New Irish Music: July/August 2024

With releases from Toby Kaar, Jane Deasy, Coolgirl, Seamas Hyland and many more

Can someone please tell me where this year is going? I swear it was just a few weeks ago that I was gearing up for the arrival of spring, coming as it always does with a strawberry in the mouth. Now I’m sat here listening to this EP from Eamon Ivri & Ioannis Nafpliotis, Flown like dust / Glacial Endeavor, and thinking about how well its frosty electronic textures and gusting drones will pair with the inevitable autumn gloom. 

I guess the passage of time has been on my mind a bit lately: I’ve been reading Time Shelter by the Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, about a ‘clinic of the past’ where Alzheimers patients can relive decades of their life in minute detail; the other day I went to see a great play called Mnemonic, which explored ideas relating to ancestral origins, migration and memory as an imaginative act. I’ve also been doing some long overdue organising of old files – tidying hard drives and sifting through folders upon folders of photos accumulated over the past 15 years.

Within those folders are innumerable awful quality shots from gigs over the years. I’m a sucker for nostalgia at the best of times – that bittersweet rush of fondness flecked with dread lol – but even I have to wonder what compelled me to take like seven blurry snaps of bands I have clear memories of disliking. Who knows. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to blend a bunch of them together in a sort of abstract visual mush for this month’s lead image, so I suppose they did come in handy eventually.

It’s been six months since I got this Substack up and running, in which time I’ve written about roughly 65 albums and EPs, as well as a handful of DJ mixes. That’s not intended as a gloat, just a remark on how much good music has already come out of this island in the first half of the year - and that’s without factoring in all the singles and stuff I missed. As ever, I’m so grateful to anyone who’s read, subscribed or shared the newsletter in that time - the support means a lot and keeps me motivated, so thanks! 

I’m going to take a break this month, so there won’t be another newsletter landing until late September or so. There’s an absolutely stacked edition below to tide you over in the meantime though, and I’ve got some ideas for some new longform bits floating around my head too. So until next time, be well, and try not to let the last of summer slip away from you too easily.

Eistigí.

Toby Kaar - That Was Then

It feels a bit reductive to say it, but if you’ve ever wondered what a new Four Tet album would sound like if he’d stuck to the path he’d set out on with Rounds, Toby Kaar’s long-awaited debut might give you a fairly close approximation. The Cork producer is no copycat, and this release is far from pastiche, but if Kieran Hebden’s collagist approach to sampling on that record offered an ornately trimmed trail through hip-hop, jazz, folk and electronica, then these nine tracks imagine that same route grown wild, a familiar palette pushed to its organic extremes, flourishing into something dramatic and new. 

The title track opens with a hyperventilation of low-end strings, an anticipatory breath before a flurry of free jazz drums – a recurring ingredient – throws us into Karr’s thicket. ‘Conceiving Two’ stitches skittering snares and hi-hats through reversing tones, Pharoah Sanders-esque sax and a whirling glockenspiel melody. ‘Cephus’ is a buzzing chorus of wordless vocals, sub-bass and keys, while the mix of plaintive strings and echoing beats in ‘Be Good’ demonstrates the heartfelt fusionism he’s been refining since 2010’s ‘Bread’.

That Was Then really has been a long time coming – as Kaar himself put it, “a lot of life got in the way” – but the pay-off is worth it. ‘Apre​̀​s Nous le De​́​luge’ balances feverish percussion and rumbling bass guitar with manipulated brass samples to become a strangely tender centrepiece; ‘Be Gone’ lets its downtempo beat carry a gorgeous melodic dialogue between piano and harp; ‘Bridge Song’ tilts toward the dancefloor with its driving four-four groove and layers of reverberating flute. It’s the culmination of over a decade’s worth of sample digging and experimentation, and much like the first time I heard Rounds as a teen, it really feels like something special.

Jane Deasy - Pink Noise​/​Ool | 

Mono Field Recordings [Sympathetic Resonance]

Sympathetic resonance is a phenomenon whereby a passive vibratory body – like a harp string – responds to the vibrations of another that shares its harmonic likeness. Here’s a handy video demonstrating how it works with tuning forks. Sympathetic Resonance is also the name of a new project by the Dublin sound artist Jane Deasy, which “seeks to bring together practices and artists whose work resonates across disciplines towards a sonic way of knowing and being in the world.”

Deasy’s previous releases – Thawing, Notes From The Bath – have typically been works of captivating electroacoustic ultra-minimalism, channelling the spirit of Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening with their longform drones and near-imperceptible intricacies. The first work released on SR, Pink Noise​/​Ool, pushes this idea even further with two pieces composed using carefully manipulated recordings of a waterfall. I’m not entirely sure what the process is here, but the effect feels like zooming in on the individual fragments that make up the sound of a cascading torrent, revealing and enhancing their tonal properties. It’s an interesting conceit that will reward attentive ears, particularly if you go in search of those sounds the next time you spot a waterfall IRL. 

Mono Field Recordings, meanwhile, does exactly what it says on the tin, offering six untouched pieces captured during a long walk over five days on Galicia’s Costa da Morte, or Coast of Death. “Most of the time there sounded what felt like subterranean roars coming from the ocean on one side,” wrote Deasy in the accompanying text. “Along the way there were many more quiet and gentle sounds from insects and frogs and streams. There is a bit of handling noise in the recordings that remind me I was there, present but interfering, as I listen back.”

Coolgirl - Road Closures [Fort Evil Fruit]

By the time Lizzie Fitzpatrick’s former band, Bitch Falcon, had released their first and only album in 2020, their tough grunge exterior had been torn apart, revealing shards of melodic light and hazy shoegaze hues amidst the heavy alt rock clatter. Her debut album as Coolgirl, released via the ever-reliable Fort Evil Fruit label, feels like an inverse of that formula. Across nine tracks inspired by side two of Bowie's Low, mica levi, John Carpenter, Ryuichi Sakamoto and modular pioneer Suzanne Ciani, Fitzpatrick imbues her slow-moving ambient experiments with deep undercurrents of creeping darkness.

Road Closures is a melting pot of electronic reference points: meditative melodies a lá Ciani and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s Sunergy mingle with full-bodied bass tones in ‘Marked Walk’; KMRU fans will relish in the mechanic rattle of the field recordings in ‘Pitch Legs’, which unravel into a mass of sub-bass and Caterina Barbieri style synth orchestrations. A Room40-style sense of foreboding looms in the warped drone oscillations of the title track and ‘Biting Nail’, while the dread-filled squall of ‘Harmonium Glitch’ feels like a lo-fi contortion of Kali Malone. ‘Dangerous Boys’ plays out like a Pauline Anna Strom-style phantasm, while ‘Harm’s Way’, ‘Moon’ and ‘Voices’ map the space between Klein and Klaus Schultz. 

Despite all these echoes though, Fitzpatrick’s nocturnal soundworld is her own, and with Road Closures arriving in tandem with her burgeoning reputation as one half of the industrial duo 7of9, her route down these shadowy backroads is paved with promise. 

Hazey Haze & mankyy - SHY BOII GETS NO SWEETS [Unscene Limerick]

Back in 2020, in the midst of a serious purple patch for Limerick hip-hop, Hazey Haze planted his flag with Is Mise, an impressive debut that found him snarling like a backfiring scrambler over sampladelic beats, his debauched verses cut with unflinching authenticity and mischievous venom. Four years and a few mixtapes later, he’s now landed on Unscene Limerick with another "document of life on the outskirts of society" delivered in that same rasping flow, only this time something’s different. 

Across these 20 tracks, Hazey sounds sombre, more vulnerable than before as his storytelling swaps delinquent braggadocio for ruminative monologues. Over dusty beats and mournful jazz samples courtesy of mankyy – with added sax from Fixity’s Dan Walsh, vinyl scratches from Andy Unscene (fka Naive Ted) and synthesised noise from Eilis Mahon – he sifts through themes of isolation, suicide, addiction and the cruel cycles that life mercilessly sucks individuals and communities into. It's subject matter he's handled before, but hits harder than ever here, his narrative focus sharpened like a razor as he paces through the productions’ murky soundscape. He delivers these dispatches with the artful confidence of an MC who’s just getting stronger. 

Fixity - FIXITY 8

Dan Walsh is a busy man. As well as being the founder of the Cork Improvised Music Club, the multi-instrumentalist plays saxophone in The Bonk, drums with Junior Brother, and is one half of the experimental electronic duo Senior Infants with The Altered Hours’ Cathal Mac Gabhann. It’s with his prolific FIXITY project that he really gets to flex his compositional muscles though. In ‘FIXITY 8’, he once again assumes the role of a one-man band, playing drums, bass, synthesiser, piano, recorder, guitar, saxophones and flutes, as well as providing a few vocals here and there.

Although his flair for collaboration – especially in a live context – is what many will know Walsh and FIXITY for, to hear his own sound distilled here is a treat. There are touches of Tortoise’s rhythmic post-rock jazz in tracks like ‘Silhouette Selector’ and ‘Gestures’, while ‘One One’ heaves with motorik hypnotism. ‘G​.​U​.​T​.​S (Get Up Them Steps)’ and ‘Stompin' On The Marshes’ are the most overtly rockin’ tunes I’ve heard from him, but he inflects it all with true-to-form eclecticism, stitching avant-garde, psych and Morricone-style western swoops into his freewheeling tapestry. ‘Why Wait’ is basically techno: a final blast of frenzied percussion and dissonance before it all ends on ‘River River’, an acoustic guitar jam cut from the same cloth as Jim O’Rourke’s early Drag City albums. 

Seamas Hyland - Maidin Domhnaigh

There’s a diaristic quality to Seamas Hyland’ debut album, which sees the Waterford-born, Dublin-based musician mix his learned repertoire of jigs, reels, waltzes and polkas with original compositions, field recordings and subtle electronics. Each performance in this 10-track accordion suite is accompanied by a first-hand note, in which he shares his own memories of the tunes, along with sweet details about where they came from and who taught them to him. It’s a nice touch that helps him honour the lineage of this music, while simultaneously exploring new, more personal sonic terrain. 

‘Navan Road’ sets the tone, with Hyland’s recordings of passing traffic on the titular street woven through ‘Patsy Touhey’s Reel’ and the ‘Eochaill’ air alongside Ross Chaney’s freeform drums and modular synth, all stitched together by producer Kilian O Flanagan. Elsewhere, a few polkas recorded live in the legendary Cobblestone pub appear next to an improvised original called ‘Press And Draw’, which melds meditative accordion sighs with soft electronic drones and the sound of distant fireworks during a lockdown Halloween. Like all the best folk music, each tune here tells a story, all contributing to Hyland’s affectionate patchwork of tradition and contemporary interpretation. 

SWEETS - SWEETS

Anyone in the know could tell you that Limerick’s been producing some of the best indie rock in the country for the past five years; they'd only need to show you new singles His Father's Voice, or The PVP album I reviewed a few months ago, to prove it. But it's always worth remembering that it’s been this way for a lot longer than that. Enter SWEETS, a supergroup of sorts comprising members of giveamanakick, Windings, Teeth and Japanese Jesus, whose debut album is an apt reminder built on bulldozing riffs and anthemic hooks.

There are points where SWEETS feels like a mid-aughts metal album in alt rock clothing – the way Liam Marley and Keith Lawler’s overdriven guitars shred and harmonise on tracks like ‘All Is Moderate’, ‘Ing Ya’ and ‘Charm Offensive’ gives things a properly face-scrunching heft. There’s a familiar crunch to the way Lorcan Bourke beats the shit out of his drums and Bertie Kelly’s bass fills the mix with scuzz; the chanted vocals and gratuitous licks on 'Smart Casual' and 'Dead End' scream classic - though I'm not entirely sure what that means these days.

Don't be fooled though, this is no regressive rock nostalgia trip. SWEETS inject these timeless tropes with freshness and intent; it packs as much of a punch now as it would have 20 years ago. ‘Thoughts?’ and ‘Prehistoric’ tap into the same tenderness found in Windings’ Be Honest And Fear Not – an album I held close when I first moved to the UK in 2016 – while ‘Watertown’ ends things on an appropriately epic note. Very sweet indeed.

Slomatics - Silver Ships Into The Past

Okay so the music here isn’t technically new, but if you, like me, weren’t all that au fait with the catalogue of Belfast doom metallers Slomatics, this seems like a pretty solid place to start. The trio are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, and to mark the occasion they've compiled a selection of previously released non-album material into a 19-track suite of speaker-crushing proportions. 

Put simply, it fucking rules. Downtuned riffs burn like bong rips across these songs, cut from the same cosmic cloth as Electric Wizard, Sleep and Conan. Drummer/vocalist Marty Harvey’s reverberant howls, along with the occasional swoop of synthesiser, summon the group’s sci-fi influences, evoking vast expanses of space, black holes and psychedelic astral travel a lá Mastodon’s Crack The Skye. 

I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about the power of the drone in relation to electronic, experimental and folk music, so the immensity and sustain at play here is really hitting the spot. While listening, I’m once again compelled to dive into Harry Sword’s definitive tome, Monolithic Undertow: In Search Of Sonic Oblivion, which traces the connective tissue between all of these sounds, at times so heavy they could crush you, but resonant enough to stretch your mind out into infinity. With their eighth album set to land some time next year, now feels like the right time to dive fully into Slomatics’ discography, and this here's a good gateway. 

Jehnova & Luthorist - PCE GOD

Listening to Jehnova can sometimes feel like levitating out of the couch you sank into. Over jazz-imbued beats, the South Africa-born Dubliner raps with a smoky flow that’s a pleasure to float away on. Don’t be fooled by the weightless vibe though, the prolific MC picks through knotty subjects of self-doubt, cultural heritage and determination with a sincerity in his voice and  clear-eyed intention in his pen.

In PCE GOD, his second release of the year and the latest to be produced by fellow NUXSENSE collective member Luthorist, Jehnova considers the act of writing itself, and the meaning, faith and focus it gives him in an uncertain world. With eight tracks running a little over 15 minutes, it’s a short and sweet ode to the process – a look into his inner world played out over dusty downtempo jams. 

of all living things - Cold Plunge

The renewed interest in genres like slowcore, shoegaze and dream pop in recent years has produced its fair share of half-baked imitations, so it’s always nice when a group brings something a bit more believable to the table. of all living things are a young Dublin band whose music certainly invokes the likes of Slowdive, Low and Mazzy Star, but over the past three years they’ve been carving their own path within this reverb-soaked soundscape, and Cold Plunge feels like a promising step forward.

Released on Galway’s Blowtorch Records and recorded with Ber Quinn, these six songs feel tailor made to accompany melancholic walks at night, with full-bodied guitars, bass and drums illuminating Eunice Saraiva's hymnal singing like a street lamp, imbuing her quiet ruminations on loss and longing with an ethereal glow. The vocal melodies and cathartic bursts of distortion in opener ‘If I’m Honest’ stick to the brain, but it’s in songs like the achingly tender ‘Damned’ and closer ‘Fecho Os Olhos’ – a sweetly strummed acoustic tune featuring Saraiva’s stream of consciousness lyrics in Portuguese – that you get a real sense of the creative synergy at play within this group. Their momentum feels anything but slow. 

Wastefellow - Wastee [Patrúin]

Dublin’s Patrúin label returns after a four-year hiatus, following up its fundraising compilation for MASI – an advocacy group for asylum seekers in Ireland – with an EP of effervescent dance music from Diolmhain Ingram Roche. Though arriving under his primary experimental pop alias Wastefellow, the EP takes its title and overall energy from his lesser-known club music moniker, Wastee. The merge feels like a natural move: previous Wastefellow releases have dabbled in SBTRKT-style post-dubstep and glossy breakbeat, but two years spent at the helm of the buzzy dance-punk outfit Really Good Time has clearly coincided with a solo tilt toward exultant rhythms and giddy NRG. 

‘Haunt You Back’ taps into that very en vogue vibe with a shuffling garage groove, fizzing vocal hooks, and plenty of synthesised shimmers, before a dial-up internet glitch signals a delightful dynamic shift. ‘Squished Activity’ shoots for the subs with a Joy O/Overmono-style drive, while ‘Your One To Me’ hits a big-room bassy stepper sweet spot. With 50% of profits from the release going to Medical Aid for Palestinians, it’s an absolute no-brainer, and a banging return for Patrúin.

Seamus O'Muineachain - Liminality

“Location has always been the biggest inspiration to my work,” explained Seamus O'Muineachain on the Bandcamp page for his 2022 album Different Time Zones, which he wrote and recorded between Czechia and Ireland. “I believe our environment plays a huge part in the creative process.”

For ten years, the Belmullet-born and based multi-instrumentalist has released music that embodies this idea: ambient piano, violin and guitar compositions conjure the horizon view of Achill, Croagh Patrick and Nephin from the seashore near his home; acoustic vignettes recall moments spent watching the world go by from a café in Hanoi, Vietnam. 

It’s interesting that his latest dispatch shifts focus from these vivid images and memories toward something more blurred. Over 10 tracks – most of which hover around the two minute mark – O'Muineachain attempts to capture life's more transient moments; the places we may find ourselves for just a few hours or minutes, but which linger faintly in the mind. Written and recorded between Thailand, Georgia and Ireland, in airports, unfamiliar towns and “impersonal accommodations” as well as at home, it's an album of pillowy piano motifs and guitar plucks, painted with the occasional violin bow and ambient pad. It's a gentle and uncomplicated set, sure, but there's a real sweetness to the way Liminality invites you to pause for a second, to take in your surroundings no matter what they might look like and appreciate your being in it for what it is.

Plus One - Ar Ais Ar​í​s Vol 2 [Ar Ais Ar​í​s]

Hot on the heels of ‘Bonk’ – a sizzling stepper from Ar Ais Arís’ debut V/A that's become a reliable fixture in sets by Ben UFO, Four Tet et al this summer – Plus One’s latest five-tracker touches on garage, cloud rap and galloping dembow, all delivered with the same giddy flair that’s made his music so irresistible to selectors and Shazammers alike. 

From the snapping 2-step of ‘Bomber’ through the woozy cyborg vox and chiptune rumbles of ‘777’ to the sugar-rush club tekkers of ‘I Can Live’, there’s something of Two Shell’s post-rave antics at play here, but Plus One’s sights remain more firmly set on the dancefloor. ‘Sweaty’ taps into the limb-swinging techno-goes-dembow bizniz of Nick León and Doctor Jeep, while ‘Zero Chance’ reaches further for zapping reggaeton rhythms, laser beam bass and swirling vocal murmurs.*

*  This write-up originally appeared in the Staff Picks section of DJ Mag’s August 2024 issue. 

Glimmerman - Temple Sublet [First Second Label]

Conjuring the space between a melancholic dreamscape and a smoke-filled dancefloor, this four-tracker from London-based Dubliner Glimmerman punctuates its soft-focus synths, ASMR breathwork and glitching vox with plumes of bass weight and heaving beats. The title track drifts on a deeeeeep reggaeton rhythm, while ‘Scatter’ imbues its Iury Lech-style ambience with trap drums and an appearance from poet Older Brother. ‘Alleged Jinx’ and ‘Reversing’ push the subs harder, but maintain that same mind altering vibe. Big one for fans of DJ Python, Batu and co.**

** This write-up originally appeared as part of a new music premiere post on DJ Mag.com

co:clear 032 - odd ned

The first, and so far only, time I heard odd ned play was at Open Ear 2019, where he spun an early evening set on the Friday, not long after I’d arrived on site. I’ll admit, aside from the breezy dub ambient vibe of it all, I don’t remember the specifics of how it sounded. What I do remember though is how I felt while sitting there, just outside the North Shore Stage tent, looking out over Roaring Water bay as the sun began its gorgeous slow descent at the tail end of a heavy few months. The DJ’s soundtrack - not unlike his EPs for wherethetimegoes - suited the sensation of a weight being lifted off the shoulders, an exhale I hadn’t known I needed.

Anyway, this new mix unearths a very similar vibe, which is nice. A recording of gently lapping sea surf mingles with echoing ambient chimes, before the faintest suggestion of a beat from Skee Mask’s ‘Nostaglitch’  – echoing like moment half-remembered from a dream – evaporates into a 25 minute drift of blurry dub sonics, softly swooping ambience and choral chirrups. Some clarity arrives in the strings of Contours’ ‘Elevation 1 (ft. Abel Selaocoe & Ada Francis)’ on Music From Memory and Michael O’Shea’s ‘No Journeys End’, played on his incredible homemade dulcimer instrument, Mo Chara, which bleeds beautifully into Florian T M Zeisig’s ‘Angel D​é​sir​é​e’. 

A tracklist like this was always going to hit the spot for me, but something about the way odd ned patiently weaves this mix together has kept me coming back again and again over the past two weeks. I even listened to it on a run, which was a surprisingly lovely combo. I have a feeling I’ll be listening to this one a lot when the seasons change again.

The Deep Ark

I haven’t spent as much time aboard The Deep Ark as I’d like to yet, but if you’re in the market for an eight-hour mix exploring the depths of ‘90s IDM, ambient and electronica then boy do I have some good news for you. Compiled by a shadowy figure known only as The Arkitekt, and accompanied by an annotated online tracklist and a stunning book filled with photography, uncanny artwork, and words that feel perfectly aligned with the sort of altered state nature walks this mix was made to be paired with, it all blends alchemically. It’s a feat of selection and assembly that came together over the course of several years; a remarkable archive of a moment, a sound, a feeling that resonates still to this day in bedrooms, fields, forests and sub-bass powered basements alike. 

Okay, but what’s the Irish connection? Well, I can’t say, but keen eyed listeners who get their hands on the book will recognise numerous Dublin locations in the photographs, and note the references to an damhsa and the works of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Samuel Ferguson in the text. The mix had an exclusive premiere on Dublin Digital Radio back in June. Toward the end, after over 160 tracks from the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, μ-Ziq and our own Sunken Foal, we hear a faint recording from the inside of a taxi, with familiar accents chattering just beneath the surface. Really though, you’re as well to just sink into the mystery, and the dreamstate that this multimedia project will conjure in the mind. 

“A powerful and deep world of sound filled with the vibrations of nature. Music to match the wave patterns, selected and transmitted to harmonise with each cycle of this guiding line. An unusual mental space where you can experience the sweet beginnings of life itself. To truly grasp the spirit of the dream tide.”

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading! Follow Anois, Os Ard on Instagram