have been totally spoiled with how gigs have turned out of late, and last Fridays was another exception Pharmacy experience that I have to blog about. Now ok so this is a gig I put on, and maybe it’s not fair to write about it but it’s often much tougher for me to really get in the moment at a gig I’m working on so maybe that balances out the bias? Plus there is no-one else in Sligo likely to blog about it so there!  Now…confession over….gig talk starting.

Beautiful Unit is/are the brainchild of Brian Mooney (see preview blog here) who is a well known magic man on the irish music scene. He’s played live with an endless list of musicians, popped up on recordings and set up his own label Trust Me I’m a Thief which has put out records from Jape, Somadrone. Si Schroeder, David O’Doherty, Warlords of Pez among others.   Using recordings made back in the day when he was in the IDIOTS as a basis for a new record, Brian out out European Son earlier this year.

Courtesy of some funding from Music Network Brian has been able to take a live group on the road playing unusual spaces up and down the country – mostly out of the back of his van. Most importantly, and this is what the funding made possible, the group were able to get together and rehearse new ways of playing and mostly new pieces- I don’t think they played one song from the album. Instead the core group of Brian, Bryan O’Connell (drums) and Jimmy Eadie (keys+) got together to experiment and slowly work out a sound that is based on their years of musicianship and knowledge.  The resulting sound is hugely adventurous without being alienating, and totally wraps you up in it.  The funding has also allowed for collaboration with a photography and film artist Hector Castells who creates a visual set up for the gig including projections, photographs, and live camera feeds…setting up the ideal atmosphere  in which to experience the music.

In the Pharmacy during sound check they elected to play from the corners of the room, placing the audience in the middle and pointing the speakers into this centre point. They also started to play as the audience were filing in so there is no strict “start” point to the gig, instead it just gets progressively louder and progressively more listened to – the audience deciding when the gig is going to start.  The beautiful unit sound just builds and builds over the (too short ) 40mins gig with layers of samples, guitar, keyboards, (stunning) drums, trumpet, slide whistle and whatever else is to hand.  Brian Quinn makes a star turn on trumpet (my favourite part being when he walks around and through the audience changing the location of the sound for each person) and Bryan O’Connell (a band of brians) is, as always, utterly exceptional on drums.  Between the musicians placed in different spots in the room instead of a linear line up, the surround sound for the audience and the 360 visuals it was impossible to look in one place for long, and so a sort of sensory overload threatens, but never comes.  The last track (or tracks?- they blend together, hard to tell, not that it matters) ups the tempo with a more direct drum beat and the layering gets more urgent building to huge sound that seems to fill every inch of the space, and ands so suddenly you feel bereft of the full sound, only realising it’s power in it’s absence….more please.