The Outside Voice – Culture Night ’25

Galway Arts Centre presents The Outside Voice a night of contemporary live music and dance celebrating the empowerment of the female voice – curated and presented by DJ Kate Butler for Culture Night 2025.

Join us for Culture Night 2025, Friday 19 September from 9pm in our beautiful Nuns Island Theatre for The Outside Voice a dynamic mix of conversation and live music curated and hosted by electronic music producer, DJ and filmmaker Kate Butler. This event will tell the story of how a century of recorded music has transformed the way women’s voices exist in the public domain, from historic suppression to global stages, through some of Ireland’s most cutting edge musicians. Spanning from contemporary renditions of Irish traditional music, experimental electronic music and innovative hip-hop, this event journeys through a celebration and empowerment of the female voice in music. Featuring Renn Miano, Katie Kim and Ellie Myler, Camiii and Alyxis.

FREE. Booking essential

This event has been supported by The Arts Council’s Culture Night Late award, and Galway City Council.

A writer and DJ in Dublin since the 1990s, Kate Butler has a monthly show on Dublin Digital Radio (ddr), inspired by rave culture, community clubbing and the disorientating futurism of dance music.

Kate’s work is 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.

Working across the visual arts, print and film, in 2021 Kate was one of the selectors of the Woman in the Machine exhibition at Carlow’s VISUAL gallery. That same year, she co-curated Utopia: The Chill Out Room as a Radical Space in the National Concert Hall. In September 2022, she co-programmed, with Ashley Chadamoyo Makombe, For What You Dream Of: Talks, Dance Rhythms and Afro-future Imaginaries, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In 2024, she curated and presented Wanna See You Werk, an event about access to DJ and dance culture, for Galway Arts Centre’s Culture Night.

In January 2022, Kate conceived and produced a short film, Sonic Cyborgs: FemTech ‘n theStudio, directed by Eavan Aiken. That year, Kate also helped to develop Viva Dean’s Synthesize_Her_, a workshop that teaches analogue synthesis / noise making technology to children, women and non-binary people.

In 2023, she co-edited, with Roo Honeychild, Mesh Net, a publication about social dance in Ireland. Kate is currently producing a radio documentary series, Control, about women and non-binary people using technology to make music.

Poster credits: Sal / Goldmoth productions