Best Kept Secret festival kicks off in Tilburg in eight weeks time. We’ll be building up to the festival with features on some of the bands involved. 

Californian garage punks Audacity will be playing on Saturday 18th June. The band formed in 2001 and have just released their fifth album, Hyper Vessels, through Seattle’s Suicide Squeeze Records. We spoke to guitarist Matt Schmalfeld about their current tour and their new album, which was recently reviewed on Musos' Guide and can be read here.

Matt, you've been together for 15 years now, did you get together in school?

Yeah, me and Kyle Gibson went to the same elementary school and we were best friends from 1st through to 5th grade. When we were 10 or 11 years old we started playing guitar and formed a band shortly after that with another couple of classmates and just kept going from there. It’s been a long time. We're just starting to be able to rent cars and stuff like that.

You have a real influence of old school punk.

Yeah, definitely. We started listening to punk when we were in seventh grade, maybe the end of sixth grade. Ramones and The Clash and all of that. We like that stuff.

You're doing a UK tour in June?

Yeah we'll be there the end of June. We were there in the fall of 2014 so it’s been almost two years. It was great the first time. I ended up having to come back and hang out more in London because I had so much fun.

You'll be doing the festivals too; you're playing Best Kept Secret with Beck.

Yeah, I still haven’t wrapped my head around it. I’m just thrilled. Beck is the best guitar based act in the world right now. Best album too.

It sounds like there are a number of songwriters in the band?

Yeah, we arrange everything together. So in the songs, maybe I’ll write the layout, or Kyle, the other guitar player. Then we'll write down lyrics but it will always get put together at a practice, for the most part. With a couple of songs on this record they were pretty much all the way done by the time we jammed them. But it’s a collaborative effort.

Do you take the lead vocal on each of your songs?

No, a couple of songs like ‘Not Like You’ and ‘Dirty Boy’, we both sing pretty much the whole time. A lot of the songs like ‘Fire’ or ‘Riot Train’ or ‘Hypo’, Kyle sings those. He wrote the body of those songs. We're blessed and very lucky to be in a good songwriting partnership. We can bounce ideas off each other. You know sometimes it doesn’t go that way. People don't like being told what to do, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but you need to be able to work on stuff together. 

It's hard enough to find someone who will accept criticism and be critical of you as well.

Yeah, I think a lot of it goes back to how long we've known each other, bouncing ideas and criticism. We don’t mind if that hurts someone’s feelings. It’s all part of the greater good of the band. 

‘Previous Cast’, is that one of yours?

That's Kyle’s song. It's my favourite song on the record. I think we did the vocals on that once. Then Kyle redid them. I think I told him “This is the best song and you’re singing it so good, we’ve got to stick with it like you have it.” Kyle could probably speak more about it but that's probably my favourite song on the record because it’s so…, it’s got more feeling to it. It'll make you cry!

And you're in the middle of a big tour now.

Right now we’re in beautiful Chattanooga, Tennessee and heading to Atlanta tonight. We’ve about a week left on a month long tour. Everything has been great fun this time round. We haven’t been on a US tour in about a year and a half so it's good to not be working six days a week and be able to do what you actually want to do. It’s like being on vacation.

When you're doing something you love it doesn’t feel like work.

That's right. And we get to try different cuisines and different beers. Our van is very comfortable. It looks like R2-D2. Things are good for Audacity these days.

Have you a message for your fans over here?

Just let people know that sacrifice is very important. Sacrifice is a big part of life. That’s our mantra that we live by. If that doesn’t sound too weird?! Life is full of little sacrifices but sometimes they lead you to a pot of gold, whether it’s a literal or metaphorical pot of gold. 

Alan Maguire's debut album, The City and the Sky is due for release on the 20th of May. He's been playing in bands for over 20 years and has played nearly every venue and festival in Ireland.

 At one point towards the end of the '90s he went to see Muff Winwood of Sony A&R in London. He told Alan his music would never be played on radio, and to come back if he ever wrote a song that could be a hit single. He's yet to write that elusive hit single but he has diverged into atmospheric electro rock for his first solo album.

There's no sign of the heavy grunge guitars of Culture Vandals or the funky chops of his work with Miss Kate and the Higher State on The City and the Sky. The guitars are relegated to the passenger seat of these abstract urban landscapes and there's more emphasis on dreamy synths and hypnotic beats.

We spoke to Alan about it in a very reflective and analytical interview. 

Alan, you have your debut album coming out ‘The City and the Sky’.

Yes, it came about because I’ve been making music for 20 years and about two years ago I turned around and there was no one to make music with anymore. For various reasons, lifestyle reasons, people have kids, or go off and do other things. Emigration is a big one, a lot of the people I had been making music with live in different countries. They leave one by one and then you look round and there's nobody there. So I said “Fuck it, I’ll concentrate on doing stuff at home on my own.” I was messing around with soft synths and VST stuff, just being an all-round producer dude. And then a few months ago I started putting everything on Soundcloud and it turns out people do listen to things and people seemed to like some of the tracks.

How did I get from doing that to it being an album? is a good question. I realised that I’m middle aged and if I don’t make myself do it, it will never happen. But also the music I had been making up til then had been very scattershot. Do a funky tune one day, do an electro/ screamo tune the next day. It sort of coalesced around a particular style towards the end of last year. I looked back and realised I had five or six tracks that were kind of coherent sonically and tell a story in a certain mood. And I thought that’s almost like I have an album.

The other thing was I wanted to put stuff onto Spotify and YouTube because that’s where people go for these things. I figured if I’m doing that I might as well try to package it together as an album. So I retrospectively went from what the technology asks of you to it being in that format. Another thing is I’ve being listening to pop music and hip hop and all kinds of things where people who absolutely cannot sing are singing on their tunes because it’s just autotuned to fuck. I never considered myself a singer. It’s not on the list of thing I think I’m good at. But I thought if Kanye West can sing on those tracks then I can sing on my tracks. 

So I got autotune, I sang really badly, I turned autotune up to 10, and its still not good singing but it’s a more coherent sound. And once you do that you can feel like there is more of a presence of a human being on the song. It makes you listen to the music very differently.  And that’s the other reason why the music sounds the way it does because of that kind of autotuned, morose, breathy thing that I do when I’m singing. That works ok when you’re doing stuff that sounds like Depeche Mode. 

The other stuff that I do is more funky. I’d have to sing in a soul way and I can’t do that. If I figure out how to sing in a soul way, I’ll do another album that is all the funky tracks together. But this is a collection of all of my most morose material. Maybe I should find a different way to phrase that if it’s going into print? 

Maybe a little sticker on the cover?

"Only his most morose tracks". It’s an interesting thing. Its fine when you’re doing that from song to song, “There’s another mid tempo mope-rock song”, and then you go back and listen to it as an album and you think “I had no idea I was that depressed”. I didn’t think I was. It’s not naturally cheerful though. There’s one or two tracks that sound, maybe hopeful, and there’s one that sounds happy but ironically happy.

The next move is to see if there’s a way for me to channel happiness into music. I’m not against happiness as a concept. It’s just not what naturally comes out. It’s not my default setting. I don’t think I’m naturally a morose person in reality but it’s the sound I can really get behind when I’m performing.

You sell morose well?

I think so. People have resting-bitchy-face, I have resting-slightly-sad-face. That’s why it’s an album.

You’re putting this out yourself?

I did go to one or two small labels that do electronic music and pretty much none of them responded to my emails. Which I wasn’t surprised about. The thing with those small electronic labels is that they are really quite focused on a genre, or a particular BPM, or a particular preset on a synth. And while I do like some of that music I’m not monomaniacal enough to produce stuff that is like that. If only I had found someone who specialises in doing medium tempo mope-rock Depeche Mode knock offs. Which wasn’t on purpose that’s just what it was. I'd prefer to sound like Mahavishnu Orchestra or King Crimson or something but that’s not what came out. 

Your own true voice?

I suppose yeah. You are forced to realise that. George Orwell said that after the age of 40 every man has the face that he deserves. Now at the age of 40 I have the album that I deserve.

Why is this the right time for the album to come out?

I turned 40 just around the same time as I realised that gigs with other people weren’t exactly plentiful. There is a sense of encroaching middle age, would be one part of it. But also I simply have the ability to do it because I bought lots of guitars and I have lots of stuff. I have lots of microphones and guitar pedals. I have the man-cave, also known as the laundry room. I found that it was logistically feasible to record a lot of music on my own without having to spend money on anyone else doing it. It’s technically and logistically the right time. Which is a terrible answer really. Shouldn’t it be that I am burning with this desire to get my message across to people?

That is the standard response.

I guess I am but I’m less likely to admit that motive to myself because it’s scary. Because you set yourself up for failure. It’s much easier to pretend that you are doing it for other reasons. Probably the real reason is that I would like some people to hear the music and to like it, and all of the things that come with that. But I am not completely open to failing so publicly so I am fooling myself into doing it.

This is the first album you've done?

Yeah, I’ve played on records that other people have done. I did an album a couple of years ago with some friends that I do improv music with. I’m all over that, if you want to hear an album of somebody playing really wanky guitar then that’s a good album to pick up. I was a featured performer on albums in the past but this is certainly the first time that I have released something under my own name. And the first time I have released something with me singing on it. I could come to regret all of this. 

You know how much music is released everyday? So, on the bright side it will probably be forgotten in a week or two. There was an inflection point a couple of years ago where everyday more than 24 hours worth of music is released. It’s vastly more than that now. It’s like in the Middle Ages, Erasmus was the last person to know everything. The last person who could possibly have heard everything is already dead, probably. We live in a world that is vastly oversaturated with this stuff. You could be upset that you are so unlikely to find an audience or you could use it to your advantage by being more willing to take a risk in the almost certain knowledge that no one is going to listen to it. This is coming out a bit more nihilistic than I expected.

What for you will make this album a success? Or has that changed from when you first decided to do it?

It probably has. Before, my idea of success was simply that I would have the patience to go through what you have to go through to get it out there. Which isn’t all that much. But I wasn’t sure I would even do that. I thought I would just drop it after a couple of weeks. Just a flash in the pan idea. I decided to do this in the first week of January this year so it seems like a new year’s resolution, and it is the longest I’ve ever held a new years resolution. As time has gone on since January and it’s become more of a reality, I think my hope is that people review it, and listen to it, and it gets some kind of critical reception. 

I have no expectations of making money. If it broke even, I’d be delighted. How many streams would it have to get on Spotify to break even? Millions, so yeah, I don’t know. Maybe if a random person stopped me in the street and said “I like your album”. If I made some connection with people beyond my immediate friends, but I’d probably be really freaked out at the same time. So I think I will wait and see what happens and work backwards from there to decide what counts as success. 

There isn’t a great ratio of the success that’s available to the people who want it. It’s pretty intimidating. I’m not willing to go on the road for six months touring, or all the things that people have to do, people that we both know, who do this full time. The amount of energy that they have to put into it and anything that you get back out of it is a bonus. So I suppose I’m a bit of a dilettante in that regard.

You’ve been playing for 20 years in different bands and, almost literally, there is no record of that. Now there is a record of something.

I wrote down a list of the bands I’ve been in for a friend and there were about 20 bands. Some of those I was in for five minutes, some for five years and we still didn’t really do anything. And with other bands I did a fair bit of gigging. I did quite a bit with Miss Kate. I don’t know if it adds up to anything. Live stuff disappears off into the ether once it’s done. It’s really different. The work you put in to play a good gig. The amount of preparation and rehearsing. The ratio of effort to reward is two different sports entirely. There’s the visceral thrill of playing music to three people but I also feel I could turn into some sort of Pol Pot character sitting at home. Because you have 100% control over the stuff you do at home and I feel like I have ruined myself for being in bands now because I can spend an hour tweaking parameters on a soft synth. “Do I need to pan this thing a bit more to the left?” And when you’re in a band you have to take what you’re given. You can’t rally micromanage people that you’re not playing money to. When you’re playing in a band at amateur level in Dublin, it’s people who want to be there. So you can’t be a controlling megalomaniac. And I never wanted to be until now that I’ve had a taste of having 100% control over my music.

They are completely different things and it just happens that the skill set is transferable. Maybe the difference with doing it live is that you have to be ok at social interactions with people. People who may be difficult or crazy. Anyone who has been in a band has been in a band with somebody crazy. 

That’s something that you get better at over time and now when you’re doing it all on your own you can be slightly nauseated by seeing yourself everywhere. You know that ‘Malkovich, Malkovich’ scene? You feel a bit like that sometimes. Some of the music is dense. Fifteen layers of drums and bass and synth and guitars and vocals and they’re all you. 

It would be interesting to through something else into the mix. I do have demo recordings and cheap studio recordings of several of the bands that I have been in. And I have about 100 hours of recordings of me improvising in an improvising band that I played with. We used to do gigs a long time ago but after that we just holed up in a studio every weekend for five years. We had a ProTools rig and nice gear and recorded. It’s almost like keeping a diary. I don’t keep a diary but listening to this stuff is a good way to revisit the person that you used to be. Its extremely ephemeral music. First of all we were playing to no audience, just to each other.  Going back is like going back and finding pictures of you wearing clothes that you wouldn’t wear anymore. You think “Jesus, was that really me?”

When I started out doing this, you would rehearse a band for a year and then record three songs in the demo studio and listen to them over and over and over. They’d be mashed into your brain and now even recording is ephemeral because it can be done so easily. There are so many hours of the improv stuff that I’ve done that I can’t listen to all of it. Whereas songs that you’ve written twenty years ago that you’ve recorded, you’ve put so much time and work into them that it’s hard to listen to them with fresh ears. 

Did you ever catch your reflection without knowing it's you and think "who’s that guy?" That’s a really different way of seeing yourself from looking in the mirror and you find recordings of yourself and aren’t immediately aware that it's you. You get a sudden glimpse of how you appear to other people. How you sound to other people. It’s not always pretty.

Vantastival is the traditional start to the festival season in Ireland. Even with its move to early June it remains the first proper music festival of 2016. This is the seventh annual Vantastival and there is good reason to believe that it will be the best yet.

They have just announced sponsorship deals with Volkswagen and Firestone, and their relocation to the idyllic Beaulieu House outside Drogheda. Badly Drawn Boy, King Kong Company and The Hot Sprockets will headline on Friday 3rd and Saturday 4th June while the likes of Sample Answer, Saint Sister, Jinx Lennon, Saramai, The Bonnevilles, Swords, and a whole host of local acts from Drogheda and its surroundings will be given the opportunity to perform. 

We spoke to Vantastival organiser, Benny Taaffe, about the challenges of staging an independent festival.

You've done a sponsorship deal with Volkswagen.

We approached them in the past when we were much younger, in our first or second year, but they didn't seem that interested at the time. The people that we were speaking to in their marketing department, we were probably flying a bit too under the radar for them. We reappraised it and went again at them this year. Our profile has built over the seven years and now they see some benefit in associating and we're delighted to have them on board. For us it’s the perfect partnership. The field is full to the gills with classic VWs. It just seems like the logical sponsorship partner to have. We're delighted with it.

And that's helped you get Badly Drawn Boy for a headliner?

Again we've been after him for a while and it's the first year it's worked out with his availability and stuff. Delighted to have him. Anyone who was in college about 15 years ago, like Louise and myself, every single student flat you went in to had the Hour of Bewilderbeest album and Badly Drawn Boy tunes on guitar at every party. It's a headliner that has been always coming. It proves to ourselves that we're getting to where we want to be. It's so good to have such a well known and well respected artist on board. He's looking forward to it.

We started out with Irish headliners. Our focus has always been to showcase up and coming unsigned Irish music. That's what we've focused on over the past seven years. Our past line ups have had bands starting out with us who have gone to great things. That's how we see our role, it's to foster new talent, give bands a break. The likes of Riptide Movement got their first ever festival slot with us back in 2012. The Young Folk, who are back this year, got their early breaks with us. It's one of the last open submission policy festivals around, where any band in the country can apply. And we listen to them all and pick a good line up from that.

You're moving venue this year to Beaulieu House.

It’s a beautiful venue. After four great years in Bellurgan we got absolutely eviscerated by the weather there last year. The frailties of the site became apparent. We couldn't stay there and run the risk of being washed out of it again. We were looking topologically where it was going to be a bit drier even in the event of a downpour. 

Also we're that bit closer to Dublin. We had pitched the festival as straddling the Dublin- Belfast axis from the start. The May bank holiday weekend was also a bank holiday in the UK so we were hoping to attract a strong contingent from the north but it never really materialised. The border is still there psychologically if nothing else. By moving closer to Dublin we're consolidating our current base, which is North Leinster in the main.

We've had quite a few campervans over from the UK. Myself and Lou go way back, heading over to the bigger camper festivals in the UK. Vantastival is slightly different in that it focuses more on the music side of it than on the campervan side of it. The campervan is a theme but we’ve been to a few where they focus on the machines to the point where the music is secondary. You get covers band and the music wouldn’t be great. Whereas with us we focus on quality original music. That’s what we're for.

And you've changed the format and gone to a two-day.

That’s a temporary change really. We hope to be back up to a three day format within a year or two. It’s just that we got so badly hit last year that to continue the festival we had to take a chainsaw to the budget, and putting it down to a two day is one way that we can save a pile on security and production costs. 

Also the kids, we have two young kids so until we get those off to school. It’s just the time really. The time spent organising. It is just myself and Louise that are the main organisers. With the kids still at home it makes sense for us to cut our workload for a few years, concentrate on getting them ready for school. Then hopefully we can devote more time to it.

It’s all about building the base. We've never turned a profit. So hopefully over this year and next year we can get some money in the kitty to take on someone with us to help with the organisation when we go big again.

Did yourself and Louise have backgrounds in doing festivals before you started this?

We did. We met on the festival scene. I was on construction crew from the early days; the Witnnesses, the Oxegens. She was on admin crew, office production crew. Over the years we got to know each other. We've worked a lot of festivals together in Ireland and abroad. We've both done Glastonbury, Leeds and Reading. We’ve both been over to Burning Man helping out there. We're festyheads. That’s how we hooked up.

You can tell that by the way the festival is run.

Thanks, we try. Even though we got two great sponsors this year in Volkswagen and Firestone/ Bridgestone tyres, we're trying to not let it affect the format of the festival. We're trying to keep the corporatisation of it out. Volkswagen have been brilliant in that regard. They're letting us deal with all the aesthetic. All they are providing is the finances to pay for that stage. 

We're delighted that we're not having any creative control wrestled from us. We will still run it as a ‘Bring Your Own’ event. Over the years we've turned away big corporate sponsorships to try and maintain that sense of camaraderie and community that we see at events on the production and build side. Electric Picnic have managed to maintain that vibe but the bigger ones have lost it altogether.

It does have a real family atmosphere as well.

 When we started the festival there wasn’t a sign of kids from us but we recognised that, with the campervan theme of Vantastival, the campervan is the only holiday option a lot of young families without a lot of disposable income can muster. We wanted to showcase events that would provide for that. We needed to have a strong family friendly ethos. It’s been with us since day one and its something that we really do value. You see happy families bouncing around the place it really adds to the vibe. Kids exploring, all the van owners gathering and their kids becoming friends. Year on year, they find each other. They start little gangs. Kids that have been there since they were three or four are now 7/8/9, and still with us. It’s their annual holiday. They all get to hook up and you get marauding gangs of eight year olds going round having the craic. It’s great to see.

It was horrendous last year. Everyone was confined to quarters. But a bit of June bank holiday weather, we're usually finishing the clean up around then, and it’s always been glorious. So we can rely on a bit of sun. Last year was bad but even before that the May bank holiday was overcast and grey. What we need is a really good sunny bank holiday weekend to get everyone back in the mood. 

With the change of venue too, we'll be very close to Drogheda so we're hoping for a strong show of support from the locals on the Saturday with day tickets and that. We were very downtrodden and negative after last year’s event but over the winter we've had time to take stock. Everyone involved, myself, Lou, and the rest of the crew, are really positive and optimistic about this years event. We're looking at a fresh start. An opportunity to put the misery of last year behind us and push on.

It’s great to hear you talking about next year and continuing it because you’d be sorely missed.

We’d have a lot more free time but we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. We’d have to go and get real jobs. 

Vantastival takes place at Beaulieu House, Co. Louth on 3rd – 4th June and tickets are available from the Vantastival website http://www.vantastival.com/tickets/ or Eventbrite.ie https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/vantastival-2016-tickets-21043552833?aff=eac2