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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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. … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more