December 2023
Dear friends,
Every year at this time, as winter deepens here in Ireland and we make our way through advent, the streets filling with all the lights, decorations and all the cheer of Christmas, I set myself a final musical project of the year to take a more obscure, often dark and lesser known Christmas carol and make my own arrangement and recording of it.
I've been doing it for some years, and as well as sending out to family and friends, , I have collected all of the music together as a downloadable album simply called 'Christmas' over on bandcamp....it grows every year.
There is so much dark and mystical music that has been composed over the centuries around this feast in the middle of winter. Its a shame that we only tend to get the upbeat pop classics with their sleigh bells and uplifting key changes on the radio and in all the shops. How about we embrace some mystery, some dark and let the unknown in....
Carol of the Bells is an old Ukrainian carol, and so it felt right to celebrate it this year, after all that poor country and its people have been through. It has such a simple melodic motif and it works perfectly plucked through a loop pedal....Then the underlying bass line echos the ringing of bells, and for this performance and recording I sampled one of the big gongs of the Gamelan (I am falling so in love with!) and set it to be controlled by a midi foot pedal.
Enjoy the video above, recorded live in one take on a rig powered by a phone battery, in the stairwell of DeBarra’s Folk Club, my local venue and spiritual home. If you’d like to receive the studio recording as a download as well as a video showing how I put the battery powered loop rig together, head to the Patreon site.
Or click here to get the whole Christmas collection at bandcamp - pay what you like…
OTHER MUSIC PROJECTS FROM 2023
Part of my varied work as a composer is with the Arts for Health team here in West Cork, Ireland, as resident composer in the Skibbereen Community Hospital working week in and week out with older residents of the hospital to engage with their own musical creativity and create work that honours their voices. Its a truly wonderful project and I am enriched by these people in all of my musical practice - I’m learning so much about what it means to be alive, to create meaning and connection, to be creative in so many different ways that aren’t celebrated in the mainstream. So I wanted to share a film I helped to make this year called ‘Last Train to Nowhere’ which is a collaboration of poetry, soundscape, film, drawing and animation, and was premiered at the national Bealtine Festival in May
Work in progress - I’m currently working with director Philippa Donnellan, dancer Justine Cooper (pictured in the window!) and photographer Tomasz Madajczak on a new dance work to be performed in 2024….And I am not just composing the score but also being pulled into the dance itself!
Another really wonderful project was composing and recording the score for this beautiful feature length film by Aoife Desmond called ‘Bury Our Hearts At The Bend of the River’. It was all shot on 16mm film and hand processed, and follows the River Lee from its source in the mountains, through the city of Cork to where it meets the sea at Rochestown Point. I created the score using a minimal sound palette which melds with field recordings I processed. I will be showing some of my working process in videos on the patreon site next year….. So if you’d like to know more about the composing process do join the patreon and say hello!
ON MY BOOKSHELF….
I have a nice little system these days for finding good books - in my attempts to limit the influence and control of social media I signed up for various mailing lists from artists/writers/bookshops that I admire and want to hear from - then every week or month I get an inspiring email to read, rather than the endless scrolling! Bookshop.org is great and supports independent bookshops rather than Amazon - and they send a weekly email with reading recommendations. I see books I might enjoy and then I order them from my local library on their app.
‘The Practicing Mind’ is a very practical guide to practicing well - something I have spent most of my life trying to do in music, but also now helping my homeschooling son learn - its also about finding happiness in the process rather than the goal. A very important part of creativity in all its forms!
A friend of mine had told me she was reading ‘Turlough’ by Irish writer Brian Keenan and seeing as I frequently play the music of Turlough O’Carolan, the blind harper and composer from 18th century Ireland, I had to get my hands on this book. Apparently the spirit of Carolan visited Keenan many times while he was in captivity as a hostage in Beruit and so on his release he wanted to write as an offer of thanks.
Finally, ‘How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds’ is from a series of incredible books created by ‘The School of Life’ - a collective of philosophers, psychotherapists, artists etc. I have been reading ‘Big Ideas for Curious Minds’ and ‘What Adults Don’t Know About Art’ with my son and we are loving them. This one I read myself and its a clarion call to retreat from the onslaught of hate/envy/hype/catastrophy/depression that the modern media and social media is designed to create, and forge a more quiet, slow, happier, less sharable life.
(If you’re interested in this, another great writer and thinker on this topic is Jaron Lanier with ‘Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now’)
Wishing you all a very peaceful Christmas season.
Justin