Cassandra Voices

Category: Music

  • Elemental Concepts and Sounds

    In October 2016, I vacated my room in Dublin and moved to a cottage on the seaside in isolated, rural Louth. The day before I did this I broke up with my girlfriend of eighteen months. Though, in hindsight, the breakup had been coming for a while, it was coincidental, or at least unplanned, for these two major life changes to occur at the same time. Though a large part of the motivation in moving to the countryside was to have more time and a better headspace for making music, a record was never a part of the plan. Rather, I felt compelled to express feelings and thoughts that I didn’t feel comfortable speaking to anyone about.

    The majority of an album, Matter, was subsequently written over a twelve-month period from late 2016: sparse, emotionally-bare songs with ambience, noise and mind-bending soundscapes – a modern take on the Irish singer-songwriter tradition. A large amount of it is dedicated to sonifying grief, regret and sadness. However, I think there is a sense of resolution and finality found throughout the work as well.

    A lot of my work focuses on extremes and dichotomies and this record is an example of that. I realised as I was writing these songs that I used a similar process for many of them and that they have a comparable form. They start out as sweet, sad songs and eventually get washed away in a sea of noise. This is probably most explicitly represented on the track ‘Over’, though it’s done with more subtlety (though not that much more!) on other occasions on the record. I think ‘Not Quite Parallel’ is the most important and effective example of this, which was the first one that I wrote which came out fully formed. The day I moved into the house in Louth I wrote this, and it quickly became evident that there was something I needed to get out and this was the first installment of it.

    As well as the explicitly personal content, the sudden change of circumstance gave me a great deal of time to think about my own life and its insignificance. Perhaps this is the real reason that I decided to release this music, as I have written a great deal of work which will never see the light of day. I’m getting older and I find it hard to measure the value of my life thus far, and am beginning to realise the importance of documentation and milestones.

    As much as I understand the positive effects of living in the moment, sometimes it detracts from thinking about the big picture. If everything is fleeting and transitory, how can we aim for anything in the future? And equally, what are we going to look back on – except for a collection of moments? Maybe life is just a collection of moments anyway, but I’d like to think that they all add up to something bigger. Even if that’s not true, I’ve decided that I’m going to believe in it anyway. I’m currently doing my best to believe in the greater good, despite the evidence that would suggest otherwise. I think that all of this relates to another dichotomy which is dealt with in the record – the balance between the individual and the universal.

    The record was largely written in isolation and, prior to its release, only a handful of people had heard any of it. However, I got a bit of an insight into the process when I showed the demos to my friend Des Garvey, who engineered a lot of the album. I sent the music over to him and his response was something along the lines of ‘that’s what I would have expected an album of your solo music to sound like’. This came as a bit of a shock to me, as it seemed so at odds with the way I viewed myself. It made me realise that very often, the people around you know you much better than you know yourself. Their view of you isn’t obscured by the bias of your own ideas of your ideal self.

    There are more particular themes evident throughout the album, though I think a lot of them relate back to these core concepts. For example, the title track deals with individual loss in the face of universal insignificance and the relationships between people, as well as those between waves and matter, in the physical world. The world seems to be quite obsessed with material objects and sometimes I feel like my obsession with waves is at odds with that. ‘Matter’ also plays with the multiplicity of meanings that a lot of words have. With that in mind, it’s worth noting that I’m also interested in homophones and concepts that explicitly have multiple meanings, as it gives the listener more space to infer their own ideas from it. The track ‘Weight’ is reliant on the use of homophones as well, in order to play with listener expectation.

    Finally, though the record is heavily built around synthetic sounds (synthesisers, digital noise, processed vocals), at its core, it’s heavily influenced by organic sounds and elemental concepts. A lot of the lyrical themes deal with water and the sea and this is no coincidence. As well as being written mostly in a seaside cottage in winter, the key relationship which the record deals with was defined by a shared love of the sea and will forever be associated with that in my mind. When I listen to it, the sounds of the waves crashing on rocks and the sea gusts permeate every aspect of the music. I hope that other people can hear that as well.

     

    The Line is the new solo project of musician, sound designer, and producer Brian Dillon. The debut album, Matter was released on Dublin label Bad Soup Records on 28 February 2020. Matter is now available to download and stream across online platforms: https://ampl.ink/4xpyV. Follow The Line on social media via Facebook and Instagram.

  • Musician of the Month: Judith Ring

    Listening is a powerful skill. It’s one of the most important things you can learn in life. There are many different ways to listen and many different things to listen to, such as music, thoughts, emotions, facts, and opinions. For as long as I can remember I’ve always been trying to listen just that little bit closer.

    I developed a hyper-awareness of sound in particular during my first years of piano tuition. One of my teachers was always playing random pieces of music off the top of her head as I arrived for my lesson. I loved to hear her play like this and longed to be able to do the same. I quickly realised that it was possible to play all the popular songs of the day just by sitting down and listening. The most important lesson I ever learnt and have never forgotten was when I was about 11 years old.

    I brought a piece of music on cassette tape to my lesson for the same teacher to listen to and teach me. It may have been Bohemian Rhapsody or some other song with an epic piano part. She had a quick listen and told me to go home and figure it out for myself. This baffled me at first but I thought I’d give it a try. I went home and listened, and then really listened, and I figured out how to play the piece… note for note. What a revelation! From then on I took on everything from Billy Joel to Guns and Roses and became obsessed with learning these piano parts exactly as they were played on the recording. I didn’t just play something similar, I had to have every note correct.

    As a teenager I had a deep attachment to the piano and had a pact with myself that I had to play every day or the spell would be broken. Even playing just a few notes would suffice. I generally practiced for a couple of hours every day and even more once I got to university. Piano was a massive part of my life. I also drew a lot and developed a love of black and white photography, so between art, photography and music I didn’t have much time for anything else. I was lucky that I went to a school that somehow allowed me to focus on all three subjects. All this has continued to feed into my compositional life, which only began in my early twenties when I did a Master’s in Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin (graduating class of 2000).

    Having broken the piano spell and replaced it with electronic music I quickly turned my attention to found sounds and musique concrète. Using sounds from everyday life to create vast soundscapes further broadened and deepened my listening experience. Every sound around me became music! Sounds that other people tried to block out while going about their daily business became the building blocks of my compositions. Being able to transform them even further through various electronic processes was mind-blowing to me and incredibly exciting.

    For many years I travelled around with a portable minidisc recorder and a small microphone recording anything and everything of interest. Machinery and transport fascinated me the most, especially when I started to pull these sounds apart to see what they would reveal. Electronic music opened my ears to so many incredible compositional possibilities during that time. The idea of sculpting and shaping sounds that had never been heard before was infinitely satisfying.

    In a world where there are so many types of music and ways of approaching the arrangement of sonic elements in time, it has always been a challenge to come up with fresh ideas. Classical music was built on a very specific musical language. Composers who understood the power of this language and how to manipulate it most effectively managed to develop their own voice and have stood the test of time. These rules began to be broken down and abandoned at the beginning of the twentieth century. The strict rules of harmony and counterpoint were challenged and new ideas and concepts were introduced. From then on it was a free-for-all to some extent and now you can literally write whatever you want.

    This makes things more challenging in many ways as you have nothing to hold on to. You can derive ideas from other works of course but creating a unique soundworld is very ambitious.

    Delving into the world of musique concrète gave me a very important and lifelong obsession with timbre. Through working with found sounds I started to explore acoustic instruments for their sonic possibilities. Over the years I have collaborated very closely with professional musicians to explore their instruments and listen deeply to the intricacies of timbre that can be drawn from them.

    Through the use of microphones I have built large libraries of sounds from every instrumentalist I have worked with and have explored their timbre even more by layering recordings of certain sounds together to make delicious textures. By using recordings you can enhance even the tiniest sound just by amplifying it within the mix to give you almost a macro-engagement with sound. This process became the basis of a PhD in composition that I completed at the University of York in 2009.

    The endless combinations of sonic possibilities in this world will continue to inspire my life and work. Although living the life of an artist has lead me down quite an unconventional path, and can be a struggle at times, I wouldn’t change it for anything. I will continue to listen deeply and I encourage you to do the same.

     

    For more of Judith’s work see her:

    Official website: www.judithring.com

    Soundcloud: www.soundcloud.com/judith-ring

    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1vVA69QkacFPkOPLdiILOQ?disable_polymer=true

    Judith is currently writing pieces for flautist Lina Andonovska and drummer Matthew Jacobson’s duo
    SlapBang and a piece for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra as part of The Contemporary Music
    Centre’s composer lab.

     

  • A Composer’s Story

    When I was sixteen I gave up learning the piano. In her report my music teacher (who had terminated my studies) wrote: ‘what an awful shame’.

    The story is a common one. Young peoples’ lives become filled with music on records, video, in films, on radio and TV, during Saturday nights, in supermarkets, in amusement arcades, on the streets and in concerts. Culturally exploded thus, they sit down to Mr. Beethoven and wonder what on earth this glaring composer from the distant past has to do with the rhythms they feel and the harmonies they hear.

    When I left school I was drumming on a local pop group and living at home, sleeping till lunchtime. I hadn’t qualified for university and my father wanted me to get a job. I remember replying in writing in answer to an advertisement for a shop assistant and saying that my hair was long and I wouldn’t get it cut. I only had the music. I used to sit at the piano for a few hours each afternoon, improvising.

    Pop band The Unkind with drummer Roger Doyle (centre)

    The Royal Irish Academy Of Music 

    Over a period of months I gradually composed a four-page piano piece and showed it to my former piano teacher. She suggested I contact Dr. A.J. Potter in the Royal Irish Academy of Music. I played my four-page piece for him; he had a vacancy and the following week I started composition studies with him – once a week for an hour. From then on I had to have something composed for every Monday afternoon.

    Dr. Potter never said ‘you can’t do that’. On the other hand he never told me exactly what to do. Maybe this was his approach. We talked about life and art and he gave me the musical space I needed. He said you could read all the books you liked about instrumentation but if you really wanted to know how a trombone works you should buy a trombonist a drink after the concert. He never encouraged me and I needed a little.

    After a year at the Academy I submitted my compositions for the Junior Composition Scholarship which would mean a year’s free tuition. At the beginning of the next term I received a phone-call from the office of the Academy: ‘With regard to your recent application for the Junior Scholarship in Composition we wish to inform you that you have been successful in…’. I had never planned on being a composer; necessity was the mother of my invention.

    I wanted to write a piece for orchestra in my first scholarship term. Dr. Potter said: ‘Well go ahead!’. I had a drawing of the highest and lowest notes of each instrument in front of me as I composed Four Sketches for orchestra. It took me five months and was later performed, when I was twenty two, by the Dublin Symphony Orchestra (because it won second prize in its competition for composers), and the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra (the National Radio/Television orchestra).

    The first radio broadcast of any work of mine was of Four Sketches. In 1969 at the end of my second year at the Academy I was awarded the Vandeleur Scholarship in Composition. During my third year I began experimenting with my tape recorder at home in my search for new sounds and compositional approaches. I took to tape music like a duck to water without ever being bothered about the ‘do you call this music?’ syndrome.  I never stopped and thought too much – I just did it.

    When I first heard tape music (loosely termed electronic music) on record, it was as though it had been brought back to me as a memory. It was strangely familiar. It was what I was looking for.

    The next time I submitted taped works to the Academy, I wasn’t awarded the scholarship. Since the Academy only had a cheap mono tape recorder and I needed a recording studio I thought: ’Three years is enough’, and so I left. The Academy is not a University so there was no degree to get even if I had stayed I was twenty one and still sleeping till lunchtime.

    Utrecht

    Soon after, a small record company in Dublin promised to bring out a record of my music, recorded some of my pieces, and then went bust. Then in 1974 I was awarded a Dutch Government Scholarship to enable me to study electronic music at the Institute Of Sonology at the University of Utrecht. This changed everything. In Holland I had the chance to come in out of the cold and join the stream of European avant-garde music. I attended three weeks of the World Music Days Festival in five Dutch cities.

    At the Institute Of Sonology in Utrecht the students had to complete fourteen studio exercises before they were allowed to submit a compositional or purely technical project, to a committee which would decide if it was ‘of sonological interest’ (sonology is the study of sound), or not. It took me ages to understand the principles of how the studio worked, about voltage control, amplitude modulation etc.. I was the last to complete my fourteen studio exercises. In the second term I was allotted twelve studio hours per week in response to my project, all on my own. I used to get heart poundings opening the door of my allotted studio – one of the best equipped in Europe.

    I began a new composition using almost entirely electronically generated sounds for the first time. This
    piece later became Solar Eyes, which was broadcast backwards on Irish radio.

    Letter from Roger Doyle to the Irish Times, July 1976 (courtesy of the composer)

    During the Easter holidays I got a great idea: why not bring out the LP myself that had met such a disastrous fate a year earlier – the covers had already been made and were sitting at home. I had saved enough from the scholarship spending money to be able to do it. I sent to Ireland for the recordings of my instrumental pieces and set about making copies of my tape pieces in the Institute’s studios – revising a section of my piece Oizzo No in the process, improving it immensely.

    I took my new master tape to Phonogram in Amsterdam and asked them to make me 500 records and gave them the money. When I told them I couldn’t afford a test pressing they said: ‘don’t worry Mr. Doyle, we’ll keep trying till it comes out ok’. And they did, and it did.

    I wanted to cover up the name of the record company that had gone bust, on the back cover, so I had 500 new backs printed with some new information on them, which I began to stick on individually with glue over the existing ones – thus becoming the first composer in the history of the world to stick his own record covers together. I was twenty five and had a record of my own music out, called Oizzo No.

    I shipped them off to Ireland and sold one to a customs man at Dublin airport on my arrival home. I had to sell 330 copies to break even, which I did after two years.

    ‘The Curious Works of Roger Doyle’ documentary (directed by Brian Lally) is being shown in the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray on 17 April. Tickets available here: https://www.mermaidartscentre.ie/whats-on/events/the-curious-works-of-roger-doyle

    For more on Roger Doyle’s work see: http://rogerdoyle.com/

    Bandcamp: https://rogerdoyle1.bandcamp.com/

  • Gimme Some Now

    In an attention economy devised to distract and occupy consciousness, the exponential flow of information generates continual flux in its wake. The novelist William Gibson recently observed that this leaves us with ‘insufficient now to stand on.’[i] How can art and music respond in this context?

    Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) foresaw and forewarned about the development of emerging digital technologies, virtual realities, and massively powerful corporate entities that control data.[ii] As a result of information overload and digital distraction, a deficit of attention and meaning has become more pronounced. Our present digitally-accelerated culture is akin to that which Jean Baudrillard outlined, where ‘there is more and more information and less and less meaning.’[iii]

    This creates a challenge to remain present – as a seemingly-infinite cascade of data continually threatens to undermine the stability of the present. A culture of information saturation mediates social relations in digital space and the ‘meatspace’ of the physical world – a relentless barrage frequently driven by the force and logic of late-capitalism and the free market – where profit is the highest good.

    These mediated dimensions of reality relentlessly seek to commandeer our attention and shape our perceptions (Cambridge Analytica, etc.). Is it possible to be free in this context? How to live with our extended technological prosthetic nervous system without it dictating the focus of our lives? How to resist corporate conglomerates that monitor and accumulate data to convert this into capital and power?

    In order to resist the extractive and manipulative aspects of these hyperrealities, space is needed to comprehend experientially where we are at – so that we can remain autonomous. If we can recalibrate our connection to the digital spectacle, we may disentangle ourselves from it and gain the freedom to address some of the global issues we face: climate change, ethnonationalism, inequality, neo-imperialism, and so on.

    ‘The purpose of all art is magical and evocative’, said William Burroughs, a means to evoke ‘the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious’, and where a concert can be ‘a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy’ connected with the engagement between audience and performers as well as the use of repetition and volume.[iv]  The role of sound in altering consciousness subtly and profoundly fascinates me, especially in electronic music, minimalism, and underground rock.

    Burroughs’ development of the cut up technique (with Brion Gysin) resulted in experimental art and writing that sought to engage and alter conscious also – to break the spell of a consensus reality generated by mass media imagery. I endeavoured to refresh and update these aspects in my own work.

    In this context, I devised an ecstatic, multisensory experience titled Digital_Ritual for amplified and processed voice, electronics, tape, and visuals. Perhaps, it is possible to reconfigure consciousness through the same digital technology that engenders the ‘continuous partial attention’ that increasingly disperses and divides our attention.[v]  This counter-magic includes digital-lysergic imagery from digital and Internet culture: GIFs, esoteric Instagram hashtag searches, laptop and smartphone cameras, occult Facebook groups, and endlessly scrolling screens.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Z9oXSmqDI&feature=emb_title

    The intention here is to re-orientate, rather than disorientate, a participant. Both audio and video are subjected to minimalist techniques of composition: repetition, stasis, steady pulses, and variation of sonic fragments. The acoustic and psychoacoustic components of sound are enhanced in the music by using a just intonation tuning system – where all intervals are tuned in whole number ratios. There is improvisation, randomness and noise to engage consciousness also.

    Musically, the focus is on density, rhythm, texture, and timbre rather than common-practice voice-leading or harmonic progressions. This evokes an esoteric (‘hidden’) aspects via the subconscious effects of provocation of ANS responses. The techniques used engage autonomic nervous arousal (ANS) of psychophysiological (body and mind) processes: affect through density and volume,[vi] perceptualization via timbre,[vii] and rhythmic entrainment from steady pulses held at length.[viii]

    This is intended to evoke, and to learn from, what Gilles Deleuze terms, ‘the affects, perceptions, and sensations to which we can be subject’ – rather than being concerned with communication of a fixed, unitary meaning.[ix] A profound experience of what it is to be alive is as resonant and significant, if not more so, than a conception of why we are here.

    Judith Becker outlines that ‘the strongest version of happiness in relation to musical listening and an example of extreme arousal is ecstasy.’[x] The ecstatic often bends and blurs our constructs and boundaries to provoke consciousness to new states by bringing us to our conceptual – the sublime – and sensorial limits. Thereafter, the reception of a work is differentiated and enhanced by a participant’s consciousness.

    Creating experiential spaces and states through art allow us to know how it is to be alive in all its weirdness, wildness, wideness, and wonder on a deeper-than-surface level. To expand consciousness beyond those narrower modes of operation which dominate when we are engaged in our daily struggles for survival, or our endless scroll through our myriad screens of cascading data.

    /// Recalibrate attention to the fullness of now /// Experience the inexplicable /// Reset the operating system ///

    Digital_Ritual happens at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin on 20 February 2020 @ 9pm. Tickets: https://smockalley.ticketsolve.com/shows/873612060 ///

    Paul Gilgunn is the music editor of Cassandra Voices, and a former Musician of the Month. For further information on Paul’s work visit: https://gilgunn.org

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Paul-Gilgunn-900819373459647/?ref=br_rs

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulgilgunn/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/PaulGilgunn

    [i] Joshua Rothman, ‘How William Gibson keeps His Sciene Fiction Real’, The New Yorker, 16 December 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real

    [ii] William Gibson, Neuromancer, London: Victor Gollancz, 1984.

    [iii] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Chicago: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

    [iv] William Burroughs, ‘Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, and a search for the Elusive Stairway to Heaven’, Crawdaddy Magazine, June 1975, reproduced in Jon Bream, Whole lotta Led Zeppelin: the illustrated history of the heaviest band of all time, Minneapolis: Voyager Press, 2008, pp. 166-167.

    [v] Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft consultant, coined the term ‘continuous partial attention’ in 1998. For an overview, see Eileen Wood and Lucia Zivcakova, ‘Multitasking: What is it?’ in Larry D. Rosen, Nancy Cheever, L. Mark Carrier (editors), The Wiley Handbook of Psychology, Technology, and Society, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2015, p. 406.

    [vi] Luke Harrison and Psyche Loui, ‘Thrills, chills, frissons, and skin orgasms: toward an integrative model of transcendent psychophysiological experiences in music’, Frontiers in Psychology, July 2014, Volume 5, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00790/full, accessed 15 February 2020.

    [vii] Cornelia Fales, ‘The Paradox of Timbre’, Ethnomusicology Winter 2002, University of California: Santa Barbara, 2002, pp. 56-95.

    [viii] Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager and Udo Will, ‘In time with the music: The concept of entrainment and its significance for ethnomusicology’, 2004, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/experience/InTimeWithTheMusic.pdf, accessed 19 February 2020.

    [ix] Gilles Deleuze quoted in David Kelly (editor). Encyclopedia of Aesthetics V.1, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 518.

    [x] Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 79.

  • Almost Nobody Speaks For Musicians Anymore

    Ireland is a funny old place. I’m not sure we’re prepared for the rough times ahead. We’re soon turning one-hundred-years old – which is basically puberty as far as nation states go.

    We’re riddled with latent energy – mostly guilt and anger – from the past, just as the future is becoming an unstoppable force. It’s hard to take pride (in its literal sense) in a past so troubled, so instead we focus on the defining moments of history.

    Centuries of suffering and persecution of people on this island become a footnote to the realignment of power structures, our identity shrouded in myth and broad sweeps, as bit-part actors in nearly a millennium of recent existence. And I think, an internal struggle between our natural impulses as sardonic inhabitants of a dark, wet and green North Atlantic island.

    The coming wave can be extrapolated to a similar battle in the area of artistic self-expression that has been raging for most of our history. What do we value about ourselves and how should we express that in the public sphere? Is society thriving? If not, then am I hearing this reality represented in the everyday art that I encounter?

    Access and Capital

    This existential discrepancy between the lives we lead and the art that is presented back to us is a discombobulating force, particularly for a nation so unsure of its footing, and in deep crisis. The usual heroes notwithstanding, mainstream radio too often provides us with local music that has been commodified and sanitised for a global market; an idea from elsewhere with a soft Irish focus which tells you that we mean you no harm; a people and an island made of random edges too often represented by a smooth, diluted version of an imported algorithm.

    Our music industry is thriving only when we appear to be competing internationally, when our output raises sufficient capital to attract the attention of the people who really should have been paying attention in the first place. And of course, one can argue that it was always thus: that artistic edges have been shaved off in exchange for access and capital. But now technology has turned a razor into a meat grinder and flipped the supply chain on its head.

    How can music that requires more than one listen (or even thirty seconds to get going) compete in a marketplace that monitors audience response in real time? How does structurally-reactionary art gain access to those very structures that it is critiquing? How can art that does not factor in commercial concerns – such as advertising, revenue, and so on – hope to succeed in a hyper-capitalist market place? These dilemmas are present across the musical food chain as specialist organisations continue to crumble in the face of ever-expanding technocratic machinations, mostly deserted in a media landscape that has been slowly absorbed by the global monolith.

    ‘As vibrant and as vital as it has ever been’

    There is a line in the sand now. Just as successive generations decide where progress begins and ends – I am seeing people decry the absence of ‘great music’, ‘protest music’, etc., etc., or the crushing, cyclical canard of the current generation not being up to scratch.

    It is all out there and it is not hard to find. Music is as vibrant and as vital as it has ever been. However, the access points are frequently controlled and poisoned to the point where people can unironically use a web browser to complain that music stopped when Kurt Cobain died or something.

    Every year I see five to ten live acts who literally flip my brain on its head – and that’s after a lifetime of working in music and going to gigs. Audiences are smart and if you treat them like adults and show them the limitless possibilities of music then they will respond accordingly; treat them like objects to generate revenue at the mercy of capital then we end up roughly where we are now.

    ‘Nobody really gives one solitary shit abut us’

    I grew up thinking everyone hated the Irish (via the UK media). From my late teens and onwards, I was lead to believe that everyone absolutely loves the Irish. But it was only when I realized that in the greater scheme things, nobody really gives one solitary shit about us that I began to understand my own identity, and where I plugged into the world both personally and artistically.

    I started to learn how not to blink. The idea remains interesting with or without an audience; trying to plug directly into the capitalist monstrosity that the music industry was becoming was a recipe for electrocution.

    Everything at the same time is no place for small, different things that need time and space to breathe: gig announcements competing with missing dogs and wellness memes for the surreal oxygen available in the greatest pile-on the world has ever seen. Thousands of years of localized learning and practice reconstituted as instant global spaghetti.

    The challenge is to stay focused as an artist, and accept that a sub-subsistence existence in a lifetime of participation in the arts is now not just a distinct possibility, but a likelihood. And that the preservation of tradition and the space for new ideas to emerge and develop could well be an increasingly thankless and costly road.

    It is not all bleak of course, not by a long shot. I don’t believe in golden generations, or lists, or any terms that attempt to run complex historical realities through a tabloid filter – I do believe in community and, right now, there are defiantly-specific, strong, and vibrant communities across genres appearing all over the country (with experienced, thoughtful documentarians capturing what is happening).

    Uncompromising acts have muscled their way onto a bigger stage by the sheer force of their own momentum and billionaire-owned radio has been compelled to accept the odd blemish in their playlists. Collectives that are popping up in major cities and beyond, call the world as they see it, saying bullshit to rock mythology and transparent hype. This is the hope that I plug into when I wobble and wonder what the hell I am still doing in music.

    ‘Twenty-first century music promotion is weird’

    I’m in my forties now and while I have plenty of energy and love for music, it has become increasingly tough to generate sufficient internal optimism to keep promoting touring acts. The contradictory force of the show itself being the panacea to hopelessness, and also, a source of profound anxiety right up to that point, is something that I wrestle with nearly every day of the year.

    As Irish cities and towns are squeezed tighter and tighter and the cost of travelling with luggage continues to climb, inevitably, ticket prices for shows go up and the associated pressure increases. You try to reach people but you are literally shouting over Donald Trump. You shout louder and you realise that you are shouting over the latest tragedy to have befallen the city so you back off and then immediately feel guilty for not promoting the show properly. Twenty-first century music promotion is weird.

    That’s the job so I can’t really complain, but at some point the space in my head is gonna be needed for reflection rather than fretting, and I’d also absolutely love a shot at music just as a hobby again. And if I cannot get out of this fantasy industry then I would, at the very least, like a shot at effecting structural change for the good of musicians. Almost nobody speaks for musicians any more.

    For more information on Vincent Dermody’s work, see:

    Alternating Current Festival, Dublin, 13-15 March 2020:

    https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/alternating-current-tickets-90288478269

    Enthusiastic Eunuch Promotions:

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/enthusiasticeunuch/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChiuauaTeardrop

    The Jimmy Cake:

    Official website: http://www.thejimmycake.com/

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thejimmycake/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/jimmycake

    Into The Music Yourself (Dublin Digital Radio):

    https://listen.dublindigitalradio.com/resident?id=599ef9395db85d00110d59fc

  • Musician of the Month – Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh

    The thing that is currently occupying my attention is a new album that I’ll be releasing in April of this year.  It’s a duo album with Dan Trueman called ‘the Fate of Bones’, a follow-up to our 2014 record ‘Laghdú’.

    Dan is a pretty big influence on me: the instrument I play, the 10-string hardanger d’amore fiddle, was something he dreamt up. He commissioned a Norwegain luthier, Salve Hakedal, to make the first one in 2010. You could think of it like a cross between traditional Norwegian hardanger fiddle and the baroque Viola d’Amore. Five of the strings are bowed, and the remaining five are sympathetic strings, their purpose being to add resonance to specific frequencies, like a selective in-built reverb.

    The instrument really comes into its own when you tune it such that the harmonics of the bowed strings all start talking to each other and the sympathetic strings, and this means that we deviate from the standard practice of tuning in fifths. Tuning this instrument in fifths leads to paradoxes for tuning the sympathetic strings, and in any case it feels so much more alive in an ‘open’ tuning. These open tunings will be any combination of fourths, fifths, major and minor thirds and sixths, octaves and maybe the odd seventh, and each tuning possesses a character and colour of its own.

    We call these alternative tunings ‘crosstunings’, and we like to write music where each of our instruments is tuned to a different but related crosstuning – this means that each instrument contains a different set of possibilities, and can play combinations on notes unavailable to the other.  Our term for this is ‘complementary crosstunings’.

    I find these alternate tunings to be a great tool for writing new music: it’s as though you’ve switched around the location of the letters on your keyboard, so that by typing your familiar finger patterns, you get new words for free. Or by adapting existing material to the new tuning, it obtains a new flavour through that particular prism.

    laghdu Artwork.

    We have been collaborating with the designer Rossi McAuley for the artwork on both albums, and the discussion for this latest album has been fascinating to me. We asked Rossi to reimagine what album artwork might mean in this age of digital downloads and disposable CDs.

    The artwork he is producing has been liberated from the constraints of being a package for a disc and he is designing a triptych of posters for us, with a new visual musical language that expands on traditional notation to include information about the harmonic relationship between the notes.

    I’ve been writing little computer programmes for myself to play with this notation and get a better understanding of how it works and how to read it. Below is an example of one set of complementary crosstunings we use.

    ‘Notation’

    I like how our title ‘the Fate of Bones’ makes me think of musical notation as a skeleton, to be fleshed out every time we turn these symbols into sound. That title comes from a passage in W.G. Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’ where he speaks of no man knowing the fate of his bones once he is dead. I guess the same goes for those things we leave in our wake, and part of Rossi’s idea is imagining somebody happening upon these posters in a hundred years’ time and seeking to communicate something to them, long after we and our music have been forgotten.

    The artwork is also partly inspired by the Voyager Golden Record in this regard, in its aim to communicate ideas in distilled graphic form across distances of time and space.  It’s important to us that this artwork be functional rather than just a thing of beauty: somebody literate in music should be able to decipher concrete ideas from studying it over time. This triptych of posters will have another function: it will form part of our performance of the music on the album, kind of like our ‘set’ on stage, which we will interact with for specific reasons.

    One of our pieces, ‘Thirteen’, will be written out across all six sides of the posters, and will demand a certain choreography of us as we play it from the score. And each time we need to retune our instruments to a new set of complementary crosstunings, the triptych will provide us with the information we need. But it will also serve as a kind of meditation device as we tune, and in this regard it is inspired by Patrick Scott’s Meditation Tables.

    We’ll be releasing the album in April, and perhaps we might share a few singles over the month or two leading up to it.  It’s quite a unique thing, I’m looking forward to sharing it with the wider world.

    For more about Caoimhín’s work see:

  • Musician of the Month: Hilary Woods

     

    The Year Past and Ahead

    In October last, I was at a Russian Circles gig in Galway. It gave me a much needed stark reminder of the power of live sound: washing over me, enveloping, reverberating my insides, shaking me out of an internal slumber. Requiring a medium to travel, the body is a conductor for sound. Filtering vibrations moving through it. Sound percolating in time through tissue and sinew, connecting, evading, resonating, confronting, decoding, making pliable.

    I emerged from the show a renewed being: sensorially realigned, perceiving things afresh, and happy I made the effort to go. As Rumi says, ‘whatever purifies you is the right path’. It reminded me also of my love for sonically-heavier music.

    Through the course of writing my new record last year I studied analogue photographic processes in London. This was an enlightening experience – awakening, purifying, and sustaining. Conversations with Lasse (Marhaug) who produced the album, opened up with us bouncing ideas on developing bath times, film grain, and Japanese post-war photographic processes resulting in layered, high-contrast, noisy, black-and-white imagery.

    I was keen to achieve sonic textures on the record similar to those I was exploring in the darkroom. In this way, my journeys in both music and visuals over the past year intertwined and mirrored elements of each another.

    During a year largely spent playing catch-up and quietly rejuvenating, another formative experience was my artist residency at CAMP in the Pyrenees, France in the summer. The opportunity to work and nurture friendships with a host of positive and inspirational people – performance artists, sound artists, composers, musical thinkers, electronic producers, creators, actors, poets, playwrights and visual artists – was a pure gift.

    At high altitude we shared studio space and meals every evening, helped with each other’s projects as we listened or gave feedback, enjoyed walks and endured the heat, watched films, and shared equipment. It was a welcome respite, having worked on writing my new album in solitude up to that point for about eight months. Much of life as a solo artist is solitary, from writing to touring to persevering with it all, so it is a joy when golden social connections are cultivated beyond that space.

    I look forward to the year ahead although it will have a ferocious pace in comparison to its predecessor, with my record due for release in spring. It will feel good to share it. There is always an element of embracing the fear when releasing anything and of learning new ways to live with the vulnerability of doing so. I feel proud of the work I achieved with others in piecing it together, and the giant steps this record required me to take in its writing.

     

    For further information about Hilary’s work visit her website: http://www.hilarywoods.com

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_hilary_woods/

    Photo credit: Joshua Wright

    https://www.instagram.com/joshuajameswright/

     

     

     

  • Musician of the Month: Paul G. Smyth

     

    Shaking Beyond

    I’m playing with Ned on Thursday. That evening in the National Concert Hall will be the first time we meet. How strange that we’ll share some food together and follow that with as deep a conversation as I’ll have with anyone this year, to an audience of friends and strangers alike. The object is to make that moment as deep as possible, as revealing as possible, as raw and true as possible.

    It’s something this music gives me that remains almost unmatched in any other area of my life and for quite some time it was without peer. For a private person it can be a gift. For someone often lost in regrets of the past or anxieties for the future, to be pulled so forcefully into the present, into an environment that says “right now, you are here to serve the beauty and terror and wonder of being alive – there are others here to help you and you will help them too”, this can be a lifeline.

    There is no single part of that transaction that I take for granted. I know how lucky I am. I know how close I’ve come to having that door closed to me and how easily that can happen. My own chaotic past left its mark, having to sell all my instruments from when I was in a band, just to get through the day-to-day. I haven’t owned a piano for fifteen years. And yet the music continues. It’s a river. It flows on without me.

    Each time I am in it, it has changed, as I have. I still recognise it as the same river, in much the same way as people and places are recognisable despite all of that constant change. Nothing is ever still. I guess, therein lies some of the beauty in this approach to music-making. It is a music of change, free to mould itself to some reflection of the world as I’m experiencing it right now and, in doing so, tell me something about what’s happening in that world. Something I might have missed. Shaking me into some experience of the present. Shaking equations in a jar until they are solved. Shaking the silt of forty-three years until it can be moved around in. Shaking.

    That may sound like a very solitary experience, and in some ways it is, but there’s a kind of high-wire vulnerability and trust required to enter into that exchange, from musicians and audience alike, which makes every performance a great sharing; a reminder that we are a part of something. We’re a part of something right now.

    If there was no other reason to do it, that would be enough. But there are many other reasons to do it, all of which reveal themselves and hide themselves to me in a constant shift. The reasons, like the circumstances, change. Ever-changing. In so, it is a music of acceptance. It says “accept your life, accept who you are”. It is a celebration of acceptance that asks you to push beyond. To accept and shake yourself to push beyond.

    As I come back to writing now, Thursday has come and gone. Ned Rothenberg has made his first trip to Ireland and returned to New York, sadly spending most of that trip in the confines of his hotel room with a pretty debilitating throat infection. A doctor’s visit and heavy doses of Ibuprofen kept the gig on track and once we started playing, all signs of illness fell away. The broken, injured and infirm parts of my own life fell away too. We were there as servants to something beyond each of us and were rewarded by being allowed to leave our troubles behind for a while, to be in that beyond instead. Ned remarked afterwards that he couldn’t remember playing so much melody in an improvised concert before. “Neither can I”, I said. And I trust that’s what each of us needed that night. More often than not, the music gives just what is needed. This time, all that shaking left melody. Shaking away illness, shaking away grief. Shaking out the knots in our own lives and leaving melody, like sunlight, shaking.

  • Musician of the Month: Natalia Beylis

     

    The Steadfast-Starry Sky in the Shannon 

    Do you remember last year when the weather was nice for ages? Six weeks of sunshine and warmth. There hadn’t been a picture-book summer like it. Not since 1995. I wasn’t living in Ireland in 1995 but still I know all about that summer.

    Sometimes, during a relentlessly rainy June, July or August, I hear people wistfully murmur ‘95′, and in their eyes, I watch them dreamily retreat back there. Last year, with weeks of skies stretching blue as far as you could see, we finally had that same kind of summer.

    July, 2018.

     

    Every evening we swim in the river by the bat bridge in Drumsna. I have never gotten into the river before. I have shivered in the cold of the lakes and the sea. Somehow though, the river had always seemed too fierce for me – as it flowed with the strength of a green-and-rust-orange serpent down through the countryside. Rare weeks of constant sun have now turned the waters warm and shallow, and just about, manageable enough.

    After we swim, we sit on the bank and open packets of crisps to share around. Swallows swoop to brush the water. On the far shore, a cow pokes its head out between the willow and alder. Swans, mostly in pairs, sail casually up towards The Flaggy Bottom.

    There is always the same lone swan. He floats over and hisses at the dog – who is sprawled in the heat licking the ends of the crisp packets. He floats over to hiss at us for the fun of it. A swan couple try to manoeuvre past him. He assumes battle form and chases them with a wing display like a ballerina dancing across the river’s stage. We affectionately dub the solitary bird, Grumpy Feathers.

    When we come home the sky is periwinkle. It’s never fully dark here at this time of year. I measure the fall of night by the animals. When they settle – like matching-curled foxes – onto their chosen couches I know it is time to move to the music room.

    I switch on my two Fender amps and the ’70s electric piano that came home with me from the recycling centre in Mohill. The piano notes travel through blue tweed cables into the Supersonic and the Fender Roc Pro 1000. Triangulated stereo.

    When I first sit down at the piano, I always play whatever free-form shapes reach my fingers. Each of my hands tends to keep its own company – clashing or harmonising without seeming to mind the other. My left hand might tap out notes in morse-code fashion, while my right flutters in triplets. Doing the daily swim up the river has changed my muscle memory.

    My arms start to mirror each other’s movements on the keys. My hands on the piano replicate the patterns of the breaststroke that I push against the current. The notes surge forward ever faster until I’m spent. The river follows me further into the night. In my dreams I struggle against its current.

    Maybe summer won’t stop until autumn. This glorious, amazing warmth, this sun, this kind of weather that people in Ireland often claim they could remember from childhood. The summer everyone has been waiting for since 1995. But in case it all suddenly turns I keep swimming. And sharing picnics. And eating ice creams by the water. And having little cans from the cooler, that too has been waiting for this summer for years, so that it can finally show its full potential.

    I keep a close eye on Grumpy Feathers and wonder about his past. Has he always been grumpy? Is that the reason he is alone? In the late evenings I sit down to the piano and settle into swim strokes across the keys.

    It is deep in the night. In my dream I am frantically scrambling against the water’s flow. I keep moving forward yet I want to stop, in awe at the wonders of the dream-river that are flashing past. Suddenly… BOOM! I become aware that I am in a dream. I stay calm like they teach you to do in these situations. I stop moving my arms. I no longer need to.

    Free from the physical constraints of waking life I float casually upriver past The Flaggy Bottom and towards the Shannon Pot. Trout and salmon and schools of two-tailed-rainbow makeyupeys dance around me. Translucent bubbles pop up from the deep beneath. The shimmery plants growing on the banks reach their tendrils delicately towards me. There’s Grumpy Feathers gliding in the opposite direction. He’s trying to say something but I can’t understand.

    I turn onto my back and drift beneath the water’s surface. The moonlike eyes of a cow blink down at me as she drinks from the river. I halt so I can watch her.

    Later I will think back on the dream while my fingers move across the piano keys in that new way that they like to; I’ll slow the notes right down and pay microscopic regard to the quiet in between the sounds. But for this split second, deep in my lucid-river slumber, the steadfast-starry universe shines behind the cow and the stars, to reflect down into the water and back up from its surface, merging together above and below me.

     

    Upcoming performances from Natalia Beylis:

    Wednesday 13 November: Clare – Kilstosheen – Soundings No. 2 with Tola Custy.

    Thursday 14 November: Galway – The Roisin Dubh – Tulca Festival (solo).

    Saturday 23 November: Sligo – The Model – Spilt Milk Festival with BB84.

    Saturday 30 November: Dublin – The Project Arts Centre – Sound Collector (solo).

     

  • Cora Venus Lunny Launches New Album ‘Numinous Soup’

    Numinous Soup is an album I quietly made by myself in my spare room on child free evenings, releasing mp3s on Patreon as they became ready and eventually combining my favourite tracks into this collection.

    ‘Mindsomereve’ is something I made almost absentmindedly, and didn’t think was finished, but as I kept listening to it to see where to go next, I realised I liked it as it is.

    ‘I Want… Bodily Autonomy For Everyone’ – it is a vast and all-encompassing thing that I deeply wish for every person in this world. You might hear both frustration and hope in my playing here.

    ‘Incapacitate The Ecocidal Machine’ uses field recordings of frogs from Wicklow and a vast machine from Amsterdam, as well as my usual strings. I never got a glimpse of the machine but the sound was something else. It filled the air, vibrated the ground, vibrated your eyes in your head. I never managed to catch sight of it. Which machine am I talking about though?

    I named the album after ‘Numinous Soup’ because it’s my favourite track on the record, and I think it’s quite soothing. It made me think of a cold day in a remote castle, getting a bowl of tasty neon green swirly glowy soup that sends you into a dream of another dimension, possibly involving a boat slicing elegantly through still, reeded, misty waters at sunset, three moons in the aurora-splashed sky, a golden whippet in your lap. It’s also the one track that doesn’t go into any scary noise places so I thought it was a good one to finish on.

    Click on….

    http://www.patreon.com/trancebranches

    http://www.bandcamp.com/trancebranches