From my Crash Ensemble composer portrait mini-album 'Lipids' released March 2021.

Stream & Purchase via Crash Records: https://li.sten.to/Lipids

Composed by Barry O'Halpin

Performed by Crash Ensemble: 
Deirdre O'Leary (bass clarinet)
Kate Ellis (Cello)
John Godfrey (electric guitar)

Lipids (2015) is driven by abstract yet very physical mental imagery; insoluble forms bubbling around in a dark medium, densely clustering and scattering. Three instruments chase each other's tails in a textural counterpoint, reverb giving delicate and liminal sounds an extended wake in which to mingle. BOH

Recorded by Jonathan Nangle at Royal Irish Academy of Music, July 2015
Edited by Barry O'Halpin
Mixed and Mastered by Adrian Hart

Lipids (2015) for bass clarinet, cello and electric guitar - perf. Crash Ensemble

From my Crash Ensemble composer portrait mini-album 'Lipids' released March 2021.

Stream & Purchase via Crash Records: li.sten.to/Lipids

Composed and Performed by Barry O'Halpin
Mixed & Mastered by Adrian Hart  

Stridula (2018-19) harnesses off-kilter tuning and unorthodox techniques to transform the amplified guitar into a sort of defamiliarised pitched percussion instrument. From simple beginnings, material spirals out into scuttling contortions, revelling in the flux and overlap of woody, metallic and noisy colours.  Drawing from forays into insect and frog sound archives, this rattling energy builds toward an eruptive, string-scratching climax that is directly transcribed from the pulsating stridulation of a longhorn beetle.

Stridula (2019) for solo electric guitar

In 'telomere', a repeating pattern becomes increasingly worn down, punctured and frayed over time.

Premiere performance by Léonie Bluett as part of the Irish Composers Collective's 'long sole sound' concert of new works for clarinet.

10th September 2015, Lutheran Hall, Dublin.


telomere

Toric' for string orchestra – Fishamble Sinfonia Performance 

Commissioned and Premiered by Fishamble Sinfonia at D-Light Studios, Dublin, September 2015, as part of their 'Death of Castrucci' concert celebrating the work of the lesser-known Italian composer Pietro Castrucci who lived and died in 18th-century Dublin.

"The next piece takes the concert on a spectacular detour from 1740s Dublin, as Barry O’Halpin’s newly commissioned 'Toric' is presented. Extended string techniques create a soundboard of dissonance, glissando, and shrieking high notes, as if this was the part of Dublin that had been infested by the bubonic plague. O’Halpin explains in the programme notes that the fifths that open Castrucci’s Concerto Grosso are transformed into “wispy, unstable lines that echo across the ensemble”. Although the piece veers in and out of dissonance, it always maintains a structure, with the two violin parts in constant dialogue."
David Scott, GoldenPlec.com


'Toric' for string orchestra –  Fishamble Sinfonia Performance

Berkelsemere (electronics)

Free Cells Drinking The Medium 

Recorded in concert at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin, July 2016.

Electric Guitar – Barry O'Halpin 
Bass Flute – Lina Andonovska
Viola – Sebastian Adams

This piece is a response to an eerily captivating piece of interference microscopy footage from 1958 that I came across by chance in the Wellcome Collection. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Ekhhhj_WI

On surface level, the film is a very clinical document of normal and cancerous cells. However, the longer I looked at these alien shapes floating in a blue void, the more abstract and visually captivating the images became, like a moving painting with distinct edges blurred by the warmth of grainy film. The rich colour palette of the footage and its fluttering, pulsating, sometimes jarring movements are sonically reflected in the piece’s microtonal harmony, rhythmic fluidity and blurred instrumental identity. As the name–taken from a title card in the film–alludes, I visualise the often fleeting, unstable musical material that jumps between the players as emerging and retreating into in its own dark liquid medium.

Free Cells Drinking The Medium (Live Excerpt)

Electric Piano , Tibetan ceremonial tuning

Improvisation

Composer: Barry O'Halpin
Performers: Kirkos Ensemble & Barry O'Halpin (guitar).
Image: Rouzbeh Rashidi

Written as a companion to a 24' silent film by director Rouzbeh Rashidi, as part of Wilderness Notes, a collaborative project between Kirkos Ensemble, 3 Irish composers and 3 directors from Experimental Film Society. Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Premiered September 2017 in a live performance/screening at Filmbase, Dublin.  Recorded Sept 2017 at Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin.

http://www.experimentalfilmsociety.com/
http://ensemble.ie/kirkos/

Notes on the Music:

"Much like Rouzbeh Rashidi’s accompanying film, the character of Stonemired is not linear or ‘narrative’, but abstract and dreamlike, as if wandering through rooms of the subconscious with starkly contrasting colours, images and emotions that are potent yet intangible. The figurative is fleeting amid a quietly churning and constantly evolving texture of drones and swells.  Just as the film embraces the distorted texture and grit of aging technologies, its sonic counterpart revels in noisy artifacts of vinyl, cassette and digital sampling, alongside the delicate acoustic impurities of barely pitched air and whispering bow hair. 

Stemming from a deep curiosity in the hidden musicality of nature, the harmonic palette is built from the sonified electromagnetic spectra of 5 chemical elements prevalent in organic cells; carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous and oxygen. Each ethereal tangle of vibrations is like a fully formed musical organism, with moving parts and uncanny harmonies pushing beyond equal-tempered familiarity.

These sonic characters –the frosty anxiety of phosphorous, the triadic warmth of nitrogen – alternately appear in distorted, intermingled and pure elemental forms, having close kinship with the haunting recurring imagery of the film." (BOH)

Notes on the Film: 

“Rouzbeh Rashidi troublingly intertwines a dark variation on a home movie full of implications of isolation and toxic relationships with the memory of a nightmare of a nuclear holocaust to come. Making vivid use of the textures of outdated video technology, he questions the boundaries between personal and universal anxiety as they mesh in the charged resonances of a technology that has itself taken on the attributes of memory.” (RR)

Stonemired (part II) - for Kirkos Ensemble & Electronics

This piece, workshopped in January 2018 as part of Chamber Choir Ireland's Choral Sketches programme, mimicks wolf and frog choruses, renders them for 16 human voices and attempts to fuse their traits together to synthesise new hybrid choruses. 

0:00–00:13  original wolf chorus recording.

00:13–00:49  Choral reinvention, harmonically faithful but stretched out in time, with nearby howl removed allowing is to focus on the singularity of the distant wolves’ gliding chord

00:49–01:04 Recording of a highly percussive chorus of tree frogs.

01:04–01:42   Choral passage borrowing irregular polyrhythms of frogs while using a transformed version of the wolf chorus harmony.

Wolf And Frog Choruses resynthesised for human voices – Chamber Choir Ireland workshop

Composer: Barry O'Halpin
Performers: Kirkos Ensemble & Barry O'Halpin (guitar).
Image: Rouzbeh Rashidi

Written as a companion to a 24' silent film by director Rouzbeh Rashidi, as part of Wilderness Notes, a collaborative project between Kirkos Ensemble, 3 Irish composers and 3 directors from Experimental Film Society. Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Premiered September 2017 in a live performance/screening at Filmbase, Dublin. 

Recorded Sept 2017 at Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin.
Mixed by Barry O'Halpin & Rian Trench
Mastered by Rian Trench.

www.barryohalpin.com
www.ensemble.ie/kirkos/
www.experimentalfilmsociety.com/

Notes on the Music:

"Much like Rouzbeh Rashidi’s accompanying film, the character of Stonemired is not linear or ‘narrative’, but abstract and dreamlike, as if wandering through rooms of the subconscious with starkly contrasting colours, images and emotions that are potent yet intangible. The figurative is fleeting amid a quietly churning and constantly evolving texture of drones and swells. 

Just as the film embraces the distorted texture and grit of aging technologies, its sonic counterpart revels in noisy artifacts of vinyl, cassette and digital sampling, alongside the delicate acoustic impurities of barely pitched air and whispering bow hair.

Stemming from a deep curiosity in the hidden musicality of nature, the harmonic palette is built from the sonified electromagnetic spectra of 5 chemical elements prevalent in organic cells; carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous and oxygen. Each ethereal tangle of vibrations is like a fully formed musical organism, with moving parts and uncanny harmonies pushing beyond equal-tempered familiarity.

These sonic characters –the frosty anxiety of phosphorous, the triadic warmth of nitrogen – alternately appear in distorted, intermingled and pure elemental forms, having close kinship with the haunting recurring imagery of the film." (BOH)

Notes on the Film:

“Rouzbeh Rashidi troublingly intertwines a dark variation on a home movie full of implications of isolation and toxic relationships with the memory of a nightmare of a nuclear holocaust to come. Making vivid use of the textures of outdated video technology, he questions the boundaries between personal and universal anxiety as they mesh in the charged resonances of a technology that has itself taken on the attributes of memory.” (RR)

Stonemired (part V)– for Kirkos Ensemble & Electronics

Performed by Ret Frem at St James Church, Paddington, London.
24th April 2018. 

Originally composed in 2014 for Kirkos.

Winning selection from Ret Frem's Call for Scores and programmed in several concerts throughout 2018, alongside works by Fausto Romitelli, Kaija Saariaho, Michael Finnissy, Holly Harding, Will Handysides and others.

RET FREM ENSEMBLE
Jenni Hogan | flute
Abi Heath | clarinet
Fraser Bowles | cello
Clare Simmonds | piano

https://www.retfrem.com

Catarrh (Ret Frem Performance, Apr 2018)

Listen in full and Purchase on Lina Andonovska's solo album 
'A Way A Lone A Last', available now on CD & digital from Diatribe Records.

https://shop.diatribe.ie/album/a-way-a-lone-a-last

Hox is the result of a close collaboration with SlapBang, the unorthodox duo of Lina Andonovska (amplified bass flute) and Matthew Jacobson (drum kit). Written to the exceptional strengths of both players, the piece merges their respective practices in contemporary classical and improvised jazz performance.

Hox uses amplification to pursue a sonic intimacy, embracing ambiguities
between wheezing air and bristling snares, flickering drones and the groan of
scraped skins. The title is borrowed from the genes that control the
development of the animal body plan, directing common embryonic
segments to diverge and transform into distinct body parts such as limbs,
wings, vertebrate spines or invertebrate antennae.

This transformation has an affinity with the piece’s cyclical, obsessive
structure and fidgeting insect physicality. Vividly present in its latter half is the warbling ‘song’ of a wasp, transcribed for bass flute, fragmented and interwoven with looping grooves and visceral, panting gestures.

"[Hox gives] me the feeling of having been pocket dialled and being led down the rabbit hole of listening to the rhythmic groove of someone’s daily ritualistic patterns, muffled and fluttering in and out of focus. Techno meets Boulez, this otherworldly kind-of-dance number is a thrilling opener for this excellent record." Music Trust Australia

Hox (excerpt)– Lina Andonovska (bass flute) & Matthew Jacobson (drums)

Barry O’ Halpin is a Dublin-based composer, member of Alarmist and electric guitarist with Crash Ensemble. 

In 2018-20 he was Arts & Humanities Artist in Residence at Parity Studios, University College Dublin, as well as Composer-In-Residence with Crash Ensemble, composing several works for solo guitar & small and large ensembles.

Written for diverse ensembles, his compositions frequently draw inspiration from the sounds and patterns of natural phenomena, weaving musical materials from animal choruses, electromagnetic spectra and the imagery of microbiology.  

His highly textural music is shot through with a crawling, organic energy, often preoccupied with unfamiliar microtonal sonorities, fluctuating rhythms, and liminal timbres.  He frequently explores new uses of the electric guitar alongside classical instrumentation, employing invented tunings and unorthodox techniques to create a sound-world less familiar than the sum of its parts.

His piece Lipids was written for and performed by Crash Ensemble in their 2015-16 Born in the 80s tour, and featured in their 2016 Composing the Island Music Marathon at the NCH.  In 2015, Toric for string orchestra was commissioned and performed by Fishamble Sinfonia & guest director Darragh Morgan, and earlier that year his Miniature for piano was performed by Raymond Deane in the Kevin Barry Room. NCH. Both as composer and guitarist, he has worked closely with Crash, Kirkos & Bastard Assignments, and curated the latter's 2014 Dublin show. 

As a member of Crash, he has premiered works by composers such as Tansy Davies, Ann Cleare, David Lang & Michael Gordon and performed at festivals Musica Nova (Finland)and Gaida (Lithuania).

He was Guitar Fellow at Bang On A Can’s 2017 Summer Music Festival in the Massachussetts, USA, as well as their November 2016 Villa Musica residency in Germany.

He is a composer and performer with experimental rock band Alarmist, whose 2015 LP Popular Demain, along with two previous EPs, have gained them an international following. Alarmist have gained acclaim for their live shows, with tours in the UK, Europe & Canada, including festivals Ottawa Jazz, Arctangent (UK), 12 Points (SWE/IR) and Match & Fuse (FR/UK). Media coverage has included BBC Radio, WNYC/NPR, All About Jazz, The Guardian and Nialler9.

He is currently a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast with Simon Mawhinney. In 2013 he obtained an MMus (Distinction) in Composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, London under Gwyn Pritchard & Paul Newland, 
In 2010 he was awarded the Geoffrey Singleton prize for his composition portfolio upon graduation from Music in Trinity College Dublin, where he studied with composers Donnacha Dennehy and Sean Reed.


(photo by Sophie Murphy)

Barry O'Halpin

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