Music Current 2026: Dublin Sound Lab - Action! Station! (Concert)

PERFORMERS:
Caittíona Frost, percussion
Paul Roe, clarinets
Shane Latimer, e-guitar
Feilimidh Nunan, violin
Paul Grennan, cello
Fergal Dowling, electronics
Barbara Elison, live audio/visual performance

TEAM:
Fergal McKeown, sound
Chris Keogh, video projection
Aidan Whelan, lighting
Paul Lynch, stage management

Dublin Sound Lab return with their trademark multimedia presentation style. In this year's festival they focus our attention on the space between the action and the sound. When a percussionist's beater strikes a drum, the action seems to stop abruptly at the moment the music begins to sound. In this new programme, "Action! Station!", Dublin Sound Lab place the listener in the gap between action and sound, the point of contact where the waveform crosses the zero-point, where the memory pointer resets to the start of the loop, at the point of suspension between action and sound.

Dublin Sound Lab is doing an important job for those in Ireland who remain passionate about music in the post-war avant-garde lineage and who rarely get the opportunity to hear such 'difficult' music performed… …flying the flag in Ireland over the past decade for European modernism.

Liam Cagney, Journal of Music

Dublin Sound Lab is a contemporary music project group specialising in electronic and computer-mediated concert performance. As well as presenting existing works, we initiate collaborations and use computer-based techniques to explore relationships between compositional process and performance practice, and to create new and engaging concert experiences.

Formed in 2008 by composer Fergal Dowling and organist Michael Quinn, Dublin Sound Lab has worked with many leading Irish and international composers, performing works by: Ailis Ni Riain, Gérard Grisey, Salvatore Sciarrino, Kaija Saariaho, Luca Francesconi, Karlheinz Essl, Peter Ablinger, Mauricio Kagel, Wim de Ruiter, Ann Cleare, Scott McLaughlin, Barry Truax, Roderik de Man, Karen Tanaka, Jean-Claude Risset, Ed Bennett, Judith Ring, Gerald Barry, Jonathan Nangle, Jonathan Harvey, Rob Canning, Gráinne Mulvey, David Bremner, Garth Knox, and many others.

Programme

Michael Maierhof - Splitting 70 (for two performers and video projection), 12’
Simon Steen-Andersen - Next to Beside Besides (for cello), 4'
Peter Fahey - Entr'act (for clarinet, percussion, e-guitar, violin, cello), 5’
Simon Steen-Andersen - Next to Beside Besides (for violin and cello), 4’
Bethany Younge - new commission* (for bass clarinet, percussion, e-guitar, cello, electronics), 10’
Simon Steen-Andersen - Next to Beside Besides (for percussion, violin, cello), 4’
Barbara Elison - Loop’n’Groove: Micro-choreographies of the past (live audio/visual performance), 43’

*Music Current Commission

Tickets

€10 tickets until 10 March, €22/20 thereafter. Booking at Project Arts Centre.