Positive diversions

I'm back after a break, with some cultural bright spots to share.

After a little break, I’m back to share some things that I’ve found brought me moments of respite, distraction and (dare I even say) happiness over the past few months. I have a feeling that we’re all in need of such things right now.

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A diptych of Copenhagen I took on a half-frame 35mm camera a few years ago and got developed… last week. Delayed gratification!

Jacob Alon

If you’re not careful, as a music fan when you get to a certain age you can become the sort of person who says that it’s ‘hard to find new music you love’. You can absolutely blame this in large part on the sheer volume of music out there, and the way it’s pushed to us on apps. (There’s more about this in my interview with Liz Pelly about her book on Spotify). And because we’re lucky to have access to so much new music, it can be hard to sit down and just listen to something. That’s both an us-problem and a modern-life-in-2025-problem.

I struggle with this too, wanting to find new music but also getting overwhelmed with the amount of options. But sometimes a piece of music reaches me through the tidal wave of sounds and I realise: this is it. This is why as a teenager I became so obsessed with music that I wanted to make writing about music my job. This is the sort of music that makes me feel in awe of musicians and what they do; that is clearly inspired by so many of my own beloved musicians but - crucially - creates something wholly original from this inspiration.

Enter Jacob Alon, who I’d started following on Instagram after seeing they played Other Voices. In the churn of Instagram posts I noticed that they had released a new single, Liquid Gold 25, and found myself returning again and again to the track, pulled towards it by Jacob’s stunning vocals (think a Scottish Jeff Buckley), the folk elements reminiscent of Big Thief, the gentleness that reminded me of Elliott Smith, and sparkle of early Perfume Genius. That might make it sound like Alon wears their influences on their sleeve, but while they are clearly a folk artist they have a beautifully authentic and distinctive take on things.

It feels like Alon has a strength that comes from living alongside fragility. Their sound is so warm and delicate, yet has a certain steeliness to it. It has a crackle and a sensitivity that makes me feel immediately alert to every note sung and every chord strummed.

(The alphabetising of this household’s vinyl collection is indeed ‘on the list’…)

Jacob’s debut album will come out on 29 May and they’re set to play the Workman’s Cellar on 11 June - I would be very surprised if this venue wasn’t changed to a larger one soon. (Or maybe those of us with tickets will be as lucky as we were with the MJ Lenderman gig at the Workman’s last year - truly one for the ages!).

I honestly think Jacob Alon is one of the most special musicians I have heard in a long, long time.

But I’ve blabbered enough. Here’s their music:

Tonal Union (label)

Another musical discovery that has buoyed me recently is Blue Lake’s gorgeous, invigorating album Weft. To get to it, I had to discover another record, the absolutely stunning, spacious Soft Power by Ezra Feinberg (shout out to the BBC DJ Deb Grant, whose end-of-year recommendation drew me to it in 2024).

Both Weft and Soft Power were released on the UK label Tonal Union, which is a real treasure chest of artists if you’re into minimalist, ambient, instrumental, or experimental work.

If the likes of The Durutti Column, John Fahey, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Mort Garson, Benoit Pioulard, and Alice Coltrane are in your record collection then you’ll eat Tonal Union’s output up with a spoon. (I’m talking a mixture of vibes and sounds here!) Everything sounds so fresh and individual - even though across the label’s output there are different genres touched on, the overall sentiment is one of gentle, expansive sonic exploration.

Fingers crossed for an eventual Irish gig by Blue Lake or Ezra Feinberg. I’m also enjoying the latest album release from Tonal Union at the moment - Day-blind by Gabriel Brady.

Cryptic crosswords

A few years back I found a second-hand copy of a book from the 1980s about how to do cryptic crosswords. This is it! I thought. I will FINALLY be that person who can sit in a pub with a pencil and a pint and merrily find the solution to baffling clues like: ‘Darkness - it’s a frightening thing! (5)’¹

You know what happened next - I tried, I failed, I gave up.

While looking for some serious distraction recently I stumbled across an app called Minute Cryptic, which helps you learn how to do cryptics through doing one cryptic a day.

When I read Minute Cryptic’s explanation for how cryptics work, it was like I could hear a key turning in my brain. Suddenly the basics started slotting into place. Yet I also learned pretty quickly that your cryptic experience can vascillate between air-punching success and utter failure. What has really helped is learning that when you ‘fail’ at a cryptic solution, you actually win, because each failure teaches you something new. You become better through being crap.

So I’ve been absolutely loving attempting newspaper cryptic crosswords, despite the very mixed results. To make myself feel better about how hard the Irish Times one is, I go to the Guardian Quick Cryptic, which is more fun, for example. As a naturally impatient person who wants to know everything and be able to do everything I try *immediately*, this has been a lesson in more than just cryptic crosswords…

Molly Fox’s Birthday

God, I love a literary novel that’s light on plot but very heavy on character. It’s like slipping into a warm bath for me - I feel like I audibly go ‘aaaahhh…’ when I realise I’m reading such a book.

That was the case with Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden, which was recommended to me by the very talented and lovely poet Mícheál McCann when we were both facilitating workshops at the West Cork Literary Festival last summer. (Side note: at the festival a few of us went to see Mícheál and the also incredibly talented and lovely poet Gustav Parker Hibbett do a reading, and within minutes I was in tears over how beautiful both their poetry was. They both write exquisite work and are wonderful humans to boot.)

This is a story set across one day, about a playwright staying in the home of her friend, a famous actor called Molly Fox. As the playwright makes her way through her day, memories surface of her relationship with Molly and another friend Andrew, as well as memories of members of their families, their time in university and how their lives have developed. A handful of other characters interact with this narrator too, surfacing even more memories. This book is basically about how we all live our lives, and the stories we tell to ourselves and our closest friends about these lives. It’s about creativity and envy; careers and lovers and Dublin; self-creation and artistic myth.

God, there is something so thrilling about reading writing by such a skilled and insightful writer. Nothing is heavy-handed, all of the revelations are deftly dealt with, and there are so many moments that - though apparently small - bring a pang to your heart.

It was my first Madden novel, but I happen to know there are quite a few other ones in the second-hand section of Chapters where I bought this, so I’ll be diving further into her ouevre imminently. I think fans of David Park and Anne Enright will feel right at home reading her work. And now that I think about it, there is of course a serious vibe of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway about the whole thing too, though that novel is in the third person.

ROPES journal

A personal moment of delight was having my short story The Myrtleville Immersion published in ROPES Literary Journal. I have been working on this story (on and off, I have to add!) for years and felt like I had finally cracked it just before I read it at Crosstown Drift last summer.

The Myrtleville Immersion is about a widower who gets really into cold-water immersion and goes to Myrtleville beach in Cork for a winter dip - after which he has a bit of a revelation…

Here are the first two paragraphs:

In what’s a lesson for all of us writers, it was rejected by another journal a couple of years ago, but the editors kindly gave me some constructive feedback on it which helped me turn it into a better story. Another one for the ‘rejection can actually lead to good things’ folder. Huge thanks to Jeanne and my writing group buddies for all giving me essential feedback on the subsequent drafts.

If you’d like to order a copy, you can do so here.

1. The answer is ‘night’ - the word to be defined is ‘darkness’. ‘Frightening’ indicates that the following word, ‘thing’, is an anagram, and if you unscramble it you get ‘night’. (Irish Times crossword)