Irish electronic artist Daithí is set to release his highly-anticipated third solo record, ‘I’m Here Now’, via Strange Brew Records this Friday the 9th of September. I spoke to Daithí about how he created this mesmerising collection of tracks, the fantastic collaborations on the album, the inspiration behind his songs including the spontaneous and grounding moment that inspired ‘Keep It For The Next One’.
‘I’m Here Now’ is an immersive listening experience, each track flows beautifully into the next with ease.
“Yeah, it was an interesting one. I came at it a very different way to what I would usually do. My last two albums, I would write a whole pile of songs, maybe almost 30 or 40 songs and then I would just pick the best out of them and then try and improve on them. Whereas this album was written differently. I had two or three songs that I really liked, that I thought were really important to me at the time of writing them. Then I spent the rest of the time connecting those dots writing songs that I thought would run from one to the other in a really nice way. So it was a really interesting way to do it and I think the main reason I was able to do it that way was because I had plenty of time and I was out in the country. This was the first record where I was in my hometown as opposed to traveling around and working in different places. I did it all in the one spot in this place called The Beekeepers in Ballyvaughan, which I kind of run as an artists retreat and yeah, I just spent these big long weekends with a couple of different mates working on different pieces and getting to play different parts over it and stuff. Yeah, I agree with you it has this very kind of connecting, run altogether. You can listen to it as one big long project and there’s a lot of big open spaces with no vocals and stuff like that as well. So yeah, it was really fun to make that was the main thing, you know.”
As the album progresses the beats become heavier, more intoxicating and frenetic. However, Daithí expresses moments of euphoria through his music amongst the agitated expressive soundscapes. Tracks like ‘Polypoly’ and ‘Like The Water’ show this element perfectly and create a compelling listen from start to finish.
“Yeah, I think a lot of the songs are built around these chord structures and melodies. After the pandemic and the lockdown I think a lot of people felt there was a big kind of a question mark over everything that you were doing, and you were feeling like, Am I really here? Is this actually what I’m doing? Then I think a lot of people had these moments as well after those two years where it’s like you made these big, large kind of life decisions and I think one of mine was planning to be more at home in my hometown and stuff and on one side, I really liked that because it was out in the country and I got a really great newfound love for where I’m from. Then at the same time, I think, all kinds of young people once they move away, kind of going back to the place that you’re from.. there’s a bit of trepidation to it. So I find myself leaning into those types of melodies and those types of feelings throughout the whole thing and once I started realizing I was doing that I started leaning into it a lot more. ‘I’m Here Now’, for instance, has a whole pile of natural recordings from around that area and then I used the Concertina in certain parts as well because that’s what my grandfather played. Then there’s all these different sections where it’s like question marks of things that I found interesting in the time and the place and just trying to explore that feeling and emotion of this weird question mark that’s over a lot of people’s lives at the moment, you know”
There are interesting and unique sound bites placed throughout the album. like a creak of a heavy, rattling farm gate on the title track ‘I’m Here Now’, Daithí explained to me how he finds these little audio treasures and where he decides to place them in the songs.
“Yeah, most of my music is written in a specific way. Basically what I generally try and do, [ is ] collect up a huge sample library of sampled recordings. I’m always going around with my phone or a recorder and when something strikes me, I’ll record it but I’ll just put it into this vault of samples that I have that I’ve been building up for like 10 years. Then you can take stuff out and play around with it, and it can kick off an idea. But another really helpful thing is it’s all dated, and it’s all where it is and stuff so let’s say I’m thinking about a certain time in my life or a certain person and I think back to when I was with them last. Then I can go into my vaults of samples and find a recording that was done around that time. Then there’s all these connections from the different elements that make a really interesting collage, and then after that, a lot of it has to do with melody. I’ll come up with one melody, and then I’ll bring on some friends to write stuff and they can take their own experiences of what I’m trying to talk about, and plant their own experiences of that on the song as well. So you get this lovely collection of different experiences and inspirations throughout the whole record and it tends to be the best way to make something unique, it tends to get you away from trying to sound… well like other people, you know.”
In the album, Daithí has a wonderful array of supporting artists – Ailbhe Reddy and Sinéad White (‘Sunset’), David Tapley of Tandem Felix (‘Polypoly’), Uly (‘Like The Water’), and Neil Dexter (‘Keep It For The Next One’). These collaborations elevate each song and create a unique refreshing aspect within the track.
“So for this record, it was a bit different again, so I had this place Beekeepers in Ballyvaughan and basically I would pick a weekend and then I would pick maybe one or two people, like two very good artists that I knew, who knew each other and we just kind of whisked them off to this place in Ballyvaughan and get them to spend a weekend just literally playing around with stuff and kind of toying with different things and showing them the different tracks and seeing what immediately resonates with them. It was a really good way to work I think because if you have two different really good artists people tend to try and egg each other on in different ways and as long as they’re comfortable with each other it becomes this really nice positive experience and I had a really good weekend with them, Ailbhe Reddy and Sinéad White, who have played together and done loads of different things. Ailbhe’s an amazing guitar player, and Sinéad is an amazing piano player as well as being really good vocalists, so they could jump on different things at different times. You know, like Ailbhe might be writing a vocal lyric and then Sinéad will be toying around on the piano and then suddenly you just start trying to record everything at once and you start getting this big rush of ideas. It was a really good way of working because it was just bringing really nice people together, having a really nice time and a private location. Yeah, it really got the best out of those artists you know, which is great.”
‘Familial’ is a mesmerising track and stand-out moment on the album with soothing melodies and lush electronics that build and become more intense and psychedelic, it’s a track that lingers in the listener’s head for days.
“Yes, so ‘Familial’. Yeah, I built that drum beat on a drum machine and I had been kicking around with it for ages. Then I’d gotten another synth that I was playing with, and I was adding in those extra ideas. That’s those little bloopy key ideas. Then I had gone back to Clare for a good while and I was exploring all the stuff that my granddad had worked on. My granddad passed away a couple of years ago and just when he passed, I was trying to learn more about him. He was an amazing concertina player and I knew so much about him from a personal level, but I was getting all these different people coming up to me from the traditional Irish music world telling me different stories about him and I started going back down through all the people that he worked with throughout the years and I found this very amazing, like very, very old Sean-nós sample kind of based around those times, and for some reason, it just really stuck with me. Then I thought about how you would fit Sean-nós into electronic music and I put a massive auto tune on the Sean-nós so that it stuck in with the melodies that I had. So it was this weird moment where I was just like, is this like heresy is it like something that really works, which excited me a lot because I was like, oh my god, I’m putting auto-tune on Sean-nós it’s like the weirdest thing ever. Then that’s how I got that vocal melody that’s there. It has this lovely Irish lilt to it, but also it has a hip hop feel to it as well. So that was the birth of that track for sure.“
One of my favourite tracks on the album is ‘Keep It For The Next One’. It’s a beautiful tune that pivots around fuzzed beats, lush textures and ethereal soundscapes. The song provides a lighter take on Daithí’s dense expressive sound.
“That one came together really quickly. It was kind of amazing. It came together in the space of two days. So Neil Dexter is the vocalist on that. I had heard a couple of his songs before but I hadn’t really met him properly. He came up to The Beekeepers with David Tapley who’s a very good friend of mine. He’s in Tandem Felix and David was in my last record. They both came together and they were bringing some instruments up that they thought I wouldn’t have. David Tapley brought like a pedal steel you know, like a real country western pedal steel. We ran that through a whole pile of different electronic effects and that’s how that starts off. You can hear these kind of pad sounds behind it. That’s all pedal steel. It’s kind of an amazing story on the record, actually because Neil had arrived and it was only about two or three hours at The Beekeepers and his wife was pregnant at the time. She’s a nurse and she actually got a bit faint and had to sit down at work. So she called him and there was this amazing moment where we were all here in this lovely idyllic location and there was something really serious going on and once he hung up the phone, he was like Yeah, I think she’s okay, everything’s fine. My mother’s gone over to her. That’s all fine. Then we had this long conversation about how when we were in our early 20s, we didn’t really have that kind of responsibility so we could do whatever we wanted and now that we’re slightly older, you know, we’re up into our 30s now, life has changed so much and he literally just went over to the microphone and just started singing into it. That’s where we got the lyrics from. So it was one of those really great, amazing moments where everything just kind of clicks in this big inspirational way, and he was on fire at the time. Yeah, I love that track as well. It’s definitely one of my favourites. Can’t wait to play it live. It’s gonna be really fun.”
Daithí doesn’t do anything by halves. His music is immersive and rich and the videos to accompany his music follows this trend. Filled with cinematic visuals ‘Familial’, (courtesy of award-winning New Zealand filmmaker Ayla Amano) is a short film in itself that presents the well-worn fractures of a family through the strains of a father-son relationship and ‘Sunset’ is another touching film directed by Michael-David McKernan and features the American actress Annie Ryan (who was in the seminal 80s film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). It’s a beautiful, touching film that follows a woman in middle age coping with loss and grief in the most poised and hopeful way.
“Yeah, a lot of my good friends will be video directors. One of my best friends is Brendan Canty, who’s a very well-known music director and he does a lot of shorts and adverts and stuff like that. So the culture of doing really good high-quality videos has always been there. Then my partner of two or three years is Norman Howard, who’s a very well-known film producer. So I’m very lucky to be surrounded by an awful lot of people who were involved in the film world and stuff like that. So getting directors on to do that stuff was super important to me, and I think when you make a video there’s so much work involved and so much kind of toing and froing and so high risk to make sure that it’s like really good and it kind of solidifies a track a little bit more. ‘Familial’ is a really interesting one. So Brendan, my friend is married to Ayla Amano who is this amazing New Zealand director and they were in lockdown in New Zealand and that’s where that video was filmed. It was all filmed in New Zealand while they were over there, and then ‘Sunset’ was all filmed in The Burren. We threw a film camera into the sea with a waterproof box and got this amazing feeling of what the West of Ireland is like when it’s at its absolute best you know when the sunsets going down in Fanore Beach. So yeah, it’s always been a big thing for me and I think it really elevates the songs”
Daithí has a solid fan base. He told me how excited he is to be able to go out and tour this album and share it with his fans.
“Yeah, It’s brilliant, the tour is the biggest tour I’ve ever done before. I’ve never really been on a proper tour of England or anything. So that’s one of the really exciting things about it. We played Body & Soul this year, and it was just this massive show and I still had everybody that I had from before the pandemic coming to the shows and stuff and it felt really, really special. So getting out on the road and really performing them is one of my favourite things to do, you know, so it’s going to be great. Yeah, yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. “
“ I think most artists realize there’s a good bit of responsibility involved in making sure that people have a good time at a show you know, as you get older, you’re consciously aware that it’s a really big thing for somebody to go out of their way and actually go to a show, so I feel I have a really big responsibility to make sure that it is the absolute best that it possibly can be to make it worth people’s time. I feel that if you do that and you consistently do that, and they know that they’re going to a good show, they’ll stick by you and a really good audience is really loyal as well and that’s so important for an artist to keep going you know, so I see it as a big responsibility to always make the shows as best as I possibly can and to always just keep making them better and better and better.”
Daithí has made a name for himself as a pioneer of electronic music and I asked him what advice he would give to an aspiring musician.
“Yeah, that’s a good one, it’s hard to make the career, that’s the hard part. I think my biggest advice would be to get really good at playing live to be honest because, as far as I could see, like I’ve been extremely lucky that I’ve gotten to be able to be a musician for about 10 years full-time. But the only way I’ve ever been able to do that is by touring and doing loads and loads of gigs as much as I can. So as early as possible if you can get out and build a scene around yourself with people, other people playing and try and play as much as you can, the experience of doing that will stand to you so much over time. Once you start going then, you just have to really like playing gigs and going around and travelling. The other obvious one as well is just surround yourself with really good people. One of the best things about being a musician is that there’s a brilliant, beautiful scene and it’s a really good way to meet new people and it’s such a sociable experience. So yeah, surrounding yourself with really good people and really amazing musicians is a blessing and super important as well for sure.”
‘I’m Here Now’ is a joy to listen to. Daithí has an impressive ability to create tunes that excite the imagination and thrill the senses. The album is a musical marvel and cements Daithí’s reputation as a trailblazer for electronic music.
‘I’m Here Now’ is set for release this Friday. Until then check out the video for ‘Sunset (feat. Ailbhe Reddy)’ below
Author: Danu
