Credit: James Watkins/BBC
Eurosonic Noorderslag is the Dutch equivalent of The Great Escape, the UK’s seaside springtime new music knees-up which sets the tone for following months’ festival season. Eurosonic typically takes place annually across four days in early January with every bar, theatre space, venue and fetish club in the city of Groningen, Netherlands turned into a stage as breaking artists from all over Europe set out to impress festival bookers and make a name for themselves.
However, with international travel banned and a global pandemic not
really lending itself to the art of squeezing yourself into a packed room, this year’s Eurosonic is a virtual-only affair, of course. For four evenings last week (Jan 13-16), four channels broadcast live performances recorded by the would-be lineup, while a fifth celebrates the best of what’s come before. It’s a very different sort of showcase to the intense venue-hopping that this event usually demands but in terms of
Louise Loves: Limerick’s Denise Chaila is the people’s choice!
Reporter:
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THE shortlist for this year s Choice Music Prize Irish Album of the Year 2020 was announced on Wednesday. For the first time since I can remember female acts dominate the finalists with a total of six nominees!
Among them Limerick’s own Denise Chaila who is hotly tipped to scoop the top prize. Denise’s Narolane colleagues and current band mates Godknows and Murli, are no strangers to the Choice Prize stage. In 2017 as the “Rusangano Family’ their debut album Let The Dead Bury The Dead, won the Album of the Year. It looks like our Limerick powerhouses could be in line to claim the title for a second time!
normal year, you’d find the
NME team (along with hundreds of music writers from across the globe) trudging across Groningen, the student-populated city in the northern Netherlands, in the bitter cold to get a glimpse of what’s new and next. Things couldn’t be further from that festival-frenzied reality, though, as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has all but destroyed the live music scene, rendering it virtually impossible to welcome hundreds of the most exciting names in music.
Without these showcase events, the next generation of talent would have a much tougher time building their story. So it’s a remarkable feat that Eurosonic (Jan 13-16) is still going ahead and having adapted quickly to the circumstances, the 35th edition of ESNS will be fully-digital, with 15-minute springboard sets by 189 acts from 36 countries streamed across four online channels. Even better, every performance will be free to watch online.
A dog walk a day plus a new smart fitness tracker keeps stress at bay
Fitbit’s new Sense is proving to be a boon for Olivia Chau as she negotiates a restricted exercise routine. Motivating and tracking her fitness routines, it is helping her monitor stress levels too
Olivia Chau’s dog Bacon is a great fitness motivator, and he helps her get out and about. Photographs: Conor Mulhern
From reluctant exerciser to ardent fitness fan, Limerick native Olivia Chau originally started training for vanity reasons.
“As I have gotten older it is more about being healthy and strong and it’s good for my mental health too,” she says.
There was a time, let’s call it 2019, when music was at the bottom rung of the ladder when it came to Irish television commissioners’ priorities even below general arts programming. There was hardly