Things To Do: Prepare for the harvest, support a doctor, celebrate rejection

Our Picks

Our recommendations – no sponsored content, or adverts, just stuff we like.

Queen Maeve’s Grave by White Sage

Andy Walsh, the founder of Little Gem records, has just dropped his third album under the moniker of White Sage.

Now the sixth release to date by Walsh’s solo dreamwave project, Queen Maeve’s Grave is a hypnotic dive into rustic electronic music and free jazz, not dissimilar to the work of composer and saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu.

Following up his 2023 album, The Goose of Hermogenes, Queen Maeve’s Grave takes as its starting point a series of recordings from that same year. The first half of the album is composed of a single live performance Walsh gave at Graceland, an annual arts event in Sligo, while the second half is a collage of field recordings and performances that he gave at the Sunday live session which he curates.

A mish-mash of droning synths and spiralling saxophones, the occasional distorted guitar and grainy recordings of a walk around the Knocknarea hill in west Sligo, Queen Maeve’s Grave is an oddly soothing Sunday morning record.

Give it a spin over on White Sage’s Bandcamp page here, which is also currently selling cassettes of the album for €10 (including a digital version).

Aonghus McEvoy Group at Anseo, Sunday

Clearly, it’s a double header of Little Gem-related recommendations this weekend.

Over at the label's regular Sunday live sessions in Anseo, experimental guitarist Aonghus McEvoy will be performing with his full band, The Aonghus McEvoy Group, for the first time in a year. Primarily, his outings as of late have been as a solo artist. But on Sunday, he is set to debut a lot of new material that he has been writing over the past 12 months, and which is due to form the bulk of his next “band” album.

Before that, I would strongly recommend you give his last album a spin, 2022’s Under and Cracked, a blend of folk guitars, scratchy violas and frenzied, but delicate percussion that brings to mind the Velvet Underground at their most anarchic.

The support act for the night is punk group St. Quiteria. Doors open at 20.00 on Sunday, 3 August, and it’s €10 entry.

For more information, visit Little Gem’s social media here.

Dr. Feras, From Gaza To Galway

Dr. Feras Hassan Rusrus is a general physician from Rafah, who returned to Gaza in 2023 after studying medicine at Alexandria University in Egypt.

However, as he was getting ready to begin his internship year, the Israel-Gaza war erupted. Dr. Rusrus volunteered as a physician in Rafah until the city was evacuated, and he then provided medical assistance in displacement camps.

More recently, the doctor was accepted to a master’s course in Diabetes Studies at Galway University, and in order to take his place, he has set up a crowdfunding page to cover his tuition.

In order to help him raise these funds and take his place on the course, this Sunday, 3 August, The Cobblestone pub is going to be hosting an evening of poetry and music, featuring performances from Sarah Clancy, Catherine Ann Cullen, Donagh Mac Uidhir, Leda for King, Emer Martin and Sara O’Loughlin.

Doors are open at 19.00. Tickets are €20 and can be purchased here.

Rose Keating, Books Upstairs

Over in Books Upstairs on Wednesday, the Waterford author Rose Keating is due to launch her debut collection of short stories, Oddbody.

It shouldn’t be too difficult figuring out if this event is for you or not. The premise from "Squirm", one these shorts, should help make up your mind up rather quickly:

“A young woman deals with the restraints of having to stay at home and look after her father who has become a worm, living in a compost pile in the bathtub.”

Magnificent.

Keating is a winner of the Marian Keyes Young Writer Award, and a contributor to the Stinging Fly, Apex Magazine, Banshee and Southword. With Oddbody, which is on sale now, she explores themes like desire, fear and shame, through 10 weird stories that blend surrealist horror with mundane everyday scenes, like sipping Lemsip while being haunted by the ghost of Count Dracula actor Bela Lugosi.

Keating will be in conversation with the author Cathy Sweeney at 18.30 on Wednesday.

It is free entry, but booking is advised.

Salon of Diúltaíodh

The Royal Hibernian Academy’s 195th Annual Exhibition is due to wrap up this Sunday, 3 August. So, to mark the conclusion to this year’s edition of the longest-running and largest open submission exhibition, I’m going to recommend you go somewhere else.

Exactly 100 metres away on Hume Street, Gallery X is staging its own exhibit: Salon of Diúltaíodh, or Salon of Rejection. Inspired by the Salon des Refusés, an 1863 group show held by artists, including Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, who were rejected by the official Paris Salon, Gallery X is carrying on this tradition of celebrating the sidelined and spurned.

Curated by the photographer Ishmael Claxton, the Salon will include works by more than 60 artists who have been rejected by “institutional shows”, chief among them the RHA’s exhibition right around the corner on Ely Place.

Salon of Diúltaíodh will run until Saturday, 9 August. For more information, visit the event page here.

Department of Energy’s Ambient Harvest

While technically the enigmatic ambient record label The Department of Energy is based in Cork, its location shouldn’t exclude it from a newsletter that focuses on the comings and goings in the capital.

For one thing, the Department of Energy is concerned with, among other things, “flora, fauna, folklore, ghosts, hidden forces, invisible agencies, magick, mythology, Old Gods, paganism, … thin places, roads, rivers, saints, streams, standing stones and the weather.”

That’s basically Clonsilla.

And for another, the Department’s latest mixtape, Ambient Harvest features a plethora of off-kilter talents from Dublin across its twenty-two tracks, including new works by composer Ian Nyquist; co-founder of Bad Soup records and member of experimental pop duo headfooters Eric FitzGerald aka Qwasi; and Sebastian Adams from Kirkos Ensemble and Unit 44.

Ambient Harvest is the Department’s sixth release, acting as a sequel to their previous mixtapes 2022’s May Day, 2021’s Lee Lines, both of which are available here.

Drawing inspiration from the summer, Ambient Harvest also is the first of three “landscape mixtapes” planned for the coming seasons. A follow-up, Irish Gothic is scheduled for this winter, and Celtic Futurism is set to come out next spring, promising to reconstruct “Irish dance music for the woods and the club”.

Ambient Harvest will be released tomorrow, Friday, 1 August. To accompany the mixtape, the Department will also be selling 48-page zines, which can be purchased on their Bandcamp page here.

All proceeds after production costs will be directed towards MASI - Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland.

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Rush Harbour Festival

The Rush Harbour Festival is returning this year, from 1 to 4 August, with live music, craft stalls and a food market planned across locations like Harbour Park, Echlin Court and The Anchor over the weekend.

On Saturday, over North Beach, there will also be an airshow at 15.00.

For more information, visit the Rush Tourism Facebook page here.

The Naked Kink

In Gallery X on Saturday, 2 August, The Naked Kink is holding a female-led figure drawing class with a kinky twist!

Artists and models will be members of the kink community, taking the opportunity to indulge their exhibitionism while wearing their finest and fetish-est.

The muse/muses will also talk about themselves, why they wanted to pose, and their life in kink.

For more information, visit The Naked Kink’s Instagram page here or contact them at thenakedkink@gmail.com.

The Lunch Punch Power House in Conference Room 4, The Abbey Theatre

Premiering today, Thursday 31 July, is the world premiere of Caitríona Daly’s play: The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4.

Running until 6 September and directed by Raymond Keane, this show uses completely absurd comedy to skewer contemporary corporate culture.

For more information and to book tickets, visit the play’s page here.

CoisCéim Broadreach presents Performing Memory

A cross-cultural collaboration rooted in Sasha Kurmaz’s response to the story of sisters in Ukraine who danced on soldiers’ graves, which sparked debate about appropriate ways to grieve.

Adapted for Dublin by choreographer Simone O’Toole, 20 non-professional dancers transform real stories into raw, collective movement.

The event is unticketed, and performances will be held at the Old Bandstand in Fairview Park at 14.00 and 16.00 on 19 September, and Wood Quay Amphitheatre at 13.00 and 13.45 on 20 and 21 September.

For more information, visit the event’s page here.

Dublin Maker 2025

On 30 and 31 August, Dublin Maker will be holding a “show and tell” at Leopardstown Racecourse where inventors and makers, sourced through an open call, will be showcasing their creations in a carnival atmosphere.

The showcase is family friendly, and tickets are free.

For more information, visit their website here.

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