New Irish Music: September 2024

With Adjunct Ensemble, Henry Earnest, Jennifer Walshe, Macdara Yeates, and more

Hello, hi, how are you?

Been a while! I hope the arrival of autumn hasn’t hit you too hard. Not to be whatever about it, but I do really like this time of year – the brief spell before winter digs its ruinous fingers into things, when wearing a sweater still feels like a novelty and ambient dub records nestle back into rotation as naturally as recipes for curries, soups and stews. (Please send me your curries, soups and stews; I need to expand my repertoire.)

There’s been a tonne of new music released in Ireland since August’s newsletter, so I’ll keep this preamble brief. If you’re in the market for some reading material though, I’d really recommend Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier, a wide-reaching examination of the Anthropocene, climate change, and what humans might leave behind for civilisations of the deep, distant future. I’ve been listening to it on audiobook, and despite some grim statistics, I’ve found the way it ties so many strands of history, science, art and literature together in its storytelling to be genuinely informative and often enchanting. Give it a whirl. 

Right then. Onto the music. As ever, I’m incredibly appreciative of anyone who subscribes, shares or supports this newsletter in any way. Paid subscriptions are always welcome of course, but anything that helps spread the word is more than enough. You can also follow Anois, Os Ard on Instagram here.

I’ve got wheels in motion for two new long-form pieces to come over the next few months, but more on all that later. I’ll be back again in a few weeks with October’s new release round-up. In the meantime, be well.

Eistigí.

Adjunct Ensemble - Habits Of Assembly - Live at Cafe OTO [Touch Sensitive]

As I write this, up to a million people in Lebanon have been forced to flee their homes as a result of Israeli airstrikes. A conservative estimate says that, since mid-September, over 1,000 people have been killed, with little indication of any let up in sight. This is happening in the shadow of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where 90% of its entire population have been displaced over the past 12 months, and at least 45,000 killed by munitions of which multiple tonnes have been transported illegally through Irish airspace. Millions more have been displaced amidst escalating conflicts in Sudan and the DR Congo. Meanwhile, on both sides of the Irish border, anti-immigrant sentiment has seen an alarming rise, with asylum seekers being met with violent riots and protests from certain members of the public, and treated as pawns in electoral politics.

All of this whirls around my head while listening to Habits Of Assembly, a live album by Northern Irish composer and bandleader Jamie Thompson’s Adjunct Ensemble, which was recorded last November in London’s Cafe OTO. The performance was devised as an improvised interpretation of their May 2023 album, Sovereign Bodies / Ritual Taxonomy, a remarkable work of avant-garde collage comprising concrète samples, free jazz spasms, electronic glitches, opera and turntablism, all held in place by spoken texts performed by Nigerian-Irish poet Felicia Olusanya, aka Felispeaks. Over a sprawling 20 tracks and 89 minutes, it rallies against the EU and UK’s brutal border policies, and tears with furious dexterity at the West’s increasingly transparent dehumanisation of refugees and asylum seekers. 

Accompanied by improvisers Stephen Davis (drums), John Pope (bass) and Sam Comerford (tenor saxophone), Thompson and Felispeaks reshape eight of the album’s poems here, alongside three new texts, to devise an appropriately raw setlist. The intricate stitchings of the record are untethered as the musicians push into its jazzier extremities, while Felispeaks’ words assume an unflinching urgency and clarity. “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds,” they murmur over droning bows and brass, before snarling “Who is justice? Where are her scales?” in the dizzying 12-minute highlight ‘Nothing Grows Here / What Does Resurrection Look Like’.

‘19 Euro/Wednesday 24th November’ targets Ireland’s Direct Provision system over a bed of dissonant textures, before ‘Territorial Irregularities’ zooms out in a climactic call for global solidarity: “I am Sudan. I am Syria. I am Gaza. I am human… Who will fight for us?” It’s a rallying fuel – a blazing addendum to a release that already felt so apposite.

Henry Earnest - Big Blue

“I try to get as swept up as possible in the emotion of what I am trying to make,” said Henry Earnest when we spoke around the release of his 2022 album Dream River, a glittering suite that adorned its lo-fi indie rock songwriting with euphoric pop flourishes, pitch-shifted vocals and generous splashes of synth, strings and drum machines. That sentimentality lingers in the fabric of his new one, but here it’s stitched with a finer, folkier thread as he steps out of the bedroom and onto the open road. 

Across eight songs recorded between Inis Oírr and Phibsborough, Earnest delivers bittersweet reflections on a life spent adrift. Modulated vocals meander over acoustic guitar strums, soft focus electronics and an array of guest musicians including backing vocalist Banríon, harpist Róisín Berkeley, violinist Lile Otaki, pianist Isaac Jones and more eaze, whose pedal steel adds to the album’s ambient country tilt. Fans of the latter’s catalogue and that of her regular collaborator claire rousay will find a lot to love in Earnest’s lyrical vignettes, filled with quiet longing and underscored with tuneful poignance. ‘Wild Horses’ interpolates the Rolling Stones song of the same name into a gentle highlight, while ‘Siren Song’ evokes early Sigur Rós albums at their sweetest. Put simply, it’s lovely – an ode to the journey rather than the destination, and all the tenderness and melancholy you’ll find along the way.  

Macdara Yeates - Traditional Singing from Dublin

We’re three for three now on newsletters featuring fixtures from Dublin’s trad haven, The Cobblestone. Following the sublime four-part vocal harmonies of Landless’ Lúireach and Seamas Hyland’s accordion adventures in Maidin Domhnaigh, Macdara Yeates arrives with an album called Traditional Singing from Dublin. This ten-track anthology of “auld songs” does exactly what it says on the tin, but like those records, it does so in a way that demonstrates the folk scene’s new generation at peak performance, honouring its deep lineage while simultaneously imbuing it all with new life. 

Yeates is a founding member of the The Night Before Larry Got Stretched singing sessions at The Cobblestone, and was formerly guitarist and Bodhrán player in Skipper’s Alley alongside John Francis Flynn and others. There’s a weathered, low-end heft to his voice, plenty strong enough to carry the weight of tunes like the anti-war ballad ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’, the mournful emigrant’s air ‘The Shores Of Lough Bran’ and the lovelorn ‘One Starry Night’. Many of these songs are unaccompanied, like the full-throated renditions of Dominic Behan’s rebel song ‘Our Last Hope’ and Liam Weldon’s ‘The Blue Tar Road’, a criticism of the Dublin Corporation’s eviction of Traveller families at Cherry Orchard. 

The sparse instrumentation that is deployed works wonders though, as does the robust production from Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox and mastering from Jamie Hyland. The bodhrán in Yeates’ interpretation of ‘The Herrin’’ – an absurd song about stripping a giant fish for parts – packs a serious punch; the acoustic guitar harmonics in ‘Rocking The Cradle’ hold the anguished lyrics in their soft, melodic resonance. It’s the work of a musician who holds his craft with a genuine reverence – a skill you can’t fake, with results that merit your full attention.

Or:la - Trusting Theta [fabric Originals]

Orlagh Dooley’s music has always managed to say more with less. Like her DJ sets – deft fusions of techno, electro, breaks and garage held together with wriggly strands of acid – her releases are rarely flashy, but reliably leave an impression. Between the shuffling post-dubstep of 2016’s UK Lonely EP and the muscular grooves of April’s Moonlight Crush, she’s patiently honed her signatures: tough-yet-nimble percussion, well placed vocal sippets, opalescent melodies that ripple upwards from deep bass currents. These tools are sharpened and polished in Trusting Theta, an assured debut album that takes cues from Irish and ancient Greek mythology to explore themes of “sapphic love, friendship, and defiance against the still-never-ending injustices against the feminine”.

In most of these nine tracks, she conveys these ideas with confident subtlety, tailored for those whose ears are tuned to their frequency. There’s a hushed, pre-dawn romance to opener ‘Milky Way Of Glitter’, in which fellow Derry artist SOAK delivers poetic utterances over a hazy dub beat. Or:la and Dutch artist Mary Lake discuss ingredients over a minimal techno throb in ‘Cooking Up Pepper Spray’, turning anger over its criminalisation into an act of wry, defiant alchemy. The driving, depth-charge drums of ‘Fired Up’, ‘Sea Slugs’ and ‘Chant’ feel made for the fabric club sound system, with the latter featuring her own vocals again, delivering an incantation against the “snakes in the grass” of London nightlife. 

‘Patriarchy Purge’ warps psychedelic sub-bass and syncopated drums to conjure her heaviest cut to date, while the Eliza Rose-featuring ‘Slay The Beast’ is a dubwise defensive spell against the predatory gaze. “Through the smoke, we’re living for the girls,” Rose intones over a murky beat, distilling the solidarity and resilience that courses quietly through this album, but which wields a power that comes through loud and clear. 

Jennifer Walshe - URSONATE%24

I’m deeply sceptical about AI at the best of times, but if there’s anyone I trust to use these generative tools to make something genuinely interesting it’s the composer and avant-garde mischief maker Jennifer Walshe. She has, after all, been dabbling in datasets for about 10 years, harnessing their potential into synapse-sizzling performances and multi-disciplinary projects. Last year, she penned an essay for Unsound outlining 13 alternative ways we can understand AI and its applications in art and music – Is AI fanfiction? Is AI a companion species? Is AI an energy drink?

Whatever way you look at it, it’s hard to argue that Walshe’s manipulation of machine learning processes in her latest album is anything less than inspired. Using dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters’ definitive work of 20th century sound poetry, Ursonate, as its foundation, URSONATE%24 “directs, hustles and goads” its delightfully nonsensical score through numerous genre permeations – from hyperpop, jazz and electro to Celtic new age, trap and black metal.  AI-generated voices wrestle with the gibberish language of the original work, all accompanied by tunes that bear an uncanny valley-like resemblance to “real” music. Despite itself, some of it does actually sound pretty good – I particularly enjoyed the woozy loops and vocalisations in ‘Vierter Teil P und Q’. 

Walshe’s works attempt to teach us that AI is not a monolith, but a messy, multiplicitous beast that, like it or not, we should at least try and get to grips with. If an album like this – which, by the way, is raising funds for children's music tuition – can help us get there, and introduce us to some cool sounds in the process, well then FÜMMS me up.

Tony Quinn - Boglands [Miúin]

The liner notes for Boglands, an anthology of new age ambient music released on Neil Quigley’s Miúin label, introduce us to Tony Quinn, the composer who supposedly produced it in the early ‘80s while working as operations manager at the mysterious Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory. The story goes that Quinn wanted to steer the esoteric lab’s work down more lucrative commercial avenues, and that Boglands actually originated in sounds he had composed for the supermarket chain L&N’s ill-fated homeware branch. These were later repurposed into 10 pieces of woozy synthwork, pastoral field recordings and immersive sound design, all aimed at snaring the growing market for pop spirituality among Ireland’s trendy middle classes. New age, nature and guided meditation were in, and Quinn wanted to milk them for all they were worth.

You might notice that Googling Tony Quinn and the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory only ever leads to Miúin’s work in “preserving” and “reissuing” its archive.  You might also remember that I previously wrote about Quigley’s irreverent propensity for releasing music that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. But don’t worry about all that. What matters is that Boglands sounds a whole lot better than the sloppy ambient muzak Quinn was allegedly trying to replicate for an Irish audience. In truth, this music shares a lot more with the work of Pauline Anna Strom, the magnificent blind synthesist whose compositions brought vivid, fantastical worlds to life, and who rallied against the new age movement as “corrupt”, “superficial” and “bullshit propaganda”. You can hear traces of her work in the gossamer keys and babbling water of Boglands’ ‘Gloaming at the Canal’ and ‘Still Life’. 

The fretless bass in the latter track, the uncannily choral ‘Bog Oak’ and featherlight ‘Footing’, will hit the spot for anyone who's been enjoying Total Blue’s recent album on Music From Memory. Frankly, I’m not so sure about this Tony Quinn guy, but if Quigley can keep whatever it is he’s up to going so I can keep sinking into the marshy electronic embrace of tracks like ‘Tramore Beach’, then that’s absolutely fine and dandy.

Minced Oath - Two Way Silver [Moot Tapes]

From his earliest appearances on labels like Planet Mu and Front End Synthetics as one half of Ambulance, to most recently being described as “probably one of the best musicians on the planet” by Autechre’s Rob Brown, Dunk Murphy’s imprint on Ireland’s electronic landscape can’t be overstated. The albums and EPs that fill his Countersunk Bandcamp page have a real vintage Warp feel, but the warmth, weirdness and melodic flair he brings to electro-acoustic composition and modular synth exploration is entirely his own. 

The latest release under his ambient-leaning Minced Oath moniker originated as a collaboration with filmmaker Stefania Smolkina for the Creative Pathways group exhibition, Déad, which celebrated the legacy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu. Building on the spooky soundscapes he produced for that project - which saw him feeding atmospheric noise sourced from old vampire films through harmonic resonators - Dunk decorates these shifting textures, moods and timbres with glitching synth patterns and effervescent percussion. Over these four tracks, shadowy drone plumes wrap around flickering bulbs of melody, but rarely envelope them entirely – closer ‘The Pickover Set’ lets the light win out with its muffled lap steel and pleasant major key. Like a distant glimmer emerging in a dark wood, there’s a mysterious quality to it all, and it’s hard to resist its lure. 

Crispy Jason - Shadowcon One [Winthorpe Electronics]

It’s been eight years since Rian Trench and John Kowalski called time on their  Warp/Sunday Best/Planet Mu-affiliated project Solar Bears. Ever since, Trench has mainly operated out of The Meadows recording studio in Wicklow, working with the likes of Mohammad Syfkhan, No Spill Blood and many more. Over the past four years, he’s released two albums of acid-dipped electro, techno and “IDM” (sorry) as Crispy Jason - it’s a recipe he imbues with more funk than ever before on this new EP for Dublin’s Winthorpe Electronics.

The spectre of Richard D. James’ Syro looms over these four tracks, although Trench’s approach feels more overtly dancefloor-focused. ‘Shadowcon One’ rides a wave of roiling acid bass, punchy drumfunk and choral synths, before ‘Coastal Parking Acid’ takes the tempo down with Drexciyan swagger. ‘Arcade Smasher’ is pure Squarepusher-style braindance (again, sorry) with a splash of peak time pomp, while the toe-tapping bassline and wavy keys of ‘City Knights’ puts you in the front seat of a chrome-plated convertible, driving top down on the seafront of an alien planet under a lurid sunset. His crispiest work yet. 

bog band - Vanity Project

I’d missed this June release from Dublin synth-pop duo bog band, aka Stephen Sorensen and Isaac Tomkin Clarke, so I’m grateful to NTS Breakfast Show host Flo Dill and her reliably lovely newsletter, World In Flo Motion, for this recommendation. Fans of the The Blue Nile will delight in the ‘80s sophisti-pop stylings of opener ‘L'Enfant Terrible’, in which Sorensen delivers his starry-eyed pleas under the glow of street light synths, guitars and a drum machine beat – “I’m so insufferable baby/I’m l'enfant terrible in truth/but no one can love you the way that I do.”

Unsurprisingly, comparisons have also been made to Prefab Sprout, which, alongside Paul Simon, feels particularly apt in ‘Lovesick Blues Song’, with its open-hearted vocals and jangling strings, and in the soulful sax of ‘Midnight Chancers’. But bog band bring their own contemporary electronic sheen to things too; if you’ve been enjoying the yearning pop gloss of Bullion’s Affection, then Vanity Project will scratch a very similar itch. Like Henry Earnest, this pair are connected to the erstwhile Herzog TV collective, whose catalogue brought a lo-fi sweetness to the Dublin DIY scene. That spirit remains here, but feels refined, smoother round the edges, as it emanates from these lovingly crafted songs.

Morgan Buckley - Shout Out To All The Weirdos In Rathmines [Wah Wah Wino]

Originally released on Rush Hour’s No 'Label' in 2014, Morgan Buckley’s debut EP felt like ground zero for a new strain of oddball Irish electronic music. Built on the country’s best bassline since ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’, opener ‘Call Incoming’ set the tone for much of the motorik psychedelia and electro-post-punk-dub-club fuckery that would soon arrive on Wah Wah Wino, the label he founded with Omid Geadizadeh and Olmo Devin, whose catalogue has since gained near-mythic levels of cult acclaim. ‘Innercity Hum’ invokes the orchestral avant-garde electronics of Roger Doyle, with whom Buckley collaborated last year on the incredible Kwalk, while ‘Heavy Traffic’ and ‘Weather Report’ combine crunchy lo-fi house and techno scuzz with woozy melodies and clattering mallet percussion. 

From these four tracks, now available digitally for the very first time, you can trace a line into the club contortions of the coveted Absolutely Wino compilation from 2015, through Davy Kehoe’s Neu! and Suicide-inspired masterpiece Short Passing Game, all the way up to more recent works on the wherethetimegoes label, which shares some DNA with the extended Winoverse. With a promise of more “treats” coming soon from the elusive imprint, now feels like as good a time as any to get acquainted if you weren’t already. The Wino wormhole veers in multiple directions, so here’s a solid place to start.  

Julie Dawson - Bottom Of The Pool [Fair Youth]

As frontperson of the buzzy Galway indie rock outfit NewDad, Julie Dawson’s vocals are usually woven through robust foundations of guitar, bass and drums – a velvet glue for instrumental strands of shoegaze, dream pop and grunge. On her debut solo record, co-written and produced with Jack Hamill, aka Space Dimension Controller, she takes an alternate route, her voice curling round stripped-back electronic beats, wavering synth melodies and throbbing basslines like luminescent smoke. It’s a freeform vibe that suits her well, and it’s fitting that she should sound so at ease delivering lyrics centred around themes of escapism – of desire for weightlessness, untethering and dissociation – over arrangements rich in breathing space.

Inspired by film and TV, Dawson finds a kindred spirit in her remote collaborator, whose house, techno and electro releases for labels like Aus Music, Dekmantel and Ninja Tune have always held a certain sci-fi quality. They sound all the more cinematic here, from the tender swell of the opening title track to the climactic peak of ‘Finale’. ‘Close The Door’ has a driving four-to-the-floor pulse, while ‘Silly Little Song’ strips things back, adding little more than a vocoder and some shimmering backing synths to Dawson’s lyrics, like a Gen Z iteration of Laurie Anderson’s ‘Oh Superman’. 

There are still some guitars too, chiming with reverb and delay in the lovely ‘I Get Lost Inside This House’ and ‘Hailee’, but pulled tighter in the strummed chorus pedal chords of ‘Ripples’. It’s a reminder of her indie roots that makes me wonder how the creative freedom flexed in this project will feed into her main one down the line. It’s the sound of a songwriter refreshed, readying themselves for the next big step. 

Myles O’Reilly - Music From The Threshold/Thirty Minutes To Departure

Irish music fans may know Myles O’Reilly best as a filmmaker. His documentary series with Donal Dineen – This Ain’t No Disco – illuminated the country’s folk and alternative music scene with a lovingly intimate lens. It exuded a cosy atmosphere that’s echoed in his own music, which imbues drifting ambience a lá Emily A. Sprague and Taylor Deupree with a diaristic touch. 

The anecdotes O’Reilly weaves into the liner notes of his catalogue aren’t required reading per se, but acquainting yourself with the context behind these releases  – an eight track album and a three-track EP – can help ease you into recommended listening headspace: an introspective reverie “where daydreams flourish and thoughts rise, untethered and enigmatic.” 

Music From The Threshold was written in the weeks leading up to the death of his elderly cat, Noah. Its music unspools gently, like a worn-out VHS playing fond memories in slow motion. Created as a sort of comfort blanket, the process immersed O’Reilly, his wife Aideen, and Noah in wavering tape loops and drones that crackle like a hearth, turning “what could have been three sorrowful and grief-stricken weeks into a period rich with reflection and profound emotion”. 

This atmosphere lingers in Thirty Minutes To Departure, an EP written during a quiet week spent on the island of Inishbofin. Its opening title track is a gorgeous durational work built on muffled synth melodies and crumbly textures. With so much disposable, AI-generated ambient music floating about in the digital ecosystem, it’s refreshing to hear a relatively “classic” interpretation retain its emotional thrust and intention. You may melt into it, sure, but this is not music for numb dissociation. Listening to it, I felt my worries unravel, their grip loosened, my mind as clear as a deep breath of salty sea air. 

Asa Nisi Masa - Days Without Night

Dedicated to “nights that never end, insomnia, and getting wasted amongst the trash”, this new one from Dublin’s Asa Nisi Masa is an ode to nocturnal living and the hallucinatory encounters that come with it. Modulated vocals cut through ruptured kickdrums, speaker-crushing sub-bass and warped rave refractions in ‘Xanax Hugs’, like a fractured memory of an afterparty’s embers. ‘Somewhere Warm’ melts into a sofa of storm cloud rap, before ‘Hope Is A Horse’ jolts us upright again with glitching synths, shredded guitars and a Baths-like falsetto howl.

The energy only gets more nervous: ‘dontsleepparalyzed’ and ‘Sunless’ strobe in states of uneasy trance enchantment and noise pop paranoia. ‘Light Passes Through Under The Door’, ‘Phone Sex’ and ‘Drunk With All My Friends’ see us out like anxious electronic lullabies, desperately willing us to drift away, into the distorted early morning smog that’s beckoning just behind the curtain.

That’s it for this month! Catch you next time.