I used to play in bands.

Then I went to art school.

Then I began using song as part of my art practice. I started by composing songs directly inspired by characters and imagery in my drawings; a magical bird called ‘Gilbert Glass’, a vampire on his hands and knees, licking bloodstains from the street…that kind of thing. I exhibited my drawings, accompanied by songs, soundtracking a specific body of work. I made CDRs of songs and handed them out at each solo show.

I set up a choir, The Order of The Golden Ghost. We sang and performed as part of my fellowship at The British School of Rome. The songs and performances detailed the world of Daniel Cullen.

‘After my wife died, a world opened up inside me. I head voices, called Blood Wizards. They gave me songs, ideas, dreams. When someone you love dies, listen to your Blood Wizards. And the most important thing they said? That love is stronger than death’

Then my father died. I didn’t want to make that work anymore.

I was angry. I needed a release. I started making a kind of gutter pop spoken word electro. The older work felt precious and flimsy. The new work abject and alive. I was free. I needed to perform.

Now music is an integral part of my performance work. I want to stage the self, as a kind of hallucinatory cabaret. Songs punctuate spoken word. There are chants, incantations. Playful call and response. Crafted writing for voice, over sequenced beats and ebbing pads. There are occasional jokes. And sporadic laughter. A sense of character portraits, poetic reverie, and slippery associations, coalescing into song.

My most recent release is Brón Improv.

On Brón Improv:
When I was a young boy in 1970s Ireland, I often went to a childminder off Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. It was a basement flat, with one large open-plan room and a door leading to a long, dark corridor. At the end of this corridor was a bedroom.

I was warned, “Don’t go to the bottom of the long corridor. There’s a bad man down there.”

And so, I would sit at the top of the corridor, staring into the darkness. I knew someone was down there. Occasionally, I would hear a cough or the creak of wooden slats as someone turned over in bed. I conjured images and voices, managing my anxiety. I became transfixed by terror, but empowered by my internal radio. Heavy magic.

In writing about this recording, I wanted to reference that childhood experience. I feel the process of being in the studio shares the same sense of solitude, reverie, and management of uncertainty.

The majority of these songs are improvised in one take, pulling directly from the pages of sketchbooks. I’m recording, while flicking through drawings. I riff off images, enjoying the associations of meanings and the sounds of words:

- Agnes to understand Agnes
- Gavin says it’s irrelevant, but I say it’s a question of tolerance
- His wife is called Eunice, there’s rubble on the golf course
- Three apples for a pound
- I winked at the tangle-haired fox
- You’ve got a little clown, he’s come from the wish dish, he’s making a little lattice of skin on your forehead
- My budgie had a heart attack

Some songs have that flitting spark of poetry, others are straight up brush-in-hand bedroom warbling. I rarely feel so free, as when on my own, singing with a glass of wine, to my favourite cheesewish pop song.

The drum patterns and programming come from playfully exploring the Electribe groove box, all done in one take.

I named this recording ‘Brón Improv’ because it is mostly improvisational and a sublimation of sadness—'brón' being the Irish word for ‘sadness.’

Boh!

Enjoy

LD x