I always considered myself a late bloomer when it came to music. Growing up, I didn’t have many opportunities to play instruments, and I chose to focus on art rather than music during my secondary school years. Becoming a better musician seemed like a mysterious journey with no obvious roadmap.
I credit my Dad for introducing me to some incredible artists like Led Zeppelin, Queen, Pink Floyd & Jethro Tull. In return, I introduced him to the captivating sounds of Radiohead, a band which played a pivotal role in developing my appreciation of interesting chord progressions and ambiguous harmony.
We listened to a lot of music together and aged fourteen my Dad surprised me with my very first guitar – an SX acoustic steel string. I remember eagerly trying to bend those strings in the style of Jimmy Page, with no great success. It would be some years before I would get round to purchasing my first electric guitar.
I struggled as a teenager to envisage my future career. I was less concerned with money, status, or even moral virtue. Instead, I found myself preoccupied with what the day-to-day experience would be like. I would ponder different paths, like the idea of becoming a doctor – helping people, earning a good income, a respectable profession. But then I would wonder, ‘What would the minute-to-minute reality be like?’ Would it involve blood, guts, and smelly feet? High stakes with people’s lives on the line?
That’s why I find myself where I am today – as a musician and a teacher. I derive immense joy from the everyday moments in my career. It’s not about the grand aspirations; it’s the day-to-day experience that fulfils me. Whether I’m playing music or sharing my knowledge as a teacher, I find deep satisfaction in the present moment.
Revelation!
Not long after finishing school, I stumbled upon a YouTube video of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ arranged for solo classical guitar. It instantly captivated me, and I dedicated that entire summer to learning the piece from start to finish. The experience brought me an unparalleled joy – the intricate polyphony, the interplay between the upper and lower voices, and the sublime harmonic movements, all projected from my own instrument! It was a revelation – I had finally found something I could pour hours into.
I discovered I had a knack for memorizing lengthy pieces, so I embarked on expanding my repertoire. Attending classical guitar recitals at the National Concert Hall became a regular thing, as I aimed to immerse myself in the rich tapestry of the classical guitar world. By the time I enrolled for lessons with Leslie Cassidy at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama in 2013, I had already delved into the works of various composers, including Villa Lobos, Tarrega, Barrios, Koshkin, and Albeniz. This played a pivotal role in shaping my technique and opened my ears to a more contemporary range of harmonies as I explored the guitar repertoire from the romantic period onwards.
My time with Leslie was absolutely crucial to my growth as a musician. I eagerly looked forward to our weekly Saturday morning lessons, where he meticulously reviewed every piece I had learned, correcting my mistakes and helping me break free from bad habits – especially my woeful right hand technique. Though my time with Les lasted only two years, he was an incredibly supportive and motivating mentor and teacher. I miss him dearly, and I often wonder what it would be like to have a conversation with him today, at this stage of my musical journey.
Everything in Its Right Place…
Regardless of my skill level as a musician, I’ve always been drawn to composing. It just felt right and has always been a natural part of how I absorb new musical ideas. I aim to combine elements that I find appealing in a way that feels satisfying—a blend of the familiar and the unpredictable. There’s a certain joy that comes with seeing a well-developed idea come to life, as if putting something in its rightful place.
I knew I lacked many of the skills and understanding necessary to compose music at the level I desired. Even though I was already composing for my band BiG Fridge, I wanted a deeper understanding of my own music to better develop and convey my ideas. That’s why I decided to enroll in the Bachelor’s program in Jazz Performance at the Newpark Academy of Music. Despite knowing little to nothing about jazz, I discovered that this foreign musical idiom shared many of the same values that resonated with me.
Attending Newpark was a humbling experience. I had never before been surrounded by so many individuals who loved and took music as seriously, if not more so, than I did. I met amazing people who possessed qualities I aspired to, and learned a great deal from them, both as individuals and musicians. Tommy Halferty, my teacher, was truly remarkable. He encouraged me to embrace my own strengths and musical voice, always pushing me to work harder and give my best.
Although I often felt out of my depth, the further I progressed at Newpark, the more I realized that I had ended up exactly where I needed to be. I was exposed to new and exciting forms of music, and I acquired not only the skills and knowledge I sought in harmony, arranging, improvisation, and composition, but also a common language to effectively communicate my ideas with my peers.
Moreover, the experience gave me a glimpse into the vast realms of what I didn’t yet know. It provided me with the terminology and techniques that empowered me to delve deeper into these subjects even after completing my degree. While at the time, the degree felt all-encompassing, I later realized it was merely scratching the surface of music theory.
Harmony Takes Centre Stage
If there’s one quality that takes center stage in my own music, it would be the harmonic content. Reflecting on my own compositions, I’ve discovered that I can learn a great deal about myself and my personal taste through retrospective analysis. This understanding of harmony is crucial for me to achieve that. It’s simply the aspect of music that I find most fascinating and exhilarating.
Much of the music I create is either modal or strives to fully explore the relationship between two loosely related chords. I aim to employ parsimonious voice leading as a means of generating new movements that sound fresh and captivating to my ears.
After completing college, I set about forming the instrumental ensemble known as Rynx Laneran, with the goal of developing and performing my latest compositions. I joined forces with Andy O’Farrell and Alex Delogu, both of whom I had the good fortune of meeting at Newpark. The music we create is deeply influenced by my admiration for artists like Portishead, as well as renowned film composers such as Bernard Hermann and Lalo Shiffrin. Our sound also takes inspiration from the captivating style of Mulatu Astatke’s music.
I’m incredibly proud of the music we have crafted together thus far, and I eagerly look forward to returning to live performances this summer. Additionally, we have plans to release more music later in the year, and I couldn’t be more excited about sharing it with our audience.
Irish Music
My fascination with traditional Irish music began with a chance encounter at a party where I met guitarist Chris Cole. Chris took me under his wing and introduced me to the fundamentals of his rhythmic approach when playing traditional music on the guitar. He generously shared his insights into arranging tunes for the instrument, and as my repertoire grew, I started creating my own solo guitar arrangements of Irish tunes, drawing on my knowledge of classical technique.
Last year, I received a tremendous validation for my efforts when the Arts Council awarded me the Music Agility Award, enabling me to develop twelve original arrangements of traditional Irish tunes for contemporary Irish classical guitar.
Currently, I’m exploring how to merge different genres from around the world by applying scales from folkloric music such as Ethiopian music to the Irish tunes I’ve arranged. I’ve recently completed three “Ethiopian Jigs,” as I’m currently referring to them, and they possess a unique quality that is both familiar and exotic. I’m excited to see where this compositional approach will take me next.
These days, my schedule is busier than ever, and I’m constantly learning and expanding my musical horizons. I consider myself fortunate to have encountered a diverse range of musicians who have allowed me to pursue my various musical interests, no matter how niche they may be. I’ve never wanted to limit myself strictly to classical or jazz music; my love for different genres is vast, and I aspire to play them all.
In the past year, I’ve arranged numerous classical pieces by some of my favorite composers, which I perform as a duo with bassist Alex Delogu. Additionally, I formed a gypsy jazz quartet called The Tenters with fellow guitarist John Mahon, bassist Dave Mooney, and violist Brendan Lawless, and we regularly perform around Dublin.
I thoroughly enjoy my role as a session guitarist, collaborating with various artists such as Christian Wethered, Adam Nolan, and Yankari Afrobeat Collective. Each experience adds to my musical journey and presents unique challenges that I embrace as a contributing member.
As I reflect upon my career as a musician, I feel incredibly lucky to have dedicated myself to the study of the guitar. It may sound unbelievable, but it often feels like every positive thing in my life has either directly or indirectly stemmed from my commitment to this instrument. It serves as my meditation, my hobby, and my livelihood. It’s what motivates me to get out of bed each day. The impact it has had on my life is immeasurable. I’ve discovered an endless game, a never-ending journey that reflects my approach to life, one of constant learning and growth, an outlook that I intend to maintain throughout my life and journey as a musician.
My musical journey started with a lot of Church organ and Bohemian brass music in a tiny village in Bavaria – and when I say village I really mean it.
At the age of five I developed a desperate desire to learn the guitar, because my mum had one (for her kindergarten group and she knew about four chords). At the age of five I wanted to be exactly like my mum, a genius.
After three years I hated the guitar because after too many odd versions of Beatles covers I was just really bored and annoyed. I quit because, in the mean time, I desperately wanted to learn a random brass instrument, which I never actually managed to do.
This tiny village where I grew up in had an unwritten rule that every kid had to learn a brass instrument to later play in the local youth brass band, in order to be part of the game. I learned the guitar and later the bass, because my dad was desperately looking for a bass player for his church band, so I was rather out of the game (and it’s nice to be able to blame the string instruments for it instead of myself).
As a child I didn’t really think about becoming a musician. I didn’t think it was a real job anyway. I wanted to become a vet, then a kindergarten teacher, then a writer – which somehow I considered a real job.
That one person at the party nobody gets…
As long as I can remember, I have always been that one person at the party nobody gets. According to certain rumours, some believed I was a genius. Others were convinced that I was just really high (yes, even as a child).
Once I came dressed up to a costume party as a tasteless dressmaker. It was supposed to be funny, but in the end people just thought I was mental.
If a costume is too close to reality, people tend to confuse it for reality. And then the costume fails and protects me at the same time. The perfect illusion is to create a mask that looks exactly like your real face. It’s still a mask then. But it’s also a protective shield. And it’s still you, right?
At the age of eleven I re-discovered the guitar because we randomly founded a band at some children’s birthday party of a friend in order to be cool or something, and I started to compose a couple of love songs about a guy I was pretending to be in love with at the time.
Ten years later I moved to Berlin to become a full-time musician. I married my band mate at the time and we moved into a tiny room in a flat share together. I was actually more like a half-time busker, half-time film student and the weekends we spent touring (mostly hitchhiking) around Germany, busking and playing in bars as a guitar-duo that played sad, experimental guitar music for two guitars.
After three years we broke up and I became a full-time film student and started to produce electronic pop music with weird spoken word elements. I was twenty-five and I felt like starting a completely new life.
The gay clown on the moon…
I recently came out as a clown which is due to the fact that I can’t take myself seriously any longer. How could I write sad, dramatic poems and scream them into the world when everything my white privileged ass can possibly emotionally understand are luxury problems?
I made myself comfortable with being ridiculous and it was quite a liberation to be stupid, and not to expect anyone to take myself seriously anymore.
My music now is sad, but funny. It’s cute. Still a lot of people don’t get it and sometimes they leave the room during concerts because I’m making fun about stuff that isn’t funny to them.
Sometimes they insult me because in their ears, I’m not doing music. Which is true, because what I’m actually doing is theatre, or some kind of performance art that people would watch at night time on Arte, and be like “what the hell made her become like that?”.
I sometimes ask myself the same question. But I realized people are mostly not really interested in honest answers.
Therapy
Music is therapy and I will make the audience my therapists as long as someone is willing to listen to my random brainfarts. Sometimes I’m scared that if too many people start listening to me I will never shut the fuck up ever again. And I’m also scared they would all just stop listening completely at some point.
Sometimes living in Berlin is scary. The city is so loud because everyone is trying to find someone to listen to them. And nobody is possibly getting enough of the attention they deserve. And unlike the village: most people are not trying to hide their problems from anyone. I mean, why should they do so?
Life makes no sense in a city like that and is beautiful and liberating (in summer), but it’s also random and scary (in winter).
I’ve recently become a half-time film maker, a half-time musician and a babysitter and a cat and a dog sitter, and a clown.
Sometimes I’m not sure if I can ever go back to a serious approach to making music. Parts of me just always want to remain a clown on a tiny stage that creates something weird and funny and magical in the moment.
Parts of me want to be an accordion-playing clown with an orchestra on their back, performing slutty lyrics in a church and crying all the time on stage. Parts of me also just want to become insta-famous or a tik-tok-star or this weird actress that is doing kind of everything and nothing at the same time and no-one knows what she’s actually famous for.
What I want to achieve next is to move to space and live-stream arthouse cinema from the moon. Make friends with many more cats. Grow my own potatoes and save the world by growing potatoes.
Generally saving the world would be great actually. Maybe that’s also possible from my treehouse on the moon.
Wingform is an hour-long piece of music I composed for Crash Ensemble between 2017 and 2020. Scored for twelve musicians, it has four ensemble movements connected by my own solo electric guitar passages, which act as a kind of connective tissue for the whole body of the work.
In 2017 I was invited to join Crash as a Composer-in-Residence as well as an electric guitarist, after which Wingform was commissioned. Being embedded in the group and growing as a musician during that time has made it the largest and most personal piece of work I’ve ever put together. I’m fortunate to have been able to work so closely with a hugely talented, open-minded and creative ensemble of players, and to have the opportunity to push the boat out in my own approach to the electric guitar as a solo instrument and as voice within a modern chamber orchestra.
Beyond the raw sounds themselves, Wingform’s biggest influence is like that of a lot of art: that overwhelming feeling of awe that comes from being confronted with nature in all its beautiful and grotesque and serene and scary forms– especially from its more hidden corners – and wanting to somehow channel or rebuild those found natural sounds and structures through the medium of music. While this is destined to fail in any literal sense the moment it is mediated through humanity and technology, the hope is that some of that uncanny non-human musicality carries through into the final work, giving that mystic sense of having plugged into nature in some small way.
The sonic seed of the piece is a short recording of a tiger mosquito swarm, stumbled upon at the beginning of the composition process. Putting aside initial preconceptions toward the sound and listening, you can hear in this mass of wing vibrations a strangely haunting, melancholy chord. Providing the root note is an electrical hum which in most situations would be unwelcome, but here it creates a striking quality of animal merged with machine that captured my imagination.
I scored out this wave-like, gliding mosquito chord for the instrumentation of Crash, in an approach borrowed from French spectral composition. I then messed around with the orchestration, creating all kinds of variations and contortions: glacial subterranean groans; double-speed Doppler flashes; delicate shimmers; and vertical chords broken into horizontal melodies. After workshopping and recording these with the players of Crash, they became the sonic palette that I would use throughout the whole piece, like a sort of shape-shifting mantra.
The piece as a whole tries to feel like a living breathing organism, and the electric guitar runs through and between movements like connective tissue. I constantly asked myself how could I make the guitar behave and sound less like itself and more like a piano or a percussion instrument, and embraced alternate tunings and unusual techniques to help unlock this. This went on to influence the winds, string, piano and percussion, which interacted with the strange sounds of the guitar to form new kinds of flavour combinations.
The opening movement is a slow-burn: it’s based on the idea of a slowly descending line, introduced via slide guitar, that gradually unspools from high shimmers into a really big snaking melody. Ebbing and flowing below this, like a tide, are the mosquito chords.
Movement II feels like faulty machinery reclaimed by nature. A tense and glitchy groove, played amazingly by pianist Máire Carroll, holds together a lattice of sounds. There are a lot of loops on the verge of collapse, and a sense of windows opening briefly into parallel musical worlds only to be slammed shut.
Movement III also plays with loops on the edge of stability, and constant forward motion with a rickety handmade feel. It combines some nods to the language of jazz and post minimal music with more hard-edged and sometimes grotesque sounds, often playing with the contrast between them as if turning a dial to a point of intensity.
The fourth movement is glacially slow, with a floating sense of grief to it, like the end of a life cycle for the organic whole. It’s an emotional and structural climax, bringing us right back to the original mosquito chord and finishing out on that initial electrical hum, the whole ensemble droning along with two oscillators.
Wingform really brought together the various threads of my musical life like nothing else I’ve done: the hands-on, aural approach to electric guitar as my native instrument; the traditional composer’s sketches with pencil and manuscript paper; audio and MIDI collage on Logic software; and a constant back and forth dialogue between all of these things before the final project was typeset in score for players to make a reality. Going hand-in-hand with this is the hybridity of the sound world, which absorbs elements of many musical languages I’ve worked in over the years.
Composing a score like this is a long, solitary process, and by its very nature you often have to take a leap of faith in believing that what you have written down will sound as good as your inner ear did when you imagined it, and that some of that magic gets through to listeners on a visceral level at the other end. This kind of music can be dense with a lot of moving parts, but for the audience it’s really there to be felt and experienced, not over-analysed.
In my other experience as part of a band, there is always a collaborative mixer where everyone ends up giving feedback and co-authoring in real time, regardless of whose original demo was brought in. It’s different with a score like Wingform,where you are the sole composer, and more needs to be decided and structured before you ever send it to players, with whom time is scarce. The development workshops I did have with Crash players, who were totally supportive and engaged, were crucial not only for test-driving bits of material but also for keeping my morale alive.
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022 (Image: Simon Marshall).
Wingform was completed at the beginning of 2020, right as the pandemic was beginning and the certainty over when it would see the light of day suddenly evaporated. It was cruel timing, but the gut punch was softened by the solidarity with every musician internationally experiencing something similar. It was all the more cathartic when we premiered it streaming at New Music Dublin 2021, and this year with a live audience for the first time at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022 followed by Crash’s 25th birthday celebrations in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. It’s also toured as an installation, created by video artist Jack Phelan (pictured).
Installation, created by Jack Phelan (Image: Charlie Joe Doherty).
By the time we reached the end of each performance, the drones vibrating through our bodies, it felt as if we as an ensemble had been through a long, vivid and disarmingly emotional journey, in the work itself and beyond. I hope that Wingform evokes something similar in listeners.
Rezo are long-time friends and musical collaborators Colm O’Connell & Rory McDaid. Colm is based in Dublin, Ireland and Rory in Malaga Spain. Borne largely out of the Covid pandemic (Rezo means “I pray” in Spanish), the pair worked entirely remotely to create their critically acclaimed debut album Travalog which was released in May 2021. They have just released their follow-up, Sew Change. Colm describes how they got here.
It kind of amazes me that we are putting out a second album less than eighteen months after the first. I’ve been called lots of things in my life but never prolific – and let’s just say my recording output bears testament to that!
I’ve been smitten by music for as long as I can remember. Santa Claus brought me a second-hand Ferguson 3-in-1 music centre at the age of eight and I don’t think I turned the thing off for ten years!
Taping from the radio (Soft Cell), pilfering from my older brother’s (Doors-heavy) record collection, or scrimping and saving pocket money for the latest Now That’s What I Call Music, no family occasion or friend’s birthday was safe from my DJ-ing prowess.
My ability as a musician never quite matched my ambition – long stints singing with a choir as a kid (the Dublin Boy Singers) and endless piano lessons through primary and secondary school brought little in the way of proficiency. But that never held me back and I don’t think there was ever a time in school or in college that I wasn’t in a band of some kind or another.
My first gigging band was The Mitcheners, a college band really, where I first met Rory. I played self-taught bass and Rory played guitar. We released one album in 2002, New Wapping Street, named after the Docklands street where we rehearsed in an old shipping warehouse – long since demolished for the glitzy office blocks that now populate Dublin’s Financial Quarter.
Despite some critical acclaim, particularly for the freewheeling slacker-Americana of lead single Cars, we went our separate ways not long afterwards. To do some adult stuff ultimately – like settle down and make a living.
Spotify link to New Wapping Street
The Mitcheners (Ronan O’Muirgheasa, Rory McDaid, Michael McCormack & Colm O’Connell).Rory and friend Jane Farley descending Tenerife’s volcanic Mount Teide – the inspiration for the cover art for New Wapping Street.Cover art for New Wapping Street.
For me, the musical hiatus ended in 2007 with an ambitious project to record a solo record in Andalusia under the moniker Noise.
Myself and my wife Beth had long coveted the idea of living in Spain, and with two young kids and the prospect of regimented schooling in the offing, decided it was now or never.
We secured cheap accommodation by the sea in the picturesque “pueblo blanco” of Sanlucar de Barrameda, southwest of Seville and shipped instruments and recording equipment over in advance.
What followed was a magical immersion into the language and culture of the area – famed for its flamboyant religious processions, fino sherry (or manzanilla) and flamenco music and dance.
With the help of local musicians as well as visiting friends from home, My Procession was recorded and released in November, 2008 and, to me, remains a document of musical adventure, cultural seduction and the emotional growth of a burgeoning family and all that goes with that.
Living the good life in Andalucia, Spain (with wife Beth and friend Erwan) while recording solo album My Procession.
Our Mitcheners family, always in touch as mates if not bandmates, decided to reactivate our creative yearnings by joining a producer friend, David Odlum, at Black Box, his studio outside of Nantes, France in 2012.
This was a bleak time economically in Ireland, following the banking crisis of 2008 and all that followed, and was just the antidote to what had been (and continued to be) a difficult time for all of us in precarious employment, varying levels of impecunity and/or indebtedness and a general malaise or foreboding back home.
What followed was a joyously creative odyssey – residential living in the countryside with our mates, making music at all hours of the day and night, rekindling friendships with the best of French food and wine.
The brief was simple – come with a song and a recipe for dinner. And we all rose to the challenge. For the next five years, it became a staple in the annual calendar and, quite apart from making some really great music, nourished us all spiritually and mentally through the bleakest of times.
For me, the song that most embodies the spirit of that time and place is Nothing Else, a kind of making-sense song for my daughter Rosa who had recently been born with Downs Syndrome. It sounds corny, I know, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the peace and the connection with others that was present in the room on the day (and night and following morning!) that we recorded it. All beautifully captured on camera in the video for the tune.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzQiFOAK4Ds
Which takes us to the Rezo project. Rory and I had for many years been exchanging snippets of songs and musical ideas worked up on rudimentary home recording equipment. This continued with a little more frequency as the pandemic hit, both of us now having much more time at home and I guess the creative bandwidth to create.
It’s fair to say that Rory was the instigator of this chapter – it was he who sent me the folk-country strum and whispered vocal that was to be Rezo – our first lock-down collaboration.
Both of us using Mixcraft, we traded mixes and remixes over Dropbox – a vocal here, a bass there, some drum loops – building and refining as we went.
We shared the finished song on YouTube around Easter of 2020 cut to a video shot in the hills above Malaga when I had visited Rory the year previously, and the reaction was amazing. So much so that we decided to do another and another until very quickly we realised we were telling the story of the pandemic, and that we needed an album to do it justice.
Travalog – a play on the words Travel and Analog recording – was released in May 2021 to glowing reviews from Uncut Magazine and beyond, and, as such, a real vindication of the work that went into creating it, and in some senses the work that preceded it.
Our follow-up, Sew Change, has just been released. Folk Radio UK called it “even more remarkable” and “proof that Rezo are still at the forefront of generating fresh and creative collages of sounds. It shows that when you choose to colour outside the lines, the most interesting shades can sometimes appear. #This is what great music is capable of being.”
Of course we hope for mass appeal and interest, but ultimately we are guided by our own north star, making music we ourselves would like to listen to, music we are proud of. Everything else is just gravy.
I grew up in a rambling country house with damp bubbling from the walls and ghosts lurking in the locked rooms. It was big enough for a family of five to lose themselves, each in their own space, occasionally coming together for meals, but not needing to live in each others’ pockets.
Just beyond the garden boundary were the ruins of an old mill, a remnant of the once thriving linen industry in Ulster. We used to collect frogspawn from the boggy patches there in old jam jars.
Just beyond the mill walls was (and still is) the Fairy Glen along which we would traipse to primary school. We were always looking out for the fairies. Mum said that if you asked them nicely they would do things for you. So I started with wee things like ‘wake me up in time for school tomorrow’. And they always did. Somehow.
We got evicted when I was eight-years-old and we moved to a Council House in a nearby estate, the only Protestant family.
We had a mixed reception. Some friendly and a few spuds thrown at the window to keep us in check. One day our neighbour’s son stole my Dad’s bicycle, but we found it in a field down the way not too long after.
I don’t recall those being the happiest of days. But four years later my Dad found an old rambling country house to rent, much like the one we’d lived in previously. And we moved.
The landlord had left an old upright piano in the house and I was instantly smitten. This was where I experienced my first musical urges. I remember being inspired by Mum and Dad’s records, anything from Dolly Parton or Judy Collins was a hit. And Mum had a very cool African record by a band called Osibisa, who I’m very pleased to discover are still going.
Drumsesk House.
I got piano lessons from a local eccentric. He was surely more Norman Bates than Norman himself. His mother lived upstairs, although you never saw her. He had four different rooms with pianos. One for each season. His toupee was also changeable. He was an excellent teacher and I even managed to pass a few grades with his help.
I had started clarinet lessons in school a few years previously, and although it didn’t feel like it at the time, this musical introduction had more than a little to do with my current preoccupation.
Mr Green taught me how to play jazz clarinet, a very important part of which was keeping the foot tapping. As part of the deal of getting a clarinet ‘for free’ I had to go on Saturdays to play with the South Ulster Youth Band in Portadown. 7am Saturday starts on the bus weren’t popular with me at the time, but looking back on it, it was a tremendous thing for a young person to be involved with.
It wasn’t until I was almost done with secondary school, and had fallen for a local outcast, musician and romantic, who was a few years my senior and very much ‘not what my parents wanted’, that I was inspired to pick up a guitar and compose.
I’ll never forget my best friend crying when I played her my first song on the guitar. Only two chords; taught to me by my brother. That’s all I could play, but the lyrics were by W.B. Yeats – the chorus: “Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold(en) and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths, Of night and light and the half light.” And the sentiment was deeply earnest. I was in love. And there was no way to unfeel it.
When I left high school I decided to delay a University degree and headed off to South America as part of an organised voluntary-work overseas initiative. I spent five months living in Ecuador teaching English to primary school children and working at an orphanage, a home for abandoned children and an animal reserve.
It was an extraordinary experience and opened my eyes to worlds I’d had no notion of. After the placement finished I wandered off alone into Peru and Bolivia with no idea of what I would do or where I would go, and ended up buying my first guitar in La Paz.
When I eventually arrived at St-Hilda’s College, Oxford I had firmly cemented my relationship with the guitar as a tool for songwriting. It wasn’t until later after graduation, when I moved to London, that I discovered the harp.
A friend and luthier kindly lent me one of his instruments, which featured on my first album As the Crow Flies recorded under the moniker Forestbrook (after my first family home). That album is as underground today as it ever was. So it delighted me greatly when – after releasing my first solo album We Are the Wildlife a decade later – the press validated my work. Four star reviews from The Guardian, The Independent, Mojo and Uncut Magazine!? So giving up the day job hadn’t been such a bad idea.
Bróna at St. Hilda’s.
It had taken me a while to find my own voice. It wasn’t a sudden occurrence. I still recall Dad’s advice when I would sing a Dolly Parton song in her voice. “Careful with that vibrato! If you start that now, you’ll never be able to stop.”
What matters most to me now is that I’m not imitating anyone. I am truly enjoying doing what I love, what feels right. But it’s not without great effort. There’s a wealth of technical knowledge, an endless sea of admin, grant applications, petitions to promoters, social media campaigns galore, and very many dull and tedious tasks that go with being a full time artist in your own right.
As I heard Iarla Ó Lionáird recently concede during a lecture; “I think about giving up this job every single week!” And I know only too well why. If only we artists could simply enjoy doing our art.
For a lot of my life I felt a fervent need to be doing something creative but I didn’t know what. Eventually I started to feel the unsated creative urge turn to intense frustration within me; a physical tension through my body, like important growth held back or suspended indefinitely. I pictured bunched vines in my arms, straining to be freed and climb. I knew I needed a creative outlet, but I didn’t know what it should be. I quashed these intense feelings, over and over, trying to reason them out of existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNcw0ZkADKY
A music-lover since I was tiny (as a small child I heard a lot of traditional Irish music; as a teen I loved The Cranberries, Alanis Morrissette, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Metallica, Sinead O’Connor, Leonard Cohen, Nirvana, a little Placebo, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chilli Peppers to name a few… then Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, Richard and Linda Thompson, Jefferson Airplane in my late teens/early twenties), I actually went through a long period in my early twenties of denying myself the pleasure of listening to my favourite songwriters.
It had actually become painful for me: Listening to my favourite songs was never enough – I felt I should be writing songs. It was a nagging, constant voice chanting in my ear. However, for years I stifled that urge, I told myself people who don’t play an instrument can’t write songs. I kept telling myself I didn’t need to have a creative outlet, it wasn’t as though anyone else needed it to happen from me: there are plenty of songwriters out there! But it was a need, not merely a desire.
A ferocious hunger was building in me and I felt utterly helpless in the face of it. I convinced myself I was unable to write a song. Isn’t it strange how boxed-in our ideas can be? How stifled and thwarted we can become because of them. I gave up on listening to music, it was too painful, and I was busy in life anyway, so there were a million distractions…
One day, however, my husband (a singer and guitarist) and I decided to record “Ain’t Misbehavin’” for a laugh on his Mac: He would put down the guitar and main vocal and I’d add harmonies. After we recorded the song – amazed by the possibilities that recording with the Mac offered – I asked my husband to show me how to layer tracks and then he left me alone for a while to play around with it.
I grabbed a notebook of poetry (I’ve written since I was a small child) and started singing words into the mic. Entire songs came out of me, already fully formed. I was astounded and elated: I put my voice to the air as though freeing a bird long-trapped and the lines of words came out as songs, as though they’d been stored inside me just waiting to be sung. No thought or effort was needed. The question as to whether they were “good” or not didn’t actually occur to me at all. The creative frustration I had been feeling for years was finally being released.
I was euphoric. I hardly left the bedroom for three days. I wrote at least twelve songs within those three days, each one a fully-formed melody and full set of lyrics: verses, choruses, bridges – everything flowing out effortlessly.
I felt like I was wholly myself – truly – for the first time in my life. I didn’t need anything else to come from it. Having the songs written was enough. My soul had the avenue of expression it had been hankering for – making me absolutely desperate – for years. A month after my first bout of songwriting, the third song I wrote – “Down Near the Sea” – won a thousand euros in the Allingham Festival Songwriting competition. It was a very welcome validation.
Despite the fact that my husband is a musician, it took a couple of years before he began writing accompaniments for my songs, all of which I wrote and recorded a capella – often recording them as I wrote them – with layered harmonies. He brought the songs to completion. He is highly intuitive and stays utterly true to the meanings and feelings of the songs. He also has an unbelievable ability to surprise me and craft unexpected accompaniments for certain of my songs. It is endlessly satisfying, having this creative relationship as well as our marriage now.
The two of us derive enormous pleasure from it. He has said he loves being pushed creatively by certain of my songs to challenge himself and get the accompaniment to where he wants it. I know next to nothing about music – keys, chords, etc – so the work of creating accompaniment is down to Steve. However, I sometimes write a line of melody for the guitar to play here and there, or request a certain sound or feel here, a certain atmosphere there, and we have developed an intuitive creative rapport between us.
Niamh and Stephen McKinney.
I write alone and in dribs and drabs: a little ribbon of melody floating to me while I unpack the dishwasher; a snippet of a lyric coming to me while I’m out running. When I feel I have the song finished or near it, I sing it for Steve and he begins to write an accompaniment for it.
Songwriting is a gift: A gift to a soul that endlessly craves to express itself, to express the way it experiences itself, and to channel pain and sorrow – as well as joy – in a way that no other art form allows. I am blessed to be married to a gifted musician who creates the accompaniments, the structures for my songs to be held in and elevated upon.
There is something ethereal and mysterious about how a melody visits you, or descends to you, and entices your voice to sing it. So deliciously mysterious; the compulsion to join voice to melody, lyric to line, in order to allow the soul a kind of freedom it can access in no other way. I have been singing since I was a baby.
Melody comes to me at odd moments, or mundane moments. I might be thinking about something else entirely and suddenly notice I am humming a tune I quite enjoy and I’ll record it into my phone. A particular lyric will ‘ask’ for a particular series of notes; the notes come and lend themselves to the words, and suddenly the marriage of words to melody have completed the expression of the feeling; they encapsulate that extremely personal experience or reflection. When it happens I experience a unique high. I consider myself lucky, to have stumbled upon relief, release: A gift.
I was born and raised in Dublin, in a house with a piano and a garden. At the bottom of the garden, there were two beautiful chestnut trees, one taller than the other. It was here that I went when I needed to be alone. I always observed the same ritual. I would first climb the smaller of the trees and then the taller. The taller was enormously high. I didn’t dare climb the whole way to the top because the branches didn’t look strong enough to bear my weight.
One day, my curiosity got the better of me and I gathered my courage and climbed to where I’d never climbed before. Sneakers green with chestnut bark and young heart thudding in my elated chest, I clung to the thin, uppermost branches and looked out over the world. A neighbour’s dog danced along the top of the wall between our gardens. I could see the church where I attended Sunday Mass, the school where I lived in daily fear of not being good enough and the shop where I bought acid drops, broken biscuits and, as a teenager, illegal Black Russian cigarettes.
Years later, my father complained about the millions of leaves that the trees shed every autumn, which took him days and days to clear away.
If you promise not to tell anybody, I’ll let you in on a secret. There is a garden at the bottom of which, two chestnut trees stand, magnificently tall and green with leaves. There is a place at the top of the larger tree where the branches look too thin to bear the weight of a curious child; from where the eye can see a church, a school, a shop and a dog that dances along the top of a wall. A place where a child went when he needed to be alone and where one day, his curiosity got the better of his fear and he climbed to where he’d never climbed before.
This is where I keep my dreams.
All children are born creative. This creativity can either be encouraged or suppressed. I was not allowed to paint as a child so I learned to paint with words.
There are basically two kinds of people in the world. Those who are up to their ears in emotional issues, and do their best to get out of them. And those who are up to their ears in emotional issues, and do their best to stay in them.
We are all here to learn.
HUMOUR AND ART
Humour is a wonderful way to communicate – it disarms and enables us to say many things that are otherwise unsayable or unacceptable to the listener.
Isn’t life wonderful, ain’t it a thrill? Drinks on the table, chops on the grill And if you’re not able, we’ll give you a pill If life doesn’t get you, then happiness will.
We, as a nation, have grown up in the shadow of the Confessional, where all our sins have been forgiven on a regular basis, which inspired the following lines:
CONFESSIONS OF A CATHOLIC KID
I used to be a Catholic
Magnificently guilty
The sex was good from Hollywood
To fabulously filthy
Forgive me Lord for I have sinned
I promise not to sin again
Unless of course I get the chance
I beg forgiveness in advance
Mea culpa, mea culpa
Mea maxima culpa
The main lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history. Art is not a luxury but a necessity. The artist is the alchemist of our times, who turns the garbage of emotional issues into the gold of creation, reflecting the world’s absurdities. Crises are gifts that tell us who we are.
Once I showed someone a place where I wrote every day. They remarked that the view was not very exciting, to which I replied: “I’m not looking out, I’m looking in.”
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ― Cesar A. Cruz
Convenience is the byword and the curse of modern society.
The songs were written over a period of 34 years. Not wishing to be pigeon-holed as a certain kind of performer, I waited until last year to record and release the album. The title song, the text of which opens this article, references growing up in the south Dublin suburb of Stillorgan. The song “Prodigal Kiss” imagines Oisín Mac Cumhaill returning to the Ireland of today and taking the Luas. What might he have made of the state of Ireland today? The chorus poses the question: How did we get from the passion and ideals of 1916 to the prevalent malaise of 2022?
And you can be sure that we’ll never forget The culture of vultures and dealers in debt The struggles and Troubles, the gold, white and green So much for our beautiful Nineteen-sixteen.
The album is compassionately critical of society – especially in ‘Girls Who Lived In Hell’, a song inspired by and dedicated to the girls who endured the Hell of the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. The last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996.
Our country has been delivered into the hands of rogues and scoundrels, Vulture Funds, Rotating Taoiseachs and Landlord TDs, who choose to serve themselves, rather than those they are chosen by and paid to serve. Let there be a separation of Church and State. Let the Church and State pay full redress to all victims and survivors of clerical and governmental abuse. Let the churches pay property tax. Let us pass a law prohibiting TDs from being landlords and/or property speculators. Let us build a society based on compassion, justice and accountability. Let us rise up and take back what is rightfully ours at the next election. Let us stand firm in hope.
We have so much compassion for the downtrodden of other nations, but very little when it comes to ourselves.
HOMELESS HOTELS
I’ll tell you a tale of the Homeless Hotels Those chosen to serve, have us under their spells We live on the streets and we scrounge for a crust And curse the hyenas betraying our trust
They say that there isn’t, we know that there is We’re hungry and fearful and God help the kids They’re lost and they’re lonely and strung out on drugs They turn into monsters that nobody hugs
Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland Some get cake and some get crumb Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland What on earth have we become?
The merciless clergy abused and denied For ages the blameless that they crucified They buried them namelessly under the sod And offered novenas in praise of their God
They’re burning down churches on faraway land We may not agree but we do understand We’re drinking and thinking and feeling the shame We don’t have the strength to be doing the same
Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland Some get cake and some get crumb Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland What on earth have we become?
Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland Trotters trotting to the trough Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland Can’t you see? We’ve had enough!
All lyrics by John Buckley McQuaid
LINKS:
VALENTINE’S DAYS – An e-book in four parts, consisting of 29 songs and 29 videos. A love story, based on actual events, which takes place in Paris, Madrid, Berlin and Aarhus):
In my studio here, I have a clavichord, built by my parents in 1971, with a somewhat rococo and amusing backdrop painted by my mother (who otherwise has left us with a stunning body of mostly modernist artwork).
I grew up with this painfully quiet clavichord, along with a gorgeous harpsichord (also built by my parents, and which I learned to tune by ear, a sign of things to come), countless recorders of various shapes and sizes (both parents were avid and accomplished players), lutes, oboes, guitars, baritone horns, and of course a piano (my older sister, annoyingly, plays pretty much all of these instruments with ease, though piano is her main instrument, so I grew up hearing that repertoire through her practice).
Clavichord
The basement of my childhood home on Long Island was filled with various tools, wood scraps, and other evidence of my parent’s instrument building habits (both were amateurs, by the way: during business hours, my father was a theoretical physicist, my mother a painter), and our evenings and weekends were filled with making music together with these instruments (ok, maybe that is a bit of revisionist history there, but we did make a lot of music together with these instruments as a family).
I didn’t realize at the time that this wasn’t particularly normal. And one of the things that it marked me with is a love of musical instruments for their own sake, and a love of making music in an exploratory way with instruments at the heart of the process, performance relegated to a secondary concern. I performed, for sure, but it wasn’t the driving force behind the music making in my house, and we never performed together as a family.
It also left me with a clear sense that the instruments themselves were things we made—not immutable, given objects—and thus were potential sites for exploration and revision.
I loved my own instrument at the time—a somewhat tetchy violin made by the engineer Norman Pickering, himself a researcher of instrument design—though it took me a while to discover that the music I was learning with it—European Classical music—wasn’t, for the most part, what I really wanted to play (the Bach Unaccompanied Sonatas aside, really). Indeed, trying to discover the music that I do really want to play (and hear) has been the driving force behind my work ever since and has led to a number of explorations in musical instrument design itself.
In my early 20’s, I flailed about trying to find ways to escape the confines of the Classical violin—its repertoire and technical training that leaves such a profound, embodied mark on anyone who goes deep with it—which led to predictable explorations of jazz improvisation and rock music, both of which also felt not quite right, though I learned a lot, and in particular ended up spending time with, of all things, the Flying-V 6-string fretted electric violin by Mark Wood, and an unfretted version made by my father.
Hardanger fiddle
Ultimately, I found the sound of the instrument unsatisfying—in spite of my best efforts, including exploring multiple other electric violins, pick-up systems, amplifiers, equalization and signal processing units, and so on—as well as the feel of the instrument—the solid-body electric violin is perversely rigid, and doesn’t seem to actually absorb any of our physical efforts.
In the midst of these experiences, a composer friend of mine (Gavin Borchert) wrote a piece for me, for the electric violin, and he was inspired by the traditional music of Norway, in particular the Hardanger fiddle; my experience listening to the cassette tape he gave me—a recording of Anund Roheim playing music from Telemark in the 1950s—was one of those I will never forget; I remember where I was sitting, the time of day, the color of the sky, and so on, when I first heard the sounds of this magical, beguiling instrument and its mesmerizing music.
There is so much I could say about the Hardanger fiddle, but I will focus on the sound and feel of it. Its sympathetic strings (extra strings that run underneath the fingerboard and ring along as you play) create a magical, personal, reverberant space around the player and, in contrast to the solid-body electric violin, it is so clearly responsive to our efforts, absorbing and extending them into this private space; it feels wonderful—physically—to play.
Adapting my Classically-based technique to the instrument was far more challenging than I expected. The strings are slightly shorter, requiring ever so slightly different finger spacing, something that took months of slow practice to adapt to, especially given my own penchant for playing without vibrato, and for having the intervals ring as purely as possible.
But even more than that, adapting my bowing technique to the instrument was particularly challenging. The Classical violin is designed to be as loud as possible, to project over an orchestra to the back of a concert hall, and it requires intense arm weight and energy to drive appropriately.
In contrast, the Hardanger fiddle is designed to ring continuously, and it has a relatively flat bridge, so playing individual strings is difficult, and the strings are under noticeably less tension, so applying intense arm weight is counterproductive, suffocating the instrument rather than activating it. The instrument induces a more empathetic, gentle approach to playing, and I feel like I literally became a different person in transforming my physical technique to play it.
Musical instruments have a way of bringing people together; indeed, in Norway one of the most common experiences with other fiddlers is simply sitting around, trying each others fiddles, visiting with a maker (many of whom are fiddlers themselves), and so on.
The instrument itself is at the heart of the matter. The Hardanger fiddle brought me together with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh back in 2000; Caoimhín was working in my father’s physics lab, and I’m forever grateful to my father for recognizing that Caoimhín and I might like to meet!
Another experience I’ll never forget: sitting with Caoimhín that summer (next to the harpsichord my parents built, by the way), playing tunes for each other, trying each other’s instruments, and so on. Subsequent similar sessions with Caoimhín in Dublin led to the discovery that I was using the wrong bow, one that itself was suffocating the Hardanger, and we now both use beautiful bows made by Michel Jamonneau; teaching my body to work with this new bow (actually, more of an old bow, based on Baroque designs) was a whole other transformative experience, far more challenging than I anticipated.
Before I continue on with where my explorations of the Hardanger fiddle led over the subsequent decades, I will mention that during this time I was also exploring a whole range of other musical instrument design projects: my frustration with electric violin speakers led to collaborations with Perry Cook on the design of spherical speakers, which roughly emulate the way acoustic instruments fill rooms with sound; this itself led to the design of a radical new instrument, BoSSA (the Bowed Sensor Speaker Array), that is a spherical speaker outfitted with digital sensors of various sorts, so you actually bow the speaker itself, the sensors then mapping your physical actions to sound through the spherical speaker (sitting in the lap!) via a computer.
BoSSA (the Bowed Sensor Speaker Array).
This led to the establishment of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), a kind of digital musical instrument design laboratory that remains in force today; which in turn led me to the development of bitKlavier, a kind of prepared digital piano that remains one of my primary projects today.
The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk).
All that to say that musical instrument design has been at the heart of my artistic practice from the beginning.
A New Instrument
Back to the Hardanger fiddle… Some 15 years after my deep dive into the Hardanger fiddle began, I had the pleasure of collaborating with the Old Time fiddler Brittany Haas. Britt plays the 5-string fiddle; the extra string is lower, and she regularly tunes the instrument up in unusual, non-standard ways, which is also common with the Hardanger fiddle—all the open strings invite a drone-based approach to playing, with lots of double-stops (two notes at a time).
One challenge though: the Hardanger fiddle, with its shorter strings, is usually tuned up quite a bit higher than the conventional fiddle, so when Britt and I would play, all of our open strings would be different from one another! In some cases, this was fodder for creative explorations, but other times was just frustrating and awkward. We did make an album together that I’m tremendously proud of—CrissCross—but the friction between the instrument designs led me to wonder whether there might be a new instrument out there, some kind of cross between the Hardanger fiddle and the 5-string fiddle.
A pair of Hardanger d’Amores.
And this is how the Hardanger d’Amore was born. In early 2010, I asked the Norwegian maker Salve Håkedal if he could imagine an instrument that has the ring and feel of the Hardanger fiddle, but is tuned down to where fiddles from the rest of the world are tuned, and also has an extra low string.
Salve immediately started sending me sketches and ideas, and several months later I traveled to his workshop in southern Norway to pick up the very first Hardanger d’Amore (initially we called it a 5+5, because of its 5 strings on top, and the 5 sympathetic strings, but later Caoimhín dubbed it the Hardanger d’Amore, given its echoes of the Viola d’Amore).
At the time, I was living in Dublin, and when I returned with the instrument, Caoimhín came by and gave it a try; he ordered #2 the very next day. Earlier this year, Caoimhín and I both got our second d’Amores, #35 and #36, a clear indication of how excited we both are about the instrument, not to mention the other 30+ fiddlers out there who now play one as well.
Solo Album
Last year, in the midst of quarantine, I made a solo album of original music for Hardanger d’Amore in my home studio. I generally prefer playing with other people, and am not so interested in playing solo concerts, but the lockdown made both impossible, so I was free to lay down some tracks that I certainly would not have had we not been so isolated by the pandemic.
The album—Fifty Five—is something of a surprise to me, and it celebrates where I grew up, amongst the instruments that my parents built and played. It also celebrates the instrument itself, trying to reveal and discover some of the nooks and crannies of the soundworld the instrument embodies.
I recorded these tunes up close, so the listener can hear something close to what I hear, right under my ear; I find it intense and personal but also, I confess, quite beautiful. I’m also excited about my latest project with Caoimhín, our album The Fate of Bones, which he’s written about here so I will leave it at that.
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Paul Francis Quin has proven himself an approachable enigma. The myriad glamour shots gracing the cover of his upcoming album ‘Life on Earth’ and various assorted publicity materials tend to portray him as otherworldly, a strange mixture of glamorous and uncanny. Nonetheless, he is quite happy to talk, in his wryly calm and personable manner, about any subject, no matter how taboo. In fact, taboo subjects are his speciality. They are fuel to his creative engine, and vital to his artistic expression.
“It’s been an interesting journey, especially at this point in history,” he tells me over the first of several hour-long Zoom calls we have. “But I can’t deny I’m excited to see these songs released into the world at last.”
Quin is a Wicklow native, born in Bray in 1971, and his serene, cut-glass accent is still inflected with the earthy intonations of that venerable seaside haven. The electro-pop singer-songwriter and exeperimentalist composer is on a homecoming journey of sorts. At the time of writing [note: this date has passed], his long-awaited solo album ‘Life on Earth’ will see its launch at Dublin’s Peppercannister Church with a gloriously disparate personelle, after a heady 2.5 years (“a slight exaggeration,” Paul purrs coyly) in the making. This represents a definitive return to music following an extended hiatus, although, it must be stressed, not a complete departure from it.
The designated venue is an interesting one, not least for its former ecclesiastical status. Paul tells me, a few months following the Zoom call and in person this time around, that: “To be quite honest, I was gagging to get on stage in somewhere like the Grand Social or the Sugar Club whatever, and do some live work there. Generally, I don’t sing live very much, I much prefer to work in a studio. But once I resalised I was actually still capable of it, I just pushed myself to get back to it. I’m at least determined to get back up on stage and at least do an album launch, and do a proper show with creative design and costumes and all that. It’s a dream away at the moment, but dreams are how I run.”
I jokingly suggest he do an alfresco gig, charging people a fiver per head; he politely laughs such a notion off.
“I mean, I am also just asking myself where did all the time go, really,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t do much music-wise, really. I mean, I had a nine-to-five job and then I went back to college, and all this time has flowed by. I remember how prohibitively expensive hiring out a recording studio could be back in the 80s and 90s, and I remember thinking I could never re-enter one again. Then again, I remember my Dad, who had a really philosophical take on life, saying to me. ‘You are going to be a very late starter. But you are going to get there’. Not sure where he meant. But I got SOMEWHERE, I suppose!”
Image (c) Billy Cahill.
EgoBoo Studios
Thankfully, such a dismal outcome has ultimately not materialised for him. We are both in the control room of the subterranean confines of EgoBoo Studios on Fitzwilliam Street, having just been buzzed in. Next to me sits Greg Malocks, EgoBoo’s owner and chief sound engineer (and now, musical director of the entire enterprise) working through a series of levels with an air of close absorption. The ensuing conversation is punctuated by occasional clicks coming from the recorder console as he works his digital magic. This is no problem of course, Paul is happy to defer to his expertise. “I need to come into a place like this,” he admits. “In order to work with a more structured environment. Even if I had a home set-up, I don’t think I’d have enough gauge of quality control and I’d never get anything finished as a result. I need to be in an environment like this.”
Paul himself lounges opposite on the studio couch, a punkish vision in a longsleeve shirt, docs and sleek denim, with long, serpentine Medusa-esque, peroxide dreadlocks and makeup stylishly pale enough to make David Bowie (were he still with us) envious. He is far from blase about the studio set-up, however, preferring it to a more home set-up favoured by many during the last two years.
“I need to come into a place like this,” he admits. “In order to work with a more structured environment. Even if I had a home set-up, I don’t think I’d have enough gauge of quality control and I’d never get anything finished as a result. I need to be in an environment like this.”
“You need a second ear, sometimes” Greg chimes in, without taking his eyes off the flashing blues and greens on the monito before him. “When Paul’s singing, he needs to be concentrating, and with a second ear, suggestions about what else he can try come about more easily. It definitely helps.”
Paul nods. “I think when there’s someone else present, it brings something else out of you as well. There is essentially an audience there, albeit one I can bounce ideas off. The love of stacling harmonies is something me and Greg share. I’ve often worked with producers and engineers in the past who would say ‘I think you’ve enough harmonies now,’ and the fact is, I can’t get enough of them! If possible, I’ll have a full choir of hamrony behind my vocals.”
Day 7 of highlighting beautiful writing from stories you recommended to us!!
Right now, he’s listening intently to the latest mix of a new untitled song, a pure 1970s disco-tinged track which, as it transpires, is actually for an entirely different project. Despite the studio’s confined, almost windowless space, Paul describes it as ‘a breath of fresh air’, allowing him to experiment with sounds quite divergent from his usual style, which has been nebulously described as very ‘eighties-esque’ in style, tightly syncopated and synth-heavy.
“People are always saying to me, ‘your music is very ‘eighties’, and no matter what I do I can never seem to get away from that. Or maybe that’s just because of the way I sing, I don’t know. But this other friend [dreampop songwriter Keeley Moss, who will also be opening for Paul at the Peppercannister gig on the 11th] had a track that was a bit more of a disco groove to it, and I thought it’d be interesting just to try to adapt a style that also manages to retain a bit of an indie feel as well.”
I mention The ‘Weeknd’, and his similar use of synth and uptempo beats in tracks such as ‘Blinded by the Light’ and ‘Save Your Tears’; songs that manage to simultaneously sound retro and futuristic. “It’s almost like a pastiche,” Paul says, “taking that sound and refitting them for a new generation. Even just listening to the instrumental [of ‘Save Your Tears’], you can tell it’s amazing track even when denuded of vocals. I’d have different lyric and vocal ideas for it, but it is a superb piece of pop music. And pop music is often the hardest to do because it has to hit the ear almost immediately. Whereas soul and R’n’B you can let grow on you more organically, but pop must have that instant grab for people. Almost like Eurovision, in a way.”
I ask why in hell he’d stoop to comparing himself to Eurovision, to general amusement of all present company in the studio.
Everything happens underground now. Or at least, behind closed doors, within spaces impounded by our boundaries, with face-to-face communication kept to a minimum, as tablet, mobile and laptop screens now stand in for sociability. We are visible to each other only through screens, our voices reduced to garbled, disembodied transmissions over a Zoom audio feed. Even those of us who may live a few miles away from each other, even short distances, seem, at times, impassable.
Lockdown has been an atomising experience for virtually everybody: the blurring of the work-life balance, to the government-prescribed restrictions over not being able to leave one’s home, then one’s county, and finally with an inability to fly overseas, as well as the basic need to socialise in large groups (though this slowly but surely starting to change). The daily monotony, shot through with a vague tension of perhaps being next in line to be claimed by the pandemic, was once described in a half-joking fashoin as ‘the new normal’, a phrase many have abandoned as mounting imaptience. A sense of unreality has slipped into the very fabric of reality itself. The very autonomy we take for granted as adults has been brutally curtailed. Many of us wonder when and where we might see our friends and loved ones again. News of the impending climate collapse and a resultant creeping sense that the world is on the brink of an ill-defined but very imminent oblivion aren’t helping.
A lot of this is doomsday thinking as well: the temptation to fall into it is on the increase.
At the time of writing, the most recent restrictions have been tentatively lifted – though right now, it feels better to be discussing something, anything, other than the pandemic, lockdown restrictions and vaccines. News of the Delta and other assorted variants make for distressing reading, even with the rollout of a multiplicity of vaccines and much of the populace having received their jab (though, the presence of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers keeping the pandemic of life support remains an ever-present worry).
Many artists on the P.U.P. now face having thiers cutoff unless they branch out into separate industries. Impatience with extended closures mandated by the Irish government’s directive to keep all indoor music events effectively cancelled. This was estimated to last no more than a fortnight. Now, nearly eighteen months on, live music in smaller venues remains illegal, with no roadmap for the event industry in sight. For many artists and creatives, ‘first to close, last to reopen’ has become a defining mantra of the Covid era.
The results of this are manifold. It seems we are at the risk of losing much of what made the nightlife so exhilarating. The unique intoxication that rises not just from a few pints and a spliff but from the very of sociability and togetherness itself, of being in the company of one’s peers and engaging in a shared sense of communal euphoria and solace. Dublin’s streets on a weekend evening are as likely to be deserted as they usually are in the midweek. The possibility that many of us are beginning to forget that unique euphoric rush of fellowship brought on by is now a horribly real one.
Of course, it is slight exaggerration, at least in the Anglophone sphere, to call this the apocalypse in easy mode, and there are far more urgent problems at hand than the halting of live performance and msic events. There is also an idea circulating that, post-Covid, there will be a flowering of creativity comparable to that of the Renaissance, which itself came gradually about in the wake of the bubonic plague. A generalised reaffirmation of life may come about from so much isolation, so much togetheness relinquished.
Frank Armstrong reviews a new book on the Irish government's response Covid-19 and wonders whether it will be said once again: “We didn’t know, no one told us”https://t.co/vikPQsuFMa@broadsheet_ie@danieleidiniph1
It could be argued that lockdown is comparable to being in suspended animation. For many people, not just creatives, this has been a strange period of working from home and thereby taking it upon themselves to make a project happen. Dispiriting as the last year and a half has been, many creatives have demonstrated their endurance and the commitment to their art. Moreover, the technological advances of 2021 have permitted many artists to create and work unimpeded by limitations as studio time and costs. Nonetheless, this isn’t ideal either.
Yet, we are alive. We have survived a pandemic and all its accompanying madness. I consider myself healthily cynical about most things, but I doubt I am naive for being thankful to be alive, with my loved ones still here and my work still invigorating me.
It’s an overcast afternoon in early July of 2021. Gunmetal clouds lurk sluggishly overhead, the air heavy with the threat of rainfall. Overcast days in the city centre are nothing new or unusual, but for the last year they’d taken on a grimly hazardous feel. Even in summer, flurries of chill air can come blasting out of nowhere, as if to remind the average pedestrian of the universe’s innate precarity even at street level. The vague sense that perhaps one should not be out in broad daylight for too long was constantly hovering at the base of my skull.
Being out of the city centre for large swathes of time had also rendered it slightly unfamiliar. The buildings that hovered above me seemed alien. I felt like I was passing through a town I’d no previous knowledge of, having to stop every few minutes to check my Google maps and see if I still had the right place – even though a year ago I could traverse multiple streets and backlanes without having to even look up sometimes. The ongoing operatic thrum of traffic and buskers, bike couriers and people generally getting on with their lives had all but ceased, save for a few meagre pockets of people also going about their business.
Working to a Deadline
After eighteen months, the album is more or less finished, though with some quite-necessary mixing still underway. Working to a deadline can be as good a motivator as any, and the focus has thus far been sustained toward that goal. As any muso worth their salt will tell you, a spirit of collaboration is key to ensuring any album is the best it can hope to be, and ‘Life on Earth’ is no different, boasting a sizable personnel on a very disparate plethora of instruments.
And Paul, for one, welcomes the opportunity to be able to work in-studio again. His determination to see the album completed is heartening – as is his (ithin reason) refusal to be deterred by the pandemic and its attendant restrictions. I ask him what, if at all, effect the pandemic had on the albm’s production.
“I think lockdown actually helped!” he laughs. “It allowed me to focus on one thing (i.e. writing and making a record) without any other distractions like pubs, parties and the need for new clothes, new hair, new shoes. When all the background noise was taken away, it allowed me to hear the music in my head. At the same time you know they say the whole world was in suspended animation and that created it’s own little creative zeitgeist. You plugged in or you dropped out completely!”
Despite the relative freedom offered by advances in recording technology, enabling most people to theoretically record, mix and finaise entire albums from the safety of their living rooms, this is no guarantee of a high quality finished product or even of quality control: “I need to come into a place like this in order to work,” he says, “because, otherwise, I wouldn’t structure it well enough, because even if if I was recording at home with all of my equipment set up, I still wouldn’t possess enough gauge on quality control, and therefore would never get anything finished.”
“Much of the songs are more synth-pop, with some orchestral elements mixed in as well,” Paul tells me. The latter elements, he asserts, is largely the influence of the aforementioned and ever-prolific Aidan Casserly, the maestro behind such recent albums as ‘Incubus’ and ‘Ballads of Sorrow’. Aidan’s hand in co-writing “Be Yourself Girl” has proven vital to ‘Life on ‘Earth’s longevity.
“I never got to do a full album with Aidan,” Paul clarifies. “Prior to that, we’d done little demos here and there, though I’d alway wanted to do something a little more substantial. This album really started with that song ‘Be Yourself Girl’, which Aidan added both the keyboard and sax to. From there, he hept sending me bits and pieces until eventually it began to take shape.”
At the time of writing, Paul is currently in the promo phase of putting the album forth, doing the usual round of interviews and trying to see it gain airplay across as many platforms as possible. A Herculean task, some would argue, but also doubly complicated in that he has been trying to do so in the midst of a global pandemic as well. He is certainly far from alone in this.
In that time, he’s also managed to amass a formidable crew of collaborators and other musicians to join him onstage when the big night finally rolls around. If the measure of a man lies in how his peers speak of him, there is no shortage of hossannas being directed Paul’s way by his tribe. The aforementioned Keeley Moss is especially forthcoming in her praise of him, telling me: “Paul is a flamboyant force of melodic magic, who delivers a torch song like few others. There’s a lavish grandeur to his Art-Pop that brims with all the tasteful grace of a sonic connoisseur.”
Meanwhile, Pheonuh Callan-Layzell, bassist and co-songwriter of heavy metal outfit Beyond the Cresent Moon, and Paul’s longtime friend and designer, tells me: “There’s a lot of creative symbiosis with what we do. Paul’s very aware of what he wants and how he wants to present his work, and he tends to be really spot-on with what he’s aiming for. He’s quite magical as well. I mean, the Paul that I know and the Paul that I see, whether on stage or in a music video, say, are to very different people, which is applicable to a lot of artists, I’d say. The Paul I’d chat to and the Paul in ‘show-mode’ if you like, are almost complete inversions of one another.”
As a full-length album, ‘Life of Earth’ originally started production under the auspices of singer, composer, producer, electronica wunderkind and multi-instrumentalist Aidan Casserly, of ‘Sebastian and the Dream’ fame. Of Paul, Aidan tells me: “I’ve always seen Paul as a very unique individual and free spirit/thinker. I’ve only met a few people similar in my life and they always bring out great creative energy in creative people such as I. His humour is pitch perfect and generous and cutting when necessary. I think we may have met in a previous lifetime, but that’s another conversation!”
If the two have a shared thematic concern, it is with the underdog, the outsider, and anyone generally unmoored from mainstream society, in particular the many upheavals experienced by the queer community and the often-seismic changes that Irish society has undergone in the last three decades. ‘Be Yourself Girl’ addresses such themes directly, insofar as, lyrically, it depicts the struggles of a young trans-woman coming to terms with the vagaries of an increasingly mercurial world. July saw the release of ‘Be Yourself Girl’, the first single off the album, but there is little time to be euphoric. In a seperate track, ‘A Better place’ lyrical approach and the album’s cover, Paul assumes the aloofly compassionate role of a guardian angel, assuring the listener that
IF I COULD CHANGE THE WORLD you know I’d make it a safer place, for you
As the title suggests, the song is a hymn to love at its most altruistic, and that the hope for a better world is not only possible, but also quite plausible. Despite his often-acidic wit, Paul’s music in fact comes from a place of deep compassion and empathy for such corners of the human experince, corners, that, despite the progress of even the last ten years, still remain sidelined. That sense of being sidelined is something Paul himself knows very well.
If electro-pop could be deemed culturally subterranean in the contemporary Irish music scene, this is not to say it is not rich in its variety of acts. If it is treated at best as niche genre of oddity or, at worst as a target for critical ridicule, Paul will soon prove otherwise on both counts.
Covid or not, the work can often feel neverending for most musicians, an endless round of recording, mixing, promo on both social media and regular media outlets (if you’re lucky, that is), trying to land a performance slot at any venue you care to name, as well as plugging the album before, during and after its release. Lack of media coverage, whether in Hot Press or in more mainstream publications, remains another hurdle, though, to Paul’s credit, he has embarked on an interview campaign with as many forums as he can. For his part, Paul has not shied away from this necessary evil. If anything, he has taken to it with a certain dogged gusto:
“I just wonder how many singles get released every week, but every time you’re doing, you’re trying desperately to be heard along with everything else that’s been unleashed on the airwaves. And it’s been extra hard to grow an audience and excite some interest in your work with no gigs and venues. So basically, all you’ve got is radio and, I suppose, to a lesser extent, the livestream gigs that people are doing at home, although I’m not quite prepared for that at the moment.
“This time around, putting something out there just feels in equal measure exciting and daunting. You ask yourself, in moments of doubt, is anyone going to be even vaguely interested? And then you realise, you have to make them interested, hence all this social media stuff. And it is very easy to do it that way, but then, of course, so is everyone else, and it’s a tough job. I’m in this first and foremost for the love of it, and the passion I had once before, that has been gobe for years, has been rekindled. I have been extending my pool of co-writers and collaborators, and i now have three or four different songwriters helping out.”
It must be stressed that none of this is any mean feat. The last few months have seen the restrictions of Covid finally lifted nationwide and a hesitant return to normalcy after two years of lockdown, quarantine measures, and the months of seemingly interminable isolation and uncertainty that accompanied them.
Paul manages to remain philosophical about the entire ordeal. “Covid seems to have brought people into communicating in a slightly different way,” he muses. “I’ve noticed people have been more open to collaborating than they might have been before. Some benefit has come out it, I’d say.”
It is these same changes in communication and understanding on a wider social level in the years preceding the pandemic that similarly have influenced Paul’s return to music.
While advances in music technology and methods have made the recording process comparatively easier when working in isolation, the roadblocks set in place by our inability to work together face-to-face has lessened such opportunities. This is before we even mention inflation, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and resultant food shortages that have occurred. To be able to see such a bleak period in human history through and to emerge with a fully-fledged work of art on one’s hands is testament to both one’s resilience, the indomitable will to endure, and perhaps even live again once the dust has settled.
Yet Paul is no stranger to such haphazardly-inflicted tests of character. His personal history, a crucial spur to the overall composition and recording of ‘Life on Earth’, is riddled with such tests. Paul is a proud member of Dublin’s gay community and has been so from a very young age; the album serves as something of a songbook for the gay experience as Paul knows it, contemplating the length and breadth of social change that has occured within Irish society over the last two decades.
After singing at family gatherings and being encouraged to sing his local choir upon his discovery that he had effortlessly perfect pitch, Paul turned his musical attentions to guitar and piano before eventually joining up with John Butler, with whom he formed the electronic synthpop duo BiaZarre. Their first single ‘A Better Place/The Colour of Rain’, recorded in Windmill Lane, was released as a double A-side in 1989. “It did well on the Irish airwaves for most that year,” Paul recalls. “Or, at least, it was on the radio every day for at least a month. We played gigs in Sides DC, Blondes on Leeson Street. We were very influenced by synthpop, all that New Romantic styliings, which, little we realise at the time, was starting to go out of fashion.”
As it turns out, the first of that single, ‘A Better Place’ is making something of a comeback along with its maker: it has received a full reimagining and recording on ‘Life on Earth’. There is a poignancy to this development, however; John Butler’s untimely death in 1998 is what the song pays ultimate tribute to.
Much more than just a collection of songs, the album stands as a social document,
Artifice has long been a part of Paul’s aesthetic and personal philosophy. While mostly an aesthetic choice, it was also in part a consciously-developed survival and defense mechanism The album, therefore, is coming thirty-plus years after he left music behind and when attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people began to undergo quite the seismic sea change, from decriminalisation to eventual acceptance in the form of the 2015 Marriage Equality Referendum, which saw same-sex marriage fully legalised within the Republic. In an op-ed for Northern Irish political weblog Slugger O’ Toole, written several days after that historical day, Paul writes:
Those I had held in check for at least a couple of decades came freely and easily. Without any sobbing. They were simply tears of relief. And joy. It was now safe to cry. What had once seemed impossible was finally and unarguably here. Yet taking it all in was practically impossible… After a dirty tricks campaign against equality that must surely have reminded every LGBT person in the land of both the latent, and the blatant, homophobia that had followed several audible paces behind them through their lives, honesty and decency had won. The people of Ireland had seen through the thick smog of lies, distractions and fear mongering to the dawn of a new day.
This is not to say equality for queer people has been fully achieved: at the time of writing, the homophobic double-murder of Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee in Sligo in mid-April still confounds the nation. Such an act of brutality serves as an unfortunately harsh reminder that small, if insidious, pockets of ignorance continue to blight Ireland’s supposedly enlightened socio-cultural landscape. Renewed calls for a comprehensive Hate Crime legislation have been made by organisations such as LGBT Ireland in the wake of the murders.
For Paul, the spectre of overt, violent homophobia, so prevalent and normalised in Ireland throughout the ’80s when he first came of age, seems to once again rear its head, as if in a gesture of grotesque reminding: I haven’t gone away, you know.
In the aforementioned article, Paul writes: ‘Back then, the fight for expression of identity was a huge battle that I personally had waged upon my world and theirs. The heterosexuals. The grand majority. Aged seventeen I was now illegal but I wore my queerness like a suit of armour. Making myself highly visible and inscrutable all in one smart move. And it worked for me. But only up to a point. One had to run the gauntlet of a very real series of dangers, threats and annoyances. People mumbled discreetly about the young man [Declan Flynn, who was gay-bashed to death in Fairviw Park in September of 1982] who had been beaten to death in a park just a few years before. Ireland was a place entrenched in a deep mire of homophobia and gay love truly was consigned to the shadows. Love was not fit for public consumption, if you were queer.’
This same darkness, very real and very destructive, is one he wishes to stand against with ‘Life on Earth’. Paul remembers a time when the process of coming-out was (and for many, remains), a deeply painful experience; when the homophobic stigma endured by gay men of his generation was the norm. Ireland in the late ’80s was a far cry from the world of today where the first openly gay Taoiseach was elected into office and rainbow flags adorn virtually every shop front during Pride month.
The shame of being fundamentally unloveable over a perceived sense of difference is quite a universal one, but one felt acutely by many LGBTQ+ people, past and present. Arguably, it is actively manufactured by a society still slowly unloosening itself from the socially conservative trappings of the Church.
It must be noted at the time that homosexual activity remained illegal in Ireland. Reprehensible as its existence may seem to the contemporary mind, the infamous the Offences against the Person Act, 1861 (“the 1861 Act”) and the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 (“the 1885 Act”) threatened a life sentence of penal servitude and a decade-long sentence of same respectively (itself an outdated concept and judicial practise even by late twentieth-century standards) for what each referred to as acts of ‘buggery’.
By the mid-80s, according to Paul, these acts of legislation were not very effectively enforced. Speaking on the Extraordinary Souls podcast, hosted by Mark Haslam, he elaborates: “When I first started going to bars, they would have been raided by the guards and so forth. So men were not supposed to be having sex with men. The act was considered to be illegal on the statute books. That said, I don’t think the law was enacted very strongly. But… for a long time, myself and my friends were technically illegal by our very existence. At least, what we were doing and the gatherings we had were, technically speaking, illegal, because of our desire for one another. It’s simply another version of the many ways society moulds and shapes sexuality.”
Conversely, he also was never a stranger to that subterranean world that arose in covertly defiant response to the aforementioned laws: a world where queer people could mix and mingle freely, without fear. Moving through Dublin in the mid-80s, a city and era both markedly different to now in terms of attitudes to queer people, he discovered it was also home to a vibrant-if-underground gay scene, with queer-friendly nightspots such as Flickers, Sides DC and the George [the former two now long since gone]. Paul described such a scene as: “A tiny little world of lingering stares of furtive glances. Apparently, I was home. I had no idea what to make of my new home, but there I was, regardless.”
In his fascinating 2005 book The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World, clinical psychologist Alan Downs, himself an openly gay man, writes: “One cannot be around gay men without noticing that we are a wonderful and wounded lot. Beneath our complex layers lies a deeper secret that covertly corrodes our lives. The seeds of this secret were not planted by us, but by a world that didn’t understand us, wanted to change us, and at times, was fiercely hostile to us.”
Paul knows this hostility, which, as Downs points out, was and remains systemically enshrined across much of the western world. As with many an artist before him, whether gay or straight, Paul’s own wounds feed into his work. Shame and pride go hand in hand for him, but it is not simply limited to his own experience. His track “Everything I Loved I Lost (That Day)” is a paean to his his long-dead father who, Paul movingly avers, did everything he could to ensure his children grew up knowing they were loved.
“My dad was consigned to a 1940s industrial school in Glasnevin,” he tells me, “and only after he died did we discover the extent of his physical and psychological and other trials, simply because he was a poor child with no parents or guardians. Instead of turning his heart to stone, my father channeled all his terror and rage into ferociously loving and protecting his family. His heart turned to gold. Having lost both of his parents by the age of seven or eight his greatest fear was not being there for his children. And he always was. He stayed young both inside and outside and died swiftly without any fanfare and with tremendous dignity. I think he knew very well what it was to suffer adversity from all sides, but to keep going in the hope of a better day.”
This same desire to keep hope ever-enkindled and passed on to any and all who need it is one of the chief driving forces behind the album; at the same time, the wounds it seeks to remedy are rarely ever so easily healed. I am reminded of a line in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, No Worst, There Is None, that I think applies to this question:
O the mind has mountains, mountains of fall: Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed: May hold them cheap who never hung there.
Essentially, it’s very easy to be cavalier, dismissive or even outright contemptuous of someone’s perceived vulnerability (“may hold them cheap”), especially if one has never undergone or been made aware of the other person’s struggle. Whether grief or worry or depression or extreme anxiety (“mind has mountains”), an inevitable toll is taken upon one’s emotional state, in turn affecting how they interact with the world.
Returning to Downs, he clarifies his point by saying: “Velvet rage is the deep and abiding anger that results from growing up in an environment when I learn that who I am as a gay person is unacceptable, perhaps even unlovable. This anger pushes me at times to overcompensate and try to earn love and acceptance by being more, better, beautiful, more sexy – in short, to become something I believe will make me more acceptable and loved.”
With ‘Life on Earth’, however, Paul will see the wounds caused and exaserbated by such rage finally overcome. My only hope is that it is the beginning of something better.
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I have been passionate about music from a very young age. I felt an urge to play the saxophone thanks to the theme from The Pink Panther. Unfortunately, a four-year-old can’t hold let alone play the sax, but it turned out that the recorder has the same basic fingering as the sax. So I diligently turned up to lunchtime recorder lessons throughout primary school until I was rewarded with a sax on my twelfth birthday.
I played the usual gamut of classics in the school orchestra and wind band but it was really the formative tinkering in the music rooms after hours with equally curious friends with a nascent interest in Brit Pop of the day that really creatively fired up.
I was part of the generation who started their teenage interest with Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Suede et al, but then came into contact with the weirded side of things when Radiohead brought out Kid A. What an important record that turned out to be in terms of bringing whole new genres of music to a new generation of music lovers.
I’ve played in bands since my teenage years, inspired by Jonny Greenwood and his weird noise making.
I always felt like I had to be in a band, I never had a clear role model for the kind of artist that I am now, or found a trajectory for how to become a solo act, which I’ve only come to in recent years.
For my solo work I’ve drawn on material that goes all the way back to when I was teenager. The opening track Amoniker from my EP The Universe Remembers is named after the band I was in when I was seventeen. It is based on samples from a cassette demo me and my band mate Nick made back in 2000.
The title track of my EP ‘Nihilism is Pointless’ features samples from a cassette recording of our first Amoniker gig in the suburbs of Oxford:
I had the idea for ‘HAL’s Lament’ – a reference HAL from Space Odyssey – in this form of a musical track when I was nineteen years old.
And I also came up with the original piano motif that eventually formed the basis for my piece Holy Island when I was a teenager.
There are other references, ideas and samples from my early years that I will continue to draw on. The facility to preserve sound over decades is a truly magical phenomena, and it’s so cool to have twenty years-worth of musical exploration and ideas to be able to draw on for inspiration.
Conversely my recent EP Athletics features material that I made from scratch in the last few months. In general, I have such a large catalogue of material to draw from that I can leave tracks to one side and revisit them at a later date, which is a great luxury.
There’s nothing more stressful than making something at the last minute and having to commit to it being finished and ready for mastering and release. The track ‘Hammering’ from Athletics EP was completed as I was sending off for mastering, though I think it turned out ok in the end!
Talking of long-standing influences, since early childhood I was brought up by my dad with a passion for sports and athletics, particularly running.
The Athletics EP is the first of my releases that has been directly inspired by this passion. I happened to see the great Ugandan runner Joshua Cheptegei break the 5000m world record at the Monaco Diamond League in August 2020. Sadly I was watching it on TV; if only I’d been there in person!
Joshua Kiprui Cheptegei at the 2014 World Junior Championships in Athletics
The excitement and surprise in the commentators’ voices was as remarkable as the run itself. No one had any idea that Joshua was going to give it a go that night, let alone pull it off.
I channelled this energy into my track ‘Cheptegei’, and I’m very grateful that the commentators Steve Cram and Tim Hutchings gave me their permission to use the samples from their commentary.
Other influences and inspirations for me have been on the sadder end of the spectrum. My mother lost her battle with cancer in 2016, and I sit typing this article at her old desk and chair. Her incredible being and courageous passing has inspired a great deal of my work, including this piece: ‘My Mother Was The Wind’.
The other track I released this with, ’Heartbeat’, is dedicated to my son Noah, who was born asleep in July 2020. Heartbeat features the sound of Noah’s heartbeat recorded in the womb during a check-up. It is shared with love and solidarity to all who have suffered this heartbreak, and with thanks to the medical staff and our friends and family who gave us their love and strength through the grieving process.
My recent single ’Crows’ is a celebration of my love for retro rave electronica, acts such as Chemical Brothers and Broadcast. It really lit a fire in me for the more upbeat end of electronica in my teenage years.
Hazy memories of seeing the Chemical Brothers at Glastonbury fused with an element of live instrumentation inspired by the likes of Battles, who I caught relatively early on at Truck Festival. Those were the days!
I used to perform with a couple of great electronic acts from Oxford where I’m from, shout out to Keyboard Choir and The Evenings. I’m getting misty-eyed!
Aside from this string of solo EPs and singles, I’ve also worked on commissions for original scores for dance company par excellence Neon Dance. We worked together on Mahajanaka Dance Drama, an Anglo-Thai collab with Thai dancers and musicians.
The show toured the UK and I released two EPs of material from the show. The track Mahajanaka seemed to really strike a chord with people, and the music video is made with footage that came out of our research trip to Thailand.
I also worked on the stage show Puzzle Creature with Neon Dance:
And have performed and collaborated with the German musicians Alex Stolze (violin) and Anne Müller (cello) as Solo Collective. We released two records together via Alex’s Nonostar Records, and have more in the pipeline!
In terms of my next solo releases I have a bunch of amazing remixes and reworked tracks from the Athletics EP, and am planning to release my debut album Canary in 2023. Keep an eye on my website: www.sebastianreynolds.co.uk
