Some events come along at the exact right time. Next week’s Trad Rising concert in Dublin, as part of the MusicTown festival, brings together a rake of acts currently making merry in the trad and folk fields.
Given the huge activity in this scene at present, the decision to spotlight some of the prominent players and ensembles out there seems spot-on.
It’s a scene where the common currency has more to do with spirit and attitude than any kind of sonic or musical connection. Lynched and Slow Moving Clouds are two of the acts on the bill, each coming from different sides of the tradition.
Lynched’s fiery blast of new-school and classic streetwise folk is imbued with a mighty rattle of punky energy and wild-eyed intent. Meanwhile, Slow Moving Clouds is a meeting of Irish and Finnish musical minds for an expansive, layered and intriguing dive into Irish and Nordic traditional sounds.
Even when he was initially lashing out punk rock songs, Ian Lynch from Lynched found his head being turned by folk and folklore.
“When I was in my teenage years, myself and my brother were playing more punk stuff and protest songs, but I still would have had that interest in folk.
“The more I dug into it, the deeper I got, and once I went down the rabbit hole, I never looked back. I took up the uilleann pipes in my mid-20s; I went back to college to do a degree in early Irish language and folklore and I became more fascinated and intrigued by what I was finding.”
For Slow Moving Clouds’ Danny Diamond, it’s a case of “a hobby taking over my life”. The Belfast-born, Dublin-raised fiddler “played for fun, essentially” before he started working in the Irish Traditional Music Archive. “I got in there through persistence. I used to go in every week for a period of six months and ask could I have a job. I was just a nut for it. Eventually, they gave in and hired me.”
Finnish Irish
Slow Moving Clouds (SMC) sees Diamond joining forces with Finnish singer and musician Aoki and Cork cellist Kevin Murphy. "Aoki played Irish traditional music and that's what brought him here from Finland. He's got eclectic interests, he's a visual artist and he makes films and he has a very broad arts-based perspective.
“My background would be a lot more conventional in terms of traditional music. You naturally learn tunes from other people and play them, but without going under the bonnet or actively deconstructing them. The songs flow in and the songs flow out. Kevin comes from an indie and experimental background so he’d be the opposite in that his way to work is take things apart and put them back together in new ways.”
But for Ian Lynch, it was protest songs in the main which piqued his interest.
“I realised that people were singing about subjects in the same way as a punk band, but in a much more articulate and open manner. They were singing about all aspects of their lives, and the songs were giving people a voice to do this. Frank Harte has that great quote: ‘Those in power write the history, those who suffer write the songs.’ Folk songs were ways for the lower classes in society to express themselves.”
Lynch found it to be a breath of fresh air compared to the punk scene he’d come up with.
“I was involved with the punk scene for a long time, and when you’re around something for a long time, you develop problems with it. I found the punk scene was too black and white and you were only allowed sing about five subjects, like sexism, racism, war, religion and getting drunk. Apart from that, people don’t want to know.”
For Diamond, it was the ability to experiment with his SMC bandmates which opened his eyes and ears to new ways of working.
“The last couple of years have been revelatory in that regard. One of the issues with traditional music is that it tends to be ghettoised in a little box on its own and I broke out of that cardboard box and realised that anything is possible.
“I’ve talked to Ian about this before and I think his perspective is different because he’s not coming from the core of the tradition, so he can pick and choose the values he wants to keep and disregard. With me, I had all the baggage without realising it was baggage because I was coming from the heart of the thing.”
Diamond also believes trad has become a lot more structured than used to be the case.
“A lot of the older players I look at, their playing is so open and free and avant-garde, even though these terms aren’t used. They were drawing on anything they heard, be it a circus going through town or a visit to Scotland – they were just sponges for music. If those dudes were around today, I imagine they’d be doing the weirdest stuff. They were just pushing every boundary.
“Now, there are academic courses and there are places like the institution where I work, so theories and approaches get formalised and become law. We’re more inclined to learn what those musicians did note for note rather than give ourselves the same licence they gave themselves.”
Tip of the iceberg
Lynch points out that a healthy singing scene exists in the capital now.
“There’s a lot of young people getting involved and you can see it with the bands who’re playing at this gig. That’s only the tip of the iceberg because behind those bands, there’s all these different sessions of unaccompanied singing, proper serious traditional stuff. Playing in a band is great fun, but the real thing is going on behind it.
“A lot of the newcomers are really digging deep; it’s not young ones singing Dubliners’ songs. You hear people singing these long narrative ballads and they’re into the serious stuff. I think it’s grabbing attention and taking off because a lot of people are looking for something deeper than a lot of mainstream music culture has to offer.”
Lynch sees it especially in the growth of The Night Before Larry Got Stretched, the monthly singing club he helps to organise which has now been on the go for three years or so.
“When we started off, there were six or seven people sitting in the cold back room of the Cobblestone. Now you go down and the room is packed out and you’d have 100 people easily all squashed in. Many are just there to listen but we’ve had some great singers over the years.”
Diamond believes that Trad Rising also has a role to play.
“People always say that traditional music is more healthy than it’s ever been because there are so many players, but it needs an informed and engaged audience as well. This is an important event for a new emergent scene which is coalescing at the moment.
“It’s good to have a festival like MusicTown endorse and acknowledge its existence because a lot of what has been going on hasn’t been picked up on by the traditional scene itself.
“It’s a new scene which is appealing to a young, more mainstream, more urban audience, which I think is vital for the survival and re-energisation of traditional music.”
- Trad Rising takes place on April 14th, at Dublin's Button Factory. See buttonfactory.ie and musictown.ie
