“I’ve been thinking about the various forms of rap artists that distinguish our local scenes and have broadly – and I mean very broadly – come up with four different factions.”
Delaney plays traditional music and can sing a bit of sean-nós if he wants to. But he is also a house-music DJ and wants to break Irish-language songs out of their usual genres.
“I found a lot of my songs through songs of Irish chivalry and old books and I had to come up with airs that hadn’t been sung for centuries,” says Sean Fitzgerald.
“I never used to play Arabic stuff out, and then I slowly started to introduce random songs,” says Jamal Sul. “I started to realise that people actually liked it and I thought, ‘That’s weird.’”
At times this feels like an all-too-straightforward exploration of a cult musician’s work – but if the aim is to spark interest in him, it certainly succeeds.
The new venue is bigger than the Tivoli Theatre was, so District 8 can now attract bigger crowds and bigger acts. But they still wouldn’t have chosen to leave the city centre, says Dave Parle.
“Fireflyes came from the desire to have something that’s not as mainstream as the rest of the Romanian music in Ireland,” says Rares Mihai Nicula, who plays guitar in the band.
