A Dublin electronic artist moves on from frogs and Celtic futurism, to DIY bagpipes

It was just after 4.30pm on Saturday when Mel Keane finished up his soundcheck in The Complex art centre on East Arran Street.

Exiting the warehouse through one of its side doors, he stepped out into the sun. He seemed satisfied with the set-up.

He had just arrived back in the city the day before, he said.

For the past couple of weeks, the electronic artist had gigged around mainland Europe. He had played in Paris and Montreuil, a commune on the outskirts of the French capital, and Amsterdam.

Back in December, Keane had released his second album, Airs, a collection of chopped and looped vocals that billowed over whirlpool synths and quivering cellos.

But as he had toured, he had gradually moved on from that album towards his next big project, incorporating newer material into his sets, he said. “The show in Amsterdam was kinda half and half.”

This next step, which has been heavily inspired by pipe music, was to get its first full outing later in The Complex, as part of Dublin Digital Radio’s annual festival, Alternating Current. 

The theme of this year’s festival was “Urban Scores”. 

The sound of bagpipes, an instrument that features in urban public spaces particularly in Northern Ireland, ties in with that, Keane said. “It’s quite, like, a confrontational music.”

Bagpipes can signify authority, he said. “Like police stations, fire stations, military.”

Keane’s intention as he researched bagpipes and the culture of pipe bands was to find a parallel between that and the noise music scene in Dublin.

The city’s more experimental artists play guerilla gigs, in unusual outdoors spaces like in an old tunnel up in Santry, the North Bull Wall or at the Portal Dolmen in Brennanstown. 

“That stuff takes place in these public spaces, here,” he said.

Frog in the reeds

Keane still had five and a half hours to go before his slot. 

He wandered up Capel Street, turning off to find a coffee in a small cafe on Mary Street.

He grew up in Churchtown in south Dublin, he said. He first released tracks around 2015, he says. It was mostly dance stuff. 

But “I wasn’t really making club bangers,” says Keane.

That early work was largely “outsider” house music, a subgenre of house with an inclination towards noise and ambience.

“It was the first niche music I got into,” he says. “Artists like Morgan Buckley and Frank Sweeney. This was the kinda scene I latched onto.”

He gigged in Tengu and in Jigsaw before it closed, as part of the DIY music collective Repeater, he says. “We ran gigs in an old laundrette in Fatima. It was a real mix.”

During the pandemic, he honed his debut album, Frog of Earth, which came out in January 2021.

The album has nine shimmering tracks, with bubbling and croaking synths. It was loosely inspired by the adoration he has always had for the amphibians, he says. “I was mad about frogs when I was a kid.”

It was going to come out around the start of the pandemic, he said. “A lot of people were tapping into this nostalgia, assessing what was important to us. We had this space to breathe away from work.”

It became this way of looking at different moments in his life that he valued, he said. “That frog era was one.”

The follow-up, Airs, arrived in December 2024. It was a release he categorised at the time as “Celtic futurism”, a forward-thinking Irish trad. 

It resembled the work of Michael O’Shea, an enigmatic 1980s musician who created his own instruments and released one eponymous album, reissued by AllCity in 2019.

O’Shea used elements of Irish folk, Keane says. “But it has this eastern quality to it.”

Irish music has always been a magnet for far-reaching influences, he says. “Like the banjo is a staple of the line-up, but that instrument started in West Africa and then the States.”

Irish traditional music is important, he says. “But it’s good to acknowledge that we are a people who have lived all over the world and have absorbed various cultures.”

And, it was while living in Lisbon that Keane developed his newfound fascination with the pipes, he says. “I had a friend called Vasco Alvez who plays the bagpipes. They play the same pipes there as they play in Spain and Scotland.”

Alvez’s work is avant garde, he says. “He pushes the directness of the bagpipes to their limit. The first time I saw him play it completely blew my mind.”

The first thought was to buy his own, but they cost a few thousand and were exceedingly difficult to play, he said. “It takes years just to be able to get, like, a clean sound.”

So instead, he opted for DIY, deconstructing the sound to figure out how to make his own, he says. “I used PVC pipes and various reeds and membranes, and there’s a huge community online of people who make their own pipes. It’s this very anarchist community.”

He had been deep down that rabbit hole when Dublin Digital Radio approached him with a commission to play at the festival, he says.

The radio station was drawn to his music because the albums flow like a journey, says Alba Molina, the co-curator of Alternating Current. 

“Every album has this mix of beats, calm and flimsy, kinda like field recordings, some of which were actually created digitally, and I found that very interesting,” she said.

Long day’s journey into pipes

By 9.30pm, the sun was setting over the city.

Queues formed outside the pubs and clubs around Westmoreland Street. Members of Acid Granny had set up by O’Connell Bridge, and played an array of synths out of a makeshift wheelchair.

Inside The Complex on East Arran Street, the quartet Landless were wrapping up a set, their voices weaving together unaccompanied or set against the drone of a reed organ.

They left the stage and the glowing pink and purple lights were switched off. The room cleared and the speakers switched to the scheduled shows playing on Dublin Digital Radio.

As the crowd split to catch some air, or to grab a drink from the bar, Keane wandered through the room, carrying a modular synthesiser.

He disappeared briefly again. Then, at about 10.15pm, he took to the stage. 

He didn’t say a word. He just blew into one of his ad-hoc pipes, making one single note. 

He held the note for about 30 seconds, then stopped. Silence filled the room. The crowd was shuffling back in. Most spectators knelt on the floor. 

Keane pulled out a second pipe, and with one in each hand now, blew into both of the two reeds simultaneously, the notes clashing. 

Smoke from a fog machine rose from around his feet and floated over the laptop to which he turned his attention, as the dissonant pipes droned on.

With a synthesiser and the computer in front of him, he gradually phased in the next passage of his set, a low-frequency vibration as a set of strobe lights started flashing, slow at first, then faster. 

A hissing sound rolled in and arpeggios that gradually overtook the pipes. A cascading melody over the dense bassline of the synthesiser.

The crowd sat wordless. Some closed their eyes. After the strobes stopped and the smoke cleared, the drone of the pipes began again, faint at first.

Eventually, the arpeggios and bass faded and all that was left were the pipes and then they too were gone. 

“Thank you,” said Keane, and left the stage. 

The performance and reed music brought Alba Molina back to her home town in Spain, she said. “It reminded me of when you could hear on Sundays in specific seasons, from afar this reed music, woodwind music used in processions.”

It was another journey, she said. “A trance for 15 minutes that evolved into these more organic sounds, like from one of his albums and then arriving at the pipes. It was this full circle.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11.32am on 7 May 2025 to reflect that the correct name is Alternating Current, not Alternating Currents. We apologise for the error.