NEST

And to a lesser extent, Glottal Stop

Amanda's new album NEST is out today on the always brilliant Krim Kram. It's an intense, beautiful and brilliantly strange album. One of several mutations of a collaboration with Eimear Walshe and a beautiful document of their shared genius. Responding to De Valera's "On Language & The Irish Nation" speech, Eimear's text gives a stark reality to the backgrounds and reality to the political and social fantasy of the speech, bringing it right back down to earth, and Amanda's music frames it perfectly to highlight the starkness and massively amplify the emotional weight of contradiction. There's space for beauty, it emphasises the strength of an ordinary person's will to survive and build shelter, and it channels the anger, heartbreak and bleakness of life in its own special way.

I'm really honored to have gotten to contribute, I helped make some vocal drones from the incredible choir recordings, played detuned guitar the only way I know how to, and am sole backing member of the Amanda Feery live band. It’s a little late to post as there are very few tickets left, but we’ll play this live tomorrow, Wednesday 18th, in St. Fin Barre’s cathedral, where the organ was recorded for the album. Tickets are here. We’ll be doing this live elsewhere, which we’ll talk about soon.

On the topic, the batch of Krim Kram releases this is a part of looks amazing, great diversity of sounds there. I can’t wait to get stuck in. I listened to the David Lacey album earlier and it’s brilliant.

Off the topic, I’ll be playing as Glottal Stop in Anseo in Dublin on Saturday, along with Luxury Mollusc, Black Coral, Feral Torch and Muckish. I’m very excited to be doing more with GS and the line up is great.