Paul Morrin
Paul Morrin has been producing music under his Spectac moniker for the past fifteen years though he presently creates under his given name. He founded Dublin-based electronic music record label Front End Synthetics (FES) as a platform to release his and his friends’ music. Morrin’s music is characterised by sharp-edged percussive sounds together with various overlaying patterns. Melody-saturated riffs and random twisted noise are other traits that define his musical output. His début album, Rabbid, was released on FES in 2003 and garnered critical praise.
“Sounds like it has grown of its own accord in the woods at night, emerging spectre-like from the shadows… a highly recommended album” Warp Records
“Anthemic, pounding, stately, slinky, and alien” Grooves Magazine
Morrin/Spectac was engaged by Lo Recordings for their offshoot Lo Alternative Frequencies (LOAF). His third release, the five track EP Horn, was released in December 2006 and was similarly praised in the media.
“Another great release from one of Ireland’s most innovative acts” Hot Press
“Fun, lively, yet emotive electronica” Boomkat
Morrin has collaborated with several leading Dublin-based artists including composer Daniel Figgis on projects such as Snakes & Ladders, THE BANQUET, and When It’s Ajar: the music of Daniel Figgis?, visual artist Lauralee Guiney on a 24-hour continuous sound piece for her work Habitus, and sound design projects with film director Eoghan Kidney, most notably his 2005 Film Fleadh-winning short, Stars and Save that Robot for RTÉ.
Daniel Figgis
Composer, producer, curator, and intermedia artist Daniel Figgis is dedicated to audacious applications for technologies old and new alike. In 1994 he released the highly influential album Skipper on Rough Trade Records which was “recomposed” by 50 fellow musicians for the project When It’s Ajar: the music of Daniel Figgis?, released in 2003.
Large-scale original live performance works include MOTOR (Kilfane Glen, Kilkenny, 2004), TAMPER (Marlay Park, Dublin, 2004), THE BANQUET (National Basketball Arena, Dublin, 2006), BATTERIE 1&2 (Peter Norton Symphony Space, Broadway, New York, 2010), ASCENSION (Pearse Museum Walled Garden, Dublin, 2010), The Silence (Marlay Park boathouse, forest, Dublin, 2011), THE BATTLE oF SPEEDS (The Orangery, Marlay Park, Dublin, 2011), and CITY HALL (City Hall, Dublin, 2013).
Photo by and © Dermot Kelly
Commissions include Soundtrap 1: DOPPLER for Beaconsfield Gallery, London, 2006, POST-PRODUCTION for WNYC New Sounds, New York, 2006, PHOTO-FINISH (with shortcuts) for arts>World Financial Center, New York (a 20th Birthday commission), 2008, AUDITORIUM for Wexford Opera House, 2009, THE JABLONSKI SUITE for Tranquillity Spa, Wexford, 2009, and dimmerswitch for Crash Ensemble at Galway Arts Festival, 2012. Daniel is currently working on the recording dimmerswitch variations for Crash Ensemble with additional musicians.
As curator, Daniel has presided over poisonhats in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, the eartheatere inaugural event at Ireland’s National Concert Hall, and Snakes & Ladders, a festival of new Irish music at Wexford Opera House, the World Financial Center, and Symphony Space, New York.
Tóirse Ó Ríordáin
Tóirse Ó Ríordáin is a musician mostly known for his dance music productions. He is less known for his guitar compositions, two of which are featured on this album.
Photo by and © Paul G. Smyth
Deep Burial
Deep Burial was a production duo comprised of George Brennan and Richard Howard who were active from the mid-nineties to the early twenty-first century. Over the course of four releases they etched out a singular vision of instrumental music influenced by, among other things, hip-hop, punk rock, horror soundtracks, science fiction, dodgy priests, the occult, glue sniffing, and psychedelia.
Avant Garde Your Grille is a Deep Burial “recomposition” based exclusively on the recorded works of Daniel Figgis, originally released on Spitroast Records (2003), drawn from three tracks: dimmerswitch variations #1, the light again, and Drool’s Holdings.
Richard G. Evans
Richard G. Evans grew up in Dublin. He performed and recorded as guitarist and composer with the experimental rock group Virgin Prunes from 1977 to 1984. He holds a PhD in Neural Networks for robotic control from Imperial College, London.
Photo by and © Daniel Figgis
Roger Doyle
Roger Doyle is known for his pioneering work as a composer of electronic music. He has worked extensively in theatre, film, and dance, in particular with the music-theatre company Operating Theatre, which he co-founded with Olwen Fouéré. Babel, his magnum opus, which took ten years to compose, was released on a 5-CD set in 1999 and contained 103 pieces of music. It is a celebration of the multiplicity of musical language and evolving technologies. Other works include an onstage piano score for the Gate Theatre production of Salomé, directed by Steven Berkoff, which played in Dublin, London’s West End, and on three world tours.
Photo by and © Laelia Milleri
Recent work includes a series of soundtracks for imaginary films – a cinema for the ear – for the National Symphony Orchestra and Crash Ensemble, and the electronic chamber opera Heresy, performed in Dublin in 2016.
He is a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s state-sponsored academy of creative artists, and is currently Adjunct Professor at Trinity College, Dublin.
Paddy Hunt
Paddy Hunt is an Irish born producer/songwriter residing and working in London. He co-wrote the single Bad Intentions for MiC Lowry (Polydor), which topped the UK iTunes R’nB album chart. He also produced/co-wrote Polina’s (Eminem, Felix Jaehn) lead single Little Babylon (Sony Ultra), as well as releases on Pegasus (Sony Germany), and NOEP (Sony Sweden).
Photo by and © Barney
He has written and produced with numerous artists including Imani (RCA Records), Richard Judge (Robin Schulz), Valerie Broussard (Carlin Music), Antigoni Buxton (Island Records), Erik Arbores (Spinning Records), Tom Aspaul, WOLFFE, Samson, and Embody.
“Sleep Circus (remix) is a reimagining of components from the work of Daniel Figgis and percussion from a two-year-old Charles in his cot. Deep sub-bass textures intimate the beauty and often hostile nature of sleep.” Paddy Hunt
Charles
Charles wants to be an architect when he grows up.
Photo by and © Daniel Figgis
Cathal Coughlan
Cathal Coughlan is an Irish singer-songwriter and a long-time resident of London. He is best known for his work with the groups Microdisney (especially the album The Clock Comes Down The Stairs, often cited in selections of the best Irish albums of its era), and The Fatima Mansions. Since the 1990’s he has produced five albums under his own name, most recently the album Rancho Tetrahedron (2009). He has also contributed original music to a number of film soundtracks and, over a period of a decade, has performed in a series of music theatre productions in France.
Photo by and © Bleddyn Butcher
His most recent recorded work was The North Sea Scrolls (2012), a bogus and satirical episodic joint history of Britain and Ireland, told in the form of music and spoken word, which was a collaboration with the English singer/songwriter Luke Haines and the Australian writer Andrew Mueller.
GREETINGS
GREETINGS is a rarely convened Nu-Prog band based in Dublin, Berlin, and New York.
Photo by and © PETER
Vincent Doherty
Vincent Doherty is a composer and sound designer. Originally from Drogheda, he moved to Dublin in 1988 and during the early 1990s began to record his own compositions. His fascination with the use of tape loops led to his early work in theatre. Since then he has worked with Ireland’s leading theatre producing organisations including The Abbey Theatre, Fishamble, Corn Exchange, RoughMagic, Bedrock, Barabbas, PanPan, and The Lyric Theatre, Belfast.
Photo by and © Barney
His work for theatre has been heard internationally at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, Sydney Arts Festival, Re-imagining Ireland festival in Virginia, and at a number of European arts festivals. He has also created music and soundscapes for several radio plays which have been broadcast on RTÉ.
Since 2003 he has worked as part of an ongoing creative partnership with Ivan Birthistle. Vincent has also worked with singer Deirdre Behan and composer Daniel Figgis. His work with Figgis includes the commissions Rotary Grove and Termonfeckin for the Snakes & Ladders festival in New York.
Donald Teskey
Donald Teskey was born in Ireland and is a visual artist who works predominately in the medium of painting. He has exhibited in Ireland, UK, USA, France, China, and South Africa. He is represented in public and private collections worldwide.
Photo by and © Reuben Teskey
Princess Tinymeat
In 1983 the mincing machine came down to have a party. It was called Princess Tinymeat.
And what a party it was. Creative, destructive, transgendered, violent, and very, very loud. The debris it left in its wake was partly salvaged and reassembled by the likes of My Bloody Valentine, and its sonic influence would be heard well into the nineties.
Following his nudge from Virgin Prunes, philosophy graduate and ex child star Binttii set about building something altogether more extreme – a collective, utterly sui generis yet strangely prophetic – made up of Binttii (voice, tapes, drums), Tom Rice (guitar), Ian ‘Sissy’Box (bass), and Colin Zappa (drums). Occasional members included the Irish avant-garde composer Roger Doyle, Virgin Prunes guitarist Dik Evans, Gorehounds drummer Gerry Gore, and Hinterland guitarist Gerry Leonard.
Princess Tinymeat (Montgomery Clift’s Hollywood epithet) achieved a cult status, not least amongst the gay and Goth sets, althought there was considerably more to them than gender bending and hair spray. They had an intellectual wit, humour, and a genuine intensity that was lacking in most of the bands they were associated with. PTM had a vision and ability that far outreached those of its contemporaries. There was much studio experimentation with proto-sampling, tape loops, processing, found objects, and a prescient use of layered vinyl crackle which brought puzzled calls from record pressing plants. Post-Punk in approach; Prog, arguably, in intent. Literary Pop with malevolence. Think John Barry, King Crimson, and W.B. Yeats fed through a grinder.
Photo by and © Ronan Bodley
Their first record, released in 1984, was the reverb-drenched 12” Sloblands / The Fairest Of Them All (Rough Trade). The cover, which was censored in all countries of release except for France, shows a gender-confused Binttii, naked save for a pillow/empathybelly. The production and attention to detail on this debut is clearly indicative of mental illness – pixie vocals echoing from a subterranean world of torture and anguish, the multidimensional listening experience as challenging as wading, neck-deep, through mud on bad acid.
After the sweet aural bludgeoning of Sloblands, they released a slightly more danceable 7” called A Bun In The Oven / Wigs On The Green (Rough Trade).
Their final and most accessible contribution was released in 1986 on both 7” and 12” and was called Angels In Pain / Put It There / Devilcock! (12” only) (Rough Trade). While maintaining the feeling of having woken from a bad dream, it had much more of an eighties dance floor appeal and became an underground success in clubs in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Devilcock!, worth the purchase of the 12” alone, has a relentless repetitiveness reminiscent of The Fall at their finest, working itself incrementally into an unprecedented frenzy, known to occasionally induce vomiting.
Witnessing a Princess Tinymeat performance was like being hit by a train draped in flowers. They became a regular event at Dublin’s Sides nightclub, their shows being a veritable assault of strobes and smoke (one notable gig at Dublin’s TV Club filled the venue and street with a thick and hazardous cloud). The stage would invariably be filled with multiple band members and dancers in flamboyant clothes and body paint, brandishing cardboard cut-out guitars and miming to viciously loud backing tracks – a performance collective led by the chimera that was Binttii, who was hailed as “the true Queen of Pop” and the greatest architect of noise in the world outside of hip hop by New York’s venerable Village Voice. Their deafening live performances, undercut by a provocative wit and an elfin body radical presence/presentation, generally lasted less than 25 minutes, leaving onlookers angered, bewildered, but invariably astonished.
Photo by and © Tony Higgins
Amid glowing music press reviews and several television appearances, including a legendary appearance on RTÉ’s Late Late Show, which resulted in an eighteen month national TV ban, the hobgoblin Binttii achieved celebrity status for several years, producing a number of bands during this time, most notably Dublin’s garage-punks the notorious Gorehounds, giving them the meat and two veg they otherwise might have lacked.
Princess Tinymeat might have gone on to better things, but through a combination of over-eager substance abuse, self-harm, crowd violence, and an errant entourage, they managed to implode before reaching the heights they deserved, but not before the spontaneous combustion or conscious derailment that was the fiercely innovative wall ofnoise: Devilcock!
Binttii was also eager to shed media obsession with his flagrant transvestism, deeming it a distraction from the job in hand.
Their recordings speak to a rigorous and timeless economy of purpose, intentionality, and constant dizzying invention. We give you PTM, exclusively derived from their TV backing tracks, albeit necessarily in truncated form. Their journey from utter vilification to the haven of Heresy Records is, in its bizarre fashion, entirely in keeping with their necessarily long game.
Princess Tinymeat came and went in the blink of a heavily mascaraed fake eyelash. They are still yet to be equalled.
Prophetic, Provocative, Powerful, Pugnacious Princess Tinymeat.
ALICE DUFFY 2017
Spooky Ghost
Spooky Ghost is the solo stage name of renowned guitarist, producer, and songwriter Gerry Leonard. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, he now lives with his wife and daughter in Upstate New York. Gerry has a history of creative collaborations with David Bowie, Suzanne Vega, Laurie Anderson, Rufus Wainwright, Roger Waters, and many other artists.
Ceol Na Phuca / ASCAP
Photo by and © Daniel Figgis
SOM
SOM is a Dublin-based Composer / Engineer / Producer mainly working with electronic artists.
Photo by and © Mike Mannix
Deafector
Deafector is an Irish electronic music producer with a love of the old school sounds and methods, using a mixture of hardware and software to produce his sound. With his combination of acid house basslines, big piano leads and a few ethereal pads and arpeggios thrown in for good measure, there is a defined unique style which sounds as good on your home hi-fi as it does on the dance floor.
This track is a recomposition based exclusively on Daniel Figgis’ DOPPLER, a Beaconsfield Gallery (London) ‘Soundtrap’ commission June 2006.
“… By convincing us that (his) sounds are coming from a distance and then disappearing, while we remain still, (Figgis) successfully exploits the Doppler effect…”real” sounds… create a tonal convergence… the allowing in of “real” sounds alongside those that have been altered/created, serves to showcase Figgis’ construct, the artist now aurally in direct comparison, or competition, with the scientist.” Isobel Harbison, CIRCA
DOPPLER composed & produced by Daniel Figgis