho Brahe is (former Plague Monkeys) Carol Keogh and Donal O’ Mahony’s new project along with Diarmuid Mac Diarmada, and the Uptown Racket Club is Donnacha Costello, David Donahue, Stephen Quinn and John Dermody, very much guitar based. With both of those acts it was basically a case of, having heard demos, I just thought this was music I could really work with – there’s lots of space to play around with and visualise. They’ll be playing along to pictures that I’m going to put on the big screen. The Uptown Racket Club will be matching it pretty closely, but with The Tycho Brahe it is improvised, there’s no script as such.”

Up The Country is essentially the third in a trilogy of Arts Festival exhibitions by Dineen, the first two having taken place as far back as 1993/4.

“I was meant to go back in 1995 to finish the third part,” he explains, “but I never got to do that, so it’s unfinished business in a way. The country theme really is about the fact that the chance to take photographs or do some filming is usually associated with the chance to leave the city, finding space to do something. Very often the camera is an excuse to go somewhere, it encourages you to observe the world, and when you do that you probably understand it a bit better. I think the reason why I want to keep taking pictures is it somehow makes sense of the things around you. And the fact that music is so involved in that process means it’s natural enough to align the two in a show. It’s an area that I feel very comfortable in, and in this case I’ve found that the music has been particularly inspiring.”