
Muso's Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season - here's the latest in our jaunts: Nostalgia is a destructive beast, particularly when it stultifies engagement with what the present-day brings. What's more, it can blind-side people into glamourised over-emoting of what may never have been how they recall it. And it's with this kind of admittedly dubious overthinking that I approach Hyde Park's gates for the third day of Hard Rock Calling , longing for more personality and drama in exchange for the impressive tally of nothingness racked up over the [...]

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next - R. W. Emerson. Lighthouse Family - Question Of Faith (Idjut Boys Remix) / BUY uncredited pic
The Lighthouse Family return to Dublin and Belfast in 2011.

As I was growing up, my family and I would go on out-of-town trips every summer to one of the northern provinces of the Philippines. It was an 8 hour road trip. What I remember most about those trips was that every year, we had the same CDs loaded into the audio system. Gyspy Kings, Sade, D'Sound, some Bossanova compilation, and Lighthouse Family. Of all those CDs, I would always wake up to Lighthouse Family's High, Postcards From Heaven or Lost In Space. Cheesy as it may sound but there was something about listening to those songs and having a [...]

This is the first in a series of artist/musician curated mixtapes that will be infrequently featured here. Our guest playlister for today is the incomparably talented Jared Nickerson of J3Concepts . This guy's resume is pretty substantial. Besides co-founding BloodSweatVector , he's done jaw dropping work for Adidas , MTV, Mad Decent, Nike, Nintendo, and is currently holding it down as art director of laFraise . He's also a bit of a music freak and, while yakking about records the other day, I asked him to put together a playlist [...]

Yesterday marked the first anniversary of the passing of a very dear friend of mine, Ruari McCarthy. He is greatly missed by many and left a huge gap in the lives of a lot of people. Fortunately for us he also left a huge impression and many happy memories. I had planned to do this post last night but i had to be through in Stirling for 9pm and was rushing about after work, which reminds me, i'll do a post on Sunday about how last nights DJ set at D.U.S.K went. I'm just not exactly in the mood for talking bout things [...]