While Irish experimental musician Áine O’Dwyer may be best known as a harpist, her improvisational work embraces the broader aesthetics of sound and its relationship to environment, time, audience and structure. On Gallarais (MIE, 2017), she utilised the acoustic decay found in Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s tunnel 50 feet below the Thames, transforming it into a ‘mystic cave’. While on her three-volume Turning in Space Blank Forms series (recorded between 2019 and 2023), the clouds of noise found in Lady Helen Seymour House, a former hospital in East London, transformed an untempered piano into something more alien sounding.
One of her well-known and sought-after releases, ‘Music for Church Cleaners Vol.1 & Vol.2,’ is now available on Bandcamp. The original eight-track album was released in 2012 on Paul Condon’s Limerick-based cassette-only label Fort Evil Fruit. An extended 17-track version (vol. I and II ), which doubled the original album’s length, was released on double vinyl via MIE in 2015 and had a second pressing the same year.
Music for Church Cleaners incorporates a series of solo improvisations on the pipe organ at St Mark’s Church, Islington, to which she was granted access over several months while the cleaners went about their duties. The recordings are as much about the space and the audience – “vacuum cleaner, a child’s laughter, various echoed clatters and chatter become part of the music.” The cleaners also requested that she not remain on one note for too long.
An extract from the Paul Condon’s release notes:
The album is multifaceted and conceptually satisfying in many ways. It’s simultaneously a series of solo improvisations, a site-specific piece of performance art, rich in chance elements, and even qualifies as a field recording, where the transcendent and menial meet. Despite the absence of cheers and applause, it’s also a live album. In this new extended incarnation, it becomes almost a kind of minimalist opera, with a subtle plot of polite contention softening amid curiosity about the trumpet that takes us out of this most concrete of recordings with a single psychedelicised blast.
Metaphysical themes are hard to avoid using an imposing instrument traditionally intended to inspire them. The titles hint at Áine’s meditative concerns while playing. Here is an Irish lapsed Catholic mind (as Cranley told Dedalus) “supersaturated” with the religion it rejects: the double meaning implicit in “church cleaning”, the forbidden “deep sounds”, the pensive, often brooding hue of the music itself, heavy in every sense. Throughout I hear the dark depths of thoughtfulness, warmth, and mischievous wit that is quintessentially Áine.