In May 2016, at the Drop Everything festival on Inis Oírr, Steffi & Virginia, the legendary DJs from the Panorama Bar at the Berghain nightclub, in Berlin, were holding court. As Virginia played a hypnotic techno tune, the musician Micheál Ó hAlmhain spontaneously stepped up with a tin whistle and began to play. When he blasted off his final note the crowd exploded in cheers. “My God!” said Steffi, who’d been holding the microphone that Ó hAlmhain had played into. “Is this guy for real? Big, big ups! Now that’s what I call a f***ing fusion!” The track, Chasing Away the Night by Gesloten Cirkel, continued seamlessly. But something had happened. In the background of a video recording of this moment, you can hear someone say, “Hands down, one of the best 24 hours of my life.”
Irish traditional music’s compatibility with techno, and with dance music more generally, is not about genres being shoehorned together. In their natural environments – the corner of a pub, a nightclub – there is something of a cycle to both: the sets go on for as long as they need to, tunes mixing and blending. Sounds drop out, then fold in again when the time is right.
For a new generation, the combination is hugely appealing. At the forefront of this expanding subgenre is Trad Rave, the “Irish Frankenstein” project of Colm Olwill and Jack Dempsey McMahon, aka DJ PCP and DJackulate.
Olwill, who began DJing in the mid-1990s, is also known for his involvement in Gramophone Disco (where he has a long history of playing early- and mid-20th-century music), in the Haunt at Electric Picnic, and as one of the collective behind the extraordinary hole-in-the-ground piano bar at Glastonbury (a venue that has also played a role in the Irish folk and trad revival).
He’d occasionally get bored by purely mixing techno tracks. “It’s too easy. You get locked in and you’re just twiddling EQs,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, the selection is hard, but the DJing aspect is too easy to be fun.” Olwill had “always wanted to do something weirder”, and six or seven years ago he “had it in my head to throw big beats behind trad records”.
Mashing up beats and trad is “really, really difficult”, he says. The tunes are “speeding up and slowing down – you can’t take your ear off it. If you have a flat Berliny bass thing over Planxty, you have to be [paying attention] millisecond by millisecond. You’re continuously adjusting the track to be in sync. We don’t play any remixes or edits: it’s all very live. That keeps the trad feel.”
Why am I learning so much other music when I’m sitting on a goldmine? The goldmine being Irish traditional music
Dempsey McMahon, his Trad Rave partner, began as a dance-music DJ and then gravitated towards hip hop, exploring the highly technical elements of turntablism and scratching. Buying old records and digging through crates of vinyl in charity shops opened his ear to all kinds of music. “I was buying stuff to use as a tool,” he says, “and then accidentally getting into 1930s clarinet swing bands and stuff like that. Once I was into all that I was interested in how it works. That’s when I got a sax. Friends of mine started the North Strand Klezmer Band, and I was hurtled into that. That was Balkan music – I got interested in that. Then I thought, Why am I learning so much other music when I’m sitting on a goldmine? The goldmine being Irish traditional music.”
Dempsey McMahon, who had a habit of slipping trad tunes into his own sets, also fell “head over heels with [uilleann] pipes for a few years. Then I went back to DJing, because I had such a strong foundation in it.” He is now a two-time world-champion turntablist.
When the pandemic descended, he began to rethink what he wanted to do musically, experimenting with an EWI, or electronic wind instrument. Combined with his talent for pipes and saxophone, his knowledge of eastern European, Middle Eastern and Irish traditional music, and his DJing and scratching skills, it effectively enabled Dempsey McMahon to create a new genre – one that audiences witnessed in his support slots for Lankum. His set at the band’s show at Vicar Street in Dublin in December 2022 was a gig of the year within a gig of the year.
“On paper it sounds really lame, something we probably would have snarled at. DJs playing trad? Rave? That sounds like Celtic-clubland stuff,” Dempsey McMahon says, referring to the earsplitting trend, from the early 2000s, of rave-ifying familiar Irish tunes. Trad Rave could not be further from that. On Thursday they bring the event to the Róisín Dubh in Galway as part of the Tonnta festival. As well as classic trad, expect to hear the pair blend Lankum’s New York Trader with an industrial drone beat, The Deadlians with footwork or Paddy Keenan with moombahton.
“Both musics existed for the purpose of dancing,” Dempsey McMahon says. “This music isn’t designed to solely to be listened to. Its DNA is about getting people off their arses and moving. Two completely different time periods, but they share that same purpose. They’re dance music. There’s no discord there. Same thing, different times. That’s as deep as I’d think about it. It’s mad how it works, how mental people go. The response is unbelievable.”
