the rooms I've been in lately
highlights of the year so far featuring Cold Summit, Peter O'Sullivan, Rita Lynn, OUCH™, and the many gigs that I wish I covered sooner
Between my last post and this one, March 9th marked one year since I started this website, and I've been enjoying the twists and turns on the road. Beginning with "algorithm spirits" and "the fourth best view on streaming"- establishing this website, the mission it stands for, and the type of music I do it for. Bigger, weirder, riskier, preferably played live, at the very least for sale and definitely not on Spotify.
As I've mentioned before, I would have liked to do more interviews and more video work, and Fourth Best still doesn't really do TikTok and all of that, but in truth I'm very, very proud of the work I've done so far; beginning to map the web of Irish hip-hop excellence, making the case for the immense value of our DIY heroes (like the team behind Féile na Gréine) and much in between.
I don't know if I've ever said it in plain text on this site, but I see the purpose of Fourth Best as something wider than new music coverage for the present tense. I want it to be an archive, something we can refer back to in the many years after. When people remember an album I've covered a decade from now, I hope they can look here find something else that mattered to us when it happened. Sometimes, the mission gets away from me; I got a very supportive reaction to the fourth best view on AI, but it was genuinely painful to write. A lot of immersing myself in a world that's the opposite of what I stand for. I didn't offer any upsides, and I even pulled some punches. A lot of the people who read it saw between the lines. It's probably been the one piece that has sparked the most attention in my DMs, matching my disbelief.
Before I published it, there was a lot of questions on what the site even is. Why don't I do release coverage and round-ups? I don't have the time to promise something consistent, but I'd still like to. When do I do guest posts? "When the opportunity arises", really.
I've been in tiny rooms across the country to witness Irish music history that I feel runs the risk of disappearing. Let me tell you about one of the best gig series in the country.
peak
Cold Summit isn't like anything else I've seen in Ireland. Part of it is an absolutely perfect sense of place; it's difficult to imagine a room for it that isn't the back of The Big Romance, clouded in its rich neon glow. The real star of the show is front and centre, towering either side of a pair of turntables. The architect of the venue's sound system, Toby Hatchett, described the vision for his work as "a hybrid sound system that marries the fidelity of hi-fi with the precision of a studio monitor from the golden era of recording studios. A system that’s not just heard but felt."
Cold Summit is a family affair. One of its pillars is the NUXSENSE collective. Manning the Numarks, flanked by the speaker cabinets, is sivv. Something like 80% of the beats you'll hear at a given Cold Summit are sivv's own work, products of crate digging and innovative sample flipping which genuinely wouldn't feel out of place on a MIKE or Earl Sweatshirt project. sivv isn't the only producer, or even the only great producer, to align with the collective, but he is unmistakably the heart and soul of the group, a self-taught beatmaker and king of the minimal; samples embellished with a delicate touch, always given immense room to breathe. On the Hatchett, it sounds sublime, and you'll find his name in the liners of the majority of the collective's near-infinite back catalog.
For a long time NUXSENSE were the most exciting "up next" in Ireland; Luthorist's debut album with the collective Hueco Mundo was the first time I ever saw hip-hop made in Ireland reviewed on the Pitchfork pages back in 2019. Pronounced nuisance; their backstory once summed up by fellow artist and sivv's cousin Jehnova in an interview with Kate Brayden: "We had a Bluetooth speaker and just freestyled when we were loitering." It's a sound forged in a youth scattered around Dublin. Its origin is casual, its ambition is global. Something you see a lot of in coverage of their come-up is talk of its geographic improbability; 2023 project Duality of a Samurai features Luthorist, Jehnova and Zimback; representing roots from Brazil, South Africa and Japan, united over one of sivv's most infectious loops. So why does it look so natural to shoot a video for it in the Botanical Gardens?
Speaking to Dean Van Nguyen for a NUXSENSE feature in The Face, Jehnova once said:
I think my music and Dublin are inseparable because just the environment that I’m around and just the sounds of the city really influence me. It’s kind of like how New York rappers, their shit sounds New York‑y. I feel like our music sounds Dublin‑y.
(Dean Van Nguyen, one of the country's best music writers by any dimension, was the one who wrote both that Pitchfork review and that feature in The Face. He also did a scene report for Pitchfork a few years prior in 2016. A decade on, it's full of incredible reminders and what-ifs. Dean still champions the NUXSENSE lads five years after Hueco Mundo. His latest coverage bears a striking headline: "Jehnova is getting even better." In the month since then, Jehnova has put another album on Bandcamp.)
What makes hip-hop music Dublin-y? Long before Fourth Best, I've wondered if the sound of Irish hip-hop would ever be cleanly definable - would the music of this island drift towards a given genre, a given production style, a given accent, a given sense of humour; but we have Irish grime, Irish drill, Irish hip-hop with its values planted in the golden age, Irish hip-hop impossible to imagine without the internet, Irish hip-hop in a range of accents, Irish hip-hop that takes the piss, is dead serious, or everything in between. The boundaries of Dublin rap are intangible, but you might learn to know it when you hear it.
In the pre-pandemic era, that same kind of introspective, jazzy, lo-fi approach showed up in a number of spaces. 2016 brought us Kojaque's now-somehow-overlooked Sunday Roast mixtape, 2017 brought us the early days of NUXSENSE, 2018 brought us the arrival of Nealo, something of an avatar of the scene, the most Dublin-y voice of all. Nealo emerged from a background in hardcore punk, reborn as an MC with the support of Arbu on the boards of October Year, and played alongside NUXSENSE at the OSLO gig series that same month.
Coming up with a hook while testing some new verses at Cold Summit, Nealo pays homage to Jehnova
Being each other's day ones, the connection stuck - Nealo played quite a few NUXSENSE shows back in the day. The sphere of influence expanded with the arrival of INNRSPACE, a neo-soul group that became the backbone of Nealo's sound both live and on record. Adam Shanahan's production and engineering also became an essential part of the sound, and Jehnova became a permanent fixture on stage at Nealo's shows. The Irish scene at that point was absolutely thriving: big gigs, high effort statements with live bands; in many ways laying the ground-work that the likes of Bricknasty would emerge from with the Nasty Sessions on the other side of the pandemic.
I still remember one of the less-conventional Nealo gigs in late 2021, early days coming out of the lockdowns - commissioned to perform tracks from a "classic album" for a Jameson Black Barrell event, Nealo assembled a nine-piece band, took singing lessons, and performed some Bruce Springsteen heavy-hitters before running into his own back catalog. I don't think he told anyone among the public they were going to be Bruce Springsteen songs before the event. Nobody else could do this. I have a lot of time for Nealo's records, but it's hard to deny that his ability to put on a hell of a show in almost any circumstance is maybe his greatest strength. It's what makes his place in this room all the more vital. He's one of a few rappers that can get away with "the final days of capitalism look likely" in a verse, and one of fewer still that can make you believe it.
The last link in the Cold Summit chain is Rebel Phoenix, something of a bridge between multiple eras in the history of Irish hip-hop - with albums spanning back to 2014, through blistering electronic-led tracks with Marcus Woods, and up to a great 2023 album Museum with Adam Shanahan on "Executive Producer" duties. This year he's back on the grind, and 2025's self-produced God's Tear sees him on the back-and-forth with none other than Jehnova. The lineup of any given Cold Summit spans a generation of excellence, an tightly-knit local scene with a clear character of its own. To study it is to know Dublin.
Bandcamp Album of the Day Jun 12, 2024
The easiest way to study it is to get in the room.
The early hours of a Cold Summit have a kind of jazz-bar feel: wine glasses, good pints, tables; the gig celebrates the deep cuts and thrives on giving artists a place to run their unreleased or test drive new productions. Hip-hop shows are sometimes too focused on hype, one of the artists tells me. But invariably the room fills up, the tables get cleared out of the way, and though the sound remains the same, hype builds regardless.
Part of it's the fact that the energy between performers is infectious. In theory there's a lineup and a running-order, but as the MCs run through a vast catalog of music both released and unreleased, mics get passed, and sometimes it hits a flow-state that resembles something between a trad session and a cypher. The fact there's no real stage in the back of the Big Romance and everyone's on the same level helps. Energy is high in the back of the building.
Zimback, originally hailing from Osaka and who one source indicates might have been rapping since 1996(!) closed out Cold Summit that night. Every single shot I have of him performing, you see others on the lineup ecstatic to see him there. Hell, most of them have Luthorist with the camcorder out and a serious grin on his face.
While Cold Summit previously took a break from 2023 until last night, I'm told it will be back within a matter of weeks with a fresh lineup. I doubt I'll be missing it.
a day well spent, with friends of the site
peter o sullivan's "a day well spent" was one of my favourite Irish albums of 2024. I didn't talk about it much here on Fourth Best, because I'm still figuring out how to write about work by my friends, or works that I work on, doing bits for PR, design, or similar. Peter has used photographs of mine in the past, but it's even harder to make any case that I'm impartial about the record because I even appear on the cover art for it, in a fitting photograph taken by Jordan Gough. I'm sitting in the corner of Maureen's, head hanging low, listening to him read at the first edition of River Runs Round festival back in 2023. While somber attention is being paid to the speech, the room itself absolutely teeming with life, shaded with warm lights and stained glass, mirrors and amber pints.
Peter's songwriting is delicate and direct, picking up on microscopic detail in bustling environments, allowing his characters to monologue and slowly spill their secrets. One might note that his songs are often about the corners of rooms, to be performed in the corners of rooms, but a short anonymous biography on Breaking Tunes takes it further:
Peter writes songs like he is trying to become the corner of the room and bring you there with him. What he writes is so different from what he speaks, the only thing in common seems to be him. In his songs there is an attention to detail and a focus on the people around him, almost always the observer.
FhaBlo
If you know where to look Peter is always sharing bits and pieces of his songs, including under many pseudonyms that I won't necessarily spoil here, but funnily enough he never made any public posts about a day well spent until weeks after its release. He moves at his own pace with his music. I don't think he ever made it for an audience bigger than the ones that know where to find him. Funnily enough, when researching the NUXSENSE story for the Cold Summit segment, I thought about Peter quite a bit. Especially when Dean Van Nguyen wrote:
Jehnova should be international by now. But the world doesn’t always appreciate the gifted, especially those who break the rules and defy all logic. Take the rapper’s decision to drop IOU 3 five days before Christmas. It was a piece of scheduling that risked the album getting lost amid the rush of end-of-year lists and general lack of appetite for new music during the holidays. But the passage of two months makes IOU 3 no less interesting to grapple with – not when it’s a project that feels snatched out of time, independent from all recent trends, flawless in its fundamentals.
Funnily enough, I'm pretty sure they've had cans together more than once. a day well spent has its own timeless qualities. I listened to that record for the first time through on a transatlantic flight, suffering a cruel sunburn that wouldn't let me sleep, and even though I had spent months of my life with lead single sinking sun by that point, something about listening to it suspended in the darkness above the earth really got me. It uses the vernacular of rural gossip to paint a story almost overheard more than told:
The postman's son was a friend of mine; I met him at the funeral of the butcher's wife
The song centres around a three-line refrain sang by the postman's son at the funeral: "Go gently into love, sinking sun, join the stars above", rendered as a layered performance by Peter and Lorkin O'Reilly the first time around. When news comes around of the son's death, Peter at first sings the refrain alone, and the delivery is absolutely heartbreaking, before the paired vocal rises back up from the background. He has a real knack for unexpected sonic details - sandcastles uses a clip from Futurama to great effect, ...typical is an unexpected bit of sound collage.
Opportunities to see Peter perform his own songs are rare - opportunities to see Peter on stage are not; he may be a man who's been in a hundred bands, from Alex Gough's backing quartet to the band that brought Rita Lynn's Mystéé to life. It was on Rita's Ostara tour that I saw him play a lot of these songs for the first time; Ostara is a festival marking the Spring Equinox and the changing of seasons, and Peter brought songs of transition with him on the way - songs of returning home and finding what stands still and what changes utterly. Many of these songs aren't ones I know where to find. He commanded absolute silence in the back of the Cobblestone, an audience transfixed. He might be trying to become the corner of a room, but he's quite comfortable in the middle of it.
I learned about Rita's music while I was working on River Runs Round, where she was a triumph of the artist-in-residence programme, her work being developed for the unique setting of St. Peter's Church in Cork. (She's since played St. Luke's. I could not have passed up the opportunity to see her in a smaller setting. Her work is soulful, minimal, intimate - I honestly think her closest contemporary might be Beth Gibbons of Portishead - but feels at home in the Cobblestone as she takes to the stage with a harmonium drone. A singular artist. The only one I've ever seen sell essential oil blends at the merch table.
As well as by Peter, she's joined on stage by cellist Jessie Hanley and drummer Josh Sampson (who has a history of working with Fourth Best favourites, touring with Talos from the early days, now playing with RÓIS). It's an extremely tight show, and should be a cheat code for festival bookers going into the summer.
Which is as good a segue as any to...
ᚐᚈᚆᚏᚒ
The single best moment at any gig I've been to all year happened right in the middle of Fragments of Eternity, an experimental presentation of electronic music by some of the most fascinating rising stars in Irish music. Sloucho put a full pro-shot of that gig on YouTube, so I made a comment just so I can point back to that moment. Brawni is doing some phenomenal high-energy percussive stuff on an enormous modular setup, and Rory Sweeney's laptop starts fading in, playing an unreleased track with Roo Honeychild and Ushmush, a banger with blistering Gaeilge, rolling bass, little chops of breakbeats. It's a run that connects highlights from both artists in a set that's rather unlike anything I've ever seen.
Fragments of Eternity is a hybrid of six different live electronic sets, sequenced onto a master timeline with a full site-specific light show. There was a Pellador merch line and lore to discover. Every single one of the sub-sets had a show-stealing moment or other; Rhoshi and Sloucho trading takes on single 150K, Vaticanjail and Spooklet bringing soaring live vocals to the table.
The show's narrative centres around a dystopian mega-corporation sapping the energy out of an otherworldly island to turn it into a product; a voice from an outer world states "This island is not a commodity." In a hastily written Letterboxd review of the recording, I wrote that this gig marks "a good reason not to emigrate". Irish electronic music continues to pass from strength to strength, but two months on, Fragments of Eternity still feels like we're crossing a threshold. It could be the highlight of any festival weekend. It's an ambitious celebration of a thriving, diverse community. Just like Cold Summit was. Just like half the gigs I go to are.
what do we do about it
I've become obsessed with Skelly's YouTube channel. The bio is "mostly gig recordings". It's an understatement. Skelly goes to way more gigs than I do. He's always armed with some half-decent microphones and a camcorder. He is twenty times the bootlegger we deserve.
I learned about Skelly from the ANSEO LIVE TAPE, a collection of his recordings from just one venue cut to police interview tape, raising funds for the venue itself and for Palestinian causes. It is an essential document of a rising Irish scene from the view of one of its tiniest but most consistently hopping rooms, capturing everything from to hyper-mathrock to post-hardcore to trans punk to electronica to shoegaze to likely successors to the Black Midi throne. If you go through his YouTube you'll find enough full sets to last the year, decent recordings of everyone from bootleggers' favourites on tour like Geordie Greep and BC,NR to a decent document of buzzy events like Whelan's Ones To Watch. It absolutely murders what I do here in terms of building the archive.
I might pull him on for an interview here some day.
In the meantime I think what I need to do more than all is just keep being in the rooms where these things are happening and writing these gig reports more often. There's so much more I wanted to write about and didn't get around to earlier this year. There was a week where I went to back-to-back fundraisers in the Grand Social, celebrating trans community resilience and women's empowerment. I should have written about seeing Pebbledash performing one of my favourite songs in years, Carraig Aonair. I should have written about the phenomenal stage presence of Stratford Rise or the absurdity of bbft. Almost every single one of these bands has been recorded by Skelly, and my future favourites are probably already sitting there on his YouTube channel.
It's exciting to see the archive is in good hands.
Photographs taken for Fourth Best by myself (Colm Cahalane) are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Or in other words, you're free to use these as you see fit, just credit me and Fourth Best. I intend to put the full archive up somewhere, some day soon. Here's to the rooms I've been in so far this year. I promise I'll take photography classes soon.
...and fuck it, two from late last year.
Thanks all. Until next time.
