At the ripe old age of 33, the bone structures of sean-nos singer Iarla O Lionaird's skull - part of his natural instrument, after all - are setting nicely into an impressively gaunt, domed gourd. Between the soul warrior spaniel-ears of hair, the intense eyes are framed by jutting outcrops, hewn almost in the haggard image of Klaus Kinski. Maybe not quite Aguirre, Wrath of God - but behind O Lionard's upbeat, hyper-literate affability lurks some of the same blazing sense of vindication.
He's got a lot to feel confident about, with a first, highly distinctive solo album just released on Real World, Seacht gCoisceim na Trocaire (Seven Steps to Mercy); a retrospective of 20 years singing in the Irish lament/aisling tradition. The songs are embedded, not in a Clannady gush, but in the spaced and alienated atmosphere of sample-happy concrete music compacted down to a complex drone; rich ambient soundscapes over which O Lionaird's clear, high, almost urbane voice makes absolute sense; his measured, open articulation stretched out over the long, meditative tracks.
It's produced by Michael Brook - ex-Martha and the Muffins guitarist, composer/producer colleague of Brian Eno and Jon Hassel, and collaborator with vocalists like the late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. O Lionaird: "I sang the songs over two weeks, but most time was spent listening to the colour of the sound. Down home, I recorded ambient sounds: my mother's voice, rivers, bells, chimes; and we got all that and Michael's textures and put most of them through an old Musicman delay box. Michael's quite a boffin; he'd be up there with Robert Fripp and Bill Nelson.
"I wanted the album to be very cold; I didn't want to sweeten it up for anybody. And it's a core sample of the musical thing I came from - from the very old and primitive to something going other places. It's like something genetic I'm flirting with." Remarkably, Brook and himself have just managed to perform the album live, at the Lanzarote Festival of Visual Music - in the natural amphitheatre of a volcanic cave, on a playbill alongside Harold Budd, Terry Riley and Daniel Lentz.
O Lionaird's break with Real World stems from singing with the Afro Celt Sound System, a convoy of Irish musos like himself and the extraordinary piper Ronan Browne, Senegalese percussionists and kora-harpists and Simon Emmerson's clubby, trip-hop electronic settings. A regular fixture on the world festival circuit, their first album, Sound Magic, sold 150,000 copies. "It's a very successful post-fusion attempt to do something with Irish trad. The notion is to make music with somebody, instead of fusing your finished statement to his, when you don't share a common language."
O Lionaird has another collaboration coming along with producer Ingmar Kiang and their dance hybrid offshoot, Technog: "It's so much easier to work with somebody with a trip-hop sensibility, because he's used to building things up out of all kinds of assemblages - which makes things a lot more democratic for the thinking musician."
Of course, 'tis far from techno-ambient weirdness O Lionaird was reared, as the last track on Seacht attests: an aisling recorded when he was 14, under the tutelage of Peadar O Riada, in the choir in the Cuil Aodha church. The characterisation of O Lionaird as a former slogadh-winning "prodigy" makes him grit his teeth. "Some people gratify themselves that I'm way past my sell-by date, but I just want to be respected as an unusual singer, who people want to work with."
The fourth-last of 12 kids, he grew up in the breac-Ghaeltacht of Cuil Aodha: "a remote, mountainous, river-laden area. The geopolitical description, from the English landlords' point of view, used to be `shooting grounds'. But it was a wonderland to grow up in: setting spuds by hands, acres of them. It was pre-industrial. My grandfather had a farm horse, and he ploughed with it and brought in the hay. And the area always had an intrinsic sense of its own culture, with all its poets and writers from the 1600s on, within an unbroken linguistic continuum.
"The parish has a population of a few thousand, but the village itself is just a blink, and there was little divergence from the essential cultural thrust or vector, which at one stage I had difficulty with. My dad wanted us to be little soldiers of cultural destiny, maybe that's why I was supported as a singer. But I was down recently in the pub and they were all singing. I felt - like the sting of the bee - that I'd left something behind, that I've only got a short span. If I was in Cuil Aodha all the time, I'd still be learning these obscure old songs . . . " Although he remained with the choir until his early twenties, he left to study in UCD for a B. Ed (specialising in literature) and worked as a teacher. Increasingly, his "crooning" began to pop up on Shaun Davey's The Pilgrim, the River of Sound and Sult albums, Tony McMahon's Aislingi Cheoil. He even (briefly) pursued a career as a television producer, but prefers his stint as a scrubbed-behind-the-ears presenter on The Pure Drop, meeting such luminaries as Micho Russel, Junior Creehan, Sean Maguire, Treasa Ni Mhiollain, Peg McGrath, Tommy O'Connell. "I was very privileged, in that they had to talk to me. They were usually very shy, yet they were vast stores of a very complex art." Yet, despite champions like McMahon, O Lionaird claims it was difficult to find his niche. "I couldn't just pull out a fiddle and play with the lads. Mind you, I narrowed my repertoire to the slow songs, which aren't exactly session fodder."
It reminded me of a time I saw him support a band in Whelan's, coming out on his own and battling the crowd into silence. "Some places, people haven't a clue what I'm singing, but they get into the emotion. But mostly in Ireland, if you even touch sean nos, half the country hates you. But I don't sing it any different to the way it was sung in my parish for thousands of years."
Surely he polishes his style? "Well, you can't be utterly naive. Otherwise you'd make whatever noise comes out of your mouth - but I'm not market-driven. Once you make a creative effort, it becomes a juggling act. I try not to be too polished, but there's no point giving people a headache. I have a slavish attention to detail and ornamentation. It's the way I was brought up, achieving a certain level technically, while building in a certain erroneous subroutine, which gives it colour.
"Certainly, the way I sing is partially a product of Peadar's influence; those Saturday mornings in his house, listening to Mahler and Hindemith, Indian ragas and recordings of the great local sean nos singer Peaiti Tadhg Pheig O Tuama." You could extend that to O Riada's recent propensity for sampling field and farmyard sounds - or other echoes: recordings of singing boys, stretched poignantly beyond their vocal range. O Lionaird's respect is axiomatic. "Peadar is a visionary who has never been given the respect he deserves. His music is just really itself."
O Lionaird's solo album is a clear tribute to that locale. Dedicated to his parents, its cover is studded with images of the harmonium he sang into as a child, the statue of St Gobnet, the graveyard. "There was no running away from death in that culture, all the funerals and wakes and open caskets, the total indulgence in the ceremony surrounding death. It was very pagan, or Gaelic Christian.
"Time stands still in a strange way in that church. I can remember so many unusual moments as a singer there: at Easter with the candles, the lasting sense of mystery. It went beyond the church. I remember as a kid, looking into hedges and taking time to see things that only gradually reveal themselves. No matter how important music is to me, it's only a co-factor in all of that."
