To celebrate the 25th anniversary of their seminal debut album, Brains, The Jimmy Cake will play the album in full – in their first concert in just under a decade at the National Concert Hall this November.

The band formed in Dublin in the late 1990s and Brains announced their arrival proper. As a nine-piece blending accordion, clarinet, saxophone, glockenspiel, trumpet and DIY percussion around the core of guitars, bass and drums they went on to release lauded efforts such as 2002’s Dublin Gone. Everybody Dead and 2008’s Spectre and Crown before later albums Master (2015) and Tough Love (2017).

Parallel to his involvement with The Jimmy Cake, pianist, synthesist, graphic designer and label manager Paul G Smyth has also set himself apart as a singular voice in Europe’s vigorous improvised music scene, working with luminaries such as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann and Keiji Haino.

We asked Paul for his choice cultural picks…

FILM

I’m being quietly haunted by a film from 2019 called I’m No Longer Here. Written and directed by Fernando Frías de la Parra, it follows an exiled Mexican teenager obsessed with slowed-down cumbia music struggling to adapt in New York after fleeing cartel violence. There’s something unspoken in it that has held me since and I don’t know what it is. “I think I know what it is,” my wife said recently as she left the room. That’s helpful, isn’t it?

In other filminess, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia is my favourite film of all time and when I last watched Cinema Paradiso, I cried during the opening credits, which my children thought was absolutely hilarious. The actual opening credits.

MUSIC

My listening habits here are both constant and scattered, as they always have been. I do like it that way and music serves a lot of different functions, depending on what else is going on around me at the time. In times of great upheaval, I retreat to the classics, which in this house means a lot of Burning Spear, Culture’s Harder Than The Rest, the first B-52’s album, Alice Coltrane, Murray Perahia playing Bach’s French Suites and Sleep’s Dopesmoker. For newer things, John Butcher’s ongoing Last Dream of the Morning trio is incredible. I’ve also been enjoying Barker’s last album Stochastic Drift, an electronic record that manages to have all these icy cold surfaces and yet feel like a living, breathing thing. Really nice. Anything that Sean Shibe puts out into the world is worthy of your ears and time, but Lost and Found might make for an interesting introduction. A recent cross-country drive with David Kitt reminded me how great Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is and my son was born to Alabaster DePlume’s To Cy and Lee a few weeks ago, so that record has jumped up the charts in terms of significance here.

BOOK

I just finished reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s first novel House of Leaves and enjoyed it very much. Now, on a tip-off from aforementioned Kittser, I’m belting my way through Anthony Cronin’s Dead As Doornails, an account of his madcap hangs with Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Brian O’Nolan (or Flann O’Brien to the rest of us). The drinking started in earnest on page one and shows no signs of letting up yet. How he remembered any of it is a mystery or a miracle. It’s pretty great. The last book that really blew me away, though, was David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which, perhaps, has more rep than readers. My wife tells me I have a talent for finding potentially enjoyable things, such as reading, and ruining them by making them really difficult. She also refers to the book pile here as my Dead White Men Collection. She’s great. Anyway, Infinite Jest isn’t hard, it’s just very long and has a daft number of footnotes. Totally worth it, even if he is cancelled or whatever.

PLAY

I’m ashamed to admit that there really hasn’t been the level of engagement with theatre that I would have liked over the years, especially since there are several theatrical experiences that have left deep marks on me. Any encounter I was lucky enough to have with the work of Robert Wilson has been transformative. I feel even luckier to have been able to thank him in person. If money was no object, I would love to go to Paris in November for Romeo Castellucci’s production of Faust in the Odéon. He’s a phenomenal theatre-maker. A few of us in the band are still at a loss for words after his 2000 production Genesi staged at the Dublin Theatre Festival broke all of our heads. You’d be shook, like.

TV

I’ve kind of plugged the TV out here for a bit and it’ll take something special for me to plug it back in. A great Netflix series that I thought was criminally overlooked was 2018’s Maniac with Jonah Hill and Emma Stone. Crazy and brave storytelling that was really smart and still managed to be funny. Highest possible recommendation. From a little further back, Donald Glover’s Atlanta was amazing. I could say all the same things about that. Special mention to the captivating Top Boy as well. Sorry it’s not more up-to-date, but great things are rare!

GIG

Going backwards first, Fever Ray in Amsterdam in 2024 humbled me beyond all reason. Totally humiliating to watch as an artist, in my favourite way. Closer to home, a new hobby is trying not to cry at a Lisa O’Neill show and failing. Junior Brother opened the last one, sounding like Captain-Beefheart-plays-Planxty or Planxty-plays-Beefheart which, either way, is obviously a recommendation. My Bloody Valentine twice in one week was a dream come true last year and I’m wearing the t-shirt as I type. Vinnie from The Jimmy Cake promotes gigs as Enthusiastic Eunuch and has a rake of great stuff coming up before the end of the year. If I had to pick three, I’d say Marisa Anderson in The Cobblestone, Slovenian avant-folk band Širom in Arthur’s, both in September, and the glorious Trá Pháidín in The Button Factory in December.

ART

I could be here all day with this one. I recommend seeking out Emma Roche’s knitted paintings, for starters. A piece like Whatcha Doing Again (2026) captures the day-to-day chaos of parenting so beautifully. I love it. Sheila Rennick’s paintings have the volume turned right up as well. Full of action, hyper, exciting and very real somehow. I also love John Graham’s meditative grid drawings and I’d like a massive Diana Copperwhite painting in my house, thanks very much. Diana, if you’re reading this, I can send you my Eircode.

TECH

Easily my favourite thing on the internet is Lost World Radio, self-described as “a music appreciation society disguised as a radio station, specializing in the old, the gloomy, and the obscure.” I kept trying to Shazam every track for weeks, usually without success, until I just looked at the screen and saw the track title scroll by along with the artwork. That was a moment.

As for hardware, I’m ready and primed for the minidisc revival and waiting for the rest of you to catch up. C’mon. Chop chop.

THE NEXT BIG THING…

Late to the party, I only heard Rachael Lavelle’s album earlier this year and it knocked me sideways. I hear there’s a new album on the way, so I’m going to say: that. She deserves every good thing that will inevitably come her way. Check out her album Big Dreams for a deeply moving piece of art pop, in the meantime. It’s really quite something.

The Jimmy Cake perform Brains as part of the NCH landmarks series on Saturday 28 November – find out more here