New Irish Music: Spring 2026

You’ll find all sorts of music in Felicity J Lord’s recent album for Stroom. Across 26 fragmentary tracks – many under minute long – the enigmatic Berlin group stitch frayed threads of avant-pop, indie-rock, spoken word and plunderphonic sound collage into a delightfully ragged tapestry for the infinite scroll era. It’s all utterly charming – fans of the Dean Blunt extended universe will love it – but the moment that surprised me most comes 17 tracks in. Out of nowhere, we hear a voice speaking as Gaeilge over a child’s lilting trad tune. In under 53 seconds, on top of a shimmery ambient backdrop, ‘Seo an Scéal’ explains why it is that we don’t speak Irish as a first language – hint: it’s the Brits! – before the rug gets pulled and we burst suddenly into the next song, the vignette vanished like nothing ever happened.

FJL like to keep things cryptic in their online presence, so I’ve no idea what the connection is, if there is one, but it’s just one of the fun Irish music cameos I’ve stumbled on in releases I’ve been enjoying lately. Elsewhere on the ever-excellent Stroom label, a new band-style album from the mercurial ambient producer Florian TM Zeisig, The Thinking of the World Began Pounding in Our Ears the Moment We Hit Shore, features appearances from Mayo harpist and Maria Somerville collaborator Róisín Berkeley and visionary composer Mel Keane, who designed the logo for this very newsletter.

One of the most prominent collaborators on that LP is Mari Rubio, AKA more eaze, whose gorgeous new album, sentence structure in the country, features some featherlight guitar strums from Henry Earnest. It’s a favour returned, with Rubio having provided pedal steel across the MirrorWorld co-founder’s dream-country jewel, Big Blue.

I’ve also been loving Dntel’s Enya Mixes, which has at long last been officially released via A Colourful Storm’s Fleetway Tapes series. Originally distributed in the blogosphere in 2010, the storied collection of edits from The Postal Service’s Jimmy Tamborello diffuses Enya’s hymnal vocals and new age synths into glorious permutations of ambient electronica and gossamer pop. If the threads that trace her music to that of modern stars like Malibu and oklou weren’t already clear enough, this here’s a sacred text. Incidentally, Florian TM Zeisig did something similar back in 2020 with his wonderful collection of Watermark edits. Someone do this with Clannad soon, please.

There’s also just been tonnes of great Irish music released in the two months since my last proper newsletter. Below you’ll find dreamstate indie-pop, folk-horror soundscapes, notes on becoming and the apocalypse, ‘90s internet star ambience, a breakthrough rap masterclass, some drone stuff, some club stuff, and a whole bunch more.

As ever, if you like what I do and would like to support it, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber for less than the price of a pint a month. But also, even just sharing it with a friend or giving it a boost on Instagram is a big help. Some fun things coming up in the next while! Stay tuned. In the meantime, dive in for a raft of new music.

Éistigi

Nashpaints - Everyone Good is Called Molly [MirrorWorld]

Real AOTY material here from Finn Carraher McDonald, who returns as Nashpaints for the first time since 2020’s lo-fi cult classic Blindman The Gambler. It’s not like he’s been resting on his laurels in the years since – in that time, he’s released buoyant club stuff as FC Music, played drums in the avant-pop supergroup Princ€ss, collaborated on albums by Maria Somerville and Mel Keane, and mastered works by Henry Earnest, famous tex and bog band. This new one is something genuinely special though – a 12-track suite of dreamstate indie-pop and shoegaze that references everything from Cindy Lee, ML Buch and Lovesliescrushing to vertiginous ambient music a lá Suzanne Kraft, Jonny Nash and Ulla.

‘Molly’ shimmers into view like a mirage, its new age effervescence punctuated by gentle intakes of breath, like waking up and realising magic is real. There’s a pastel-hued elegance to ‘23’, in which twinkling chimes and plucked electric guitar strings underscore gentle, echo-drenched vocals. It’s a feeling that lingers throughout the record’s first half, through the filigreed organ sparkles and shuffling percussion of ‘The Giver’ to the twinkling doo-wop of ‘Stretching’, MacDonald’s voice gliding from a pitched-down croon to a reverberant falsetto.

Things pivot toward a Loveless-style wall of noise in the seven-minute centrepiece ‘Boyfriend First’, but just like on MBV’s opus, the real wonder here is in how, through all its stylistic pivots, Molly maintains its magenta-toned atmosphere. It’s an easy one to nestle into, a blissful haze that remains in the second half as MacDonald drifts between abstract instrumental soundscaping (‘Link’, ‘The Kiss’), honeyed mid-century pop (‘Lost Dog’, ‘Tonight I’m Thinking of my Big Eyes’) and the sweet spots in between (‘Burning’, ‘Desire’, ‘Maybe2’). Some moments nod to the likes of Jessica Pratt and Rat Heart, while others invoke his label peers in both wherethetimegoes and MirrorWorld, but really, what MacDonald demonstrates here is an alchemised musical identity that’s his own. It’s just superb.

NIMF - Sirenoscape [Cursed Monk Records]

I know I bang on about worldbuilding a lot in this newsletter, but few recent releases have embodied this notion with quite the same potency as NIMF’s Sirenoscape. The New Jersey-based Irish artist’s debut feels less like an album than it does like a full multisensory experience. Across four lengthy pieces – framed as ‘scenes’ of ritual enactment – the composer born Aoibhín Redmond conjures a haunted landscape, where old folk songs become ghostly incantations and environmental audio courses through shadowy melodies and dark ambient textures.

Created over the course a few years, with visual elements and diegetic scene design from Alexander Kuribayashi and Denis Forkas, the result is an immersive work of cosmic folk-horror, its atmosphere so rich you can practically feel the rain pelting your skin, the black smoke in your lungs, the unease in your bones. On a misty shoreside in ‘Solar Excess Sacrificial Ecstasies’, gulls squawk and embers crackle as a muffled flute plays a mournful rendition of ‘Willie O’Winsbury’. Then, menacing organs, horns and marching drums introduce Redmond’s hushed rendition of ‘Sumer is icumen in’, a medieval song best known for its appearance at the climax of The Wicker Man, and whose presence is just as chilling here.

‘For The Invocation of Plagues’ and ‘Echoed as a Rhythm Against Reality’ find us caught in a storm, horse whinnying and thunder rumbling as Redmond sings quietly over a plucked melody. Are we performing a séance? Progressively, an ominous ambiance takes hold, with spectral shrieks and roaring thuds folded into the droning synths and whistles.

‘A Ballad for Looking Into Time’ – a song first released in 2022 – ends things on an eerie lullaby, Redmond’s Irish vocals repeating like a mantra or a spell over subtly psychedelic production, as though there was something a little unusual about the mushrooms you gathered for the campfire. It’s a heady brew that NIMF stirs on this record, and once you’ve emerged from the other side, you just might find yourself going back to the cauldron for more.

Fixity - Assurance [Moot Tapes]

The reliably excellent Moot Tapes returns with its first new music since last summer’s Lasmuigh by Jellypelt, and it’s an absolute knockout from Dan Walsh’s Fixity. Following a run of solo releases, the multi-instrumentalist and producer invites a cast of musician friends into the fray for this seven-track suite of explosive avant-rock, jazz and freeform psychedelia, capturing the untethered energy of the project’s improv-based performances as successfully as any of the actual live albums he’s released over the years. On the other hand, it’s also Fixity’s most thoroughly composed work to date, with sweeping string sections featuring across the album, arranged by Áine Delaney. Recorded between 2022 and 2024 at studios in Malmö and Dublin, the result is a record that hits a sweet spot between abrasiveness and beauty, as liable to take you on a thrill ride as it is to bring a tear to your eye.

It opens with ‘RIVER RIVER’, which appeared on 2024’s FIXITY 8 in the form of a Jim O’Rourke-style acoustic guitar jam, and returns here in a flurry of crashing drums, bass, saxophone, flute and strings, with an undercurrent of distorted guitar and what sounds like a theremin lifting the whole thing into euphoric terrain. ‘NEEDSMUST’ and ‘CLATTER’ are blasts of scuzzy instrumental psych-punk filled with bold orchestrations and jazzy flourishes. ‘ASSURANCE’ starts out borderline loungey before morphing into something altogether more Tortoise, John “Spud” Murphy’s mastering bringing a typically bone-rattling heft to the bass while guitars, strings and sax swerve through a hail of drums.

‘GRATITUDE’ is just gorgeous, a cinematic string composition unlike anything heard on a FIXITY record before, while ‘GO COMMUTE’ chugs back into familiar territory like a freight train in the album’s most unabashedly hard rockin’ moment. Closer ‘WHAT HARM’ sends us on our way, walking us to the door as instruments chatter amongst themselves, FIXITY’s assembled musicians winding down in flowing, mellowed out harmony.

E The Artist - SIX [Nyahh Records]

In the Book Of Revelation – yes that one – the Seven Seals refers to a series of symbolic judgments from God, each signalling the commencement of a new phase of the end-times. I won’t get into it here, but just know that it involves the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, you know the lads – and only gets worse for humanity from there. It’s also the thematic foundation for the Nigeria-born, Dublin-based E The Artist’s debut album on Nyahh Records, a suitably cataclysmic LP of world-crushing Afrofuturist noise, scorched spoken word, and burnt-out techno.

It’s appropriate that the record has seven tracks, but perhaps more telling that its title is SIX, the sixth Seal being the most chaotic of the lot, all plagues, storms, earthquakes and terror. You might get a sense of this unease in opener ‘IDTYEK’, an acoustic oddity held in place with creepy tendrils of barely comprehensible falsetto, like the weary incantations of desperate spirits. The tension builds in ‘MANTRAS’, with its molten sub throbs and ghostly vocal glitches, before Ruby Eastwood and Mel Keane step in on ‘BRIDGES’, a portrait of late-capitalist dystopia manifested in hushed poetry, synthesised organ pipes and mournful guitar.

It really kicks into gear with ‘BLACKOUT’ though, when frequent collaborator and fellow Bitten Twice collective member Julia Louise Knifefist delivers typically feral screeches– “I WANNA BLACKOUT!!” – over blood-curdling sub-bass implosions and contrastingly beautiful synth echoes, soaring like angels attempting to escape earth. KRAF weaves hallucinatory howls and deadpan raps into the overdriven squalls of ‘LINT, before ‘RISE’ leans fully into a cathartic tidal wave of power electronics.

It all ends on ‘DROGO’, a 20-minute denouement in which muffled ruminations on life and death meander over desolate drones and distortion. Staying on theme, the album fades into its final 30 seconds of near total silence, mirroring the brief nothingness that comes upon the opening of the seventh Seal, in anticipation of yet more stages of apocalypse to come.

Ellie O’Neill - Time of Fallow [St. Itch]

To paraphrase an old Greek guy, you’ll never step in the same river twice, because you’re not the same person, and it’s not the same river. It’s an idea worth holding onto as you listen to the debut album from Ellie O’Neill. Across ten intimate yet exploratory folk songs – woven together with coiling acoustic guitars and muffled pianos – the Meath singer-songwriter navigates memory, love, loss and self-discovery through the non-linear lens of queer temporality.

Recorded mostly within a brief window in the pandemic, when she was back living in her family home, it documents a specific period of personal growth – of both queer awakening and heartbreak – but simultaneously reflects on how the past, present and future tend to swirl and converge in states of constant flux and becoming. As she sings herself in ‘Sister of the Sea’, over shuffling percussion and open-tuned plucks, “To repeat is to be born again”.

As a musician and vocalist, O’Neill sits in the Joni Mitchell lineage alongside artists like Hanna Frances and Adrienne Lenker, but as a lyricist, she takes her cues from more literary sources. Inspired by the works of Audre Lorde and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, she spins patchwork narratives out of lived experiences and poetic evocations, all coursing upwards from within, through tidal tributaries toward moments of clarity. O’Neill has spoken about how some of these songs, at least in their earliest forms, were written in quick, intuitive bursts, as though their meaning was already stored fragmentally inside her, waiting to be poured out like fully formed realisations from a valve. It’s a sentiment she seems to acknowledge in ‘Anna with the Silver Arrow’, a song that holds both romantic yearning and grief in its clutches as she hovers between one state of being and another – over the chorus’ strummed chords she sings, “Knowing comes before revealing”.

The feeling carries through in ‘Half Immune’, a hushed piano tune recorded in the dead of night in her bedroom that recalls love, desire and memories thereof with a near-spiritual physicality. The nocturnal space is palpable in the recording, a tangible present in which we find her looking back in order to, ultimately, move forward toward self-actualisation. If I had the time and wordcount, I’d try to pluck out a more coherent thesis on the imagery and ideas that emerge across this record, but I don’t, so I’ll just encourage you to do so yourself. ‘Seán Song’, ‘Little Sister’ and ‘Seabird’ are particularly special, if you’re asking, but honestly just sit with it and let its poetry reveal itself to you in its own time.

Curtisy & owin - Get A Life!

How are you meant to deal with being the man of the hour? It’s a question that’s clearly been on Curtisy’s mind a bit lately, and not without good reason. Since bursting onto the scene in 2022, the buzzy Jobstown rapper has been on a restless upward trajectory, from Choice Prize nominations and packed-out tour shows to viral moments in the Medieval Times. It’d be a lot for anyone to take in, but as his anxieties spar with his ambitions across this latest project, with dextrous bars delivered with his signature mix of wooz and charisma over an eclectic buffet of beats by owin, the answer he seems to arrive at is a simple one: you take it in your stride, and you double the fuck down.

“Fuck it,” he exclaims twice over the sampled intro melody in ‘Talk Of The Town’, before the beat bursts through like a train and he lets rip with bars brimming with playful braggadocio. Over mellowed-out boom-bap, he takes stock of things in ‘Tell Me I’m Good’, before channeling MIKE’s loping flow in ‘Yesterday’s News’, sounding agile and assured over a sparkly city pop beat flip: “I’m not familiar with limits… I wasn’t shit now I’m brilliant.”

He takes a more ruminative tone on ‘Sonny’, reflecting on the type of influence he wants to be for his nephew, and sharing reassuring words with his mother. It all plays out over the most unabashedly gorgeous beat, with an open-hearted string arrangement and sweet backing vocals from Kean Kavanagh. From there, the mixtape finds him flexing in a range of styles, from the Earl Sweatshirt-y lo-fi languorousness of ‘Knotted’ – “Free Palestine, fuck Costa” – to the luminous drill of ‘Bones’. ‘My Friends’ taps into Jim Legxacy’s nimble emo-rap, all wrapped in an ornamental bow by Emily Beattie’s angelic outro vocal, leading into closer ‘Couch Springs’.

‘The Instigator’ is the only slight misstep, an autotune-heavy joint that only blunts the strength of Curtisy’s voice in its raw form. But it doesn’t matter. The whole release has great moments to spare, bolstered by guest verses from Enniscorthy MC Lil Skag – “Christy Moore, how I Ride On”. It all points to an artist who, more than anything else, is enjoying the process – of making tunes with his pals and playing around in whatever way he sees fit. If he becomes the country’s best rapper in the meantime, that’s just a bonus.

Soria - Half Silver Mirror Burn | Living Room n°89

In 1996, not long before becoming one of the world’s first internet celebrities via her 24/7 webcam lifecast called anacam, the Minneapolis-born performance artist and musician Ana Voog collaborated with David Sylvian and Ingrid Chavez on ‘I Was Waving At You’. The spoken word track featured on her second solo album, 1998’s AnaVoog.com, and paired its somnambulant ambient backdrop with woozy ruminations on half-remembered dreams and melodies as ephemera.

It’s no surprise that Soria Reilly would weave a portion of that track into this new one of her own, stitching its poetic echoes into a sonorous haze of synth as her own hymnal vocals drift in and out earshot. The Berlin based artist specialises in this kind of thing – intimate and elegiac meditations, both spoken and sung, draped over enchanting electronic reverberations. She doesn’t release much – try 2024’s immersive longform work Labyrinthine Thread, or last year’s ‘Albatross’ from Air Texture’s Place: Ireland compilation – but it seems like more may soon be on the way. We can certainly hope so.

The original version of ‘I Was Waving At You’ also appears in Soria’s recent mix for the excellent Living Room series. (Check out Nashpaints’ contribution too!). It’s a gorgeous set, all blissed-out downtempo and ambient dub techno lushness, with some field recordings peppered in for good measure. Pure magic.

Ordnance Survey - Autotelic [Scintilla Recordings]

Neil O’Connor continues his process-based adventures in electronic music production with a new album of verdant kosmische. Like late 2024’s Biofeedback Loop, which reflected data gleaned from EEG brain scans via lush modular synthesis, the music on Autotelic delights in stochastic patterns. Using a mathematical system known as Markov Chains in the Max MSP music software, he trained some machine learning models to make decisions about pitch, tempo, rhythm, melody and timbre across the record. I have absolutely no idea how this stuff works, but do know that it’s a probability-based technique that’s also used by Autechre in their brain-scrambling live shows, and which they lifted the lid on a little during some online demos shared a while back.

Autotelic sounds nothing like Autechre, but you can sense a shared DNA in the sheer life that teems about these eight tracks. Don’t let the generative part fool you though – this isn’t some churned out AI slop. Instead, these aspects feel, to my ears at least, like delightfully destabilising elemental forces. Amidst the Moog arpeggios, motorik grooves and basslines, there are strange Buchla shimmers and hazy strings, morphing vocals and mutated field recordings, all interjecting in ways that are organic and pleasingly surreal. The borders between what’s composed and what’s conjured by O’Connor’s machines is continually blurred – a sort of musical rewilding that encroaches, scurries, zaps, pops and hums like an abstract painting of an overgrown garden.

Imagine hearing a concoction of Can, Boards Of Canada. Stereolab and Broadcast in a dream, and trying to remember what it all sounded like the next day, and you’ll land somewhere in Autotelic’s uncanny ballpark. It’s another gem from one of Ireland’s most technically proficient and exploratory electronic experimenters.

Pippa Molony - The Foggy Dew (feat. Rory Sweeney)

There have been countless recordings of ‘The Foggy Dew’ over the years, but I promise you’ve not heard one quite like this. Reuniting after their haunted dream-pop collaborations on 2024’s Hungry Ghost EP, Pippa Molony and Rory Sweeney trade the trad-folk accompaniment most often associated with the song – an anti-imperialist lament written by Fr. Charles O’Neill to commemorate those killed in the 1916 Rising – for dense electronic sound design.

The duo’s short rendition – just shy of three minutes – harnesses the drama and intensity of The Chieftains and Sinead O’Connor’s essential 1995 version, but soaks it all in rich atmospheric textures, at once expansive and foreboding. Molony’s hymnal vocals reverberate through a dense cloud of layered synths, which billow slowly like timestretched Angelus bells in the distance.

PLUS ONE - 2014

It’s easy to get misty-eyed when thinking about dance music in 2014. On a personal level, it was the year I first got properly sucked into the stuff. I have some very hazy memories of watching Wicklow’s own Mano Le Tough and The Drifter at Trauw in Amsterdam, and having my brain thoroughly rewired when one of them played Robert Hood’s ‘Alarm’. Looking at RA’s EOY list from that year, I’m struck by how many of these tunes are fully burnt into my psyche as formative moments: Objekt ‘Ganzfeld’; Barnt ‘Chappel’; Floorplan ‘Never Grow Old (Re-Plant)’; Leon Vynehall ‘It’s Just (House of Dupree)’; Jack J ‘Something On My Mind’; Theo Parrish ‘Footwork’; Floating Points ‘Nuits Sonores’.

This isn’t to say that PLUS ONE’s new EP sounds like any of those, but if there’s one thing Matt Finnegan’s tracks always succeed in doing, it’s making me temporarily forget my despair at the wider state of dance music today, and reconnect with the sense of thrill and excitement I had about it back then. Like last year’s WRITING WRONGS and 2024’s ubiquitous bop, ‘Bonk’, the four tracks on 2014 lunge toward the future, but take something of a bygone era with them – basically, catnip for fans of early ‘10s Hotflush, Hessle Audio, Hemlock and Livity Sound. ‘CLIP’ and ‘KNOW BETTER’ skip and gallop on rubbery beats, surfing their brain-buzzing basslines and vocal glitches toward euphoria. ‘NEVERSTOP’ veers into ‘Hyph Mngo’ territory, but swerves pastiche by trading pure ecstasy for something a little more grounded.

‘ONE LAST ROLLIE BEFORE THE NIGHTLINK’ wraps things up nicely, a short n’ sweet minimal house roller that, once again, lured my mind back to afterparties gone by. I doubt PLUS ONE’s as nostalgic as I am, though. After all, his music is lighting up dancefloors right now, getting frequent spins from Ben UFO, Four Tet and the rest. So maybe I’ll stop fixating on the past for now, and find a dancefloor to hear this stuff played loud on a proper system.

Michael Lightborne - Ambient Volcanoes of Ireland [Gleorecords]

I adored Michael Lightborne’s Dormant Volcanoes of Ireland last year. Over six tracks of tectonic drones and slow-surging rhythms, the Birmingham and Cork-based artist burrowed into mythology and psychogeography to explore themes of post-colonial trauma, climate change and our complicated relationship with the land itself.

Back in December, he released a companion album comprising two longform pieces. Released on tape – with all proceeds going toward The Sameer Project’s Rebuild Gaza campaign – the music here is based largely on the accordion drones that spawned Dormant Volcanoes, but which were mostly absent from the final album. On the A-Side, ‘For Lava and Saxophone’, Lightborne collabs with Lorenzo Prati – who provided purring brass textures to the stormy field recordings of ‘Bog Bodies / Brí Éile’ – to conjure an ominous soundscape, barren as a post-eruption wasteland. On the Side B, ‘For Accordion and Shortwave Radio’, signs of life and light start to emerge, flickering like embers through the undulating aerophone and synth sighs as human voices attempt to make contact through the static – glimmers of hope amidst the desolation.

Black Coral - Dark Coasts [Tesla Tapes]

While listening to this debut solo project from Cian “Moose” Megannety – effect pedal maker for Fontaines D.C., Gnod, Conan, Gilla Band and many more, plus a member of psych metal outfit Wild Rocket and experimental electronic supergroup BB84 – it helps to imagine yourself next to an immense body of water at night. Maybe you’re on a rugged headland, looking out on a vast and tenebrous bay; perhaps you’re floating on a small vessel in the middle of the Atlantic, with nothing but abyssal blackness above, below and around you.

As the EP’s title would suggest, these are the sorts of scenes Megannety was likely picturing while creating this music – four tracks of deep, enveloping synth drones and brain-tickling textures that buzz, zap, throb and roar with dubwise low-end pressure and distorted sci-fi circuitry. It might sound intense – it is! – but the truth is, like all the best music in this wheelhouse, it’s nothing but pure pleasure to leave the world behind and sink into these huge, sustained tones for a bit. Follow their primordial sub-bass frequencies toward the ocean floor, and you just might find infinity.

Polytunnel - Skeuomorphizm

Chasing 2024’s Ursula K Le Guin-inspired LP, The Word for World is Forest, Moot Tapes founder Peter Lawlor dishes up another helping of alien electro and techno a lá Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilations. Released via Parisian label Yoyaku Records’ Chapelle XIV Music imprint, it’s a vinyl-only affair that’ll delight Drexciya heads – or, more locally, fans of the Front End Synthetics catalogue – and anyone looking to add a little bit more sci-fi to their record bag.

Like a lot of the best music in this realm, these six tracks strike a nice balance between dancefloor heft and extradimensional loveliness, all pounding analogue kicks and clacking hi-hats mixed with dusty synth purrs, metallic zaps and acid squelch. It’s the sort of music that begs to be played loud, through a fog machine’s illuminated haze, but will sound just as good on a home system, like a little slice of the cosmos pressed on wax.

Caterina Schembri - A birch forest seen, imagined, and remembered [Ergodos]

“Time is a shapeshifter, on occasions a gentle wash, a swift wind, or a heavy hammer,” wrote the Italian-Colombian composer Caterina Schembri of her new piano suite for Dublin’s Ergodos label. Performed by Máire Carroll and recorded in St Peter’s Church of Ireland, Drogheda, these three pieces are described as reflections “of time passing, and individual perceptions of it”. In a word, it’s gorgeous – a work of patient beauty that evokes images of woodlands bathed in morning light, and the complex interior worlds that emerge in the acts of seeing, imagining and remembering such a scene.

‘Seen’ opens with a sense of foreboding, keys repeating with a sort of background anxiety that slowly resolves and alleviates into something softer, like a breath of fresh air as the birch trees come into view. ‘Imagined’ carries a kind of yearning as it flourishes outward from slow, pensive steps into something vivid and bright, a wish for something that may still come with time. ‘Remembered’, a slow, bittersweet theme reminiscent of Ryuichi Sakamoto at his best, retires to the recesses of the past and finds peace there, motifs glimmering like sunbeams through branches. Listening to it, it’s easy to feel time slowing just a little, a chance to pause amidst the relentless march of minutes, months and years.

Barry O’Halpin & Kirkos Ensemble - STONEMIRED

Originally conceived as a live score for the Dublin-based Iranian experimental filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi’s 2017 project of the same name, Barry O’Halpin STONEMIRED is a 24-minute composition in four parts. Accompanied by members of the Kirkos Ensemble – violins, cello, piano, bass clarinet and alto flute – he devises a strange work of abstract chamber music and surrealist horror tropes, all fed through an old TASCAM tape machine. Weaving harmonised sine waves based on elemental vibrations – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous and oxygen – into its mysterious atmosphere, peppered with uncanny textural flourishes of downtuned guitar, it’s the sort of music that lures you in like a spider might to its web. Spooky, uneasy, and sort of irresistible in the right headspace.

O’Halpin, who’s also a member of the Crash Ensemble, specialises in this sort of experimentation, and in the years since composing STONEMIRED he’s sought inspiration from Ireland’s limestone and bog landscapes to mosquito swarms and wasp songs. Before all that though, I knew him as one of the guitarists in Alarmist, an instrumental band whose polychromatic blend of math/post-rock, electronica and jazz blew my mind when I first saw them live in The Factory in Galway in 2012, and whose tracks like ‘Bathtime For Squid’, ‘Clapper’ and ‘PG Films’ are still on regular rotation in my headphones. Listening to those tunes now, the threads connecting that music to the sort of work O’Halpin is making now are not so obvious, but the sense of harmonic nous and razor-sharp compositional chops are of course all still there – more subtle, sure, but no less rewarding.

That’s it for this month. Catch you next time, and don’t forget to subscribe!