In Three Songs (2007), O’Connor couples extended vocal techniques with the ukulele. In this piece, O’Connor was particularly interested in what scholars of phonetics call the “vowel pool”: the matrix of all possible vowels. No single language uses all the vowels contained in the vowel pool; English speakers use only a limited number. For Three Songs O’Connor extends his “pool” to include vowels used in Polish, Estonian, Chinese, Japanese and several other languages. These are notated using a combination of the International Phonetic Alphabet and photographs of the landscape around South Dublin County. The latter are used in conjunction with cross-sections of the vocal tract to indicate specific tongue-positions to the singer. In this work, the macrological geographical structures of South Dublin are replicated micrologically in the singer’s mouth, producing vowel sounds from Vilnius, Tibet and Berlin. Performed by Jennifer Walshe.

"Three Songs" by Ukeoirn O'Connor

Scintillia consists of three huge scores made of bamboo, willow and wicker. One score is based on satellite photographs of a forest in South Dublin County; the other two scores are based on constellation positions and satellite orbits in the sky over Tallaght on 15 March 2007. In constructing the scores from bamboo and wicker, Verens was influenced by the stick charts of the Micronesian Marshall Islanders. The stick charts of the Marshallese are used as navigational aids for rowing canoes between islands, and notate ocean currents and swells rather than geographical formations. Verens writes “The stick charts fascinate me because they are a completely different way of thinking about mapping, being  concerned with patterns and flows or energy and how these flows are affected by objects that exist within them. This mapping methodology seemed perfectly suited to sound.” Similarly, Verens has often referred to Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, noting “Music doesn’t merely have a shape but shapes the world.” In Scintillia, Verens plays a sort of glass bead game with space and sound, highlighting connections between constellations, geography, sound and energy, and promoting a very unique type of musical harmony. Performed by Jennifer Walshe.

"Scintillia" by Detleva Verens

Boon considers his Community Choir Drawings series an open-source composition, one in which the viewer is expected to be an active participant in decoding and assigning meaning. 

The deployment of communal authorship in this project recalls for Boon the gift drawings and songs of the Shakers, drawings which were executed as depictions of heavenly inspirations or gifts. Gift drawings were not considered to be the work of an individual artist (the drawings were never signed), but a contribution to the whole community that could be employed as any member saw fit. 

Boon’s Community Choir Drawings series is imbued with a similar sense of openness and generosity, which reflects his career-long engagement with the ethics of community and the importance of group spirit.

Performed by Jennifer Walshe.

"Community Choir Drawing 1029: lamh" by Turf Boon

Heavily-influenced by the Surrealists, outsider artist Violetta Mahon’s dreams have always been central to her practice. She has kept dream diaries meticulously since 1988; though she originally wrote in the English alphabet, since 2000 she has recorded her dreams using a combination of the Deseret alphabet developed by the Mormons, and Sol Re Sol, a musical language devised by François Sudre. Mahon’s dreams consistently feature sound in a wide variety of forms, such as in the following extract:

“There is an African priest, about 5’10”, a little on the skinny side. He’s wearing a red and white 1980s style computer knit jumper with a picture of Marilyn Monroe on it. Marilyn is red and white, knitted in slightly large and awkward pixels. The arms of the jumper are a bit baggy. The red is a little close to wine. He’s wearing a priest’s shirt and collar under the jumper (which is slightly v-necked); the shirt is red, a slightly more tomato red than the red of the jumper, and the collar is white. He’s holding a padded toilet lid out in front of him. There’s a picture of Marilyn on the toilet seat, surrounded by pastel chintzy flowers; this is overlaid with a gold-coloured plastic lyre which he plays.” 

Mahon’s dream diary practice also extends to extracting particularly notable musical imagery from her dream diaries and rendering this imagery in watercolour collages. Mahon calls these watercolours “clamours”; they function as graphic scores which musicians can use in performance. Realisation by Jennifer Walshe.


"The King, Poto and Deauville" by Violetta Mahon

The most important aspect of drag queen The Dowager Marchylove’s recent text work is her sound poetry, composed in response to specific sound walks in Dublin. As the quintessential flâneur Baudelaire immortalised a brief encounter with a woman in the streets of Paris in À une passante, so do the Dowager’s sound poems strive to seize and glorify the sounds she hears on her peregrinations. The Dowager’s practice differs from that of the nineteenth-century flâneur, however. In The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin writes of the decline of the arcade and with it of flânerie, of how “the department store is the last promenade for the flâneur.” For the Dowager, on the contrary, this is the beginning—her promenade extends throughout the streets of Dublin, through shopping centres to bus-stops and in and out of housing estates. In her suite The Wasistas of Thereswhere, That Blows in all the Vallums and Let’s all Wake Brickfaced, we see the Dowager treading a path through Tallaght to the Hellfire Club, walking north along the path of eskers, traversing Clondalkin to the Twelfth Lock of the Grand Canal; moving, being, listening, present in the moment and echoing that moment back in a continuously shifting blend of sound, text and image.  

"The Wasistas of Thereswhere" by The Dowager Marchylove

Freya Birren originally trained as a marine biologist at the University of Bergen, receiving her master’s degree in 2006. In 2007 she moved to Ireland to pursue research into the impact of near surface geophysical change on the anammox bacteria at the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, NUI, Galway. After consulting on Grúpat member Bulletin M’s recordings of under-water sounds off the coast of Galway, Birren began to turn her attention to sound and art. Her first exhibitions at Tulca Arts Festival, Galway and the Model Arts Centre, Sligo focused on extremely detailed drawings, natural extensions of her interest in 18th century botanical and zoological illustration. Since then Birren’s focus has turned to sound and film, applying the biologist’s gaze to time-based media as organisms embedded within the electromagnetic field.  

"Libris Solar" is taken from the EP of the same name, available from Farpoint Recordings. The EP features music, drawings and a film by Freya. 
http://farpointrecordings.com/cds/freya-birren--libris-solar/

Performed by Jennifer Walshe.

"Libris Solar" by Freya Birren

O’Brien Industries’ Radiophonic© series are available in a wide variety of formats, from CDs for the radio presenter to LPs for the professional DJ. The In TimeTM collection continues O’Brien Industries’ exploration of guerrilla- style recording, in this case using obsolete spy technologies bought wholesale from Cold War suppliers to record the latent dynamics of social situations in present-day Ireland. In a 3© features two fortune-tellers reading the same palm, strangely concurring and disagreeing, unfurling meaning and subterfuge, guess-work and fact. 

"In a 3" by O'Brien Industries

Since 2000, Bulletin M has been working on "The Bulletin M Book of Songtags," an open work consisting of hundreds of sound files, many of them field recordings made in South Dublin County. These sound files are arranged in various taxonomies, ranging from “Ducks; Tymon Park” through “Grannies, Square; complaining” to “Luas Hair Band Vocals; David Lee Roth”. According to Bulletin M, “People tell me how many sound sources they have at home, and I make them a version of Songtags tailored specifically to their space. A CD in the kitchen, a CD in the front room, two more upstairs, one in your car? You get five CDs. You play them simultaneously, on shuffle, preferably for days. The idea is to change your relation to space completely.” 

"The Bulletin M Book of Songtags (edit #47a)" by Bulletin M

Composer Flor Hartigan’s interest in non-traditional musical notation is evident from her earliest works. My Fair Gob (2001) is notated on a series of delicately woven strips of paper; other compositions are notated in embossed tin, embroidery, and macramé. Hartigan’s more recent scores can seem austere in comparison, focusing as the artist says “merely on the line.” 

Conturador (2007) stems from Hartigan’s engagement with the River Dodder in South Dublin County; over a period of a year, she made an intensive study of the river, yielding a series of field recordings, videos and sketches. Hartigan then relentlessly worked and re-worked this material, creating a musical score laden with intricate weavings and delineations, contours and finely-graded marks.

Performed by Jennifer Walshe.

"In a 3" by O'Brien Industries

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