Really sorry to hear that DEAF Festival have today announced that this will be their last every DEAF. After 8 years the organisers are finding the financing of the festival too much of a struggle, and have decided to call it a day.  In many ways I’m not surprised, festivals of such scale require so much organisation and planning and it’s near impossible to sustain if they are not at least well funded enough to pay the directors.  With a drastic cut in Arts Council funding due in the budget (and suffering cuts from this year no doubt) and an extremely difficuly commercial fundraising climate it is just too difficult to sustain.

They certainly end on a high note, the 8th DEAF is a momentous undertaking and I think has had the most ambitious programme to date. The public response has been visibly large, with over 2,500 fans on their new facebook page (created less than a month ago) and capacity audiences for most gigs.This years festival has made huge inroads into the bringing together of contemporary classical and electronic/dance audiences blurring the lines between dance, electronica, contemporary music and sound art, so it’s an even greater pity that this is the end rather than the beginning. Festival’s like DEAF are the first casualties to Arts funding cuts as they are project based and not underpinned by a full time funded organisation. I wish it weren’t the first of many but I feel with the cuts coming down the line we’ll be seeing many more announcements like this one.

- Update to all facebook fans:

Hi all …

With just three days and nights to go until it’s over, we’re nearing the end of this years DEAF. It’s been an amazing festival, possibly our best to date and certainly our most well attended since we started the festival eight years ago. So just before we wrap up this year we’d like to let you all know that this is going to be our very last DEAF! All things considered we’ve decided to finish up on a high note and move on to the other projects that we’re anxious to get off the ground. So it’s certainly not the last you’ve heard of us!!

As so many people have invested so much time and effort to help us over the years, and so many of you have supported us by coming along to the events, we’ll be putting out a more detailed statement in a couple of weeks as to why we’ve decided to stop DEAF.

We just wanted to let you all know now before we finish up this year, as the gigs over this weekend will be the last ever DEAF events. So we hope we can convince as many of you as possible to come out and help us give the festival a great send off. !
We’re going to do one final mailout listing the last couple of day’s events, but we’d like to draw special attention to what’s now turning out to be our last ever DEAF closing party. It’s on Saturday night at The Good Bits, Store Street, Dublin 1 (formerly Radio City/Cavern).

We’re delighted to have Detroit’s Electro Bass pioneers AUX 88 performing live in the main room. The AUXMEN played at the first ever DEAF event at the Guinness Storehouse so it’s more than fitting that they’ll be here to help us wrap DEAF up on Saturday night. They have also been hugely influential for so many of the artists who have performed for DEAF over the years. Also playing will be Jerome Hill, Rob Hall, Mark Broom, Toirse and a bunch of other DJs. The venue has just been taking over by Johnny Moy and has just been renovated. We’ll be putting extra sound into both rooms especially for the night !! Details are on our website here: http://deafireland.com/2009/?page_id=453
We really hope you can make it down to join us !!

Eamonn & Karen / DEAF
DEAF: Dublin Electronic Arts Festival / D1 Recordings
147 Parnell Street
Dublin 1
Ireland

www.deafireland.com
www.d1.ie

A huge congratulations has to go to Eamonn and Karen for their vision for DEAF and all the hard work they’ve put in over the 8 years since it’s inception. Organising can be  a thankless task- if you do it well the general public has no idea how hard it is, and a festival like DEAF couldn’t happen without herculean effort on the behalf of it;s directors and team. I suppose all good things do have to end and they’ve gone about it in the right way- going out with a bang. I’ve no doubt the new projects they allude to above will be ones to look out for in the future- I look forward to hearing more.  DEAF is dead, long live DEAF.

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