There’s something serious afoot in the worlds of traditional and folk music. As we emerge from the stillness of the pandemic, all manner of glorious bedlam is breaking out. The fizz was there before 2020 but it’s bubbling over now in earnest. Lankum, Ríoghnach Connolly, Lisa O’Neill, Landless and others had been blasting the boundaries of their music for some time, and now that live performances are taking off again, we’re hearing more voices coming together to make a welcome racket.
The National Concert Hall’s main auditorium is hardly a space ideally suited to traditional and folk music. Its formality can distance listeners from artists and its seating can tether punters to their seats, sometimes unwillingly. But there is no doubting the boldness of the Concert Hall’s programming in recent years. It has catalysed unlikely encounters between artists such as Sam Amidon and Karan Casey, and Iarla Ó Lionáird with the Crash String Quartet. And mixing it up between the the main auditorium and the more intimate space it calls the Studio, the NCH has managed to carve out a particular identity as a venue boldly going where others may be fearful to venture.
This year the Tradition Now series casts its net wider still, luring an eclectic collection of artists to the first of two editions this year. The remarkable Clare concertina player, composer and band leader, Pádraig Rynne, brings his rich mix of Irish traditional, jazz-tinged, folk-inflected avant garde music to the final afternoon of the series, while this mini festival will close with Lankum’s firebrand Ian Lynch, who will bring his monthly podcast and radio show, Fire Draw Near, to the main stage.
One of this month’s most intriguing collaborations is between Lankum’s Daragh Lynch and Scottish composer, cláirseach player and singer Iona Zajac. The pair will make the Studio space their own, building on the seeds of their first encounter: a reimagining of the song, The burning of Auchindoun, recorded for Broadside Hacks’ Songs without authors Vol 1, released last September.
Auchindoun was an experience they both enjoyed, and one that yielded material that they’ve set aside for airing this summer. They’ve only performed live once together, in Belfast earlier this year. So Tradition Now offers them a chance to build on those foundations that promise much by way of eerie soundscapes.
“We were given the brief to find an old song and reimagine it,” Zajac says, recounting the context for her first creative collaboration with Lynch, “so I chose this song about Mary Queen of Scots called The Four Marys. She had four ladies in waiting, all called Mary, and one of them has a terrible fate. So we recorded that song and I changed the melody to it, and then Daragh came in and added these amazing things to it, and then we decided to hold on to that recording at the time.”
In the interim, the pair have invited Radie Peat to add backing vocals to the song, and they’ve been warming up an array of amps, synths, keyboards and a 1950s drum kit complete with animal skins, in preparation for their concert, as well as signing up cellist Aonghus Mac Amhlaigh for the evening. Zajac has also recently released her debut EP, Find Her in the Grass, while Daragh has been busily mixing the new Lankum album with regular producer Spud Murphy. Collaboration seems to suit both musicians exceedingly well. And the dramatic break imposed by the pandemic has proven to be an unexpected bonus for Daragh.
“In a weird way I enjoyed the lockdown because we’d been touring so regularly and it was pretty gruelling”, he admits. “So at the start it was such a nice thing not to have to be anywhere. It was beautiful, in its own way. And now, listening in retrospect to the work I’m doing with Lankum, the music seems really apt for what’s gone on over the past two years. I didn’t really realise it at the time. It’s just looking back on it that it really makes sense.
‘Air of uncertainty’
“And when it comes to gigs, there’s still an air of uncertainty about the pandemic for the next year or two. If we book gigs for December, will there be another [Covid] wave? For the moment, things seem to be somewhat back to normal. In a weird way, we just have to wait and see. It’s a kind of a healthy way to look at things anyway: a good skill to have learned.”
The Olllam are a four-piece band who’ve been described as making music that sits somewhere between Radiohead and Planxty. “Ollam” is an old Irish word that describes a master of a trade or a skill. Anchored by Belfast piper John McSherry and American multi-instrumentalist and producer Tyler Duncan, this is a band that can breathe as easily in an all-night rave as at a fireside session. For The Olllam, it’s all about getting into the groove, and with their latest album, Elllegy, recorded remotely during the past two years, they’re chomping at the bit to get back on the road together.
“It’s so exciting to be playing shows again,” Tyler says. “It feels like time has gone sideways. Pandemic time goes that way. It’s not linear time. It sort of feels like it’s the next summer, even though it’s been three summers. The album had a unique place, in that we were just about to start working on it when it [Covid] all went down. The album got catapulted into an entirely different realm for that reason. I feel we were on a trajectory where we did a tour the summer before Covid and we rediscovered the potency of our band and how much fun it is to do, and so we decided we just had to make another record.”
Luckily, Tyler and John had a raft of tunes which they had composed a short time before the pandemic struck. The band were left with no option but to work on the new material remotely. They’re feeling confident though, that the music will find its audience again, and that listeners are open to all manner of eye-popping arrangements, having access to so much diversity through social media and music streaming these days.
“There’s a lot of young people who are really digging it, and older people as well,” John says. “As time has moved on, there’s a lot of new stuff that taps into different styles of creativity, and I think it’s becoming more the norm now. I was always part of that. Playing with Dónal Lunny in Coolfin, back in the day: sure, he was always at that kind of caper! It’s been four years since we last played together and I can’t wait to get together again with the boys. And Tyler and I have a lot more tunes waiting in the wings, so we’ll be sure to do some recording too.”
Michael Shimmin, The Olllam’s drummer, muses about the title of the new album, Elllegy.
“That, for me, was definitely related to the pandemic,” he says, “and the sadness for so many people who died all over the world. There’s one track on the album called The Burialll Stone and it’s very mournful. I imagine it being played at a funeral. So that title encompasses some of the feeling on the record. The album isn’t all sad and slow. There’s a lot of upbeat stuff and major keys, too, but Elllegy is a poem in remembrance of those who have passed and I think that was at least subconsciously linked to the pandemic.”
For bassist Joe Dart, the desire to dig deep for this album even went as far as the strings on his bass guitar.
“In this recording process the bass is a lot more of a presence in the low end,” he says, “and I had to add an extra string on the bass to get some of this low stuff, setting this undertone for some of these tunes. There’s a hypnotic element to the Olllam sound and I think the bass has a hand in creating that. Ultimately this is still music that’s outside the realm of anything that I have ever done. For me, the whole sound is something totally new and unique. I’m very excited to play this record live, because we recorded everything remotely. It’s going to be fun.”
The Tradition Now series at the National Concert Hall begins on June 15th. Iona Zajac and Daragh Lynch play on Thursday, June 16th, at 8.30pm at the Studio; The Olllam play on Saturday, June 18th, on the main stage. nch.ie
