Editorial, John Brereton
We might be slightly behind timewise with celebrating International Women's Day but it's great to have an issue almost exclusively featuring some of our finest female artists and from such varied fields of music. Our cover artist Meljoann has released her third album, Status and it's a beauty, a wonderfully produced slab of danceable pop underpinned with some of the most salient lyrics heard in years. Written, performed, produced, and mastered by the artist, Status prompts a critical discussion about the forces that shape our culture, while proposing we reclaim autonomy and build a better, more self-sufficient future. As Meljoann pointedly states, "There is an important conversation to be had around the fact that our culture is controlled by billionaires. This album describes this late-capitalist dystopia, in which Big Tech and Big Data hold our fates in their ghoulish hands. It also describes how we can escape. Our community is creating grassroots networks, building on open tech and anarchist principles of dual power and mutual aid."

An artist who has firmly pushed against big tech is the seventeen year old old time Blues sensation from Donegal, Muirean Bradley, an artist who has basically eschewed musical history this side of World War 2 to carve out a burgeoning reputation for herself as a top class interpreter of the music of the Mississippi Delta. Muireann's guitar chops are sensational and she has a long career ahead of her. Delving deeper into the past is Dee Armstrong, a member of the iconic group Kila for three decades, who has just released her debut album, Deichtine's Daughter, where she weaves together original compositions, family collaborations, and centuries-old tradition, reimagined with her distinctive artistry. The album explores themes of strength, independence, and the untold stories of warrior women and showcases Dee's absorbing, dynamic musicianship.

Living in Ireland since 2003, Korean jazz pianist So Young Joon has performed as a pianist, composer and arranger with numerous ensembles in all of Dublin's main jazz venues, as well as with her own quintet, for which she composes original music. Notable performances include three concerts in the National Concert Hall, one of which was a sold-out event in which she led a six-piece band in a critically-acclaimed radical rearrangement of the music of Thelonious Monk and it's on this tip that we feature her here. Her monthly Groovy Sunday Jazz Master Album series, Hyde Bar, on Lemon St, has celebrated classic albums by Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Dave Brubeck and Count Basie thus far and is highly recommended

Interview: Adhamh O'Caoimh

Hyperpop wunderkind Meljoann, the mind behind powerhouse lifestyle brand Mustics®, has put together an effervescent new album. 'Status', takes a breathless look at contemporary society and its relationship to technology, and finds the whole sordid affair wanting.

Status' is remarkable. How do these ideas start and develop into these kaleidoscopic songs?

I tend to hear things in my head first. A textural feel, or an emotional feel that I want to do, and it usually comes with a few musical ideas. I studied sound engineering for a few years, so I do have the technical chops to make something resembling what I hear.

The production is incredible.

I've just recently switched from Pro Tools to Reaper, and I've just got a home studio. I've got one main hardware synth that I am obsessed with that I got in the nineties. A Roland JP-8080. My partner has collected a few synths as well, so sometime's I I'll use some of those alongside some soft synths and samples. I like to take field recordings and mess with them.

It's an incredibly detail oriented sound.

Thank you. Yeah. I tend to get bored really easily. I need a lot of detail and texture. And structurally, I need to be kept entertained.

The themes as well are very relevant, especially in light of current events.

Big Tech has been on my shit list for a long while now. They re ruining people's lives. We're talking about fascist oligarchs. These people get to control our arts scenes, our relationships. Every transaction on the Internet, a billionaire gets a cut of it. PayPal or Stripe. And they're all disgusting. It's insane to watch this play out on the world stage, in such brazen fashion. You used to have to look for it. Now you don't. They've always been like this. Google started out with this motto of "Don't be evil"?

They took that all seven years ago or something. It was so cutesy and lovable, but the mask came off eventually. I guess that's what power and the profit motive does to people.

What I'm really interested in with the record was to explore the alternatives, like, the community alternatives that we're building up.

They're perfectly viable. We don't need to use these things, Twitter and Meta. I am in a community of hardcore nerds that are way into this stuff. And you don't even have to be that nerdy to use it anymore.

Mastodon, for example. I think people have forgotten that all you do is type a few things into a few text fields. Just do it again, and we're grand. We can build alternatives away from the clutches of these oligarchs.

Well, that's the hope. I mean, especially the theme of community. When it all falls apart, it's the people around us that we're going to need.

Politically, how can we organize effectively when the platforms that we're using to connect with each other and spread the word about different actions are controlled by the very people that we're trying to organize against? There's all sorts of dodgy things happening. that we don't know about as well as what's blatantly out in the open. For exam-ple, hopefully, we're all off Twitter by now, but recently enough their algorithm was leaked, and it was made clear that anything with a link in it is completely deprioritized by the algo-rithm. That is bad for artists, but also anyone trying to organize anything.

I think with community-built alterna-tives, first of all, there's generally a lot more customization options built in. So you can control your own feeds more precisely and make sure that you see the things that you're interested in from the people that you wanna connect with .

One thing that I'm hoping for with this album is just to get the word out a bit more about these alternatives. A lot of people don't know. Mastodon is a good entry point, and it's connected to loads of different apps, and we call that the Fediverse.

I've heard of that.

If you've got a Mastodon account, you can follow the equivalent of You-Tube, which is PeerTube. You can follow an account there and get notifications every time a video comes out. Or the equivalent of Twitch is called Owncast. So you can get a little notification every time something goes live that you want to see. Once the profit motive is removed, you get what you're interested in and what you're looking for, which is human connection, proper, honest conversa-tions, and real relationships. Actually finding art that you want to find. I love technology, and it just shouldn't be in the hands of these fools.

Speaking of technology, was there anything that you came across, an instrument or method of recording, anything that you found, new or old, that was inspiring to you?

I constantly try to learn new things.

One thing was switching from Pro Tools to Reaper. Everything is so much quicker. I couldn't believe it. And very customizable. I love working in that DAW.

You're self releasing this record, with your label Boy Scout Audio.Is there a plan for a physical re-lease? Or are you doing that with someone else?

Well, unfortunately, I've got no money at all for a physical release.

I'd love to. People were asking the same about my last album, HR, but I just don't have the resources at all.

I don't have enough money for rent or food. I can't really do this without arts funding at the moment, which goes back into what I was saying about Big Tech. They're boasting about disrupting things. They have disrupted the ability of artists to earn a modest living. Even minimum wage. You're lucky if you do that these days. I've been looking at other kinds of ways to support myself because, obviously, streaming income is nothing. I'm moving everything off Meta now, Instagram and Facebook. I'm going to leave that completely in April, and I'm just trying to encourage as many people as possible to check out the other alternatives There's plenty of other places we can hang out and we're not directly enriching a fascist. I'll leave my account out and resources for people who want to move.

I wrote a blog post giving all the links to get your data off Meta and everything. I'm gonna keep kind of updating that blog post as I learn these things myself.

What can you tell me about Mustics®?

Mustics® is a performance art, hyper capitalist lifestyle brand Ive been doing for a while.

I started on social media because I was just looking at everything you're supposed to do as an artist. Making these little videos, shilling products and the rest of it and just becoming an influencer that I adopted, as an artist. I'm not interested in those things. So I thought, you know, if I have to do this, I'm gonna completely rip the piss out of it and have fun by myself. Because if I'm sick of this, then there are probably a lot of other people sick of this. And I was right. I think a lot of it's like kind of a mas-sive, role playing game at this stage.

Anyone can join in and banter away.

I do live streams as well. You can get business advice or dream interpretation with Doctor Synergy Myers.

'Status' ends on 'Positive', which is a beautiful way to close the album.

I feel that's really important. If you've taken someone on a depressing jour-ney, you've got to give some glimmer of hope at the end. 'ESC' as well, which is a slow jam dedicated to free and open source software, which I'm not sure anyone has done before. A bit of a weird pairing maybe, but it's very natural to me. 'Positive' actually came from a dream. I had dreamt the whole chorus of it, and that happens to me a fair bit. Sometimes, the songs I dream are shite. Well, we'll say they're mostly unlistenable.

But, I thought, you know, this one I could make into something. The dream itself gave me the vibe I was looking for. I was on the top deck of a bus watching some teenagers play a video on their phones. Their faces were really soothed, and comforted.

I just felt I wanted to provide that for people.

Status is out now on Boy Scout Audio. www.boyscoutaudio.bandcamp.com. Meljoann opens for Mary Ocher in the Bello Bar on Saturday May 24th.

Three wonderful Creative Commons images were used as backgrounds in The Goo photo shoot:

1. Central Bank https://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/2683446178/ William Murphy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

2. Bank of Ireland https://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/6849019450/in/photostream/ William Murphy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

3. Stephen's Green SC https://www.geograph.ie/photo/5238334 © Copyright Rossographer and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ Rossographer: https://www.geograph.ie/profile/12869