ELECTRIC DESTINY

Roger Doyle, one of the great unsung talents of the Irish electronic music scene talks to Jim Carroll

It was in Paris in the spring of 1969 that Roger Doyle fell in love with electronic music for the first time. The young Irish musician went to see a show by the Maurice Béjart dance company. Doyle was impressed by a piece called Messe pour le Temps Présent by French electronic music composer Pierre Henry, so he bought the LP.

"It was a life-changing experience," he recalls. "It felt like I was remembering this music, which I'd never heard before. It felt familiar and I knew it was what I was looking for. It was a magical world that I wanted to find a way into. I didn't know how these sounds were made. I was very innocent. All I knew was that you needed a tape recorder. So I saved up and got a tape recorder, not knowing how anything was done, and began to experiment."

Those early dalliances led Doyle towards a calling as a composer. He's now tagged the godfather of Irish electronica (more by default than design, given how few others were following similar paths during those early years). Doyle's intriguing career has encompassed innovative work in theatre, film and dance. Later this month, he will be performing at the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF) with General Practice's Operating Theatre Ensemble.

"I don't do 'cold calling' normally," he says, "but a few years ago I took a chance and contacted the people at DEAF to find out if I could be involved in their festival. I was aware that they were young and mightn't have heard of me. To my surprise and delight, they knew my work and were keen to involve me in any way they could. This is the third year we've done something together."

Doyle regards DEAF, like RTÉ's Living Music Festival, as an important development. "It seeks to involve a new generation who inhale technology and have wide-ranging musical interests. It examines the undermining of the differences between 'high art' and 'popular culture' and the interesting hybrids evolving out of that in a 21st-century world. Both festivals bring the world to us and we badly need it."

Such events also attract attention and audiences who might not otherwise experience composers like Doyle. "It's harder to get press or radio coverage here than it used to be. Composers have slowly become inaudible and invisible . . . On the positive side, the huge success of Gerald Barry's opera The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in London recently, in a way, puts Irish composers on the map again for those who thought we had none."

Having studied in Holland and Finland, Doyle returned to Ireland in the late 1970s. It was not a welcoming place for electronic music composers. "I returned to nothing, went on the dole and didn't compose anything for a year because there were no facilities here for the sort of music I wanted to compose."

Yet Doyle persevered. CBS Ireland released his Thalia album in 1978, Rapid Eye Movements appeared in 1981, and he co-founded the Operating Theatre music-theatre company.

"We wanted to make music a really central element of the theatrical experience. We were just sick of people standing around talking and that was what Irish theatre was, and mainly still is. Of course, that's a contentious issue. In our penultimate show, Passades, which we did last year in an abandoned warehouse, we got rid of text altogether. In that sense, we fulfilled a life-long dream with that show."

Doyle enjoys this work, not least for its social and financial benefits. "Theatre has become very important for me because otherwise I'm just in the studio all day long composing. All of these things get me out into the world, get me interacting with people and earn me some extra money, which is welcome too."

He says he has few regrets about how things have gone. "I was elected to Aosdána in 1986. This gave me a small stipend from the Government each year, which enabled me to devote all my time to composing. This changed my life for the better and I have composed nonstop since then, working on huge projects, for instance a five-CD set, Babel, which took me 10 years to compose. I suppose my music would or could be better promoted in other countries.

"I had a fantasy for many years about living in Paris after my studies in Europe, being in my late twenties and thirties, speaking French, getting to know the electronic music scene, drinking coffee by the Seine with my peers, playing piano in some club at night and having a French girlfriend. As I get older I shudder at that fantasy. I would have been stranded there after a while."

Roger Doyle and Operating Theatre Ensemble perform at Live at Filmbase, Temple Bar, Dublin on October 29th as part of DEAF 2005