New Irish Music: December 2024
Rounding out the year with releases from Mel Keane, ELLLL, Deathbed Convert and more
Nollaig shona dhaoibh!
I’m back in Tipperary for Christmas, but before I log off and listen to nothing but ‘Arthur McBride’ on loop for a week, I wanted to get one last newsletter out. So here we are! I’ve no real preamble prepared, other than to say thanks again to anyone who’s read, subscribed or shared this Substack over the past 12 months. I’ve loved having my own outlet to explore Irish music’s many forms and the response so far has been heartening. I’m excited for what’s in store in 2025 – please stick around!
Right then, onto the round-up. Below you’ll find reviews of some recent Irish releases I’ve loved. Until next time, be well!
Eistigí.
Mel Keane - Airs [wherethetimegoes]
Mel Keane follows the amphibious ambient masterpiece that was his Frog Of Earth LP with a suite of ethereal vignettes. Melodies and motifs made of once familiar sounds – plucked harp, zither and synth, viola bows, human voices, birdsong – are rendered in otherworldly HD across 12 compositions, their essences reconfigured into complex and uncanny soundscapes that glitch, glimmer and swirl like a murmuration of digital starlings.
It’s perhaps a cliché to say this music sounds like a living, breathing thing, but listening to tracks like ‘Psygod’, ‘Seán’ and ‘Book Nano’ featuring Nashpaints’ Finn Carraher McDonald, you can almost picture a strange and beautiful new world being born in slow motion, one filigreed harmonic particle at a time.
‘Eclipse M’ evokes this imagined world at night, where synthetic chirrups and rustling distortion assumes the texture of nocturnal life, all under the glow of moonlit keys and flute-like choral coos. ‘Palms’ plays out like sacred chamber music from an alternate dimension, its warping harp flourishes and orchestral ornamentation underscoring a wordless autotune lullaby.
In the Filipa Cordeiro-featuring ‘Zither FC’ and rhythmic ‘Res Glyph’ there are echoes of Irish experimental luminaries through history such as Michael O’Shea, who created spellbinding, sitar-like music on a 17-stringed wooden door instrument, and Roger Doyle, whose orchestral electronic music resonates to this day. There are hints of the psychedelic Winoverse too, and nods to contemporaries in the wherethetimegoes catalogue, but really, Keane’s music has established him as a lodestar unto himself, and Airs feels like a new high water mark.
ELLLL - Earth Rotation [BRUK]
Cork-born, Berlin-based Ellen King has been exploring techno’s shadowy corners for about ten years now. In her music released as ELLLL – from the throbbing murk of' ‘Romance’ to the lurching breaks of ‘Housebreaker’ – the GASH Collective co-founder has tended to err on the darker side of sound design, where frosty sub-bass and spectral melodies are regularly subsumed in thick layers of fog. It’s an atmosphere her debut album relishes in, culminating in 13 electro-acoustic experiments that reference trip-hop sampling techniques and horror film soundtracks as much as they call to mind derelict, dust-covered dancefloors.
Released via Low End Activist’s BRUK label, Earth Rotation is a rough-hewn jewel. ‘Ooze’ rumbles into life with a low-slung beat, over which wavering tape loops and thick plumes of smoked-out bass unspool. Into the gloom, King weaves muffled foley and birdsong, flickers of tangible reality amidst the uncanny ambiance. Blurred fragments of club music are decontextualised like distorted snapshots, assuming a phantasmal unfamiliarity in ‘Sticky Dub’, ‘Rats’ and ‘Spot Test #1/#2’.
Her penchant for eerie melodies and uneasy mood pieces is made clear in the triptych of ‘Images Theme’, ‘Brush Strings’ and ‘Piano Mallet #2’, while ‘Flow Rate’ conjures images of a deep sea wreckage awakening with its industrial textures and ominous echoes. ‘Titan’ and the title track are reminders of King’s rhythmic sensibilities, their drums thundering through dense corridors of some haunted nightclub. A decade into her electronic excavations, ELLLL is still going deeper and deeper and deeper, unearthing music that bears a signature that’s entirely her own.
Deathbed Convert - Inverse Field Vol.1 - Inishowen [Touch Sensitive]
Connor Dougan duets with the coast of Inishowen on his latest album as Deathbed Convert. Fed up with the habitual mould of making music at home, the Belfast-based producer made his way to north Donegal, where he set up his equipment outdoors and let the environmental audio inform his electronic improvisations. The result is 11 cuts of gusting ambient and downtempo that reflect his interactions with the landscape in real time.
Tracks like ‘Tullah Bay’, ‘Carrickabraghy Castle’ and ‘Malin Head’ are pure bliss, their billowing synth drones and electric guitar strums in meandering conversation with the shoreside surf. Elsewhere, in ‘Kinnagoe Bay’ and ‘Tullagh Dunes Campfire’, Boards Of Canada-style beats underscore crackling keys and a feeling of expanse stretching out into the north coast ahead of you. That sense of place becomes more tangible still in ‘55°13'37.0"N 7°28'27.7"W’, in which local radio frequencies oscillate – a lá Lia Kohl – over the sound of passing cars, a yapping dog and reversing synth chimes.
There’s so much history and intrigue to be found in Inishowen, as documented in this piece by Paul Doran for The Thin Air, but Dougan’s dialogue with the landscape is much simpler than all that – this album’s loveliness resides in its spontaneity.“It’s merely an opportunity for me to respond, musically, to places I’m experiencing for the first time,” he explained in the liner notes on Bandcamp. “If these recordings have succeeded in capturing a fraction of the majesty of the place, I’m happy out!"
Various Artists - Hunger Is Violence [Diet Of Worms]
Hunger Is Violence is a new compilation from Diet Of Worms that’s raising funds for the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC). Comprising 14 interpretations of Richard Berry’s rhythm and blues classic 'Louie Louie' from artists including Natalia Beylis, Seamas Hyland, pôt-pot and Coolgirl, the release encompasses disorienting sound collage, noise rock, throbbing ambient, accordion drones and electric guitar instrumentals. The tape edition features gorgeous artwork by Bournemouth Runner and Ed Kelly, and as the author Kevin Barry puts it in his accompanying liner notes, “that single propulsive riff from deep in the vaults of times has been exploded in many new ways, and somehow still refreshes”.
It’s essential listening for an essential cause. “Now more than ever our acts of empathy are critical,” Barry writes, “even if they are not enough.”
Cormorant Tree Oh - Moonish [Trapped Animal Records]
Mary Keane’s second album as Cormorant Tree Oh navigates the same folk horror soundscapes as her first. Like 2022’s Swoontide, the nine tracks on Moonish evoke eerie rural environments, and the imagined menace that so often lurks amongst the shadows there.
Groaning organ drones, uneasy synth throbs and sinewy strands of plucked banjo, guitar and violin underline Keane’s incantatory coos in ‘The Wrong Kind’ and ‘My Tiniest Bones’, her voice trembling like a candle’s flame in a creaky old house. A bedtime ritual becomes an anxious exercise in ‘Terror Of The Countryside’, as she turns lamps off one by one to acclimatise slowly to the creeping darkness. Purring sound designs and psychedelia accompany the quiet panic of ‘Rorschach’, in which a familiar figure becomes blurred in a hallucinatory hall of mirrors. ‘Tied And Grinded’ bears the hallmarks of a séance, its sub-bass drones and bells billowing out before ‘To Be Flowers’ steps into the forest for a funereal flute and accordion assisted waltz.
Although her music dwells in this pastoral dread, Keane does seem to delight in these uncanny landscapes, unearthing strange potential in every shadowy crevice. In Moonish she sounds energised – creative claws out, ready to howl.
Fionn Regan - O AVALANCHE
I have such a soft spot for Fionn Regan, whose 2006 debut album, The End Of History, genuinely holds up as one of the definitive Irish records of the past two decades. Over the years, the Wicklow artist has tinkered with the levels of fidelity in his folk music, from orchestral accompaniments to rickety indie rock, but his most memorable songs have always been the ones that let his lyrics and acoustic guitar do the legwork.
Regan himself seems to understand this, with a muffled piano or a gentle beat serving as sole substantial add-on in much of his recent output, along with some generous helpings of reverb. O AVALANCHE, his first album in five years, makes the most of this; his open-tuned strums are given a mountain range’s worth of room to breathe as he delivers his poetic vignettes, gently harmonising at times with the actor Anna Friel, whose home in the Majorcan town of Deià he wrote the record.
Again and again, Reagan’s lyrics reference late night walks down dark roads of the soul, where rain tears at the neck, lightning strikes in sheets and vampires swarm. But amidst the crashing waves of pain and fear, light and serenity are depicted in the emergence of a love that feels eternal, and the sense that one is no longer wandering this uncertain terrain alone. It’s a mood reflected in the hazy timbre of these tunes, a spellbinding turn from one of our finest songwriters.
Naive Ted - Output (Works 2013-2021) [The Unscene]
Limerick cult hero and turntablist extraordinaire Naive Ted hung up his luchador mask last year, bringing an end to a decade of devious hip-hop skronk and techno punk experimentalism. Consider this a sort of Greatest Hits collection – a gateway into the strange extremities of a smorgasbord catalogue of solo material, collaborations and Soundcloud exclusives. Amidst the broken jazz freakouts (‘Charlie & The Accomplice’), dizzying brass loops (‘Hello Null’) and unsteady electro (‘DEVOlution’) and bugged-out sound collage (‘Fizzy Pop Romance / Runnin' Cos Runnin'), you’ll find speaker-crushing club stuff (‘Big Man (JOY)’, ‘COME APART’ and ‘Protein (Glycerol mix) (feat. Citrus Fresh)’).
At the centre, you’ll also spot what is – as far as I’m concerned – his standout track: the blistering ‘Only the oppressor knows peace’ featuring Limerick MC MuRli, whose politically-charged verses leap defiantly over Ted’s frenetic beats. The track, among many more on this release, capture how critical this masked figure has been in the city’s flourishing underground over past 10 years.
Polytunnel - The Word for World is Forest [Alien Communications]
This might be Peter Lawlor’s debut album as Polytunnel, but the Kilkenny-born producer is certainly no newbie. Before relocating to Glasgow, he had a longstanding DJ residency at the original Bernard Shaw (RIP) in Dublin; in early 2017, I reviewed his brilliantly titled Zizek At The Discotheque EP for The Ransom Note. Since 2018, he’s co-run the excellent Moot Tapes label, through which he’s released some reliably great house and ambient productions of his own. All the same, this new album is probably the finest example of his dancefloor nous to date.
Deriving its title from Ursula K Le Guin sci-fi novel of the same name – which explores themes of “destruction, resistance, and the devastating impact of imperialism” – The Word for World is Forest is Polytunnel’s tribute to classic Detroit electro, with flourishes of breakbeat techno, acid and deep house woven through for good measure. Put simply, it bangs. Fans of Drexciya and The Other People Place alike, along with Dublin’s own Decal and the Front End Synthetics label, will find a lot to love in these nine tracks, which encompass warm-up thumpers ('Dopamine Dreams’, ‘Paro’) and cosmic club pumpers (‘Off Grid’, ‘Retired Speed Runner’).
There are tracks for wide-eyed, late-night adventures (‘Dying Of The Light’, ‘Shrub Lyf’) and tracks for coming to again in the early-morning afterglow (‘Amber Warning’, ‘Sommar’), all bearing the sweet buzz of drum machines and synthesisers working in perfect harmony.
Ordnance Survey - Biofeedback Suite [Scintilla Recordings]
If Neil O’Connor’s last album as Ordnance Survey – the passage tomb-inspired Turas, which I reviewed here – was a work of musical archaeology, then Biofeedback Suite is one of neuroscience. With information gleaned from EEG scans, O’Connor used electrical brainwaves as a compositional guide, reflecting their patterns in the envelopes and filters of his modular synthesisers. The result is an engrossing, slow-moving symphony of electronic drones and pulses, which morph and flutter over the course of eight gorgeous tracks.
O’Connor also incorporates binaural beats across the album, which are reflected in tracks’ titles. Don’t ask me how it’s supposed to work, but the idea is that certain frequencies can conjure particular mental states such as deep sleep, relaxation and focus. Very neat, but our composer doesn’t solely rely on this stuff to make the music work; the human voice lends a hand in ‘8Hz Alpha (Amhran An Badora)’, with The Gloaming’s Iarla Ó Lionáird delivering a typically tender rendition as Gaeilge over synthesised piano and strings.
My Bloody Valentine’s Colm Ó Cíosóig joins in too, lending uncharacteristically calming percussion to album closer ‘1HZ Delta’. It’s yet another successful experiment from one of Ireland’s most ambitious composers.
Ricky Force - Passion EP [Creative Wax Recordings]
Longstanding Dublin junglist Ricky Force returns with his only solo EP of the year, chasing his 2023 appearances on Tim Reaper’s Future Retro and Deep Jungle with four cuts of 160 BPM wizardry. ‘Roll With Me’ eases things in with a percussive simmer and a tantalising sample of Ashanti’s ‘Rock wit U (Awww Baby)’, before vaulting into action with cosmic synth swells, dubwise brass and warp speed drum breaks. The title track maintains that pace – a breakbeat sword dance peppered with bass and reversed vocal reverberations.
For every slice of razor sharp beat science, there’s an atmospheric flourish or melody to match; it’s the producer’s knack for pulling off both simultaneously that’s made him such a favourite among discerning heads. You can sense it in the rolling mood-building of ‘Be Mine’ as much as in the peak-time drum juggling of ‘Lock Up’ – his sound is fine tuned to the sound system source, but bends toward the future with every break.