AOA Mix 004: lullahush

lullahush expands on the electronic and trad music alchemy of his new album in an hour long mix, and speaks about the creative and personal processes that went into creating it

If you read April’s New Irish Music round-up, you’ll already know how much I loved lullahush’s Ithaca. If you didn’t, that’s okay too. In a word, it’s exceptional. The Athens-based Dubliner born Daniel McIntyre’s second album alchemises a vast catalogue of samples — from Irish trad music to memes, voice notes and cluastuiscint exam audio — into a luminous electronic patchwork.

Named after the island of Greek mythology to which Odysseus longed to return after years in exile, Ithaca’s nine tracks spin an abstract narrative around the notion of home. Considering Ireland’s centuries-long history of emigration, and the breadth of music and literature it’s produced, McIntyre uses his collagist compositions to untangle ideas around memory, identity, belonging and pride, with a more intimate personal narrative woven into its tapestry too, albeit more subtly.

In it, you’ll hear sean-nós singer Saileog Ní Cheannabháin glimmer amongst glitching drum fills and twinkling ambience. Elsewhere, a whistle reel bounces around a pounding beat a lá Morgan Buckley; snippets of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim Two Birds appear and disappear in an instant; a keening song becomes a deconstructed techno bruiser; Maija Sofia sings a lovelorn ballad and outlines the role of water in Irish history, ecology, culture and mythology; McIntyre’s 97-year-old great uncle sings ‘On Raglan Road’ over crumbling samples and muffled instrumentation.

Mixing trad and electronic music is risky business, and often ends up sounding half-baked at best, and incredibly corny at its worst. But lullahush has really pulled it off here, showing a reverence to his source material while still finding something new to say with it. I really think it’s quite special. You can read my full review of the album, which is out on the taste making electronic music label Future Classic, here.

I wanted to speak to McIntyre a bit more about the record, and some of the ideas that went into it, so we jumped on a call on Monday evening and did just that. He’s also provided an excellent mix that expands on some of the musical ideas on the album, including an excellent “half-remix” of John Francis Flynn’s ‘Tralee Goal’.

It was a fun, rambling chat, that didn’t actually go too far into the specifics of the record. Instead, we spoke at length about turning it into a live show, the creative and personal processes that led to its creation, interacting with Irish art and music when living abroad, the influence of Flann O’Brien, Gilla Band, Wah Wah Wino, and a whole lot more. You can read the whole chat below — edited for length and clarity — and listen to the mix while you’re at it. I’d also recommend listening to

TPOE

’s interview with him here.

Also, don’t forget to follow Anois, Os Ard on Soundcloud!

Éistigi.

Eoin: Hello!

lullahush: Hey, how's it going, Eoin?

I'm very well, thank you. What's the craic?

Ah, you know yourself. Doing my best.

Having a Monday.

Having a Monday, yeah. Ah no, it's good. We played a gig on the weekend, so the weekend was the work and I took today off.

Was the gig in Athens?

Yeah, we're playing a few shows over here while we're still sort of figuring things out. It's quite nice. We’re playing a lot of DIY places and stuff, just trying something different with the set every time.

That's a fun way of doing it. Like, not so much making it up as you go along, but working out the framework and seeing how it plays out.

It is kind of like making up as you go along. With so much electronic music, when you play it live it's just replication and track stuff, and it can be quite boring. We wanted to try and find a way of doing things so that we never play things the same way twice. There's a lot of room for improvisation and chaos and risk and failure as well, which is exciting. It’s also quite draining, but it's good.

lullahush

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I guess that feeds it back into the trad side of things on the album to a certain extent.

Yeah, so, for the first show that we played here, two trad players came over from Ireland and played with us. A drummer, Jason McNamara, had come over from Ireland first of all, and we’d kind of figured it as a three piece [with collaborator Kelvin Barr], and then the two trad guys came in. Then, we were in Ireland recently and we played a last minute set in [the beloved trad music venue] The Cobblestone. We all kind of sat around in a circle and had a few more players come in. It was very much like a session, but with APCs and MIDI controllers and tape machines and stuff. It was cool.

How does that go down in The Cobblestone?

It went down well! So, the concertina player, it's his family's pub. They're actually really supportive of weird stuff in there, especially in the back room. And yeah, it’s a really nice crowd; a good few people came down. It was very much like, okay, we're trying something out here. Some of it might work. Some of it might not work. We're trying to do that with each gig, to make it like: this is an experiment, this is something happening live, you know? And, yeah, it’s working so far.

Would you say there’s an Irish music community in Athens?

So my collaborator Kelvin, who made the artwork for the album, lives here. We started working on stuff, trying to figure out how to do it live, just before Christmas, and we did a more ambient basement show just the two of us. Then, as the album was coming out, and more things were getting booked, Jay came over, and he's just here for a couple of months to figure this stuff out. So yeah, there's not a whole lot of Irish people here, but we have a little thing going.

It's been interesting playing this music here, and making this music here, and seeing how people respond to it here as well. I think it's nice that all the Irishness is there in it, but that it can sort of speak beyond that, and that it’s not just that. It’s able to say something to somebody from anywhere in the world as well.

Before I talk to you about the album, I wanted to get a bit of a picture of your history with music, and what steps brought you to this point, even from an early age. What kind of trajectory would you say you've been on as a music fan and musician?

I started out playing guitar, and as soon as I could play a bit, started a band. I was always in bands as a teenager, moving toward psychedelic rock stuff, and then got quite into the sort of interesting sonic side of things through that. The next kind of logical step then is you start to get into production and Ableton and stuff. I think a lot of people who are into psych stuff or into post-rock, like pushing what you can do with guitar, kind of just naturally gravitate towards electronic music.

I was doing production for other people, and I worked a lot with an artist called Æ MAK and got to learn a lot about the sounds I was interested in. I'd been doing a lot of sort of pop-adjacent stuff — stuff that was on the grid and very detailed. Kind of flashy production. Then I took a little trip when I finished college, up to Donegal where my mam's from, and spent a couple of days just not thinking about any of that and just focusing on what was in my head — following no rules, just doing what felt natural. I ended up making this thing that really felt like something new — something that was actually my voice. I never actually released that, but it was basically ambient music. I didn't really know what ambient music was back then, but through that I found what I was interested in.

Then I did the Red Bull Music Academy, and that switched me on to all of the wilder stuff that's out there. I went further in on this style that I had in myself, but I was still writing songs. I wanted to try to find a way of having this sort of pallette but also be able to say something lyrically. I made an album that was more like that [A City Made Of Water And Small Love] and I think sometimes some of that succeeds, and some of it doesn't. But yeah, I just got further and further into this sonic world that I wanted to create.

I'd always been making these little experiments with the trad stuff, just trying out ideas or sampling things. And then, you know, I was working on a bunch of different projects, basically four albums, and trying to decide which thing to put my energy into. It just felt like I was able to say the most by working with the traditional material. I also thought that I was kind of onto something that hadn’t really been said before, and because the material I was working with was already so beautiful, and had so much in it, I felt like I could really enhance what I do and shine alongside that. It just felt like the right time to go fully into this and see what happened.

What was that process like?

So the first [track I made sampling traditional music] was on ‘An Droighneán Donn’, the first track on the album. I had just sampled Saileog Ní Cheannabháin’s voice and was like, okay, ‘What if these things were applied to it?’, ‘What if it existed in this world?’ I just kind of made a thing out of that and left it aside. And then the urge kind of took me to be like, okay, how would you do that in a more beat-driven context? So I sampled ‘Over The Moor To Maggie’ and tried to do a Morgan Buckley type beat on top of that.

It was just a couple of bits like that where I would take a tune, try something with it, and put it down. But then, when I kind of felt like I wanted to dive into this more, there was stuff there. There were things to start from, and then I just got really deep into that world. I had kind of an archive in my mind of things to try, places to go with it, and what to pull from.

But I also think leaving Ireland was pretty necessary to being able to fully dive into this. I think it would have been harder to make, I think I would have been much more self-critical and feel less free with what I was doing if I was in Ireland.

I get that. I've lived in the UK for nine years, and I think something I've gathered in that time is that you kind of start engaging with the music and art or whatever of the place that you leave in a different way when you've been gone a while. I haven't worked out why that is, and I haven't worked out any kind of intelligent way of articulating it, but even though I wrote a good bit about Irish music when I was back home, I think I only really started engaging with it in a really intentional, purposeful way after leaving. Maybe it's kind of trite to say that it’s a way of feeling close to home or something, but maybe it is that?

It is. And it’s within you as well, you know. It’s there. Maybe there's an element of running away when you move away, but like, you can't run away from what's inside of you, so it has to come up somehow. It has to be dealt with somehow. And it's kind of a safer proximity as well, because you can engage with the romanticism of it a bit easier because you're not constantly faced with the hardships of it. Do you mean your writing took on a more local voice or you just started writing about Ireland more?

Writing about Ireland more, yeah, certainly. Or maybe trying to engage with the threads that connect various strands of music in Ireland, or artists from different parts of the country who may be making music that sounds world's apart. Like for instance, one of the things that really sparked for me about Ithaca was that, at the same time I was listening to that a lot last month, I was listening to Maria Somerville’s new album a lot too, which deals with similar ideas about home and what that means. And while the records don't sound anything alike, there were so many little parallels going on in my head while I was listening to them both. I guess that's what I mean.

I think you can really hear the landscape in her sound. There’s a distinct Irishness there that's not obvious. It’s a more subtle thing that lives within the rocks and within the sea and within the wind and stuff. That's the sort of Irishness that comes across from Maria's music.

And I guess with that stuff as well. When you're too close to it, you can't see it. It takes that zoomed out perspective to understand what the whole picture is.

So, just so I have my timelines right, were you already away by the time work really started in earnest on the album?

Yeah, when I really started to dive into things, yeah.

So maybe the vision became clearer after that.

Definitely. And also, it was just the right time in my life as well. The other aspect to it, beyond just the traditional stuff, is the use of real life samples: taking things directly out of what’s actually going on and having the music sort of score your life, and then having your life sort of score the music. And then finding a way to mingle those two.

Can you give me an example of that in the album?

So yeah, like, with ‘Máire na Réiltíní’, the whole thing is like an opera of [a particular period of my life], and there's loads of little moments that I recorded throughout the course of that in there. All the sound design either plucks directly from real life or is made to replicate a particular moment or a particular memory. And there are things earlier in the album that are kind of like omens of that: samples of some of the voices, some of the things that people are saying. It’s kind of like a second layer to all these details in the tapestry. lf you want to follow it, you can listen closely to the samples and where they're placed and what's happening alongside them. There's actually a bit of a map there.

I think it’s a kind of humanness that only contemporary production really allows for. I think that's maybe the most interesting way of pushing electronic music right now: really digging into how you can weave and blur the lines between real life and art.

It's tricky, isn't it? Like, I guess it always depends on the type of electronic music someone is making as well. Occasionally you'll read a description or explanation of what an electronic album is setting out to achieve, angled with this incredibly detailed narrative, but its presence in the music might be impossible to detect. That's not to say that all electronic music should have very obvious markers as to what its theme is or what its narrative is, but yeah, like you said, it's maybe about finding a balance between reality and the abstract and the implied, and how much people are told and not told.

There's a time and a place for each mode and, yeah, I think in many ways Ithaca is a pretty clear aesthetic experiment. With the way this kind of sampling is done, I just felt like I had to do that, like I had to get that out. And now, having done that and moved on, I’m like, maybe it’s a bit too on the nose at times, but that’s okay, because it is what it is. I’m working on an album at the moment that’s much more abstract and trying to actually respond to that — something that can take some of the same emotions and blur them, make them unclear and do the opposite of what Ithaca does. But you need to get somewhere to be able to go the opposite place and find new ways of expressing and keeping it interesting.

So, as you said, there's a tapestry here that deals with multiple narrative threads. When it came to assembling the samples that weren't your own — samples from music, samples from other sources — were there any in there that you felt were like a bridge between the thematic ideas you were trying to explore?

Yeah, definitely. The most fun in making it was in finding where things lined up, or how the placement of one thing in one context opened up this bridge into another place. And then you have to jumble it all together and mix everything together. It’s quite overwhelming to think about how much you can pull from like, even when this one had a clear enough criteria. There’s just so many ways you can do it and so many places you can pull from, but when I really got into it and got into kind of a flow state with it, it became clear: how this thing can interact with that thing, and how to make the whole thing into a proper world.

Are there any sounds in there that you feel are maybe less obvious that are of particular sonic or thematic value to the record?

So, yeah, when I started getting into trad, I got into it because my friends were getting quite into it, and one night we were watching Come West Along The Road. It was this performance by The Voice Squad singing ‘The Banks of the Bann’. It’s just these three lads sitting around the pub, but it's the most insane, impressive, tight three-part harmony you've ever heard. That was one of the first pieces I came across that really blew me away. I sampled a line in it — “She appeared like fair Juno or a Grecian queen” — and used it as a riser, like as a link between the first two sections of ‘An Droighneán Donn’ and the “drop”. It expands into the next part though that. I’d say that was probably fairly unnoticed, but that’s one of the ones I’m particularly proud of.

I’m a pretty big Flann O'Brien nerd, and it just so happened that when I was listening to the album a lot last month, I was simultaneously listening to The Third Policeman, which I wrote my dissertation on about about 10 years ago and…

What was your dissertation on? Sorry to pull you aside, but what was the topic?

So it was about The Third Policeman and another book called House of Leaves, and the way that, in contemporary literature, Hell is often understood as a state of mental distress, like a loss of control of one’s mind or power over one's own life, as distinct from classical depictions of Hell, which were usually based on physical torment. So like, in The Third Policeman, this guy has dedicated his entire life to being a scholar of this preposterous philosopher, and he murders someone in pursuit of that knowledge. His punishment is to be in this Hell where he slowly loses his grip on reality. But anyway, I was listening back to that while listening to the album, but then I was thinking about [Flann O’Brien’s other novel] At-Swim Two Birds as well. Am I right in saying you have a snippet of that at the start of ‘Dónal na Gealaí’?

Yeah, yeah, that’s right! That's probably the other one of these little references I’m happiest with, because it's like, “I disappeared into the comfort of my own mind”, and that's the point in the album where I think it gets most heady and it goes into my own thoughts. I was really happy to get some Flann O’Brien in there because reading At-Swim Two Birds was very influential to my approach to art in general, and especially in this context because he’s kind of sampling folklore. You know, he’s got Mad King Sweeney in there and stuff. He’s just got an expression that’s really particularly Irish but also completely forward thinking and experimental. I find that very inspiring in thinking about how to make stuff and how to have my own kind of local voice that embraces the culture and history but also strives toward something new. Flann O’Brien is the man for that, completely.

There’s a real Irish tradition of experimental and avant garde art, as much as trad or whatever. We’ve exported some of the biggest, most revolutionary figures in modernism. That's an aspect of Irish identity that I'm very proud of. I want to engage with and sort of follow in that tradition.

It’s been very interesting over the past few years watching this “revival”, which I don't really like as a term, play out in Irish folk and trad. Seeing acts like Lankum and RÓIS, who are creating something so, so, so experimental while retaining that energy. It’s so distinct from, say, I don't know, taking a sample of an accordion and slinging it on top of a 808 and calling it a day.

I also don't like the word revival because it implies a commercialism and a “bandwagon-ness”. I mean, that’s always there when things become popular; there’s a desire to simplify things with terms like that. But I do think [what’s happening] makes a lot of sense. What we’ve seen over the last 20 years in Irish music is a move away from this desire to just replicate what's coming from the UK and what's coming from America. I wrote my dissertation about Gilla Band and how they articulate a post-recession, 21st century Irishness in a unique and revolutionary but also distinctly Irish way. I think we’ve just seen this move toward embracing our home dialect and a confidence in ourselves. We’re a young nation – it takes time to have that confidence on a global stage and I think that’s what we’re seeing now. An abandonment of fear and toward giving true expression.

That’s gas that you did your dissertation on Gilla Band. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

I pretty much went into the specifics about their lyrics, the context of them, the way things are placed. I was talking about this post-recessionary feeling, like this dream that had collapsed. I just think that first album [Holding Hands With Jamie], that way of expression, it’s like Flann O’Brien again. It’s in that very Irish tradition of the avant-garde and of pushing things out, but he’s screaming about chicken fillet rolls, you know? Also, that desperation, that Irish id that’s in there. I just found it really fascinating and inspiring. You can see their influence around a lot, even though it gets watered down a good bit. I think it was a really important moment. And what we’re seeing now is really an expansion of that kind of thing.

I think you can totally hear that kind of thing in Ithaca as well. One sample that pops into my head is the snippet from the Cluastuiscint [Irish language listening exam], or when a woman’s voice is there encouraging someone to go out and get pissed because they’re only young once…

That's a meme! It’s a meme of the Pocahontas tree. We were here in a taverna, and my friend who sings later on the album, we were getting her to read it out. It's written in a Dublin accent and she's Greek, and the sample is just her reading out this meme.

I actually wanted to ask about Maija Sofia’s contributions to the album. The two tracks she's on are incredible. How did she come to be involved in it?

Maija was here for a good bit, and we met here, and we were hanging out, and I was working on this stuff, and just asked her if she'd try that verse in ‘Jimmy an Chladaigh’. She just did a beautiful job on that. The song is also about somebody leaving home and being missed and stuff, and I think she was having some of the same questions that I was having about our relationship to Ireland at the time. And then the other piece, [‘Maija an Uisce’], the spoken word thing I completely illegally ripped from her DDR show, and I just made the tune. And then I just said to her: “I've made this”. She was really good about everything.

So now that the album’s been out for a bit, out in the ether, and I’m presuming it was finished for a while before it was released, how are you feeling about it? What’s your relationship with it now that it's no longer just kind of living with you, and now that it's being absorbed?

Being perceived, yeah. It’s a horrible thing to release music [laughs]. It's my least favorite thing in the world, but unfortunately, it's the main thing that I do. But I think probably everybody's like this. I’m happiest just being in the room with the stuff you know? In the moment, making it.

With my first album, I put all of myself into it, and it took forever to come out, and then it came out, and it didn't really do anything. And I think that’s a good lesson to learn about why you do this in the first place. So I was sort of prepared for that again this time, and I knew it was going to take forever to come out, so I just went ahead and made another album in between which I'm nearly finished now. So, I was able to just be in that, and stay in this new world for a while.

So when the time came to release Ithaca I had enough creative satisfaction going on and enough perspective on how things work in music to prepare myself for disappointment and emptiness. But it hasn't been disappointing and empty at all. I think getting this live set together has been a big part of that, because it's not just like… I haven't just made like the perfect gravestone for this stuff, and it's going to just sit there forever. We're finding a way to keep it alive and to find new life for the music and for some stuff on the first album, and for the new stuff that I'm working on. I'm feeling pretty energised about all of that and I’m pretty excited for this other dimension of it.

Do you have a pretty busy schedule for the next few months? Are you going to be playing quite a bit more?

Yeah we’ve got a good few things coming up. Luckily it's kind of like low key and DIY here, so there's like there's a lot of space to figure things out, and that's been really nice. We're playing in Paris next month too, and I think we're going to do a few gigs in Ireland in August, and then I think some more stuff in Europe in September.

I think we went about it in the right way, for me anyway, because I take everything too seriously and freak out about every minute detail of everything. So it's good to kind of be getting into this stuff gently and taking this approach of every day being an experiment, making sure we try something new every time. It keeps it fresh and exciting for us and kind of takes the pressure off of being perfect, or, you know, blowing up or whatever. It’s more like we're at sea exploring,

So, I ask this having read the news today that rent in Ireland has reached, I think, a record high country wide, but how are you feeling about the concept of home at the minute? Like, from the perspective of the record, it’s obviously a knotty relationship that one always has with a place, but what is that relationship looking like for you now?

It’s probably more knotty than ever, and it's not it's not getting easier and it's not becoming more clear. I just got back from Ireland. I was back for a week doing some gigs, and hadn't been back for a while, and it was kind of tough. It’s a difficult one, and that can't really answer right now.

Before we finish, can you tell me about the mix you’ve made?

A lot of it's looking at stuff that I feel — whether it’s obvious or not — is similar or deals with traditional music, or the sentiment of it. There’s a couple of Morgan Buckley bits in there, which I think is the closest music to some stuff on Ithaca that's out there. There's a completely unauthorised half-remix I did of a John Francis Flynn tune that started working on for Ithaca but never completed. I did a little kind of Warpy thing with the Plague Monkeys and mixed in some keening into that. And then there's a few kind of big tunes like Wastee’s ‘Cola’, which is Wastefellow’s more club thing. There’s a few moments of that organic electronic dance music sound. There’s some Daphni, some Arca., I think it goes to some weird places.

It’s interesting you should mention Morgan Buckley and the whole Wah Wah Wino extended universe as an influence..

I mean, Shout Out To All The Weirdos In Rathmines [2014] was just so ahead of everything that happened in electronic music in the mid-2010s onwards. Like, I think Mount Kimbie’s best album so far is Love What Survives [2017], but Morgan was already doing that. And also with the trad stuff, like, [in ‘Inner City Hum’] it sounds like he’s put a tin whistle through a sequencer. It’s totally that buzz, and that was like 10 years ago.

It’s funny, I've listened to that track so many times but I've never once considered the fact that it sounds like a tin whistle and that it could have a trad side to it. It’s always just sounded like a weird, psychedelic mess to me before, in a good way. But then, yeah, hearing it in the context of this mix, I was like, ‘oh, fuck, that's Morgan Buckley does trad’.

It’s totally the trad electronic buzz! Even in the rhythm of it, I think he’s got bodhráns on it as well. Yeah, he’s the OG.

He’s the man. And yeah, same with everything that label does really, the way they just release things and just don't seem to give a fuck is… Yeah, I admire it a lot.

They’ve managed to escape the horrors of releasing music. All the horrible stuff.

Like all fucking press you have to do!

Not this, this has been really nice.

Thanks so much for chatting!

If you find yourself back in Athens give me a shout. Good luck, take care.