Hors Catégorie

PS Coffee Roasters

Gloves, cup of espresso and water on a glass-topped table with fliers for events under the glass — Yes, that is a flyer for a Bay City Rollers tribute band, supported by a Smokie tribute band

Ride distance: 71km
Beverage: espresso, naturally

I rushed to get a ride in on Monday in advance of storm Ciarán, though in the end the storm tracked north of Dublin and it seems that Newry took the brunt of it. Either way, it was no bad day to sweat out the excesses of the long weekend, cold and damp but clear skies and little wind.

Naas is, notoriously, a terrible place, but I could have finessed my entry to the town a little better than coming straight in on the Blessington Road, a narrow country road built for traffic a fraction of what it sees now. The relief when the road finally widens enough for cars to pass comfortably is tempered by the procession of identikit housing estates on the outskirts of the town.

Still, once you get onto the main street, it’s a bustling place. Turn onto the road for Sallins and PS Coffee Roasters is tucked neatly into the corner of a brutalist concrete block on the right. On previous occasions, the espresso in the Naas branch hasn’t matched the standard set by their roastery in Clane, but this shot was excellent: thick, savoury, complex. Good coffee, nice presentation, comfortable couch, early Daft Punk on the stereo…what more could you ask?

On the way home, I took the quieter route past the race course, admiring the modest residences of the humble folk of Kildare.

Staute atop a high clumn in front of a country house — A typical Kildare lawn ornament

Storyboard

An expanse of parkland, a thin layer of mist hanging above the grass, sun peeping through the trees — The last of the morning mist in Phoenix Park

Ride distance: 57km
Beverage: espresso

I spent an hour on Tuesday fettling the fixed-gear: swapping pedals, fitting the rack for the saddlebag, tensioning the chain. Slathering each link of the chain with wet lube, thick as olive oil but a lurid, chemical green that no sane person would put in their mouth. Then the rest of the day watching the rain, heavy showers building to a steady downpour. The following day, the shakedown ride: a couple of hours on flat roads, nothing hectic, classic winter riding.

I slipped out through the back door to the city, the gates of Phoenix Park at Farmleigh. The closed roads around the perimeter of the park attract an odd cross-section of cyclists, from nervous wrecks and invalids too frail for the open roads to headbangers in full TT rig out for some heads down, no nonsense, mindless boogie. Even the Prince of Darkness himself once put in three laps of the circuit, shelling star-struck wheelsuckers with each charge up the Khyber Pass.

From there, the rat-run along the walls of Luttrellstown, low buzz of tension from impatient drivers skirting the M50 toll gates, until I hit open countryside behind Westmanstown. Along the R149, a hedgerow where every single tree had been felled in the recent storms. The rusted but ornate gates and crumbling walls of once great estates. The towers of the Intel plant visible in the distance. Fields raising the annual winter crop of grey-brown mud. The flats stretch to the horizon, all the long, steady miles you can eat. Three hours is usually plenty, four a hard maximum.

On the way back into town, I stopped in Islandbridge for coffee at Storyboard. Storyboard is a rare stop for me, awkwardly placed: heading out, I’m just getting warmed up; coming home, the attraction of hot water applied externally usually trumps that of hot coffee applied internally. But it’s a nice café in the modern, well-lit, minimalist style — even the exposed ductwork in the ceiling looks clean, deliberate. Decent espresso, Dungarees blend from Farmhand, a Dublin roastery that was new to me. I must be less stand-offish this winter.

Interior of cafe, showing the counter with menu on blackboard behind it, exposed pipes in the roof, a small pile of pumpkins on the floor — Post-industrial chic at Storyboard

Exploring the Parameter Space

Mammoth interview with Autechre in advance of their Vicar Street gig tomorrow night. I’m not usually gone on interviews that just present the unedited transcript of the conversation, but it seems appropriate here, given the multi-hour scale of some Autechre releases. There’s something of the same sense of wandering aimlessly in their world and unexpectedly happening on something really interesting.

If you’d asked me thirty years ago which bands of the day were likely to go down the Grateful Dead route of massive documentation of their live work, I might have guessed Sonic Youth, but Autechre wouldn’t have been anywhere on my radar. Nor Fugazi, for that matter.

Square

Road passing alongside a horse race course under partly clouded skies — The Curragh under big skies

Ride distance: 115km
Beverage: double espresso, with a flapjack on the side

A few days of cold, bright weather before storm Babet rolls through. Everything looks uncannily sharp and clear through the cold, dry air, absent the haze that usually hangs over the mountains. The compass swings in winter, away from the mountains and west towards the flatter land of Kildare and Meath. The world contracts as rides get shorter, start later, the grey gloom of the mornings uninviting. There’s a perpetual sheen of moisture on the roads, decaying leaves carpeting the ground—cornering is treacherous, fast descents a gamble. More often I go out on the fixed gear, to preserve expensive derailleurs from the corrosion of road salt and the constant abrasion of the mud.

The route to Kildare town is quintessential winter cycling: one main road climb up Ballinascorney, a scatter of foothills around Ballymore Eustace and Kilteel, and the rest is flat. From Brannockstown onwards the smell of wealth rises off a procession of stud farms, luxury cars, expansive mansions. The run back from Kildare to the city passes by the racecourses at the Curragh (where 20,000 gathered to watch Dan Donnelly fight in 1814) and Punchestown. The Curragh should be easy, a pan-flat run under open skies, but there’s no escape from the wind, and it’s a relief to turn onto the gently undulating roads after Athgarvan.

I took my cafe stop at Square, an archetypal modern coffee shop, all hard surfaces and European minimalism, well-lit and attractive but not really cosy. They did me wrong once or twice during the pandemic years, serving me espresso in a paper cup, but all is forgiven as this shot arrives in a small ceramic vase that sits nicely in the hand. Decent espresso too, house branded but roasted by PS Coffee Roasters. I would have murdered a sandwich or a bowl of thick soup but only sweet things on the menu, had to settle for a flapjack—I was hanging by the time I got home. Still, well worth a visit if you’re passing through Kildare.

Round tower silhouetted on a hillside under cloudy skies — The round tower at Old Kilcullen graveyard

Les choses sont contre nous

“All Sankey’s things—the chipped Baby Belling on the draining board; the bits of unmatched blue and fawn carpet; the one-bar fire, the transistor radio, the stereo with its handful of dog-eared albums from the early Seventies—had a used but uncooperative look. He had assembled them, and while he was still alive his personality had held them together; now they were distancing themselves from one another again like objects in a second-hand shop.”

—Climbers, M. John Harrison

Roundwood Stores

Ride distance: 87km
Beverage: one espresso, accompanied by an excellent sandwich

The weather was still absurdly warm as I headed out the following day on my second coffeenée (is that a word? it is now) of the week. Haze softened the autumn sunlight as I climbed to Sally Gap, light breezes playing over my bare arms, strands of spider silk hanging in the slow-moving air. At this time of year, I’d often be bidding farewell to the Gap for the year, farewell to the gales and drizzle and bone-chilling descents. But not in 2023.

Following the Military Road down past Glenmacnass waterfall to Laragh, I turned back towards Roundwood. Around Annamoe, Wicklow County Council were hard at work eliminating the last remaining stretches of smooth asphalt in the county. One can only imagine that an influential member of the Council also owns a gravel quarry — they’d gravel-dress the M11 given half a chance.

I stopped at the Roundwood Stores, where the tasteful choice of font on the signage advertising “Artisan Grocery” betokens the kind of bourgeois luncheon experience I’m looking for in a cafe. The yellow wall hides a sunlit courtyard with enough space to stash your bike. I ordered an espresso and a croque monsieur — a blackboard on the counter reassured the Plain People of Ireland that they were being threatened with nothing more exotic than an ham-and-cheese toastie.

The croque monsieur was the Platonic ideal of a toasted sandwich, the thick bread grilled to a golden-red, crisped in the fat running off the cheese and thickly sliced ham. The espresso, on the other hand, was deeply odd. I can best describe it as a hazelnut praline emulsion — thick and finely aerated, but no hint of coffee to the flavour whatsoever. I’ve had a lot of weird, funky shots over the years, but this was a new one on me. Still, it was nowhere near enough to ruin the pleasure of eating a good lunch in the sunshine.

Sadly, once it was done I had to climb back on the bike and waddle the thirty kilometres home.

Five Points

Ride distance: 46km.
Beverage: 1 espresso (doppio)

Fittingly, the Coffeeneuring Challenge 2023 begins in the same place that every day begins for me, Five Points on the Harold’s Cross Road. Originally an independent fiefdom, Five Points was absorbed into the Borg-like 3FE empire a few years ago, trading the old blue livery for the current red. Though Five Points is no longer home to the best scones in Dublin, the espresso is reliably decent and the staff are reliably sound.

From there I head out through the empty Sunday morning streets of Terenure. This is rugby territory — improbably young boys are practising on the school playing fields, so small that when they line up to take a kick, the ball stands higher than their kneecaps. Older rugby fans are still in bed, nursing hangovers after Ireland’s win against Scotland last night. Just a handful of dog-walkers and serious runners getting the last few miles in before the Dublin Marathon.

There’s no breeze until I reach the bridge over the M50. Suddenly a blast of tropical warm air, borne on a middling south-westerly. Warmer than any day in the wet July just gone, unseasonably warm. Climate change-y warm. I stash my gilet and arm warmers in the saddlebag, should have trusted in the forecast, implausible though it seemed.

I take the back roads by Bohernabreena and Glenasmole up to the Featherbeds before dropping back down towards the city. A steady stream of cyclists with more stamina than me heading the opposite direction, Wicklow-bound. Two Garda cars parked up by the Noel Lemass memorial, where someone is setting up placards and loudspeakers; two more cars a little further down, Guards standing in the road eyeing approaching drivers with suspicion.

I swing around by Tibradden, past O’Connell’s Rock where two hundred years ago the Liberator delivered an oration to vast crowds. Hard to imagine walking up there from the city, yet few can have had horses or carriages to carry them. Cut left at Johnny Fox’s and over the last rise before the long descent all the way down to the river Dodder in Milltown.

I detour by the market in Herbert Park and ride home with two musettes full of apples hanging from my neck, Holstein Coxes and Tipperary Pippins from Llewellyn’s orchard.

Market stalls clustered around a small bandstand in Herbert Park — The bourgeoisie of south Dublin in their element: Herbert Park Market

Chasing Mailboxes lays down the law for the Coffeneuring Challenge 2023. The challenge is straightforward (ride your bike and drink coffee seven times in seven weeks) but in keeping with the grand tradition of randonneuring established by Audax Club Parisien, there is an elaborate set of rules, some honoured more in the breach than the observance.

Burning Ambulance runs down the oeuvre of Hedvig Mollestad. I only know Black Stabat Mater (and fully endorse Phil’s praise) but this video of Ekhidna covering “Red” convinces me that I need to dig deeper.

Tone Glow top their hefty A.R. Kane interview with an even chunkier one with Hal Hartley. Last year I rewatched the video shop classics of my youth — The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and Amateur — and they still hold up for me. Judging from the interview, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Up Home!

“When you grow up in the East End of London in the 1970s, you wanna believe in evolution, I’m telling you. You don’t wanna believe that this is the end game.”

Hefty interview with Rudy Tambala of A.R. Kane over at Tone Glow.

I’ve listened to the Up Home! EP a few times in recent weeks, A.R. Kane on my mind since the review of the box set in the Wire. Filleted from the Complete Singles Collection, the EP sounds more striking than ever, almost incomprehensibly accomplished for a band only on their third single, and a quantum leap on from their debut, “When You’re Sad”. The lacerating distortion, the cavernous dub spaciousness, the rough sutures between the musical ideas left defiantly exposed…even in the febrile milieu of early UK post-rock, there weren’t many bands who sounded so individual, so unexpected. Maybe My Bloody Valentine (the jagged stop-start noise of Isn’t Anything more than the amniotic wash of Loveless) or Disco Inferno. It surprises me that several times in the interview Rudy mentions Slowdive, who I always thought of as being irremediably obvious and plodding, but perhaps I underrate them.

Elsewhere:

Keith Leblanc (Tackhead, Sugarhill Gang etc.) talks to Burning Ambulance.

Aquarium Drunkard explores guitar/drum duos, talking to Steve Gunn, Jim White, and Rick Brown of 75 Dollar Bill (who played two transcendental sets at the Workman’s Cellar last Saturday).

Conference of the Birds (1973)

Conference of the Birds album cover Jazz will, I suspect, ever remain an unknown continent for me. I bought my first jazz album, one of those low-rent I Love Jazz compilations, when I was too young to drink. I’ve picked away at the music over the thirty-five years since but my knowledge remains only fingernail deep. In the end, I just don’t find the head-solo-chorus jams that are the meat-and-potatoes of jazz that compelling. I struggle to discern the nuances of individual style — I could number the players (mostly pianists) that I can reliably recognise on the fingers of one hand. My favourite recordings run to more developed arrangements, or collective improvisation (better yet, both at the same time…Charles Mingus often delivers here).

Conference of the Birds is a heavyweight session, but of the four players, I’m familiar only with Dave Holland, from his brief tenure with Miles Davis. I’ve never heard a note by Sam Rivers (despite his even briefer tenure with Miles), nor Anthony Braxton, though both are major figures in the avant-garde. Barry Altschul is no more than a name. The generally reliable Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings gives it Core Collection status, rating it a “quiet masterpiece”. That the last edition of the Guide came out in 2008 gives a fair idea of how long I’ve been intending to listen to this album.

Despite the free-playing credentials of the four musicians, Conference of the Birds charges out of the gate with “Four Winds”, a track that sounds almost nostalgic for the bebop era, Altschul laying down a high-tempo cymbal pulse while the horns chase each other. The solos stray a bit too far into goose-throttling territory to have been tolerated at Minton’s but the spirit is there. Three of the six tracks follow that template. Two take a more conversational approach, forgoing steady drum rhythm and long horn lines to open up a space into which the four musicians interject brief phrases. The second and shorter of these, “Now Here (Nowhere)” gradually builds to a perfectly balanced, suspended shimmer. Were it not for the title track, it would be the highlight of the album.

But “Conference of the Birds” is a thing apart. It opens with a meditative bass solo from Holland, before he strums a few chords (sounding implausibly like a Nirvana riff) to announce the main theme. As he picks out the melody, flute and saxophone twine around each other, rising into the air. As the theme repeats, Altschul moves from hand percussion to cymbals to marimba. Inspired, apparently, by the sounds of the dawn chorus outside Holland’s London flat, the melody seems to reach centuries back in time. It’s like little else I’ve heard in jazz — maybe Coltrane’s version of “Greensleeves” from Africa/Brass is a second cousin — and I wonder if Holland had perhaps been listening to some of the jazz-adjacent UK folk bands like Pentangle? Either way, it’s a limpid, spellbinding piece of music that immediately reminds you that this is, after all, an ECM album.

This post is the second in an occasional series, in which I’m working through the span of life, picking an album (and, preferably, artist) new to me for each year of my life. Previous posts.