Oko / Alarmist : Double-Bill at Whelan's

Two Dublin bands, both exploring their own space between jazz and rock, both alumni of the acclaimed 12 Points festival that has its gaze firmly focused on pathways of creative European music.
Guitarist Shane Latimer fronts OKO, a gutsy quartet that runs the gamut from delicately sculpted electro acoustic shapes to gritty streetwise funk. Drummer Shane O’Donovan provides the pulse, Darragh O’Kelly brings the splashes of dark keyboard colour, and Djackulate is the free agent with the turntables, riffing on a creative consensus that draws on Krautrock, vintage TV shows, noise, musak and IDM, like a fluctuating soundtrack to a typical Saturday night in Dublin town....

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Two Dublin bands, both exploring their own space between jazz and rock, both alumni of the acclaimed 12 Points festival that has its gaze firmly focused on pathways of creative European music.
Guitarist Shane Latimer fronts OKO, a gutsy quartet that runs the gamut from delicately sculpted electro acoustic shapes to gritty streetwise funk. Drummer Shane O’Donovan provides the pulse, Darragh O’Kelly brings the splashes of dark keyboard colour, and Djackulate is the free agent with the turntables, riffing on a creative consensus that draws on Krautrock, vintage TV shows, noise, musak and IDM, like a fluctuating soundtrack to a typical Saturday night in Dublin town.

Alarmist were one of the breakthrough acts of this years 12 Points in Sweden. Crafting a very personal music that embraces jazz, math rock, electronica and formal composition, Alarmist offer further proof that the next generation of musicians are moving away from old stylistic dogma. Genres are harvested and manipulated, and multi instrumentalists Neil Crowley, Elis Czerniak, Osgar Dukes and Barry O'Halpin take a quasi orchestral approach that allows their music to hover in its own instrumental space, gravitationally pulled toward a rock aesthetic but constantly implying other philosophies in a way that excites.

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