The Bonk

Rub off the Dark Presents:

The Bonk (+ DOG PLUG)

09.09.2026
Doors: 19:30
15 € plus booking fee

The Bonk is an Irish experimental music project headed by Waterford songwriter and improviser Phil Christie. Gathering influences from 60’s garage, jazz and experimental pop, the band's arrangements bring recursive rhythms and improvised melodies together in loose minimalist song forms, which hit like an odd yet graceful lovechild of Captain Beefhart and Mulatu Astake.

“Never afraid to try something new or opaque, The Bonk are a testament to creativity and the glory of letting go of the chains of structure.” - Clash Magazine

“The Bonk use slinking and jagged rhythms, as well as a complex, melodically dynamic push & pull to create one of the most singular Irish records we’re likely to hear this year – and they’re equally captivating live.” - The Thin Air

Check out their current album ‘Greater Than Or Equal To The Bonk’ on at the link below. 

https://thebonk.bandcamp.com/album/greater-than-or-equal-to-the-bonk

ABOUT DOG PLUG

A cable on the floor. A socket in the wall. The quiet hum between them.
Imagine the current before it moves.
Dog Plug is what happens in that charged pause.

The trio of Tony Elieh, Mazen Kerbaj, and Maurice Louca did not come together so much as condense. Their histories are braided and repeatedly entangled across years of shared projects, rehearsals, tours, studios, and stages stretching from Beirut to Cairo to Berlin. They have played in larger constellations, in ensembles that expanded and collapsed. They have composed, improvised, dismantled, and rebuilt music together for two decades.
But this is the first time the three of them have lived in the same city. The first time the electricity has had nowhere else to go.
Dog Plug is not a meeting. It is a short circuit.

Their original name, Kilab al Bottariya (“battery dogs”) refers to jumper cables, that essential object in Beirut and Cairo where engines fail, where improvisation is a daily survival skill, and you learn quickly that systems rarely work as designed. You learn to connect things manually. Directly. With sparks if necessary.
Dog Plug keeps this image: three bodies, three signal paths clipped into one another. Energy pulled from one source to ignite another. A music of contact.

– Ziad Nawfal

annihayarecords.bandcamp.com/album/dog-plug