Various Artists

Under the Island - Experimental Music in Ireland 1960-1994

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Boomkat Product Review:

Incredible survey of DIY and avant curios from Ireland sourced from years of digging and sorting through obscure, overlooked morsels of concrète poitín, ferric tone poems, hallucinatory noise and wraithlike laments for posterity.

With a pure focus on works produced within the island, ‘Experimental Music in Ireland 1960-1994’ plunges intrepid ears into imaginative microcosms of music practically unheard beyond the bedrooms and non-studios of their makers. It firmly builds on an renewal of interest in experimental Irish music that bloomed roughly a decade ago with Finders Keepers’ ‘Strange Passion: Explorations In Irish Post Punk DIY And Electronic Music 1980-1983’ and a growing interest around Dome’s London recordings of Michael O’Shea, and continued thru reissues of Roger Doyle and Stano nuggets in more recent years.

With the exception of Roger Doyle, whose channel-hopping, Nicholas Collins’-esque radio collage ‘Tape Piece One’ is a highlight here; the hating wheeze of General Strike and Flying Lizards legend David Cunningham on ‘Ul 58’; or Trunk alum Desmond Leslie, whose ‘Esoteric Tone Poem (1960)’ hails the earliest work on offer: the majority of artists on Nyahh’s set are largely uncovered to a wider audience for the first time, and in mass they convey a wilderness of ideas connected by a rhizome of pursuit into the subconscious undergrowth, nary a flying fuck about pop appeal or rationality.

In that mode we discover the Arabic-toned choral keen and noise of ‘Foreign Bodies’ by Fergus Kelly nestled beside a Michael O’Shea-esque work for electrified strings (quite possibly a Hurling Stick - the sports/equipment/English div-basher - with pick-ups?!) on ‘Music for an Electric Hurling Stick’, along with the wickedly scribbly synth ditty of ‘Little Geography’ from The Shit, deeply uncanny, Amiga-based concrète from Burning Love Jumpsuit recalling early NYZ on ‘Praise the Eyes of Satan’ and a promenading collage from John Carson & Conor Kelly amid its treasures.

The label makes sure to note this set in contrast to better known Irish music from U2 to Thin Lizzy, and influential oddities whose work escaped the island in Doctor Strangely Strange, Mellow Candle, Princess Tinymeat, and the Virgin Prunes. But lest we forget, some of the greatest synth music ever made also comes from Irish born or derived artists - Enya, Kate Bush, Aphex Twin, Autechre’s Sean Booth - and it’s in light of the latter, and their shared search for the unusual, esoteric, inexplicable sensations, and electronic music’s potential to evoke the beyond, that we hear this set, albeit coming from cruddier and humble origins when Ireland was an economic backwater, unlike today.

TIP!

CD (14)