VIBRATIONAL REBELLION IN LONG TONES

“One of the starting points for this music was a recording I’d made of the sound from the BAE Systems shipyard, which is situated across the park from where I live. BAE are Europe’s largest weapons manufacturer and the third biggest arms company in the world. They make warships called military destroyers at the shipyard near my house.

For over a year this consistent metallic banging noise would echo around the park for hours a day. It turned out to be the construction noise for the foundations of a massive new shipbuilding hall, a multi-million pound investment to boost the efficiency of the thriving arms industry. I have been using this recording in live sets over the last year and wanted to carry the idea through to these recordings. It caused me to think differently about environmental sound and how we choose to acknowledge or not the meaning of certain sounds we live with, how there is much information in each sound we hear.

The idea of treating machine sound as music and musical sound in a more mechanical way became an underlying action for the recordings on Lux Gratis. I am quite inspired by the repetitive nature of industrial sound and began to weave this together with my love for minimal music. During this period I was also pretty obsessed with any kind of vibrating/rumbling tones, so these sounds are all over the place on this album.

 

During a residency at Q-02 in Feb 2024, I collected recordings from different machines as well as trying out some compositional ideas for live instrumentation, featuring woodwind and keyboard instruments more than the usual viola. I love the sound and idea of air and how it’s channelled through different pipes (organs, saxophones etc) to create tones. So for this music I was drawn to air instruments more than string and bow instruments. I was also visualising the wind instruments more as an organ, in blocks of sound more than in a linear melodic way.

 

Another trail from this thought involves the idea of breath and space, considering temporality within music but also the notion of breathing space and the lack of it within certain oppressive environments. Several tracks feature underlying machine noise, intended to create a feeling of sometimes imperceptible uneasiness.

 

In the months after the residency, I edited the recordings in a collage-style to make these tracks. It’s the first time I’ve made music in this way, and purely for a recorded output rather than with a live representation in mind.” – Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh