On the Record: Saturday Night fever parties in the badlands of the Big Apple

If you want to do your heart some good, head to Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter's Mister Saturday Night Soundcloud page and check out their Mister Sunday mix from a few weeks ago.

Recorded at Industry City in New York on the first day of the duo's outdoor summer party season, Mister Sunday is a thrilling sunsplash of grooves and rhythms. The recording is actually two combined into one, with one mix as you'd expect taken from the decks and the other from a microphone perched in a tree beside the dancefloor. Old school, like.

The Mister Saturday Night story is gaining new legs and adding extra chapters every month. The duo recently announced that they’d taken over an abandoned industrial space in the New York badlands around Queens to turn it into an outdoor urban backyard bar called Nowadays.

This joins the already established Mister Saturday Night parties in the Big Apple and elsewhere, as well as a well-regarded label for Hank Jackson, Anthony Naples, Keita Sano, Gunnar Haslam, Lumigraph and others. One recent release was from the hugely promising Nebraska.

Mister Saturday Night ties neatly in with that storied New York narrative about how clubs and scenes develop and evolve. We’ve all read the stories about parties and makeshift venues from The Loft back in the day to Body & Soul in more recent years contributing to the rich fabric of NYC clubbing lore.

Mister Saturday Night has a Derryman at the helm in the shape of Harkin, who played in various indie bands as a kid. But it was first in London and then New York that that Harkin saw how just sticking to a house or techno template would never be as exciting as branching into other areas.

Harkin is another example of the new wave of Irish DJs and producers making inroads worldwide. It used to be that when gauging the influence of Irish spinners beyond these shores, you quickly ran out of names to drop. Those with any international profile were few and far between, with Belfast’s David Holmes and Cork’s Fish Go Deep heading the list.

Now it’s a much different scene. It’s a very good time to be an Irish DJ and producer: Gavin Lynch is taking the Matador brand from festival to festival and fine-tuning releases for Richie Hawtin’s Minus stable; Sunil Sharpe’s has ongoing adventures in the lands of crunchy techno; and John O’Callaghan’s busy diary includes summer dates in Ibiza, Australia, Mexico, Canada and elsewhere.

As Harkin and all of them have shown, geography is not something to hold you back.

Mister Saturday Night’s Eamon Harkin plays the Beatyard festival in Dún Laoghaire on August 1st

YOU’VE GOT TO HEAR THIS

Olivia Chaney - The Longest River
Chaney is the Florence-born, Oxford-reared, London-based folkie putting new shapes and shades on English folk's tender, elegant stirrings. Her debut album shows much poise, whether it's her own material or grandstanding with covers such as Alasdair Roberts's Waxwing, Henry Purcell's There's Not a Swain and Violetta Parra's La Jardinera.

ETC

It's time to refight the punk wars in Cork with Punk on Film, a season of flicks examining the legacy of the 1970s movement. Films to be shown include The Damned: Don't You Wish We Were Dead (introduced by director Wes Orshoski); Julien Temple's The Filth & the Fury; Wolfgang Büld's Punk in London; and Rude Boy, a fictional account of a roadie for The Clash. All screenings are at Triskel from July 19th to 22nd. triskelartscentre.ie/cinema