Fri 24 Oct
8:00 pm
FREE
Aury Livingstone grew up in Durban, South Africa. Initially inspired by acts like Audioslave, AC/DC, and Guns N’ Roses, he took up the guitar at age nine. As a teenager, he began playing in local bands, and, in college, he started an acoustic singer-songwriter venture that incorporated looping and textures to expand the parameters typically permitted by the limitations of a solo arrangement.
While Aury saw some success as a solo artist, he eventually stepped away from music to focus on his studies, but his itch to create had no antipruritic. With a backlog of tracks that he thought would be great to work on with a band, Aury moved to Cork to start again. “My impression when I arrived was that there were a lot of singer-songwriters,” Aury tells Post-Burnout of moving to the Rebel County.
Aury and Stephen immediately bonded and continued to jam long after the recital. “I’ve had all these ideas in my head for years to try a new project,” Stephen says. “I tried a bunch of times to get it off the ground, but I never had an Aury to kind of work with. [Laughs] I had other fellas that weren’t as organised, but Aury’s really reliable and he comes up with brilliant ideas.
Allowing the project to grow at an organic and leisurely pace, Aury and Stephen have accrued a songbook that spans over three years. There was some stop-and-go with what they were trying to develop, mainly due to nailing down a drummer, but, thankfully, they have that position filled with the addition of the Cork-based musician Jamie Ryan, whose studio they use to practice and record in.
The influence from the loose and improvisational origin of what is now known as Sun Merchant permeates into their sound and structure. “The way that our project is set up, we’re very open to things,” Aury says. “We’re not trying to, necessarily, drive a certain direction, and say, ‘This is exactly what we want to get out of the band, and anything that veers from this, we’re throwing out, because we have a specific sound.’”
For some indication of what they’re doing, Aury credits some influence on the project to Balkan music and seminars he took at the Labyrinth Musical Workship, while Stephen adds, “The three of us are kind of just driven to get it done now. Aury was listening to a bit of Gojira when [he] was back in South Africa, and [his] mate played some Gojira for [him].
Now that Sun Merchant is solidified and confident, the members are jonesing to do what kicked it all off: playing live. The band made their debut gig at the Where Next We Meet music festival in Clonmel back in June, but they realised that they would need their music out to get any kind of traction from promoters, venues, festivals, and fans.
So, the band chose one song from their many, many options and went with “Hold My Sober” for their debut single, which came out last week at the time of publishing. “It just stuck out, really,” Stephen says when explaining their choice. “Aury worked on the lyrics, but it started from an Instagram reel of me doing that riff. So, it was a reel on Instagram, and Aury was liking the riff.
With their debut single out, Sun Merchant are going to be performing sporadically across Ireland for the remainder of 2025. When it comes to what to expect after, it should come as no surprise that the members have a very nonchalant and measured attitude toward their future.
