some new essential music videos with jarjarjr, Princ€ss & Ahmed, With Love
Two wildly different Irish hip-hop cuts and a performance by one of the country's most fascinating experimental groups. All they have in common is that I think they're class.
Ahmed, With Love & Curtisy - Help Wanted
In my coverage of Curtisy & Rory Sweeney's phenomenal recent run I mentioned Ahmed, With Love's recent moves with Brook Records were worth keeping an eye on. To announce the upcoming mixtape COMMA, FULLSTOP. we get this gorgeous cut from the dream team - Karim, Curtisy, Rory & TXPE_EATER locked in. I do genuinely think they're practically unbeatable as a duo in Ireland right now, and if the stuff that has been playing at gigs is anything to go by, there's a ton of top-tier unreleased stuff I'll be looking for on this mixtape.
I call out the video specifically not just because I've been enjoying the Brook Records stable's visuals pretty consistently but because there's a little preview snippet at the end of the track that sounds like it might be his best tune yet.
Outside the video, I really just can't get over how good the merch has been for him recently. I saw someone wearing the full A,WL. GAA kit at Féile Na Gréine over the weekend and like, who else is doing it like this? Also up for grabs are the mixtapes on handwritten CD-Rs and packs of themed trading cards around that GAA kit. I don't know how I've written about multiple Irish acts with trading cards and sports kits at this point. Maybe there's some nascent genre I've not identified yet.
jarjarjr - Last Call
This one brings together two threads I've been thinking about lately - jarjrjr's extremely exciting new album campaign and the work of iconic Irish video artist Brownsauce - both of which I've been thinking about breaking out into their own articles on the site, so it's cool to see them both in once place.
jarjarjr's story is crazy, and one I actually touched on briefly in my latest scene report while covering the rise of Curtisy, Rory Sweeney & co. Coming up as a producer in a lo-fi scene racking up millions of plays on hazey remixes of Nas and MF DOOM and getting international love for jazzy instrumentals, the first insights that he was completely barred out came in 2020 with a couple gigs around Cork and the pandemic-era double single Two Pin Plug. These two tracks revealed a diligent student of his inspirations, dropping dense, multi-syllabic rhymes with stone-faced confidence, and some of his best work in the background. These tracks came with the promise of a debut album Catch The Dusk, which continued to elude us for years as his International Beat Machines label continued to resurface gems from his SoundCloud archives.
Last Call is the second single in an album campaign that shows a huge amount of investment and focus. First single Sense The Beer Bought feels very much at home in his discography of hazey jazz; albeit recorded in The Clinic with Louis Younge, Dylan Lynch and Neil Dorrington, the track channels brings out a chemistry and fluidity that can't be captured in the DAW. Last Call feels new for him though, and is another testament to that new level of musicianship - the vocoder and cozy bass synth feel almost California Love. His studious flows sound enormous in that context, and with a new single about to drop any minute it's fair to say we should be giving jarjar his flowers now.
I've always had my eye out for something Brownsauce is working on; I've had a draft cooking for ages about his Somewhere In Ireland film that brought the Limerick rap scene into my point of view with its gorgeous rotoscoped animations mixed with an erratic editing style, and a keen curatorial eye that brought together the PX Music scene and The Mary Wallopers as unlikely pals (I can't prove that this film started the Mary Wallopers, but they were still going by TPM when it came out). This video shows off his playful animation style, creating 2375 frames with Melissa Duffy and Michael Winchester over 5 months. It calls out "NO AI WAS USED IN THE CREATION OF THIS VIDEO" which, honestly, is class.
Princ€ss live at BYOL for Féile Na Gréine
I'm a bit late to the wherethetimegoes "supergroup" Princ€ss, by which I mean they've already pulled a fair bit of attention internationally by the time I got around to them, but I have been all in on them since their appearance on Limerick staple BYOL (Bring Your Own Lunch) which was released over the Féile weekend. The full BYOL archive is worth a look, but this flawless live show is beautiful, dreamy stuff; they start out looking like a particularly great new shoegaze group but then the tracks turn into long hypnagogic instrumental passages, fusing those shoegaze elements with strings, samples, synths, and even a hint of trad (at least I've never seen an SP-404 and a heavily processed tin whistle on a stage at the same time). Reviewers have made a lot of the band's self-identification as a supergroup and how they work as this melting pot of different musical backgrounds and influences, and I think it's really something you should watch for yourself in this video to get a bigger sense of it before diving into the (phenomenal) recent record. I'm excited to get deeper into the wherethetimegoes universe at some point - another one for the long list of articles I really should write. This video is as good a starting point as any I could recommend, though.
