What's The National's Bryce Dessner Doing In Cork?

The Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival takes place in Cork until Sunday. It's a four day celebration of the musical avant-garde with performances by Wild Beasts, Julianna Barwick, My Brightest Diamond and an Irish premiere of ‘Wave Movements’, an orchestral piece by Bryce Dessner and Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire. The festival is curated by Bryce. Curating a festival. That must be fun? The National guitarist is excited about curating the first Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival, which will be ‘like throwing a party for your friends’. How did it come about? At the invitation of Cork Opera House’s Mary Hickson, Bryce readily agreed to curate what is the inaugural Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival. The four-day extravanganza of music, art and conversation, it will provide a new berth for collaborations between Irish and international artists and will include a few performances of Dessner’s own compositions. How important is such a place for musical ideas and exchanges?“I think that place is a huge part of pretty much any musician’s work, in how one responds to an environment, whether it be your actual surroundings or the more figurative place we’re all living in,” Bryce says. “This particular festival is really born out of a love affair with Cork as a city, which I have known for a long time.”