Haunted Dancehall
National Concert Hall, Dublin
★★★★☆
Halloween is around the corner and at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, the gates of Hell have been flung open. Such are the vibes in the customarily genteel venue’s main auditorium where producer and composer Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, is staging a set that is half hard-core dubstep, half horror show.
Red lights throb, thick black smoke billows. All that is missing is Martin wearing a devil mask and waving a pitchfork.
He might actually be doing precisely that – with so much smoke, it’s hard to see what exactly he is up to on stage.
Attendees at the third Haunted Dancehall one-day festival at the National Concert Hall have no difficulty hearing him, however – so loud is the distortion and so relentlessly doomy are the beats he conjures during a menacing, mesmerising turn.
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Haunted Dancehall was first held in 2022 as part of an initiative by the National Concert Hall to draw an audience beyond those who might attend a classical recital or a season by the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society.
As it returns, the event has morphed into a sort of National Ploughing Championships for hipsters. Craft-beer beards are ubiquitous, Palestinian scarves de rigueur.
Martin, who is later joined by grime MC Magugu, headlines, but an impressive bill draws primarily on Irish talent across several spaces. Earlier in the evening, the upstairs Kevin Barry Recital Room welcomes Oregon-born, Dublin-based Jasmine Wood. She negotiates a suite of ethereal ambient pieces, topped off with manipulated vocals that make her sound like a Blair Witch Project version of Enya.
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Her set is hypnotic and ever so slightly unsettling – until a guitarist jumps in to help on the last song and the atmosphere of oppression turns sweeter. A spectral aura similarly hangs about Fermanagh singer and producer Róis on the main stage. She wears a red nylon mask that makes her look like one of Darth Vader’s personal guards from Return of the Jedi and delivers a nerve-shredding cover of Nirvana’s Something In The Way.
Back in the Kevin Barry room, Dublin songwriter and composer Saoirse Miller movingly revisits the story of Bridget Cleary, the Tipperary woman murdered in 1869 by a husband who believed she had been replaced with a faerie changeling.
It’s a chilling exploration of the intersection between institutionalised misogyny and the fractured psychosphere of rural Munster – or at least it would be if the woman seated in front of me didn’t suddenly whip out her phone and start browsing the Next catalogue.
Haunted Dancehall is a gripping addition to live music in Dublin – though it might be more gripping yet if more attendees made an effort to sit through a performance rather than constantly coming and going. In the Bug, it has the perfect headliner – a channeller of end-of-days atmospherics who suffuses the National Concert Hall in an apocalyptic haze. Something wickedly groovy has come to the National Concert Hall and it’s hard to think of a better appetite-whetter for Halloween.
