Take a bow: Caoimhin O
Raghallaigh gives a modern,
experimental spin to Irish
traditional music.
By Nick Kelly
Saturday May 23 2009
I was sitting on the hard pews of the Unitarian Church on Dublin's Stephen's Green when I first heard Caoimhin O Raghallaigh
play live. Playing in near darkness -- he was bathed only in the
faintest blue light -- the fiddler wrung the most extraordinarily
haunting sounds from his five-string viola.
Rich with melancholy and the infinite sadness, the notes filled the room with their own particular kind of blue.
But
then came the joyful uplift. O Raghallaigh brought on an Indian
percussionist to spar with, who beat out a kinetic rhythm on his
African djembe drum and then got down on his knees to hammer away at a
set of gourds.
As O Raghallaigh himself said of one of his
collaborators, which equally applies to himself: "Not alone do you not
know what's going to happen next, but you don't know what just
happened."
Although the 29-year-old Dubliner makes his living as
a professional fiddle player and grew up immersed in the traditional
Irish music scene (he spent two years living in Miltown Malbay in Co Clare -- "the trad Mecca"
-- and worked as a trad music archivist and uileann pipe maker), the
tunes he played in the church -- his altar-ego, if you like -- were a
far cry from mainstream trad.
They owed as much to classical
musical, post-rock and even jazz than they did to our own indigenous
folk music. O Raghallaigh's out-there experimentalism may alienate the
trad purists, but it marks him out as a true maverick, a risk-taker
revelling in his own creative independence.
If we must list reference points, he's like the missing link between Martin Hayes and 'Purple Haze'; and any analysis of his musical DNA would also reveal the double-helix of Estonian composer Arvo Part and Iceland's Sigur Ros.
And there are encouraging signs that our cultural tastemakers are alive to his talent: John Kelly
regularly playlists his brilliant 2007 solo album Where The One-Eyed
Man Is King on his Lyric Fm show, while online rock magazine State
recently dubbed him "the most singular traditional Irish musician of
(his) generation".
I met up with up Caoimhin one lazy Sunday
afternoon in a Dublin hotel ahead of his next show in St Audeon's
medieval church on Dublin's High St. The performance is part of Note
Production's four-pronged concert series known as The Fold, which
styles itself as "a space for new improvised and experimental music".
Caoimhin tops a bill that also features experimental rock duo Thread
Pulls and a spoken word performance from Cathal Coughlan.
The
softly spoken Caoimhin speaks with an infectious enthusiasm about his
craft and the other musicians he has worked with (in particular Iarla O Lionaird, accordionist Brendan Begley and uileann piper Mick O'Brien).
He has played his fiddle all over the world, from Alaska to Australia, from Norway to China, the latter as part of a music-and-poetry double-up with Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ni Domhnaill.
His
devotion to his craft is such that he gave up a promising career as a
theoretical physicist (he worked on a particle accelerator project in America after studying in Trinity College)
to follow his muse. But he has never looked back. He still loves to
play the bread-and-butter stuff -- slides and polkas, jigs and reels,
slow airs -- but is increasingly drawn to developing his own individual
style.
"As a listener, I'm aware that music does certain things
to me," says Caoimhin. "I'm trying to figure out 'what is it that I
find of value in listening to this music? How is it affecting me?'
"And
then trying to create a new music that has the same effect on people
with no background in traditional music. That's the idea. It's like
taking the essence of the effect and allowing other people in on it."
Caoimhin says that he is not alone in trying to push the boundaries of his chosen musical form.
"All
over the world, in other folk music traditions, there's a lot of people
writing really interesting contemporary music which is very obviously
directly related to folk music -- but isn't folk music.
"I got really excited by some of these people, like Nils Okland,
a hardanger fiddle player from Norway. He extracts the essential
information and makes new music that's so beautiful. So I thought it
would be interesting to see what would happen if I tried to do a
similar thing with our music.
"My album Where The One-Eyed Man Is
King opened up a whole new listenership. They don't need a background
in traditional music to get it. So I'm trying to communicate to people
who might have switched off."
I mention how for me his music has
echoes of Arvo Part and Sigur Ros, and Caoimhin's eyes light up: "The
space is the big thing with Arvo Part," he gushes. "I really wanted to
figure out how to have space -- and lots of it -- in my music.
"And
I love Sigur Ros so much. The sense of time is beautiful in it -- the
long time scales, which is like Arvo Part. In traditional music, a lot
of people are focused on the notes. I'm more interested in the texture.
If you were to chew on it, what textures would you be able to taste?
"We're
really lucky because the traditional music we have is incredibly rich.
Like, say, sean-nos singing: you could dive forever into that and
continually come up with things that are so beautiful and so relevant
to so many people.
"It's curious that more people aren't doing it."
Caoimhin
O Raghallaigh plays St Audeon's Church, High St, Dublin 8, on Thursday
June 4. For more info, see www.stateofchassis.com
nkelly@independent.ie
- Nick Kelly