I am a folk songwriter by trade but produce electronic music for fun or sometimes for projects from time to time.

These are six pieces I handpicked from my hard drive from the past 4 years or so, I'm not entirely sure how far back they go, or even which one I made first but they were all just sitting there gathering dust so I decided to pick my favourites, mix and master them and let them go!

Tracks 1, 3 and 6 are pieces that I produced out of pure boredom. I was playing video games while I made them. I would start the piece with some sort of beat, play 5 or so rounds of zombies, pause to add a bass line and melody, 5 more rounds, and continue this process until it was finished. None of those 3 tracks took more than 2 hours to make.

Track 2 is a piece I composed with an amazing contemporary dance choreographer named Eoin Ó FÍannachta who I was partnered up with as a composer on the South Dublin Arts Office funded young choreographer program 'Emergence'. We had one zoom call to brainstorm what the piece should be about, look like, sound like etc. and after that we exchanged audio files, video clips and mix note emails and the performance went off without a hitch. I think covid restrictions hadn't been lifted yet or I may have actually had covid at the time but I didn't get to see the performance ever in person which is a shame but it was very enjoyable to watch Eoin slowly formulate with every video clip he sent me and it turned out amazing. I'll drop a link to the performance at the bottom of this.

Track 4 was composed for a project I was involved with as a composer called Unwrapped, a not-so-christmas-themed Christmas event curated by Tallaght Community Arts in South Dublin. They usually would have organised yearly live events for the lighting of a huge Christmas tree just outside Rua Red Arts Centre in Tallaght but because of the covid restrictions that year, TCA decided to make a short series of videos. To this day I still don't think I could tell you what they were even about. When I found this piece on my hard drive, the Pro Tools session was titled "Fox Idea (unfinished 1.4)" but it sounded pretty finished to me. The atmosphere of the track reminded me of hearing the bells from Christ Church and elsewhere when I went for sleepovers in my older sister's flat on Dame Street when I was a kid so I decided to rename the piece "Crazy Chester Beatty".

Track 5 started off with a recording I made of a poem written and recited by a dear old friend and former bandmate, Megan McGarry. She was the lead singer of my first band that broke up around 2019ish I think but towards the end of the band's lifespan I started working as an unofficial substitute engineer in a decent recording studio in Tallaght. The band never made any recordings in there but Megan would come in semi-regularly and the two of us would make acoustic recordings of our band's music or sometimes newer songs that she never ended up releasing and still hasn't. The very last time Megan came in she recorded a poem she had just written. I had been listening obsessively to Kae Tempest's "The Book Of Traps And Lessons" so naturally asked Megan if I could put music to the recording of her poem, she thought it was a great idea.

Rant over x

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaJq4uwg_m0 (Eoin's movement piece)

Special thanks to:
Eoin Ó Fíannachta
Megan McGarry
Fionn Fealey
Gerry Horan