- In July 2012, Tiarnan McMorrow, Conor Hamilton, Damien Clancy and Gearoid Doherty started Faint, Sligo's longest-running house and techno night, because they were sick of having to travel to Dublin or Belfast to get their fix. At first, none of the local nightclubs were interested—dance music wasn't a moneyspinner—so they threw parties on boats and in hotel function rooms, giving acts like Andy Hart and Fantastic Man their Irish debuts. After one particularly successful event, the hotel manager approached the four of them with a concerned look. "We're really happy but we never want to do this again."
The crowd that night weren't violent or disrespectful, but they were, as crowds tend to be across Ireland, young, loud and extremely boisterous. Fast-forward to 2018 and little has changed in that regard, except these days Faint regularly pulls audiences in the thousands. At last Thursday's day-into-night session in partnership with Belfast festival AVA, 1400 locals and students swarmed the car park at Faint's current home, Sintillate, Snapchatting relentlessly while whipping up an atmosphere that would put most football stadiums to shame. 1400 people in a town of roughly 30,000 is a pretty incredible feat—one person joked that nearly 1/15th of the total population was in attendance.
Faint might be putting Sligo back on the map, but it's by no means an anomaly in Ireland. From Waterford to Limerick to Galway, house and techno is booming right now, partly thanks to the runaway popularity of young, relatable DJs like Denis Sulta, who headlined last Thursday. I wasn't there when he arrived, but someone said he had to be chaperoned, hood up, through the gates by security.
The outdoor half of the party, which ran from 6 PM through 11 PM, was easily the funnest. It rains a lot in Sligo—including earlier that morning—but the sun burst through in the afternoon, turning the sky a dazzling bluey pink around sunset. Kildare's DJ Deece kept the vibe raucous with thumping house tracks like Omar-S's "I Wanna Know," before handing over to Brame & Hamo (AKA Faint cofounders McMorrow and Hamilton), who opened on a deeper tip: Soofle's "How Do You Plead?" From there they went tougher, then soulful, then ravey, striking a nice balance between big-room hits (Dark Sky's "IYP," Tronco Traxx's "Walk 4 Me") and more leftfield bombs—Eleven Pond's "Watching Trees" was a pleasant surprise. By the time they finished with their own current smash, "Roy Keane," the security guards had given up telling people to get down from their friends' shoulders.
Inside the venue, a loud, wide space with a sunken dance floor, the atmosphere was still livelier than most parties, though you could sense fatigue setting in among some of the crowd, especially those in the front row, who seemed more interested in taking Sulta's photo than dancing. He hit the decks after Or:la, who impressed with 90 minutes of '80s jams and synthy techno. Sulta went more flamboyant, serving up big chunks of disco, indulgent prog tracks and another raucously received airing of "Roy Keane." He wasn't on the decks for long before he called over Or:la, Sally C and Brame & Hamo for an impromptu back-to-back, at which point the big guns really came out: Tomcraft's "Loneliness," Tim Deluxe's "Just Won't Do" and Dario G's "Sunchyme." The moment the first chords from "Sunchyme" rang out, two guys leaped onto a podium in front of the booth and began pulling their friends up. A security guard clambered over the decks towards them, but then slipped and fell, thwarted once again.
Photo credit /
Jimmy Kilgallen