Kristen Sinclair

  From theverge.com Read the article on The Verge's website here .

 “Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country.”                                                                                   - C.S. Lewis   “The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in, no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place.”                            ...

“ A world without memory is a world of the present. The past exists only in books, in documents .” -           Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams (1993) Dementia runs in my family on my dad’s side. We sometimes call it ‘doting’ where I’m from. I wouldn’t say this was the reason I began making scrapbooks and journals, but throughout my teenage years, it helped to justify my rather uncool hobby of documenting my life piece by piece. I imagined that one day I’d be a senile old lady able to sit back and read over my life story, significant and insignificant details sellotaped side by side. I’d no doubt forget and read it all over again with renewed amazement. I vomited on the first scrapbook I ever had sitting in the front seat of my mum’s car on the way to hospital. I can’t remember why we were going there exactly, because I was very young and it’s a vague memory. But I can remember what the book looked like, as soon after, I received an iden...

An electronic patchwork of moving tiles and faces, some lifting a guitar up to the camera, some poised next to a microphone and all smiling, fill young girls’ computer screens across Ireland and beyond. This virtual band practice is the most recent incarnation of Girls Rock School NI. Founded at Belfast’s Oh Yeah Music Centre in 2016 as a spinoff of Ladies Rock Camp, Girls Rock is a summer music camp that gives girls and non-binary youth aged 11-16 the opportunity to learn an instrument from scratch, form their own bands, write their own songs and cut their teeth as burgeoning rock stars. Weeks of coaching, merch-making workshops and Q&As with the province’s leading women musicians lead up to the final showcase where the new-fangled groups take to the stage to showcase their original material to a live audience for the first time. Girls Rock NI was the brainchild of Sister Ghost frontwoman Shannon O’Neill back when she was a student. After hearing about a similar Girls Rock Cam...

Founder Linda Coogan Byrne The music industry was rocked last year when publicist and consultant Linda Coogan Byrne released the Gender Disparity Data Report focusing on the amount of Irish radio airplay for domestic artists. The report crunched the numbers to reveal a staggering disparity between the number of Irish men played on national radio compared to the number of women played on the same stations. The report was collated by data logged on an industry system used to track artists’ airplay and royalties called Radiomonitor. The number of Irish women featuring in stations’ top 20 most played songs was shockingly low compared to their male counterparts. Tracks from home grown female talent made up a measly 5% of the top songs from 28 of the Republic’s main radio stations. Worse still, four stations – named and shamed as FM104, LM FM, WLR FM and South East Radio – did not feature a single local female voice in their top 20 most played tracks. Dermot Kennedy, Niall Horan and The Acad...

In Waiting (Source: Pillow Queens' Bandcamp) ‘Highly anticipated’ is a cliché attached to many debut albums, but after four years of EP releases and relentless touring, In Waiting from Dublin’s Pillow Queens has lived up to its title. Brooding melodies, fuzzy guitar and hazy harmonies meet anthemic choruses in this cathartic exploration of being young in modern Ireland. Recorded in rural Donegal, the LP sees Pillow Queens grapple with spirituality and religion, family, politics and the crises of late-stage capitalism. Touching on everything from queer identity to life and gentrification in the Irish capital, impassioned vocals channel the anger of punk into rousing indie rock. In a country where almost half of people aged 25 to 29 still live at home with their parents, this frustration is tangible. ‘Handsome Wife’, a single from 2019, is a rejection of the nine-to-five, marriage and kids, white picket fence lifestyle that still feels expected even in today’s society. Riff-d...

“I’m going get my piano tuned now, I’m very excited!” chirps Amy Montgomery as we wrap up our call. The 20-year-old singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist is just over a week away from the release of her debut EP following two new music videos, a string of singles and touring as far away as Australia. The culmination of four years’ work, Intangible is twenty-one minutes of powerful alt rock with squalls of guitar feedback lifted by bright, fluttering synths and vocal prowess akin to Janis Joplin, Alanis Morissette and even Miley Cyrus. Raised on classic rock, Amy’s sound gives a subtle nod to the music that nourished her, but she manages to rise above her influences. “I’ve been surrounded by music since I was born and in my house growing up. My dad is a big muso, he loves all sorts of rock music and I would hear AC/DC from no age. I picked up the guitar after my dad inspired me to; he plays the guitar as well and taught me my first few chords. I have this memory from when I was...