The Goo 1
Festival Focus RECEPTION 2025 Reception, the long
running Dublin-based series of concerts that focuses on cutting edge experimental music & performance will celebrate 9 years of activity with the return of the Reception Weekend festival on February 14th & 15th at The Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2 & Tengu, Dublin 1. 2025’s programme ranges from durational minimal works to ecstatic club music to free improvisation and outsider pop. Adhamh O’Caoimh sat down with Reception 2025 Curators Aonghus McEvoy and David Lacey to see what they have in store for us. For almost a decade, Reception has been at the forefront of experimental music in Dublin, seeking out unconventional compositions, removing the divisions between performance, composition, improvisation and installation and creating spaces for some of the country’s most innovative artists to hone their singular crafts, unencumbered. Next month, Reception will hold their most inspired and ambitious festival to date. Four staggering concerts across The Project Arts Centre and Yamamori Tengu, on the 14th and 15th of February, the Reception Weekend will see the Irish premiere of Eliane Radigue’s ‘Occam Ocean’, performed by celebrated instrumentalists Rhodri Davies, Angharad Davies & Dominic Lash. Elsewhere, Susan Geaney will premiere a new work commissioned by Reception, and the first performance on Irish soil from Chicago’s acclaimed electronic innovator, RP Boo, responsible for an entire genre of hip hop infused dance music. Alongside these historic performances, glut of amazing shows from some truly wonderful Irish musicians, such as violist Ailbhe Nic Oireach32 taigh, the duo of Reception founder Aonghus McEvoy and Dublin composer Dunk Murphy, as well as concerts from noted New York experimentalists Jack Callahan and Jeff Wittscher, celebrated Japanese composer Ryoko Akama and Spanish composer and guitarist Clara de Asis. DJ Sets from Dublin Digital Radio’s Kate Butler and Don Rosco will round out this amazing affair. Can you tell me a little about how Reception began? David Lacey: “We started Reception in 2016, myself and the composers Conal Ryan and Rob Casey. We’d been doing stuff for a few years, here and there. I had been working with Rob, an amazing composer and pianist, since 2007. We had an interest in composed music, and also improvised music, that grey area. There was a room in The St. Finians Lutheran church on Adelaide road, and they had a piano there. At the time, you could rent it out. We had the idea of doing a semi-regular concert series, between ourselves and a pool of musicians like Susan Geaney, and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh. We had five or six different people involved, and each would have different interests, so each concert became a slightly different thing. For example, Aonghus played a concert of solo guitar pieces by Eva-Maria Houben, a German composer, and Jorge Boehringer, an American composer. So we would have had quite a varied approach to it. Some of this would have been very sparse, acoustic chamber music and Rainfear, a synthesiser and drums group that comprised myself and David Donohoe (who composed the fantastic ‘Fen’) which was much more noisy and abrasive. We also would have brought over people like Rhodri Davies, the Welsh harpist, who is also playing at the festival. We had this series of concerts every two or three months, and all these threads and people from that time have come together now. It was going in that vein for a good number of years, and Aonghus also been putting on gigs in and around the same ballpark, while playing some of our shows, so it seemed to make sense to do them under the same banner. That would have been in 2019, with the Japanese/ Belgian sound art duo Rie Nakajima and Pierre Berthet. They’re kind of instrument builders…”