Music Reveiw: DJ David Holmes at RHA Gallery, Dublin

4/5

David Holmes’ five hour set at the Royal Hibernian Academy’s central Dublin gallery was a journey into the unexpected. In a white-walled downstairs space, the Belfast DJ and soundtrack composer diligently mashed cinematic swells, house beats and krautrock grooves.

Upstairs, meanwhile, guests sipped complimentary drinks from event sponsors Hennessy and participated in games of handball in an impromptu court installed in a yawning gallery room. From there, the curious wandered into a second exhibition hall and an instillation by artist Maria McKinney that scrutinised the relationship between science and agriculture via a series of photographs of cattle with paper mache adornments on their backs. ‘Eclectic’ hardly begins to cover it.

This was one of those evenings, then. One moment you were grooving out to Holmes’ complex weave of floor-fillers and dense instrumentals, the next you were tossing a branded GAA handball against a wooden wall.

It sounds absurd and perhaps it was. Holmes’s textured was accompanied by a lively video show, which fleshed out the music via artful squiggles and cloudlike swirls.

The Belfast-born DJ has just released a new mix collection as part of the acclaimed Late Night Tales series and his live set was in a similar vein of fearless genre-splicing. Amid spoken word contributions by BP Fallon and tracks by Buddy Holly and David Crosby, the compilation features a cover 10CC’s ‘I’m Not In Love’ with disembodied vocals reminiscent of those deployed by Holmes on his remarkable 2008 album The Holy Pictures.

He didn’t sing at the RHA — indeed, for most of the evening he stared intently at his laptop. Nonetheless, this was a performance of wit, empathy and imagination. And if the intensity ever became too much, you could always nip upstairs for a game of handball.