When old school friends Neil O’Loghlen and Jack Talty met up and started working together in about 2010, they had an idea about something that might fly.
Both musicians had grown up steeped in traditional music and then had their heads turned by other sounds and styles. O’Loghlen added double-bass and jazz to his whistle and flute repertoire via the Cork School of Music and stints at the School for Improvisational Music in Brooklyn and the international workshop at the Banff Centre in Alberta in Canada. Talty went to the University of Limerick to study electronic music and audio production.
What would happen, the pair mused, if they wrote music that took its routing from both trad and everything else they were into, and they then got a group together to record these arrangements?
Invigorating album
The result was one of the most exciting and invigorating Irish albums of recent times. Released in 2013, Ensemble Ériu’s self-titled debut was where O’Loghlen and Talty’s initial trad sketches drew jazz, classical, rock and ambient colour and context from the contributions of Jeremy Spencer, Paddy Groenland, Matthew Jacobson, Matt Berrill and Saileog Ní Cheannabháin. It was truly an album worth making time for.
Today, as they drink green tea and talk about their new album Imbas, it's the response to the self-titled debut that sticks with them.
“The reaction caught me on the hop,” admits O’Loghlen, “but it was great to get. Our idea at the very beginning was just to get together and see what music we could come up with. There were no exterior influences or other ideas other than to see what we could come up. For something to start like that and get as much recognition as it did and to continue on to a second album is quite amazing.”
Grounding in trad
Talty adds, “Since we were 14, we had played in ceili bands and sessions and had learned the tradition and got grounding in that.
“Since then, we’ve studied other forms of music and having more of a world view of things. We’d always been chatting and we were always going to be playing music together and this was a development of that.”
“The first album is a lot different to what came before it in the trad world, which is why I think there was so much interest in it,” adds O’Loghlen.
Talty feels the band’s “carefree abandonment” owes a lot to a new universal openness when it comes to music-making. “People have access to influences now that they never had before so musicians in general are more open. It’s easier and commonplace to be influenced by different things now. There’s a bit of a DIY culture in the music – people don’t mind putting on gigs themselves and are not worrying about selling them out. There’s an audience there and it’s snowballing.”
This yen for experimentation is something O’Loghlen thinks comes with age. “In your formative years, your emphasis is less on expanding your knowledge as developing it and learning your craft.
“It’s a time of your life – when we were teenagers playing in bands, we were learning the craft.
“Neither of us have it in our personality to try out something unless we try to learn about it first. We spent a lot of those early years at the root and foundation of traditional music. It’s only natural as we got older that we began to look at things with a different perspective.”
There's a natural roll and momentum to Imbas which the pair attribute to the fact that all band members were involved in the dig and lift of the music and not just the two founders.
“The first album was a get-together,” says Talty. “Myself and Neil worked out the parts and then we got some people in. Now, it’s a band so this is a band album more than the creative experimentation which was the debut. It’s a free organic sound coloured by improvisation.”
“The idea was to perform to the unformed,” says O’Loghlen. “That took a lot of thinking because it was very hard to talk about so we had to do it. It took time to form the ideas. Now, it’s rolling and it’s more comfortable. Since the first album and the gigs, we were able to develop more material and more of a cohesive band sound.”
Blurring of lines
What’s interesting about the evolution of their sound is the blurring of the geographical lines. There are both Irish and international leanings and both mappings make complete sense.
“Our influences are drawn from a wider musical world,” says Talty, “but we try to make something recognisably personal about it. When I think of the work of someone like Brian Bourke, I feel that it’s identifiably and indigenously Irish, but it’s drawing on the wider world of visual arts. That’s something we try to do.”
“It’s Beckett for me,” says O’Loghlen in terms of influences. “He’s undeniably Irish but totally modern and avant-garde at the same time. That’s our aim. That’s our goal. I guess you could call all of this post-modern in a sense as you’re responding to modernist approaches to traditional music as opposed to conservative, straight-ahead approaches.”
It all comes back to the listener and Talty thinks Ensemble Ériu’s music fits snugly in a modern age where genres and divisions coalesce and come together.
“When you listen to something, you’re not listening in terms of styles or genres and I feel we fit into that way of thinking. It’s very much rooted in the tradition, but at the same time, people are responding to something else they hear in the album. They’re hearing something and going, ‘What is that? Where is that coming from?’. Some people get annoyed, but others are intrigued.”
Ensemble Ériu play Dublin’s Sugar Club on June 24th and Cork’s Triskel on June 25th.
