Soul Ambition - Kick Up The Arts

Soul Ambition - Kick Up The Arts, Blick Studios, 27.09.08

Soul Ambition is a life coach operation. Not something I would usually have a lot of time for, but I found it interesting enough to give a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. To open Tracy Dempsey asked up the people in the room to take turns to introduce themselves; they gave their name, relationship to the music industry in Northern Ireland and what they hoped to get out of the event. Some familiar names and some new. Mostly musicians of some kind, and some people who worked in more than one area related to the business side of things as opposed the to creative side of things.

An ineresting man called Davy Sims then gave a short provocative talk based around a quote from himself circa 1983, "There is no music industry in Northern Ireland" He then put forward a case to suggest that this was still the case, which led to speculation from a few people that this was due to a lack of management skills and busines knowledge. The positive outcome of this is that there wil hopefully be some speakers and instructive sessions involved in similar get-togethers in the future.

There was a bit of moaning about venues, promoters, people's attitudes (which has been covered before, elsewhere) and a comple of heated exchanges when certain people (in the media)'s names were mentioned. Thankfully it didn't go on too long.

I don't have photos on this PC (I have some I may post later) but I should have some images of the 'Kick Up the Arts' event (blog links) and the Heavy Trash (feat. Jon Spencer and Matt Verta-Ray.) gig in the Kings Head, and maybe even some video to go along with a bit of feedback on Friday's ECKER at the Front Page.

In other news I'm continuing to write reviews of other people's records in a hope that I can keep my ears open to critical listening exercises before I make some decisions about editing my own sounds.

There is a chance to hear some of these quite new sounds (heavily influenced by older sounds) this Friday at the Black Box, Belfast as part of the Oscillations festival. BEW will be doing visual tricks as the other electronic artists play audio and then playing an audio set at about 12pm. Also that evening, an opening of a show of screen print poster art.