An initial listen to The Beautiful Road, the second album by Irish duo Rónán Ó Snodaigh and Myles O’Reilly, feels a little like stumbling onto some kind of magical ritual. Something about it seems elemental, mystical and otherworldly. But look a little harder, and it becomes obvious that this is a very human album, one that, for all its preoccupation with ancient landscapes and deep time, is actually rooted very much in the present. It is a work of graft and craft as well as exceptional artistry: music like this isn’t just plucked out of the air; it is the result of a serious and well-defined working relationship, nurtured over a period of years.
So when Folk Radio got the chance to talk to Ó Snodaigh and O’Reilly, the first thing we wanted to know was how the pair first came to work together.
“We met almost 20 years ago when we both lived in Dingle and county Kerry,” says Ó Snodaigh. “We had a friend in common, Bernard Hayes, and would spend many nights back in Bernard’s house after closing hours playing songs in his kitchen late into the night. It was around that time that we first started recording together as well. We literally started recording songs in that very kitchen, and then in other various kitchens and living rooms”.
“I began collecting recording equipment and regularly would facilitate the recording of Rónán’s songs down through the years,” O’Reilly adds. “It was only up until recently, with my new found passion for modular synth and synthesisers, that I’ve had the confidence to collaborate musically instead of just engineer.”
O’Reilly’s history as a sound engineer might be one of the reasons for the album’s attention to sonic detail. Another reason is the use of outdoor recording sessions and rural settings. As O’Reilly explains, “We’re both prone to thinking a lot about things. We have hyperactive imaginations. So in our day to day lives, when there’s lots of routine and things to do, our imaginations don’t have the time to be quiet. Independent of each other, we both write songs and lots of different kinds of songs. Depending on how fast the day is or how slow the evening is, the songs can be very eclectic and different. So once we decided to isolate our creative minds somewhere quiet where we wouldn’t be interrupted, we were able to produce a certain feeling with consistency, that would pervade throughout the work. In the two very isolated places that we decided to record, there was a consistent and natural uninterrupted mindset. The kind of peace and solace one gets from travelling or walking through nature, just listening and being an observer. We knew that environment, had a healing effect on our of state of mind, and in a sense we were able to imbue those feelings into the sounds we were creating.”
All this results in a sound that is absolutely unique. Was there an intention to create a soundworld that didn’t really have a precedent, something that seems almost to exist outside of musical history?
“I’m a huge fan of folk and traditional music, which has been the inspiration for a lot of my music films and documentaries, but I’m also a lover of minimal ambient music and that kind of attitude towards creating ambient soundscapes that mirror the natural world.
Minimal ambient gets inspiration from patterns of sounds made in the natural world. Great ambient music resembles mathematically the sound of wind through leaves, the sound of birds and the seemingly chaotic randomness of sounds that exist in nature. So it really made sense as soon as I applied the same principles under Rónán’s Folk song architecture. Instead of just being a very obvious electronic beat, or noticeable melody and scale, the ambient sounds aren’t obvious at all but far more subtle. Just like in almost every environment, when we walk through a forest or through a city. If we have a pair of headphones on and we’re listening to music, there are ambient sounds that leak through the headphones that our brains also hear but don’t listen to. They’re not intrusive. That was very much my attitude towards playing electronic sounds on these records, and I guess what makes them slightly different sounding.”
O’Reilly mentions ambient music, and the influence of Eno is evident even if it is not immediately obvious. But what are the pair’s other influences, musical or otherwise?
“We listen to a lot of music when there’s a big car journey to be made. Mostly driving to gigs around Ireland. We like to play ping pong with our phones and take turns playing each other songs we adore. Mostly always, if not all the time, we keep surprising each other with songs from very different parts of the world. Songs with very different languages and cultural leanings. Our tastes are extremely eclectic and far-reaching. To say we love and adore world music in general, is probably most accurate for the pair of us.”
The pair are keen to emphasise the connectedness of their work and the constant exchange of ideas. This way of working together was, for many musicians, changed or halted by Covid. A lot of artists are tired of being asked about the pandemic, about how lockdown changed their creative processes; The Beautiful Road seems to address its effects head-on. Ó Snodaigh is keen to explain Covid’s effect on the auditory world around us and the more specific world of music and how it is made.
“When the pandemic happened and the ambient sounds of the city and in cities around the world stopped, the sound of traffic went from a roar to a hum, to a murmur, to nothing. It was evident that people enjoyed this. You could see it on social media. People posting about the silence in their backyard, and their balconies, and on their rooftops. And so when the world started back up again, people noticed the ambient sounds from the cities returning, and for the most part decided they were happier when those sounds weren’t there. So really, what we have tried to do, and it wasn’t that hard in fairness, was to create more comforting sounds in the same frequencies as the disturbing human activity sounds. Instead of the constant hiss and rumble of tyres on tarmac, we created more rhythmical hisses from scratching cardboard with a brush, creating wind rhythms with breath, rustling noises with bells. Instead of blinking and beeping electronic sounds from traffic lights, radio towers, car alarms and check-out counters we created those sounds in a more cheerful manor as if we fed a cityscape noise through an auto-tune and literally tuned the city, cheerfully, playfully and very subliminally underneath the recordings.”
They mention the wish to create a comforting auditory space. What practical steps did they have to take to achieve this in terms of adapting a studio space?
“The right room and the right speakers. We made that part very easy on ourselves. To actually hear perfectly what was going on in our recordings at the time of capturing ideas by choosing perfect shaped rooms with almost zero reflections and very high-definition, high quality studio monitors. To really pay attention to lower and higher frequencies at the time of recording so that we could play with those sonics in that exciting phase, rather than leaving it too late to improvise with them in a later mixing stage.”
An enchanting aspect of the finished album is the way Ó Snodaigh incorporates his collection of found rings and keyrings into the sound in a very visceral, physical way. How did this come about?
“I began collecting rings, earrings, bracelets and other bits of broken jewellery over the years while on tour with the group Kíla. Sometimes when you are abroad you can have an afternoon to walkabout and often I’d stumble on little trinkets on the ground. I sewed them into a crois/belt I have and some ankle bell straps too. I use the ankle bells often when recording but I had never before used all of them together. Working with Myles has been very encouraging for me in terms of exploring some of my more unexpressed ideas.”
Perhaps because of the physicality of Ó Snodaigh’s techniques, there seems to be something shamanistic or atavistic about some of his performances. “There has to be a spiritual element to it,” he says. “It is music, after all, and that’s one of the ways we can feel the big emotions and sometimes explore the big stuff.”
Of course, his capacity for “exploring the big stuff” is bigger than most people’s. As well as being a talented musician, he is also a fluent speaker, singer and writer in both Irish and English. For many bilingual artists, choosing which language to use at any given time can be governed by political, commercial or aesthetic interests; for Ó Snodaigh, the choice seems to be far more natural.
“It depends on who I’ve been talking to. If I’m talking to someone in Irish, I’ll be thinking in Irish, and chances are, if I’m working on something new, it’ll be in Irish. It’s not always that predictable though, sometimes I’m singing to a friend in my mind, and if English was what we spoke together, it’ll be in English, sometimes I feel stronger singing in Irish, it can have a very reassuring sound. I can find solace in those sounds very easily.”
Ó Snodaigh clearly has a poet’s eye as well as a keen ear for melody, whereas O’Reilly, broadly speaking, is a purveyor of mood, of subtle tonal shifts and enveloping soundworlds. I am keen to know more about his relationship with ambient music and how he evolved in that direction after being the singer in an indie band.
“In my 20s, fronting Juno Falls, we were fortunate enough to work with a producer for our first and last album Starlight Drive by the name of Herbie Macken. I already knew of Brian Eno, and I was a big fan of his minimal ambient albums, On Land, Thursday afternoon, Discreet Music. I loved those albums. But it wasn’t until I worked with Herbie that I heard electronic ambient effects sounding gorgeous in folk songs. Herbie had worked a great deal with Neil Finn from Crowded House, creating soundscapes for his music. He was really the catalyst. I only recently discovered how to create such ambient sounds. I never thought that I would be able to make ambient sounds because I thought you needed to be a scientist or mathematician to play the synthesiser, or at least be an expert piano player but sure enough during the pandemic and after watching a lot of YouTube videos, I realised, well, you only need a few tools, and it’s actually very easy. It’s ridiculously easy in fact, to create beautiful drones, tones and sounds to mirror the mood in a room, in your heart and how you feel. It’s all just so intuitive and there are sounds that I thought I personally would never be able to access. But we can all access those sounds. They’re simple to create. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to come up with a drone that best describes the mood you’re in. Herbie Macken is now my brother-in-law, because two years after him producing the album Starlight Drive, I met his beautiful younger sister Aideen who has been my partner, my girlfriend, and my wife for 18 years. Coincidentally my long time friend and bass player from Juno Falls, Dara Diffily also plays bass on The Beautiful Road. He immediately locked in with the recordings and created gorgeous and sympathetic bass lines in the mixing phase of making the record, as he has also been a star witness and willing participant in my ambient/folk journey.”
Ambient music, in general, and O’Reilly’s, in particular, can often have visual or filmic elements to it, and it comes as no surprise to learn that he is a filmmaker as well as a musician. He explains it in the following way:
“It seems as though the songs we recorded are still very much moving or growing into themselves, particularly because we’re creating visuals for the songs and it seems like a very natural, on-going process. Without us even realising at the time of recording and mixing the album, the songs were all destined to have visual accomplices. The recordings and the videos of the songs are all the one life. Perhaps it’s quite easy for me to say that because I’ve spent so long making music films but the creation of their videos has been an extremely natural process. So much easier than creating a video for a song that someone else created, where I did not have a part in the writing or recording. I guess I’m definitely setting out with that intention from the recording stage.”
O’Reilly talks about bringing a ‘sense of letting go’ to the recording. I understand this to mean the duo allowing themselves to be more open to the natural world and allowing natural processes to enter into their way of working. How important does he think it is for musicians (and people in general) to be deeply connected to their surroundings?
“In our day to day lives, we do a lot of things. We have a lot of routine. If we have a family, we need to think about all of their routines and needs. We have daily jobs, whether we’re going to work in an office, or working for ourselves. So when you’re being creative it’s more of a meditation. It’s very important for musicians and audiences to turn off all the apps that are in their mind. Just like the apps on their phone. To be able to use the full processing power and creative functionality to make and appreciate artistic expression, and for it to be a positive, rewarding and meditative experience. You can’t create or realise a masterpiece without first letting go of the external world around you, to look really deeply inside of yourself and get to the core of how you feel. To essentially express and bring clarity to those deep innermost feelings in a pure and immediate way to firstly help you understand, and then to help others relate.”
As a philosophy of creativity that sounds noble and humble and rooted in the real world. But it also sounds genuinely ambitious. So where do those ambitions ultimately lie? Do the pair have any plans to record together again in the future? Thankfully, the answer seems to be a resounding yes.
“We would like to make a third album together. We’d definitely have enough inspiration, motivation, and creative fuel to keep going. As our audience grows, more people come to the shows. And as we hear more lovely things back from people in comments online and in person, we’re more enthused to keep creating together to build on the fire that we’ve started. To climb higher up the mountain and to bring more people with us. We hopefully will release another record with even more exposure and an even greater audience. So we ultimately wish to collaborate with the right record label in order to do that. The team behind these releases has been a small family so far, with our amazing publicist/manager Louise Barker and the very generous Claddagh Records, printing our vinyls and cds, but we hope to grow that family, in order for our audiences to grow.”
The Beautiful Road is available now on Claddagh Records (Order here)
Live Dates
Sat Sept 2nd – Electric Picnic
Sat Sept 23rd – Waterville, Kerry Tickets
Sun Sept 24th – Connolly’s, West Cork Tickets
Wed Sept 27th – Whelans, Dublin
Friday Oct 20th – Culdaff, Donegal
More to be announced
Connect:
Rónán – Facebook – Twitter – Instagram – Spotify – Bandcamp
Myles – Youtube – Facebook – Twitter – Instagram – Spotify – Bandcamp – Patreon