Scene and Heard

NEIL YOUNG CORK:

While Neil Young is busy gathering cash through online funding site Kickstarter for his PonoMusic project, it’s good to hear that Ireland may benefit through the involvement of Cork-based company PCH International. Corkonian businessman Liam Casey will manufacture the music players, presumably in one of his Chinese facilities.

PonoMusic includes an online music store, and a playback device, the PonoPlayer. Young is aiming to bring a “studio-level” quality to digital music files, and while it’s still unclear as to when the players will be available, a retail price of $399 has been mooted. According to PonoMusic, the format will recapture the emotion of music in a way that reflects what the artistes recorded: “They [musicians] describe how we take them back to the same feeling they had in the studio.

This is a feeling that they’ve lost — that we’ve all lost — with the proliferation of lossy compressed digital formats such as mp3 — where everything became loud and flat and heartless.” Perhaps Mr Young will pay a visit to his business partner’s HQ in Bessboro, Blackrock, when he’s playing down the road at the Marquee in July.

GIG WISE: Indiependence (August 1-3) in Mitchelstown, Co Cork, was launched yesterday, with a lineup that includes Public Enemy, Tom Odell, White Lies and David Holmes.

Electric Picnic (August 29-31) tickets have been on sale since Wednesday, with early birds getting on the case for a decent line-up that includes the likes of Outkast, Beck and Foals. For those who find a full weekend too much of a commitment, there are day tickets for Sunday at €90 +bf. Paolo Nutini is also on the Picnic line-up, as well as being added to the bill for the Marquee in Cork (July 8).

MUSIC NEWS: Jimmy Page has remastered Led Zeppelin’s first three albums, and they will be available in a smorgasbord of formats (vinyl, CD, digital, etc) from May 30. Each album will come with companion audio comprising unreleased music related to that album. For all their rock’n’roll excess, the Zeps never got themselves in the type of stew poor MIA is in for raising her middle finger during a performance at the Super Bowl in 2012.

The NFL is attempting to sue the British/Sri Lankan artiste for $16.6m, a figure the sports organisation say is close to what advertisers would pay for the two-minute slot MIA was onstage for. NME reports MIA has asked Madonna for financial help to fight the case.

COMEDY CAPERS: Tommy Tiernan has announced a World Tour of Kerry for May, taking in six towns in the Kingdom in the first fortnight of the month. In Cork, Bernard O’Shea from Republic of Telly is at the Everyman on April 19, while Patrick McDonnell of Savage Eye fame is in City Limits tomorrow.

FILM TIPS: Nymphomaniac comes with the warning that “this film contains scenes that some may find offensive”, but anyone worried about having to justify going to see such a sexually-explicit film at the Triskel in Cork this weekend needn’t be worried. It’s made by arthouse favourite Lars von Trier, and won several prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Conscience clear!

This first instalment of the two-part offering stars Stacy Martin as the young ‘nymphomaniac’, with Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg) taking up the older role in the second part. To make the explicit scenes, Von Trier filmed body-doubles having sex, and then superimposed their genital areas on the film’s stars. Meanwhile, the next ‘live’ event at various Omniplex cinemas is The Golden Age from the Bolshoi on Sunday, March 30.