Anois, Os Ard: May 2024

Welcoming summer with new music and mixes from Natalia Beylis, Carlos Danger, The Personal Vanity Project and more

In the middle of Cahir, Co. Tipperary – my hometown – there’s a statue dedicated to the blind uilleann piper Edmund Keating Hyland, who was born there in 1780. He’s probably best known for composing ‘The Fox Chase’, a descriptive jig that evokes the various phases of a hunt. Incidentally, that tune is based on ‘An Maidrin Ruadh’, an air made famous by the soprano and harpist Mary O’Hara, who you’ll know for ‘Óró Mo Bháidín’, which Passion Pit sampled on their halcyon anthem, ‘Sleepyhead’. 

‘The Fox Chase’ demonstrates the pipes at their most sublime: just listen to this version by Séamus Ennis, or this live performance by Planxty’s Liam O’Flynn, and get swept away by the undulating drones and ornamental chanter. Finbar and Eddie Furey’s rendition, meanwhile, is a transcendent trad-meets-free jazz jawdropper that sounds like something Pharaoh Sanders could have concocted if he’d spent a few months out in the wilds of Connemara. It shreds.

Anyway, I bring this up because I’ve been back in Cahir for the past week or so. It’s the first time I’ve been home since publishing my essay exploring the drone in Irish music, so it felt appropriate to go and pay my respects to Hyland’s statue, and to give him some due props here. Take a look at him!

Regrettably, I couldn’t squeeze in a trip to Sherkin Island for Open Ear this year, so a lot of my past week has been spent living vicariously through friends’ Instagram videos. Admittedly, seeing Ireland’s best festival unfold on my phone was a recipe for debilitating FOMO, but I still took a lot of pleasure from watching everyone immerse themselves in the very best of Irish experimental and underground music from afar. The line-up was incredible as ever this time round, comprising the likes of Mohammad Syfkhan, Belacqua, Moundabout, Polyp, JWY and The Cyclist & Elaine Howley. I got goosebumps watching the Banger Cliff tent go thoroughly apeshit when Lesko dropped Plus One’s ‘Bonk’, a scorcher of a track released on Galway’s Ar Ais Arís label that has become the weapon of choice in the Hessle Audio extended universe lately. A couple of weeks before Open Ear, I saw a video of Four Tet playing it out to an enormous crowd of EDM fans at EDC Las Vegas, shortly after he'd dropped 'Levels' by Avicii. Get yourself a banger that can do both! 

Between that and the viral sensation of ‘The Spark’, a drum & bass rap track made by the kids of Kabin Crew & Lisdoonvarna Crew, it’s been a pretty big month for Irish tuneage on a global stage. There’s also been a tonne of great new music released, which you can read all about below! 

I’ll be back in a few weeks with an interview with the DJ Cian Ó Cíobháin, who recently celebrated 25 years of his world-class music show on RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, An Taobh Tuathail. And, of course, there’ll be another new release round-up at the end of the month. Until then, be well!

Eistigí.

Natalia Beylis - Lost - For Annie [Outside Time]

Anybody can make a field recording, but few capture the complexity, depth and sinew of what surrounds us quite like Natalia Beylis. Whether it's chirruping birdsong, murmured dialogues, the rhythmic rattle of an old sewing machine, or the gentle cadence of a cat napping on the keys of a piano, the Kyiv-born, Baltimore-raised artist's modulated dispatches from her Leitrim home paint an intimate portrait of her environs. Woven together with wavering tape sounds, organ drones and burbling electronics, her catalogue documents the uncanny musicality and layers of meaning that can be found in every moment. 

Like 2021’s arboreal odyssey Whose Woods These Are with cellist Eimear Reidy, the 19-minute ‘Lost - For Annie’ is a work of audio environmentalism, originally written to accompany an installation by visual artist Annie Hogg, which explored the ecological damage caused by large-scale commercial farming and forestry. The first portion is filled with drifting ambient hums and an orchestra of bird calls, recorded some years ago in a woodland near Beylis’ home and sampled from old LPs. Gradually, the chirps disappear, replaced by the heaving rumble of machinery and the rustle of footsteps, which she recorded later, after that same woodland was clearfelled, and a new wild forest had begun to grow. In the album’s liner notes, Beylis explains how most of the birds identified in the piece are on a list of high conservation concern; the wordless choral chant that appears in the final portion feels like a beckoning for those birds to return, their song emerging once more as the piece floats to a close – a contemplative snapshot of an ever-shifting landscape and its inhabitants. 

The album’s latter half is equally illuminating, comprising three pieces made as part of a community-led multimedia research project aimed at unearthing the history of the mysterious stone sweathouses that are dotted around Leitrim. From the recorded interviews with participants about the uses people had for these sauna-like spaces, through the brief scrape of a ceramic sculpture made by Kate Murtagh Sheridan, to the immersive organ drone that sees the LP out, Beylis patiently introduces us to this fascinating local lore. Like the birds in ‘Lost - For Annie’, its nature is uncertain, not fixed, and relies on our attentive engagement. It’s a curiosity that her sonic explorations consistently stir, and which buzzes with a particular potency and poignancy here.

Carlos Danger - Irish Hash Mafia

Rory Sweeney’s fingerprints are all over Dublin’s DIY scene. Whether he’s releasing off-kilter footwork, jungle and ambient experiments on Bandcamp, adding an ethereal electronic sheen to tracks by Pippa Molony and SLOUCHO, or providing elastic beats for rappers to bounce off, the Bitten Twice collective co-founder’s approach is one firmly rooted in fucking about and making music with pals. It’s a dynamism that permeates this latest project under his Carlos Danger alias, which is described as “a love letter to the DIY sound and ethos of ‘90s Southern hip-hop, as well as a time capsule of the leftfield DIY sounds being explored by the Irish underground.”

Accompanied by a coterie of MCs, Sweeney cooks up a distinctly Irish take on Memphis rap and trap, dicing up distorted strings, brass and woodwind samples with thunderous 808s and hyperlocal skits. Birmingham’s Tony Bontana spits and slopes over woozy piano runs in opener ‘Departed’, before EMBY and Keanu The Pilot let rip over dulcimer whirls and thick bass throbs on ‘Pull Up’. Curtisy – who's just released an impressive first album of his own – lends his Danny Brown-via-Dublin flow to six tracks, ranging from Herbie Hancock-style electro funk (‘Rap Heritage’) to high-speed jazz alongside Smokey in ‘Roma Chipper Loughlinstown’. He spars with Ahmed, With Love in the hazy trap jams ‘Decent Curtisy’ and ‘Lean Swag’, while E The ARTIST bellows and snarls over speaker-crushing beats in ‘Bismillah’ and ‘Beastmode Normalstate’. Flickers of MF DOOM, Burial and The Avalanches emerge in moments with Luke Maher, Lonely Chap and Yeire13, buried among the tongue-in-cheek interludes featuring Eamon Dunphy and some other colourful characters.

With its in-jokes and creative excitability, this project serves as a reminder of the easy camaraderie that’s so often abandoned when this music thing gets too serious. It’s a point Sweeney hammers home in the album’s accompanying text: “No career stuff in mind, just us hanging out, having fun and sharing our passion for music. These are moments I will always cherish and I love yiz to bits.”

The Personal Vanity Project - The Personal Vanity Project [Pizza Pizza Records]

Kevin Shields' fabled drum & bass album has been stirring nerds' imaginations for years; there's a great article in The Quietus devoted to My Bloody Valentine’s rhythmic innovations and dabblings in electronic percussion. During lockdown, Limerick musician Chris Quigley took a swing at recreating what those more elusive '90s recordings might have sounded like. By the Cruiser guitarist and engineer's own admission, the attempt was a "total disaster", but it did leave him with a collection of song fragments that would eventually become The Personal Vanity Project's debut album, a nine track suite that surfs the shoegaze wave on a board of motorik drums and harmonised vocal hooks, and lands in an irresistible indie psych sweet spot.

Joined by Bleeding Heart Pigeons drummer Brendan McInearney and James Reidy from His Father's Voice - whose new single is also great btw - on keys, The PVP merge influences from Sonic Youth and Stereolab with echoes of our own Sea Pinks and Junk Drawer. Tightly wound grooves roll into shredded kosmiche jams, all held together with colourful ribbons of fuzzed-up guitar, oscillating organs and pedal board fuckery. In standout tracks like 'Callan', 'Since You've Been Gone' and 'Late Boomer', the album’s most tuneful moments ramp out of some of its heaviest tremolo arm blaze-outs. 'Sodium Lamp' evokes Limerick legends Windings, while 'Swimming' ends things on a Respect-era Squarehead tip, but really, The PVP are ploughing their own furrow. Not bad for a failed experiment. 

Jennifer Walshe & Tony Conrad - In The Merry Month of May

No exaggeration, Jennifer Walshe at Open Ear 2019 remains one of the most exhilarating festival sets I’ve ever seen. Performing on the Saturday afternoon to a tent of hungover punters in various states of recline and rot, her rendition of the spoken word fever dream, ‘In Glorious Mono’, quickly had the whole crowd on its feet, whooping and cheering along with her surrealist observations extracted from internet search debris, referencing celebrity dogs, robots, AK-47s, Xboxes, tampons, Twilight and Tinder over a bed of strange, scratchy sound design.  

It’s a hallucinatory vibe she’s conjured every time I’ve seen her since: a postmodern concoction of absurdist humour and digital anxiety that’s captured once again in this collaborative album with the late, great Tony Conrad. Walshe recites the album’s title in feverish incantations over lurching violin bows, summoning the same hypnotic hysteria as her pandemic-era ‘ULTIMATE CHILL DANNY BOY MEGAMIX’. ‘Well You Would’, ‘He Only Had One Paw’ and ‘He's Definitely Not the Type’ delight in ridiculous lyrical elasticity, with Walshe popping, whistling, snarling, gasping and bending her vocal chords like jelly round Conrad’s preposterous plucks and bassy plumes. It's always a treat when experimental music leans hard into hilarity, and here we have two masters outdoing themselves at every turn. 

That frenzied energy feeds right into the fidgety monologues of ‘Wake Up’ and ‘O My God’, capturing the everyday fears and frustrations of late stage capitalism, parenthood and Facebook comment sections. As his final recorded work, this album is a testament to Conrad’s singular brilliance. As a collaboration, it speaks to a crucial synergy – a shared creative lunacy perhaps – that’s required to pull something like this off, and to make it so fun to dive into again and again.  Innnnnnnnn… ttthhhheeeeeeeee….. merrrrryyyyyyyyyy….

Pôt-pot - GOING INSANE [Blind Head Recordings]

Originating in 2020 as a solo project of Cork musician Mark Waldron-Hyden, the initial premise of pôt-pot was fairly simple: explore experimental psych and drone-focused music with a basic live set-up. It’s a process he captured on a scuzzy debut EP for Warm Milk Recordings, The High Civilizations. Later, upon moving to Lisbon for an artist residency, he was joined by Mykle Oliver Smith and Joe Armitage, whose fuzz-drenched guitars and bass accompanied his motorik drums and whirring synths on Ode To A, a suite of loosely structured krautrock jams improvised around a single note, evoking the likes of Beak> and The Jimmy Cake. 

Now a five-piece completed by Sara Leslie and Elaine Malone, pôt-pot’s latest outing for Blind Head Recordings takes a decidedly more tuneful turn, while retaining the taste for rolling kosmische they were born from. Channelling the likes of Spaceman 3, Broadcast and The Velvet Underground, as well as local legends like The Altered Hours, the title track, ‘NO FRIENDS’, ‘I SEE THE SUNLIGHT’ and ‘WE WERE ALWAYS HERE’ layer looping vocal chants over proto-punk and psych-rock arrangements. Waldron-Hyden’s hypnotic monotone duets with Malone’s siren howl, in contrast to her hauntingly hushed new single as MANTUA, ‘seek you out’. Her harmonium drones also replace the band’s earlier synthwork, adding an earthy tremolo to instrumentals ‘TWO FACES’ and ‘EXITING’. 

pôt-pot was always intended as a live project, and there’s a real physicality to the way these tunes play out. They feel made to be played in small, sweaty venues; their refrains yelled back at them in pint-soaked unison. Who knows though, when the formula goes this hard, it might not be long before the stages get a whole lot bigger. 

SLOUCHO - NPC [Sweet Sun]

Worldbuilding will only get you so far; you need the tunes to back it up. Luckily, SLOUCHO seems to understand this. Although the accompanying text to the Dublin electronic artist's debut album spins an intriguing sci-fi narrative involving a mystical island, ancient rituals, astral travel and portal dolmens, you don't need to know that to enjoy his pristine post-dubstep, garage and hip-hop productions. While its title, NPC, refers to the duality of being a main character in one’s own life, and a non-playable one in everyone else’s, thinking about this stuff is mostly an optional side quest when listening to these nine tracks. The music stands on its own two feet; it bangs because it bangs.

‘Mutant’, featuring Rhoshi, reworks the vocal from Henry Earnest’s dream pop ballad ‘Free’ into a glitching trill, layered over nimble Livity Sound-style drums and swoops of drill sub-bass. ‘Come Around’ with Rory Sweeney and ‘Brand New (feat. k-caz & EMBY)’ tap into the neon-hued pulse of early Joy O and Jacques Greene, the latter being the first of four vocal-focused cuts that feature across the LP. Giddy centrepiece ‘Super Maramu’ – named after the dog in the album’s lore  – sounds a lot like Two Shell before they became insufferably stuck in their own gimmick. ‘Rocks (ft. k-caz + Vaticanjail)’ and ‘Lights On (ft. Yamag​ō​chi)’ end things on a nocturnal hip-hop note, their beats bathed in digital luminescence and melancholic melody. Whatever world it awakens in your mind, you can’t deny the soundtrack.

David Murphy - Cuimhne Ghlinn: Explorations in Irish Music for Pedal Steel Guitar

I’m a simple man, really. Stick an ambient album made with pedal steel guitar under my nose and you’ll have my attention immediately. Make that album a reimagining of ancient Irish harp tunes and historic airs by the likes Turlough O'Carolan and Seán Ó Riada, and you’ll have my heart completely. This is the endeavour of Cork multi-instrumentalist David Murphy’s debut solo album, which seeks “to take the instrument away from its excursions across well-worn roads through the dusty American south and southwest and deeper into a world much closer to home”.

Murphy is joined by an ensemble of musicians including Ordnance Survey’s Neil O’Connor (modular synth), Arborist’s Laura McFadden (cello) and Erased Tapes affiliate Peter Broderick (violin), who help him craft eight contemporary classical compositions that bask in the pedal steel’s humming glow, and bridge it comfortably into the Irish canon. O'Carolan’s ‘Bridget Cruise’ and ‘Eleanor Plunkett’ stretch out like a sunset on a mountain side, their gentle drones, piano and trumpet motifs elevating the instrument’s reverberant strings to a tender plain, while ​Aisling Urwin’s gossamer harp plucks and Anthony Ruby plaintive tin whistle in ‘An Draigheann’ take its slow-moving southern twang somewhere altogether greener. At times, it takes a back seat: ‘Citi na gCumann’, 'Cuimhne Ghlinn' and ‘Sean O'Duibhir a Gleanna’ lead with plaintive strings, keys and uilleann pipes, allowing the pedal steel to adopt a more textural role, totally at home in its expansion of traditional forms. 

Shane Latimer – Residuum [Diatribe Records]

Shane Latimer is primarily a guitarist, but you'd be forgiven for not realising that on a first listen to his new album. Over eight tracks, the avant-garde, jazz and improv specialist stitches an abstract tapestry using repurposed and reimagined fragments of recordings he made over the past few years. The resulting suite taps into minimalist glitch techno and Ina GRM-esque electroacoustics, and unravels with a fitful, brain-tickling intricacy. ‘Ebb’ warms things up with a subtle Clicks & Cuts pulse, its acoustic palette and fuzzy feedback twisted into an eerie Farben-esque form, while ‘Cheap Shades’ is a woozy collage of plucks, crackle and buzz, like Pierre Schaeffer harnessing magique concrète from old Gibson. 

‘Ten Minutes In The Tumble Dryer’, ‘Clickbait’ and ‘Uniform Uniform Unicorn’ invoke the strange beauty of Tomaga’s catalogue, with Valentina Magalettii’s scattershot drums replaced by the haywire hiss, shuffle and throb of Latimer’s studio gear; shards of tonal light come from sampled snatches of strings and clarinets from an unsuccessful film score pitch. ‘Press Here To Capture The Memory’ takes cues from experimental turntablists Philip Jeck and NikNak, transforming vinyl scratches into a muffled fog. Faint voices and warped motifs will pull you in, offering glimmers of clarity, before the torrent of amplified distortion that ends the album on ‘High And Mighty’ sends you right down the winding rabbit hole of noise once more. 

Byron Yeates - Time Machine [Radiant Records]

“Lightness and darkness, driving basslines, femme energy, and playfulness are all elements that I try to incorporate,” said Byron Yeates of his DJ sets when I interviewed him back in 2021. It’s a vibe he’s continued to conjure in the years since, and increasingly channelled into tracks released on his Radiant Records label. Here, the Galway-born, Berlin-based producer serves up four more cuts that feed generously into contemporary tastes for ‘90s prog and trance, but with an acute dancefloor knowhow that’s felt strangely lacking from some other artists’ attempts to do the same in recent years. 

Yeates has a knack for extended sets, so he understands when to let the euphoria loose, and when to let things breathe. You can feel the latter in ‘Liquid Sky’ and ‘Time Machine’, with their pumping basslines, delicious vocal chops and fizzy synths; you can practically taste the anticipation sizzling in the back of your throat with every teasing breakbeat and rushing siren. ‘Hyper Hyper’ shoots for peak-time with propulsive techno grit, rib-rattling bass and the sort of ecstasy-fueled trance flourish you’d find in vintage Love Parade footage. Rounding it off with a slick early morning club tool in collaboration with Sligo-born Spray, it’s another rave-tuned jewel in the Radiant Records crown.

MÁTHAIR ‘forty days and forty nights’

A few weeks ago, the Tipperary-born, Dublin-based DJ MÁTHAIR went straight from playing a day party with the BPM (Bitches Play Music) crew, to a late-night rave in Tallaght with Bitten Twice. Respectively, these collectives represent two sides of the same coin in the capital’s young electronic underground, with the former focusing on hypercolourful club experiments, and the latter leaning into darker, harsher palettes. Their shared DNA is in their frenetic energy, and flair for rhythmic dynamism and drama. It’s a spectrum that MÁTHAIR surfs with ease in this new mix, which vaults from earthy dubstep and bass-warped breaks into tempo-pushing techno, footwork and jungle. It’s a patchwork of percussive dance music from across the globe that should delight fans of Simo Cell, CCL, DJ Voices and their ilk, and demonstrates an emerging DJ on the verge of a breakthrough.

Local Selection 239: JenTen

Recently I’ve been reorganising my music library: sifting through old hard drives in search of lost gems; separating them from the stacks of crap that accumulated over the years. Some of my favourite rediscoveries have been the stripped-back, tough as nails techno tracks I was into around 2014. The way artists like Robert Hood, DVS1 and Truncate could make something so hallucinatory and hard using such tightly wound arrangements was formative. It instilled in me a love for minimalism in club music that stuck, even as my tastes swerved about over the next decade. 

It’s an energy I’ve been craving again lately, so this mix from JenTen really hit the spot, alongside her guest slot for Efa O’Neill’s Out Of Space show on DDR. In both mixes, the DJ – who’s based between Dublin and Berlin – chops and layers her loop-driven selections with a proper Detroit flair, all velocity and funk without a second wasted on anything as trivial as a breakdown. She may be a relative newcomer on the scene, but as you match your breath to the interlocking rhythms, bubbling arps and rolling basslines of this full-pelt 60 minute session, it’s tempting to feel like plenty of capital T techno DJs could learn a thing or two from her.

DifferentSound invites Sunil Sharpe / Podcast #284

Hearing certain DJs play can be like a factory reset: a way of purging the disillusionment from your system and reconnecting with just how vital this music can feel when it’s in the right hands. Sunil Sharpe is one such DJ, and for all the incredible nightlife advocacy work he’s done in recent years through Give Us The Night, it’s always worth remembering that he’s also just a total monster behind a set of turntables. 

This set he played in Connolly's Of Leap should do the trick. In a post about it, Sharpe outlined the beloved West Cork venue’s own history of resilience over the past 230 years, and how there’s something about the energy down there that inclines musicians to go “off the leash” a bit. Case in point, this 128-minute techno masterclass, mixed on wax (of course) with mind-melting dexterity is the sort of session that makes you reach for every superlative under the sun, only to end up with a wordless, primal yell. There are plenty of those going on here; the 150-cap room’s crowd noise cuts through the crunchy live recording to place you right at the heart of the action. You can practically feel the sweat dripping off the ceiling, the feverish heat, the ecstatic head rushes let loose with every whoop and cheer.

There’s a hardgroove scorcher from Dublin’s Dylan Fogarty, jacking acid from Sol Ortega, Jerome Hill and DMX Krew, a heady blend of Four Tet’s remix of Chloé Robinson & DJ ADHD’s ‘Pax’ with Peder Mannerfelt’s ‘Pumping Plastics’, and a whole lot more besides. By the time you hit the frenzied closing portion, you’ll be exhausted, but equally revitalised; ready for anything. This is what it’s all about. 

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!