Joshua Burnside is the sound of twenty first century Ireland , traditional and roots influences combine with world music, electronica and experimental rock to make a sound that is reflective of the Ireland of now and not the Ireland of yesterday
Joshua released his debut album “EPHRATA” in May 2017 to critical and commercial acclaim , it both won the Northern Ireland Music prize and racked up an impressive 5 million streams on Spotify
In the past year he has graced stages in Ireland, UK , Germany and the US and was invited to play for President Bill Clinton on the twentieth anniversary of the “Good Friday “ Peace Agreement in Belfast
His music has found strong support on BBC 6 music, Radio 2 , Radio 1 , RTE radio and he was selected by the influential NPR radio station as one of the Austin Hot 100 when he played at the SXSW festival earlier this year
He plays tonight with a full band.
Support tonight comes from another Northern Irish artist “Malojian “ , who combines Americana with a strong strand of sixties psychedelia where influences come from both sides of the Atlantic , the Byrds, Neil Young , Crosby Stills and Nash, the Beatles, the Kinks , the Small Faces but is no mere plagiarist as he updates and combines these into a sound that’s totally his own. He also has found fans on 6 music , tonight he plays solo
‘There’s an indefinable quality
and charm to Joshua
Burnside’s debut’ - The
Sunday Times
‘It makes you glad to have a
pair of working ears’ - Phil
Taggart, BBC Radio 1
‘an endless adventure…a
record that won’t tire, such is
the depth and scope of what
you hear’ - Daily Mirror
Line Up
‘Rumbling, brooding, powerful, magnetic’ - The Irish Times
Joshua Burnside is an experimental folk artist based in Belfast, and the most recent recipient of the Northern Ireland Music Prize for his debut album ‘EPHRATA’, released last year. The album was highly praised by the The Sunday Times, Irish Times, State and The Thin Air as well receiving huge support from BBC 6 Music DJ’s Lauren Laverne, Tom Ravenscroft, Guy Garvey, and BBC Radio 1’s Phil Taggart and Huw Stephens.
EPHRATA has been praised for lyrics which blend local history with surreal imagery and apocalyptic themes, as well as the fusion of south american rhythms with traditional Irish melodies and instrumentation.
A political satirist is assassinated, two shellshocked siblings hallucinate a zombie apocalypse, and a terminally ill physics professor turns to god, these are the kind of stories that are laid out, tied up, unravelled and strewn together in ‘EPHRATA’.
Written in a burst of a few weeks whilst living in northern Colombia, the songs deal with a diverse range of themes, from PTSD and technophobia, to larger questions about time, love and death in the modern age. Balanced with an even more diverse palette of sounds, from south american rhythms, banjos and accordions to crunching beats, found-sounds, loops and whistling, he has created a stormy world that swirls and shifts your perspective like a dream that lingers on long after you’ve woken up.
‘Understated and exaggerated, thought-provoking and reflective, constantly keeping the listener on their toes’ - Golden Plec
Prodigious, eclectic, original, unpredictable, well-produced... Stop me when the kettle's boiled' - Cultureni
'Hands down one of the most-forward thinking folk artists from these shores' - The Thin Air
