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Mesh Net is a collection of reflections on the history, experience, and significance of social dancing in Ireland, from ancient times to the present, edited by Kate Butler and Roo Honeychild.
Born of a previous collaboration between Butler and Club Comfort for Dublin Fringe 2019, the publication sees the party crew collaborating once again with members of their community to come to terms with dance music and culture at large.
A selection of writings survey dancing in Ireland in a range of its aspects. These are placed side by side with commissioned visual work from artist Aisling Phelan and a selection of photographs taken by longtime Club Comfort documentor Faolán Carey. Through this assemblage, Butler, Honeychild, and their collaborators trace a sense of their place in history and the world and try to draw insight for the times we live in now.
As part of their Radical Spirit Commission (by Dublin Fringe Festival and Project Arts Centre) for Dublin Fringe Festival 2023, Club Comfort is delighted to be publishing this book with Project Press, an imprint of Project Arts Centre.
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Club Comfort is a music and nightlife collective who have been active in Dublin since 2017. Founded by local DJs and producers Baliboc, Selky, and Roo Honeychild, Club Comfort is known for their boundary-pushing sensibility in music and queer party culture. In 2019 the collective produced Comfort Carnival at the National Stadium as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, a one-day festival of music and art. 2023 sees them producing Mesh Net, a publication reflecting on the culture around them, alongside Comfort Carnival: Coda, another day-long event returning to the scene of the crime to present the latest shifts in the contemporary Irish underground.
Roo Honeychild is an artist and music producer from Dublin. She is well-known for her work in music, radio, and nightlife, and also writes. She is a longtime Dublin Digital Radio host, having recently joined the station's steering committee to support the organisation and its development. She is also the founder of City Imp, a Dublin-based label for local acts to put out independent music. Having spent the last few years working as a DJ and party starter in Ireland and Glasgow, this year she has begun developing and performing live music under the guise of a new electronic pop persona. The forthcoming publication of Mesh Net consolidates Honeychild's experience as a researcher, collaborator, and co-conspirator, charting a lesser-known landscape of alternative music and DIY culture in Ireland's past, present, and future.
Kate Butler is a writer and DJ, active in Dublin since the 1990s. She has a monthly show on Dublin Digital Radio (ddr), inspired by rave culture, community clubbing and the disorientating futurism of contemporary dance music. Kate's work is largely concerned with societal barriers to technology for creative purposes, particularly for women and other marginalised groups. Since 2017, she has been developing Atomic, a programme which teaches girls and marginalised children how to DJ and gives young people access to broadcasting on ddr. In 2021, Kate was one of the selectors of the Woman in the Machine exhibition at Carlow's VISUAL gallery. In January 2022, Kate conceived and wrote a short film, Sonic Cyborgs: FemTech ‘n theStudio, directed by Eavan Aiken. Kate has also worked on Viva Dean’s Synthesize_Her_, a workshop that teaches analogue synthesis / noise-making technology to children, women and non-binary people. In September 2022, Kate co-programmed, with Ashley Chadamoyo Makombe, For What You Dream Of: Talks, Dance Rhythms and Afro-future Imaginaries, at IMMA. Kate is currently researching This is a Story about Control: Music, Technology and Gendered Roles of Creativity, a book and radio documentary about women and non-binary people using technology to make music. She will give a preliminary talk on her research at ddr's Alternating Current in October 2023. Find her on Instagram here.
