irish experimental music

‘Under The Island: Experimental Music In Ireland 1960-1994’

• by Will Simpson
• February 15, 2024

A new album, ‘Under The Island: Experimental Music In Ireland 1960-1994’, focuses on an amazing bunch of late 20th century Irish bedroom producers and their early, lo-tech tinkerings 

It’s 1977. While punk is raging in London, across the Irish Sea in one of the faraway towns, a 16-year-old Dubliner is fiddling around with a Dictaphone.

“I developed a fascination with them,” remembers Daniel Figgis. “I was in a band at the time, called Normal Service. Our concerts weren’t going well, and I didn’t really like the inclinations of the other members. So I thought I’d try a more esoteric approach.”

He decided to deconstruct one of the group’s performances, using one of their tape recordings, a pair of scissors and Sellotape. The result, ‘Look! I’m Running!’, is a three-way sonic argument between a rock band, a Space Invaders machine and an artillery gun. It wasn’t the first time Figgis had used a Dictaphone in this way.

“One time, my aunt and uncle were having an argument. I recorded it, and then while they were continuing to talk I played excerpts from the earlier argument to plug the holes in their conversation. They started to argue with the earlier version of themselves and that fascinated me.

“I have no recollection of playing ‘Look! I’m Running!’ to anybody. But I must have played it to my parents. I grew up in working-class Dublin, in a classic kitchen sink drama scenario where we lived with my grandparents. We had an outside toilet – you’d have to go down four flights of stairs in the middle of the night and out into the back yard if you wanted to have a pee.”

‘Look! I’m Running!’ is just one of a number of pieces on ‘Under The Island: Experimental Music In Ireland 1960-1994’, a new compilation cataloguing the experimental music being created in Ireland in the late 20th century. It’s revelatory, in that it shows that far from what was perceived to be the hub of cutting-edge music at that time – London, New York or Düsseldorf – extraordinary, forward-thinking sounds were being created, often with the most basic of technology.

The phrase “lo-fi” barely covers it. There’s Sean O’Huiginn’s ‘Flostic’, also from 1977, which uses dental floss, elastic bands and an oven rack to create what sounds like the cries of a distressed Clanger. And ‘Lake Waters Of Sorrow’ by Nigel Rolfe, a piece which poses the question – what would a bodhrán sound like if you filled it with milk and blew rose petals across the tensile surface? Answer: like Moomins dancing on a frozen lake. 

Meanwhile, Danny McCarthy’s ‘Music For An Electric Hurling Stick’ is exactly that – a piece played on a hurling stick plus strings and pickup. It was part of a series of experiments that employed sports equipment as instruments. 

All these upend preconceived notions of what music is. There’s the otherworldly opener ‘Esoteric Sound Poem’ (1960), a stirring, six-minute sonic coagulation of contorted samples by Desmond Leslie, an ex-Spitfire pilot and true maverick who became a pioneer of musique concrète (his music was sporadically featured on ‘Doctor Who’). 

Perhaps most astonishing, though, is Roger Doyle’s ‘Tape Piece One’. Recorded in 1971 at his parents’ house in Dublin and using tools that many teenagers would have had in their bedroom at the time – a tape recorder, a radio and a record player – Doyle constructed a collage that juxtaposes, among other things, ‘Peer Gynt’, ‘Greensleeves’, The Beatles, the BBC News, ‘Theme From A Summer Place’ and ‘God Save The Queen’. It’s ‘Revolution 9’, but more brazen and defiant – joyful, even. 

“In some respects, the Roger Doyle piece is the marker,” suggests Dave Clifford, who wrote the sleeve notes to ‘Under The Island’. “It’s someone reaching out from the DIY dark of Ireland at that time and making something… quite psychotic really. It stitches together film, religion, pop, the news and comedy in musical form. It’s a fantastic piece of work.”

Clifford was familiar with many of the names on the compilation. Best-known for Vox, the early 1980s fanzine that was Ireland’s version of Sniffin’ Glue, his essay paints a picture of a nation as a cultural wasteland, dominated by the Catholic church and the showbands. By the late 1970s, though, change was arriving, and ‘Under The Island’ places these sound artists – who were largely working in isolation from each other – as heroic outliers. They were part of and, in some cases predated, punk’s cultural earthquake. 

Probably the most famous name on the compilation is David Cunningham, head Flying Lizard, who was brought up in Armagh but left for Maidstone College of Art in 1973. 

“I don’t think of myself as an Irish artist,” he says today. “I mean, my accent has gone – it’s just disappeared over 47 years.” 

His contribution to the album, ‘UI 58’, is an experiment he made in 1976. 

“It was, ‘Let’s just try and see what happens’. I made a tape loop of one note on the Stylophone, played it on the tape recorder and overdubbed it three or four times on the Revox. It was the very first time I had done anything like this with overlaying tapes of the same material.

“At the time, I wasn’t aware of anyone doing anything similar in Ireland. I mean, out of the whole of our sixth form pretty much everyone went to university in Dublin or mainland UK. The Northern Irish culture was very chauvinist, anti-art, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-Catholic, and if they’d had enough black people it would have been racist too.”

By then, Cunningham was well on his way to a long career in experimental music, which took him around the world and some time later, into the ‘Top Of The Pops’ studio. Roger Doyle ended up working at the highest level in theatre and music composition, Nigel Rolfe worked in performance art, Danny McCarthy as a sound artist, while Daniel Figgis himself signed a record deal at 19 and has sustained a 40-year career in left-field music, with a new album out in 2024. For all these artists there was a happy ending. 

For Ireland too. ‘Under The Island’ reveals that beyond rock and folk music, the country has an experimental tradition as rich as any other European nation. 

“It’s a huge and valuable document,” says Dave Clifford. “And now it’s a piece of cultural history – something to have in your hand, to say ‘this happened’.” 

‘Under The Island: Experimental Music In Ireland 1960-1994’ is out on Nyahh

Will Simpson

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Irish Experimental

Irish Experimental music is a genre of music that combines traditional Irish music with elements of experimental music. It often features traditional Irish instruments such as the fiddle, tin whistle, and bodhrán, as well as modern instruments like synthesizers and drum machines. It often incorporates elements of ambient, electronic, and avant-garde music, as well as traditional Irish music. Irish Experimental music is often characterized by its use of improvisation, experimentation, and exploration of new sounds and textures.

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“They more or less had the same, what we call the same nyahh , and the same style.” –Joe Heaney, Sean-nós singer

As mentioned elsewhere on Bandcamp Daily over the years , Ireland and its musical culture inhabits a curious place in the wider panorama. A small outpost on the periphery of Western Europe, with its own fraught history and relation to the world, Ireland has developed enduring sonic traditions and idiosyncrasies with each generation’s incremental experimentation.

Ireland’s living tradition has followed its custodians across the world, from penal colonies to coffin ships to generational memory. Much as they did at home, Irish folk musics weathered the onslaught of repression, erasure, and stagnation, slowly taking on the character of the places where they took root, in turn widening their scope and expanding on their story. New musical movements have sprung from that peripheral position, from rock ‘n’ roll’s belated mid-’60s arrival on Irish shores to the ways in which hip-hop and electronic dance music forms manifested themselves from the ‘80s onward.

More recently, pop phenomenon CMAT’s early character work as a Dublin-specific Dolly Parton auntie explores the worlds of camp and hyper-femininity with recognizably Irish humor. Acoustic rockers The Scratch’s detour through a decade of metalcore groove under the name Red Enemy brought moshpit-ready throwdowns—and a major-label deal. The much-loved and lauded second folk revival of recent years has seen the modernizing and academic work of artists like Lankum and John Francis Flynn bring the tradition to new prominence, while the music of Limerick-based scratchologist Andy Connolly, the former Naive Ted , wrangles composerly explorations of folk, classical, and avant-garde forms from a pair of turntables, a laptop, and his own boom-bap and techno sensibilities.

Somewhere amid these developing identities in contemporary and underground Irish music lies County Leitrim-based DIY label Nyahh Records , an outpost for outsider music, in all of its forms, on the fringes of rural Ireland.

“I thought a lot before I decided to start this label, and I was like, ‘How do I make it different from other labels?’” says musician, sound-maker, DJ, and Nyahh Records founder Willie Stewart. “Because I could be putting out records all year without really thinking about it—but they’ve got to have the nyahh . That’s the most important thing; if there’s no soul or originality to it, I’m not really interested in it. Originality and uniqueness is what really makes me want to put music out, y’know?”

Stewart is an amiable fellow, passionate, and literate about Irish-made music. Named after a term for the intangible feeling or spirit of a piece of music , Nyahh has become a consistent source of, and seal-of-approval for, a vast array of sounds in recent years, self-describing as a “home for sound collectors, noise makers and music builders.” The label is home to the solo work of Stewart and partner Natalia Beylis , as well as intrepid sonic explorers like cellist Eimear Reidy and Lankum’s Ian Lynch in his One Leg, One Eye guise. The label’s burgeoning reputation, aided by shouts out from the likes of The Guardian , has been a springboard for Stewart’s mission of shining a spotlight on widely-ignored corners of music and sound practice, winning new admirers among the faithful and eternally curious.

“I was doing a smaller label just before this, called Hypnagogic Tapes , that was putting a lot of international acts, mostly on cassette tape and CD-R,” Stewart says. “But then I decided I wanted to change it, and basically start anew, try and put out vinyl and proper-quality CDs and cassettes, so I got the money together to do that. The idea is to explore the more experimental side of Irish music and culture. I’m really confused about how we’ve had Beckett, Joyce, Flann O’Brien, all these surrealists and incredible avant-garde writers, but we don’t have a history of sound poetry or, y’know, experimental writing that’s come into our underground.

“The legacy of that incredible, rich culture–extreme for the time, y’know–doesn’t really seem to have rubbed off on contemporary musicians. Like, there’s just not an awful lot of experimental music in Ireland. But there is some, and my aim is to try and find it and help to give it a voice and a platform and get it out into the world.”

With no given remit to fulfill other than the pursuit of the nyahh itself, the label has flitted between the outer edges of tradition and the contemporary moment. Stewart’s own musical history takes in a similarly panoramic frame of reference. Perhaps best-known to well-seasoned Irish moshers as part of ‘90s alt-rock outfit Bambi , in the late 2000s he co-founded Woven Skull , a three-piece whose hypnotic, rhythm-focused slant on psych-folk draws equally from the heart of Irish tradition and Irish counter-culture.

Stewart’s—and by extension, Nyahh’s—position between these worlds, has resulted in his curating of a pair of intriguing archival compilations released via Bandcamp and on limited-run CDs documenting the histories of these two disparate strands of music in Ireland, unearthing parallels and connections in the process.

Taking inspiration from the song collection work of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax , A Collection of Songs in the Traditional & Sean​-​N​ó​s Style , released in July of 2023, brings together the work and voices of two generations of singers in the long-standing sean-nós (pronounced “shan-noas,” Irish for “old-style”) tradition, drawing equally from previously-released records and off-the-cuff smartphone recordings. A portion of the download sales will go to CATU , a community union for renters, social-housing tenants, mortgage-holders, and people in emergency and precarious living situations in Ireland.

“It wasn’t an archival project and nothing’s posthumous, so I didn’t approach it in that way. I just wanted to capture people that were currently singing sean-nós,” says Stewart. “Everybody on there is still alive and singing. I wanted to bring them into my world from their world. Their world is underground as well, but I wanted to bring this music into my underground world, so it’d be accessible to curious listeners.”

A style of unaccompanied song noted for long melodic phrases, ornamentations, and improvisation, sean-nós’s similarities to Middle Eastern and Mediterranean songforms have spurred ethnomusicologists and historians alike to speculate on connections between the maritime tradition of Ireland’s western province of Connacht, and ancient trade routes that brought it into contact with the seafaring cultures of North Africa and Spanish Armada shipwrecks.

“I see parallels between sean-nós singing and what everybody now seems to be obsessed with, which is drone music,” says Stewart. “Drone music is a new, fashionable thing, but people have been making drone music forever. It’s the earliest sound that we have. It’s the first thing we hear. It’s what we hear in our mother’s womb. It’s the sound of the Earth, and so many indigenous cultures have that—and they’re usually cultures that have been colonized at some point.”

A Collection of… is a beguiling point of entry to that world: Connemara woman Sarah Ghriallais’s mournful 1987 rendition of emigration song “An Sceilp​í​n Draighneach” comes from the expansive archives of Irish culture non-profit Gael-Linn , while her son Michael Frank Ó Confhaola delivers an authoritative “Róisín Dubh.” Rosie Stewart’s lilting on drinking melody “Jug of Punch,” meanwhile, lends emphasis to another undercurrent of traditional Irish song.

The sounds of the world are audible throughout its live recordings: the murmur of audience at Dublin’s Cobblestone pub during Ruth Clinton’s “Lament of an Irish Mother,” the sound of wind chimes on opening track, Conor O’Kane’s “Harvest of Clovers,” a version of an Edgar Lee Masters poem that evokes the vibration of the earth. Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin’s soulful baritone on love song “Eileanóir na Rún” was recorded on his smartphone in the green room in Stiúideo Cuan , a music venue and cultural center in Spiddal, County Galway.

“A lot of the reason for doing the phones and the field recorders was because I just love the sound of them. We all have these devices in our pockets. Then also the convenience and immediacy of it; they could record the song, and then have it to me five minutes later,” Stewart says. “As a whole, this album is definitely an archival document. I wouldn’t have had the budget to send people into a studio, and a lot of these people wouldn’t have access to a studio either.”

“Experimental music, and sean-nós, I see it together,” says Stewart. “It was almost like an experiment I did, to see if the experimental music world would engage and embrace this sound, and they have and I’m really happy with that.”

Later in the year, the label released Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960–1994 with the aim of establishing an understanding of and drawing common threads between disparate and oftentimes isolated experimental artists and their practices from the 1960s onward. Without the benefit of a long-standing tradition and documentation of same, Stewart proceeded to inquire with surviving domestic pioneers in sound art, field recordings, and outsider composition, like artist, UCC professor, and Fluxus counterpart Danny McCarthy , in order to further his own understanding of the matter, and inform the running order and scope of the collection.

“When I first heard [the musique concrète of] Desmond Leslie , from the infamous Leslie family from Monaghan, those recordings he did in the late ’50s, early ’60s, I was like, ‘What the hell is this? There’s got to be more of this out there.’ I already knew some people who had been active from the early ’80s on, so I just started asking them whether there was more, and they were like, ‘Not really.’ There weren’t very many sound artists active at that time, but I did find some.”

Under the Island , like its counterpart, deals in recordings and source material influenced by materiality and technical restrictions. But the real joy for Irish music heads are the sights and sounds of respected and well-known names in the domestic arts canon at play.

Desmond Leslie would be regarded as a pioneer of electronic sound, along with other notoriety , with licensed library acetates of his work scoring early episodes of Doctor Who . The early work of Roger Doyle, now recognized as both a trailblazing composer and an unsung hero of Irish new wave as part of Operating Theatre alongside actor Olwen Foueré among others, is represented with a 1971 tape collage. A picture of McCarthy greets owners of the physical CD, wielding a camán or hurley (a stick used in the Gaelic game of hurling, traditionally fashioned from the wood of ash trees) festooned with strings and a pickup, a recording of which from the late ‘80s is present. Corkonian post-punk figurehead Giordaí Ua Laoghaire recontextualizes familiar tones and sounds in “An Pocaide,” a free-ranging solo improv piece met with perfectly cut golf-claps at its tail-end.

As one might imagine, the absence of aesthetic or geographical commonalities presented narrative challenges when assembling works from such a broad sweep of artists into a coherent, chronological order—a task done with the help of cultural commentator and VOX zine head Dave Clifford . “I don’t mean this in a reductive way, but they’re all outsiders. There was no scene built around what they did,” says Stewart. “It’s a unique album because…it’s pulling out stuff from a scene that wasn’t there.”

“The Desmond Leslie recordings were actually recorded in the mid-‘50s,” Stewart continues. “That’s definitely the first music like that made by anyone with any affiliation to Ireland, as far as I know. 1994, that’s when personal computers became affordable to people. A lot of people bought computers and started making computer music. A lot of people that maybe were making sound art or experimental music fell into the trappings of beats. The only people on [ Under the Island ] that had access to a computer were Burning Love Jumpsuit, and I think only one of them had a computer. They would get together with all the recordings and samples, and basically just cut and paste everything. It was the early days of the personal computer, for artists anyway.”

Stewart says that these compilations are standalone endeavors that will live alongside current and future releases in the Nyahh catalog. His stated goal of pulling seemingly disconnected strands of documentation into the orbit of listeners is, in and of itself, an admirable act of service to an island stuck at the intersection of the Western world.

“The sean-nós one, I could be putting out compilations like that, from different aspects of traditional Irish music, forever,” he says. “The Under the Island comp, I just wanted to…I feel like we’re standing on this island, and we’re screaming and shouting to the rest of the world to say, ‘Look, we have work here, it has value, it’s good quality.’ I’m just very motivated about letting the world know that Ireland has a lot to offer.”

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Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 – 1994

The mission to track down all traces of an Irish avant-garde has received a boost with the release of this delightful compilation, compiled by  Nyahh Records . The label has left no dusty attic unexplored in its efforts to drag subterranean Ireland to the surface, providing documentary proof of free-thinking at a time of joint church/state hegemony.

This experimental impulse could apparently be found at all levels of society. Take the aristocratic UFO hunter Desmond Leslie, who created electronic soundscapes in his Monaghan castle and took his place with the Meeks and Derbyshires of the world.

Outside the country estate, there were pioneers like Roger Doyle and Danny McCarthy who used bedrooms and arts centres as their labs, radio broadcasts as source material, tape loops and even stringed hurling sticks as their instruments.

Some even went beyond pure sound, using it as just one element in a multimedia set up. Nigel Rolfe brought traditional elements into the modern art realm, creating a dense thicket of bodhran and a woman’s keening lament to soundtrack one of his installations. The sublimely unsettling ‘Lake Waters of Sorrow’ is the result.

These are just a few highlights from a compilation that tells a compelling alternate history of Ireland in the late 20 th century. File it beside Mangan and O’Brien in the canon of great Irish experimental art and let’s hope for more excavations in the near future. Pádraic Grant

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Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 - 1994

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A home for sound collectors, noise makers and music builders who love a good Nyahh. "They more or less had the same, what we call the same nyahh, and the same style." - Joe Heaney

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Billed as “an arboreal music and research project,” this experimental/sound art duo is inspired by the Robert Frost line, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” Performed and recorded outdoors, the cello and keyboards of the pair indeed invoke the spirit of the woods, and, as this is a field recording, including incidental sounds of their live session, like a barking dog, which actually doesn’t detract from the music being performed. Nickie Harte Kelly

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This album is truly one of my favorite as it makes me think about the act of forgetting something when you don't want to. You can't control it and makes you feel miserable. This truly makes me enjoy the memories I can remember because there will be a point in time where it will be gone. tenr3d

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I'm really fascinated by what Beylis creates under such limitations in her records, be they improvised pieces in unlikely spaces or working with neglected instruments. I think working with so little to create so much is really a testament to her artistic abilities. I could listen to her work all day. clevencd

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Various Artists Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 - 1994

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After two years of digging, hunting, unearthing archives, digitising and a lot of correspondence, Nyahh Records is very excited to finally be announcing the release of ‘Under the Island: A Compilation of Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 – 1994’. Ireland, a country known mostly in the pop music arena for U2, Thin Lizzy, Stiff Little Fingers et al and of course, the Show Band era of the 60s’ to the present, the country is not known for producing a lot of ‘cutting edge, Avant Garde music. A few very influential bands did get out such as Doctor Strangley Strange (1967 – 1971), Mellow Candle (1965 – 1973), Princess Tinymeat (1984 – 1987) and the Virgin Prunes (1977 – 1991). A strange bunch for sure, and where would we be without them. But, further down underground there were a few artists working away in their bedrooms and non-studio settings experimenting with tapes and handmade instruments. Here for the first time is a collection of these artists and their work. Sounds that had been left in boxes on tape or cassette have now been cleaned up and presented together in a collection spanning over four decades.

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Anois, Os Ard

Exploring the drone in Irish music

A story of sustained tones, sacred rituals, and the search for connection with the world around us, told with the help of ian lynch, paddy shine and baptist goth..

Ar aghaidh is ar aghaidh is ar aghaidh.

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God. And the word was God. One word. One syllable. One frequency.” 

It’s a cold Monday night in October 2021 and, in East London’s Cafe OTO, Ian Lynch is delivering his cosmological ode to the drone . Over a billowing swell of sub-bass and distorted synth, the Lankum musician’s voice reverberates slowly through the intimate space, introducing this live edition of his Fire Draw Near podcast , which “investigates Irish traditional music and song in all of its myriad forms”. Tonight, he’ll chart the complex history of the anti-war song ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’ , but first, he encourages us to cast our minds further back, to the sound that started it all. 

He continues: “Our earliest ancestor was not a single cell organism, but a single vibration, born of electromagnetic radiation, transmitting through the universe 13.9 billion years ago. But eventually, the signal split. Eventually, it multiplied. Eventually, it became everything we know: the earth, the wind, the water, the fire, the luminiferous ether, and us – living, breathing, stinking, and tragic. All of us descending from the same source, and within each of us, the in-built desire to be back there once more, vibrating at the same frequency as everything else in existence. Instead, we find ourselves flung through the cosmos upon this dying rock at great speeds, in the wrong direction. Wave upon wave upon wave upon wave. And without the stories to show us the way, we might never find ourselves again.”

A little over two years later, shortly before Lynch brings his experimental solo project One Leg One Eye to a live setting for the first time at Berlin’s CTM Festival, he tells me that this monologue originated after he did some reading into the imperceptibly deep hum of Cosmic Background Radiation – “essentially, remnants of the Big Bang”. It left him considering the notion that “all life in the universe stemmed from this great eternal drone, and how the unity that we all seek is to be a part of this vibration”. 

“Our interactions with drone in music are a form of sacred ritual,” he says, “and the closest thing we have to achieving this oneness.” 

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You don’t have to look hard to find the truth in this sentiment; through every epoch of human history, our fascination with the drone is plain to see. As the writer Harry Sword puts it in his essential tome, Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion : “The drone is found everywhere from Buddhist chant, to Indian raga, free jazz to ambient techno, minimalism to industrial, not to mention the myriad drones of nature.”

From ancient instruments used in spiritual ceremonies, through the works of La Monte Young and the Theatre of Eternal Music, Alice Coltrane , Pauline Oliveros and Ravi Shankar, into the distorted zones of Sunn O))) , Jah Shaka and Earth , its immersive force has drawn us in again and again and again – a connective tissue between cultures all over the globe, united in their quest for transcendence. 

In Ireland, this resonance runs deep, echoing through centuries of traditional music, culture, and the landscape itself. Lynch is among a raft of artists and labels who, in 2024, are revitalising the country’s long-held love for low, sustained tones. Nowadays, its felt in the feverish thrum of DIY shows and trad sessions alike; in the nasal timbre of unaccompanied sean-nós singing and the natural buzz of field recordings; in the booming bells and organs of churches, and the electric groan of digital synths.

You can hear it in Lynch’s vocals, uilleann pipes, concertinas and whistles, which, as One Leg One Eye and in Lankum’s celebrated LPs and live shows, he envelopes in a thick fog of doom and dark ambient influences. Lankum’s producer John “Spud” Murphy injects similar plumes of relentless bass weight into the music of OXN , Katie Kim and Percolator .

Elsewhere, artists like John Francis Flynn and Gareth Quinn Redmond twist canonical folk songs and instrumentation around pillars of soft-focus ambience, crackling distortion and tape hiss, while Declan Synnot , Michelle Doyle and Cliona Ni Laoi work with harsher palettes.

Meanwhile, acts like Áine O'Dwyer , Eamon Ivri , Queef, Katie Gerardine O'Neill , Natalia Beylis and Moundabout augment audio snippets extracted directly from the environment, transforming them into abstract, otherworldly tunes. Others, like Baptist Goth , harness the sacred qualities of the drone as a way of exploring and conceptualising time itself, tapping into ancient frequencies and tracing their journey through generations, locations and communities into the present day.

Among this burgeoning movement of musicians, who are mapping the terrain between classic forms and the contemporary undergrowth, the drone offers common ground; a shared language in an ever-evolving story of Irish music.

There are numerous words for drone as Gaeilge . The most common of those, dord, is also the name given to a particular type of ancient bronze horn, which dates back to 1000 BC, and is thought to have produced a sound similar to that of a didgeridoo. As Lynch points out, dord is also the word used to describe the noise a stag makes, a buzzing or a chant, and the sound of the pipes. 

The earliest representation of a set of mouth-blown bagpipes in Ireland dates back to around 1550, in a stone carving found in Woodstock Castle, Co. Kilkenny, which depicts them being played with the standard two drones attached. The bellows-driven uilleann pipes – with their warmer timbre produced using three drones, regulators and melodic chanter – were developed during the 18th century and, over time, became a signature instrument in Irish folk music, preserved by the likes of Séamus Ennis and Na Píobairí Uilleann organisation , and made famous by the likes of Planxty’s Liam O’Flynn , The Bothy Band’s Paddy Keenan , and The Chieftains' Paddy Moloney .  

In the sean-nós tradition, the droning, nasal effect of the voice – or, the “nyahh” – was once described by the Connemara-born singer Joe Heaney as representing “the sound of a thousand Irish pipers all through history”. The “nyahh”, which is elsewhere more loosely defined as the “soul” or “lift” in the music, is something Heaney understood as existing between the “words and the language”, and was something he also recognised in the voices of Native American, Azerbaijani and Indian singers. 

This hard-to-pin-down quality enticed the Leitrim-based musician Willie Stewart too, so much so that he launched the Nyahh Records label in 2021 as a “home for sound collectors, noise makers and music builders” located largely, though not exclusively, in Ireland. It released One Leg One Eye’s debut album .​.​.​. And Take The Black Worm With Me in October 2022 and, in 2023, inspired by the song collecting of Alan Lomax, delivered two crucial anthologies: A Collection of Songs in the Traditional & Sean​-​N​ó​s Style and Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 - 1994 . 

When I interviewed Stewart about Nyahh Records in 2022 for The Thin Air , he spoke about his interest in the work of the filmmaker Bob Quinn, whose Atlantean documentary film series explored the shared culture between Irish and North African people. “I feel like the ‘nyahh’ is a huge part of that connection,” he said. “The similarities in sean-nós and North African Amazigh music are undeniable. It’s all so focused on drones… I think everyone knows what the ‘nyahh’ is. They just might not know the word.”

This understanding of the drone as a phenomenon shared between cultures is echoed by Moundabout’s Paddy Shine, who first met his bandmate Phil Masterson in 2010 at Stewart and Natalia Beylis’ Hunter’s Moon Festival. For Shine, who’s also a founding member of the psychedelic outfit Gnod, the vibrational energy of pub trad sessions that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as a kid in Athlone mirrored that of the Berber and Gnawa music gatherings he visited years later in Morocco. 

“It’s the exact same thing going on,” he says. “It was all coming from one place, and that place was the drone, that resonant force… That's how it kind of started to make sense to me. It was like, okay, this all comes from the same source. It’s just about tapping into that. And that’s what the drone does. It allows us to tap into that primal part of ourselves. And we can all very easily join in on that drone. Anybody can get involved.”

It’s that universality and accessibility of the drone that drew Shine in as he started making music; he would tune all the strings of his guitar to a single note, and sing over his open strums. “You're already flying then,” he laughs, “because it starts to play itself.”

Shine and Masterson’s acoustic and electric guitar playing on their 2023 album An Cnoc M​ó​r is similarly expansive. Whirring chord progressions and jangling riffs are held in place with quivering strings, battered Hammond drum machine beats and mantra-like vocals. Across six tracks, the pair weave tendrils of desert blues and pagan folk loosely through kaleidoscopic passages of kosmische and earthy psychedelia. 

The album takes its name from Cnoc Mór na nGaibhlte, one of Ireland’s highest mountains, and the tallest of the Galtees, a range where the counties Tipperary, Limerick and Cork intersect. In 2022, Shine and Masterson rented a yurt among these hills, and would go on long hikes or swim in nearby rivers every morning before getting to work on music. 

A recurrent sound across the album is that of the environment in which it was made. A sample of the wind on the mountain is heard on the album’s opening track ‘The Hills Hum Hymns’ – a rustling gust that courses over its rugged sonic terrain. These recordings provide a backbone of sustain to the tracks, a hypnotically droning foothold for the music, built into its birthplace. Here, the Galtees themselves become an instrument, played as intuitively as breathing. “It’s in the air, isn’t it?” says Shine. “It's in the air of where we live.” 

Lynch’s relationship with the drone started early too, and came just as naturally as it did to Shine. “I remember when I was very young, about five or six, me and my brother Daragh would often just hum sustained notes at each other for long periods of time,” he says. “I’ve no idea why we started doing this, but I can remember just getting lost in the resonances and sounds that we both created.

“The sound of the drone of the pipes, particularly in the work of Planxty, was something that I gravitated towards very early in my discovery of traditional music, and that sound has remained very close to me ever since,” he adds. “Usually, when someone is learning to play the pipes they will start off with what is known as a ‘practice-set’; that is a bag, bellows and chanter. The drones are then added at a later stage. I remember when I first got a set of pipes with drones I was so blown away. I would just sit there for hours playing the drones by themselves, feeling them as much as hearing them. I think I liked them even more than the sound of the chanter.”

Like Moundabout, Lynch makes use of field recordings from the world around him on .​.​.​. And Take The Black Worm With Me, captured in Dublin locales like Bulloch Harbour, Baldoyle Racecourse, Bayside Dart Station, and further afield in Vilnius Cathedral. Across the album’s five tracks, he manipulates these sounds into immense droning instruments alongside his pipes, shruti box, synths, concertina, hurdy gurdy, tape loops and guitar. 

Speaking about the creaking instrumental ‘The Fancy Cannot Cheat So Well’ on the No Place Like Drone show on Dublin Digital Radio, Lynch described recording the sounds he detected in the area surrounding an electricity substation, and how their frequencies would seem to vary at different times through the day.  “It’s quite amazing when you start to listen to these things and you can hear the musicality in it,” he said. “With industrial or electronic noises, it’s something you wouldn’t commonly associate with having any kind of warmth or inherent musicality. It seems to be on another end of the spectrum. It’s a cold harsh sound that’s so far removed from the human experience. But when you can find the beauty and the music within that, it's quite a rewarding experience.”

On the opening track, ‘Glistening, She Emerges’, Lynch’s uilleann pipes howl like banshees in a cloud of processed tape loops and distorted bass. A filmed early recording of the album’s gorgeous centrepiece, ‘I’d Rather Be Tending My Sheep’ , a song collected (or possibly written) by Ruth Tongue, emerged during lockdown. At the time, Lynch would visit an abandoned factory where his father had once worked, and sing accompanied by his shruti box. In the video, you can sense the echo of the warehouse around him, the natural drones of the city emerging from an industrial shell.

Elsewhere, harsh electronic drones converge with traditional music on ‘Bold and Undaunted Youth’, an adapted version of the ‘Newry Highwayman’ , which dates back to 1788. 

Lynch’s merging of experimental sounds and processes with traditional music is hardwired – an unshakeable instinct to explore the possibilities and extremities of these instruments and songs on his own terms. “From a very early age I have always had a difficult relationship with Irish traditional culture, whether that is the language, the music or the singing,” he says. “Each stage of my creative output has had to do with my untangling and working out of this unease, whether that has been through hardcore punk with The Dagda, black metal with Sodb, experimental folk with Lankum, and most recently in composing the soundtrack to the film All You Need is Death . 

“I have never been able to properly express myself playing straight up traditional music and so I have always tried to find my own voice and to find a way to interact with the tradition in a way that is true to my own internal musical reality. Quite often this involves utilising various sounds associated with the tradition in new and unique ways with internal markers of arbitration being informed by my own musical tastes and proclivities.”

This will be demonstrated once again on the forthcoming album by Crone, a project “based on myths surrounding various manifestations of the sovereignty goddess” that Lynch has been working on with musician George Brennan (BB84, Cholera House, Melodica Deathship, Deep Burial) and actor Olwen Fouéré. 

For the multidisciplinary artist Dylan Kerr, whose music and site-specific performances regularly revolve around overlapping layers of choral vocals and durational sound, the drone is not just an integral component of their creative practice, but a long-held connective power attached to ideas of space, family, time and spirituality. As a child growing up in Portlaoise, they sang in their church choir accompanied by the organ; they played flute in their local Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann group alongside an uilleann piper, and their uncle played in a band with a bagpiper. 

Kerr describes the music they compose and perform under the Baptist Goth persona as sacred; their work explores the “embodied languages of ritual, protest and worship, and the different things that can emerge from them”. “I'm really interested in ritual,” they say, “and rituals in relation to the church and sacred music.”

During their concert at St. Munchin's Church in Limerick last year at Féile na Gréine festival, bells tolled round their reverberating voice and searing electronics. For another set at Dublin’s Pepper Canister Church, they were given permission to play on its 17th century organ. “It was really intense to be in that space and to be allowed to access this instrument,” they remember. “All of the history that is connected to that place – holding that, and then shifting it somehow.”

Like Lynch, Kerr interacts with these revered traditional materials and spaces with a radically personal touch; their art has encapsulated themes of queerness and memory, and uncovers different ways of understanding what it means for something to be sacred within that process. “Performing in churches is a big way to be able to shift the narrative of what people expect of these spaces,” they say. “Churches are amazing spaces that are very energetically heavy for a lot of people.”

For Kerr, the church in their hometown is reflective of that idea. Last summer, after singing there for their sister's wedding, they struck up a rapport with the rector, who told them they could come play the organ whenever they liked. “The first time I went there was really intense actually,” they remember. “I wasn't able to play for the first hour I was there. I was just sitting there crying. My family has always been connected to this church. The organ has this plaque for my great aunt, who worked in the clergy because she left money in her will that paid for the electric blower connected to the pipes.”

“It was just like, all of these things, piecing them together and going to play it was this meditative thing,” they continue. “I feel like I'm connecting with these inner parts of myself, but then also intergenerationally with my family, who've been through this place, and my community back home. I was totally reshaping and reframing my experience of this space.”

Here, the drone and its vessel, so deeply rooted in Irish Catholic liturgy, becomes a window to history; an illuminating thread between the past and present, the traditional and contemporary. It’s a characteristic shared with the music of other Ireland-based artists for whom these church organs are a primary instrument, like Colm Keady-Tabbal and Robert Curgenven . More potent still, for Kerr, the drone and these ritualistic sounds can enable us to transcend time entirely, and enter a frame of mind of pure, empathetic listening.

“A big thing for me in my work is [exploring] time as a material… and the drone’s ability to shift and stretch time. But then there are also these patterns of repetition; I'm also working a lot with chant. In entering these deep, meditative, repetitive spaces, we can become incredibly introspective. Also, in experiencing this type of music as an audience member with other people, it becomes a space where everybody is holding space for each other in that moment.”

You can hear it in a recently released live recording from Dublin’s Unit 44 on Berlin label 3 X L, and in standalone pieces like ‘I wake up in the morning and I cry’ featuring Natalia Beylis. At Kerr’s most recent lives shows, at CTM Festival in Berlin and The National Concert Hall in Dublin with GASH Collective, they’ve woven microtonally tuned sin waves through fragments of sean-nós and overtone singing, all in tribute to the late Swedish experimental pioneer Catherine Christer Hennix , whose cosmic drone music sought connections between Indian ragas, Arabic maqams and the blues, and St. Brigid, one of Ireland’s patron saints. “She’s the mother of the snakes that St. Patrick got rid of,” smiles Kerr. “She's just a bit more punk.”

The drone is an invitation – a radical, intercultural magnet that defies arbitrary borders, and brings us together; a global chorus of frequency that goes on and on and on; ar aghaidh is ar aghaidh is ar aghaidh . “It’s something that is constant through all ages and with all people, throughout the world,” says Lynch. “It is one of those universal things that transcends boundaries – temporal, spatial, political, cultural and natural.”

As a new wave of Irish musicians taps into this signal, it simultaneously sends it outward in its own accent, in search of that connection. We’d do well to welcome whatever response may come with open arms and open ears. Can you hear it? Eistigí.

Thanks for reading! Come back next month for another round-up of new Irish music, and an exciting essay for spring. In the meantime, be well!

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