Praglia is a migrant's album, a meeting point for songs written and rewritten in various locations throughout Ireland, Italy and the American Southwest during the last two years, gathered together and recorded in a remote wooden house, nestled in the titular high plains which overlook the city of Genoa. 

The songs themselves are intricate and intimate, with fragments of clarinet, cavaquinho and hang layered over a base of fingerstyle guitar and melancholy baritone. They speak of obscure, dreamlike places ("the tattooed wilderness", "the origami wasteland", "the burning fountain"), peopled by a motley symbolist cast (the "Tetris angels", the "patois crow" and the enigmatic "Steven"). This distilled vocabulary charts a cryptic psychogeography; each listener must (re)align landmarks and archetypes in order to unearth its hidden narratives. 

faith healer

prehistory

acéphale

scrawl

From the new full-length album, 'Flotsam', available via iTunes, Spotify and Bandcamp...

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/flotsam/id1209561699
https://open.spotify.com/album/2ggEZa3tJmxjlSdYlb9BP7
https://joelcathcart.bandcamp.com/album/flotsam

surface tension

"seven voices" is a collaborative piece by Isobel Anderson and Joel Cathcart: a vocal song cycle embedded in a gently disorientating mesh of local field recordings, accompanied by a series of large paintings on cardboard. The work is a 'non-opera'; its haiku-like texts describe seven archetypal yet anonymous characters: the monarch, the lover, the child, the magician, the fugitive, the addict and the hermit, hinting at possible connections without insisting on a particular narrative.

seven voices

a short song commissioned by Lyric Studios for their 2010 show "The Lives of Spaces" in Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast. Written and recorded in a single afternoon with a terrible budget microphone, although I never told them that... 


pendulum

JC-penned track from the post-folk duo's debut EP, released all the way back in 2008

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/albrechtspencil

aim at nothing and miss

Taken from Albrecht's Pencil's reasonably motley sophomore EP, "Ekes From The Creel"

ovals

Taken from Albrecht's Pencil's eponymous full-length album

leviathan

inkblots

embers

composer 
songwriter
visual artist

contact: joelcathcartmusic@gmail.com

Joel Cathcart

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