Myles O’Reilly performs ‘Her First Crios’ while Aideen Macken hand weaves a traditional Irish waist belt called a Crios. ‘Her First Crios’ is featured on the new album from Myles O’Reilly’s [Indistinct Chatter] series of ambient works titled ‘An Ode To Soft Landings’ https://mylesoreilly.bandcamp.com/alb…
“A ‘Crios’, pronounced ‘Kriss’ is a type of hand woven waist belt that was commonly worn in Ireland for many thousands of years. Sadly during British occupation they were banned, and the tradition died out. Each Irish family would have had their own unique pattern. Knowledge of how to weave the family Crios would have been handed down from generation to generation.
Christmas 2021 for Aideen and I was bit rough. We both had Covid. Thankfully my present to Aideen was a small weaving loom. She had only recently joined The Liberties Weavers @thelibertiesweavers, a local organisation dedicated to reviving some of inner city Dublin’s old weaving traditions. Where we live in Dublin 8 was for hundreds of years was the weaving mecca of the country. It’s here that Aideen learned of the Crios and how to make one.
This film is a document of how we spend a lot of our days at home. I’m making music upstairs and Aideen is weaving downstairs. The cats look on. It details the exact process we both go through in practising our new found crafts. The song I’m playing titled ‘Her First Crios’ is the current ambient manifestation of a song ‘The Most Colorful Thread In The Loom’ from the album I released earier this year, the video of which I posted here. It is what the tune has evolved in to now. The emotions from that song, dedicated to Aideen and her weaving, put under the microscope. A deeper and totally instrumental dive in to those feelings, moulded from the same intentions.”
By Thomas Blake Traumatic events can sometimes change lives in unexpected ways. In Myles O’Reilly’s case, suffering a serious accident and spending over a year in recovery provided a pathway for his discovery of ambient music. Up until that point, his musical output had focussed predominantly on pop and folk idioms (he was once the guiding light in the Brad Pitt-endorsed Irish underground indie-pop act Juno Falls). He is still capable of writing luminous, gem-like folk songs of the highest quality – see 2022’s Cocooning Heart for proof of that – but he has also developed a parallel career as a purveyor of gauzy, dreamlike ambient instrumentals. Music from the Threshold is the latest in a clutch of compositional albums and the most varied and emotionally resonant yet.
The compositions seem to take inspiration from both Western and Eastern ambient music. At times, they are thick and earthy, with the deep sheen of polished mahogany. At times, they are minimal and chilly. Frequently, the two strands combine to create a sound that has echoes of Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 2013 collaborative album, Disappearance. It’s a delicate balance, achieved with apparent effortlessness. Household Chores, for example, pits tinkling, icy top notes against a resonant and oaky background ambience.
Although meditative to its core, there is a paradoxical liveliness to many of O’Reilly’s compositions that is unusual in ambient music. It is fitting that the album is inspired partly by the death of O’Reilly’s cat: cats can change on a whim from the laziest to the liveliest of animals, and this split personality makes its way into these soundscapes in the form of Watching the Beautiful Game’s skittering, popping electronics and hazy, slightly decayed background notes. Movement is an important feature. Guiso Walks the Kerry Way is rangy and exploratory in a way that ambient music normally isn’t, but it never forsakes its calmness.
The way these tracks are built and layered means that each has its own distinct profile, which means that the mood changes subtly from piece to piece. A Holy Tone, as its name suggests, is reverent, dense, though not without a sense of play and an engaging twitchiness. The melodic overtones of Midnight Art Attack have a drifting, dreamlike quality, improvisational and random-sounding, like the musical equivalent of automatic writing. Noah Under the Stairs is sinuous and soothing, its tones rippling out in restful contours while the underside grows staticky and papery.
The Visible Soul of the House is perhaps the album’s most dramatic moment: drawn-out synth chords build and shift, hinting at the monumental. The track seems to inhabit deep time, to examine a hyper-extended moment from the perspective of an apparently inanimate object. It is also the most cinematic piece: O’Reilly is a filmmaker, and the whole album has a vivid visual sense but here it becomes more noticeably filmic, more structural, even introducing the eerie idea of a narrative just beyond comprehension. For all its calming qualities, ambient music has the ability to capture strange and uncanny life forces, to tell stories in a deeper and more enigmatic way than with simple human language. It seeps into the cracks between states of consciousness and merges the states of dreaming and wakefulness, life and death.
Myles O’Reilly seems to understand this uncanny power innately, and he puts it to mesmerising use on Music From the Threshold. The final track, One Last Loving Gaze, is short, sad, and almost entirely still. It is a fond but aching farewell, and like everything O’Reilly does here, it is suffused with grace and dignity, strangeness and quiet passion.
*** Music from the Threshold LISTEN to album tracks via Bandcamp ***
The video for ‘The Dealers’ was made by Myles O’Reilly. The song was directly inspired by singer and songwriter Brian Brannigan’s trips with his mother
‘The Dealers’ is a deftly lyrical and musical highlight from Dublin band a lazarus soul’s recent album No Flowers Grow in Cement Gardens.
“I was fascinated by these strong working-class inner-city women, who were the breadwinners in a time of high unemployment & eked out a living in all weathers. I loved the vibrancy of it all as they brought Dublin alive with their sales pitches, Apples 5 for a pound.”
The song is a beautifully-realised elegy to Bridie and Tessie, two Dublin characters “out on their feet, selling knocked-off Reebok along cobbled streets.” The song’s orchestration is by Joe Chester and features noted Irish musician Steve Wickham on violin.
Myles O’Reilly’s music video underscores the parallel between the past and present with footage of the diverse and vibrant market now and then, with footage from the market now, and archive clips from Hands: Dublin’s Workhorses and The Humours of Moore Street.
Since the ’90s there has been a perennial threat that Moore Street would be closed down and replaced by a shopping centre, and it’s also the spot where Padraig Pearse surrendered to British forces along with five of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of Independence in 1916.
Filmed and musically scored by Myles O’Reilly, the flora and fauna of Rónán Ó Snodaigh’s poem, When Peace Broke Out In The Garden, become the central characters in an epic tale of war and transformation.
By Alex Gallacher
The flora and fauna of Rónán Ó Snodaigh‘s poem, When Peace Broke Out In The Garden, become the central characters in an epic tale of war, negotiation, peace talks and transformation. The changing seasons mark the turning tides of fortune and defeat, prayers and hope for new beginnings. Will peace return?
The reading was filmed by Myles O’Reilly and is set in the scenic Sheep’s Head Peninsula (West Cork, Ireland); Myles also provides the ambient score. It’s great to see them collaborating here again. In last year’s interview for their album The Beautiful Road, Thomas Blake observes: Ó Snodaigh clearly has a poet’s eye as well as a keen ear for melody…O’Reilly…is a purveyor of mood, of subtle tonal shifts and enveloping soundworlds.
There’s a wonderful magic to the collaborations of these two, something Myles touched on in his guest article last year:
In that quaint cabin, isolated from the world’s noise, music flowed as if the dam was broken. All of our thought power for each lap of the moon could be dedicated to our craft. Time melted into the ether, and we lost ourselves in selfish sonic reverie. No interruptions, no distractions. Just us and our instruments. Melodies and rhythms that excited our ears. Not forgetting momentary pauses to be creative in the kitchen. To replenish and recharge. Stepping out regularly to gaze at the waters of Lough Key and the woodlands surrounding us, another plate of our favourite fuel in hands: bacon, eggs, black pudding, and bread, to which the last track on the album now serves as an ode.
