A supergroup of experimental musicians look to fuse synthesisers with the “world within” the Irish harp

Gareth Quinn Redmond missed being in a band.

He had written, recorded and toured with a slew of artists, such as Glen Hansard, Bell X1, Villagers and The Scratch. 

But it had been a few years since he had been in a band, he said. “I love being in them. I love the camaraderie, the family element.”

“All in the trenches, trying to fuckin’ make this thing happen,” he said, while sipping a cup of tea outside Mish.Mash cafe on Capel Street under the sun on Sunday afternoon.

He liked playing ambient music live but disliked doing it as a solo artist, he said. “I just found it really boring.”

To rectify this, he honed in on two local musicians, the electronic multi-instrumentalist Ross Chaney and harpist Méabh McKenna.

They didn’t really know each other outside being admirers of each other’s work, McKenna said, sitting next to him.

“Me and Gareth hadn’t even talked,” he said. “We’d be glancing at each other’s Instagrams, thinking ‘That’s cool’.”

“Like ships in the night,” Quinn Redmond said.

People may have assumed they were all friends, Chaney said. “I’ve actually, like, met Gareth physically three times.”

That was two years ago, and it all changed when Quinn Redmond reached out to the pair with an email, McKenna says. “It was a big concept. A whole kinda manifesto. It was exciting, because we were all hungry for the same thing.”

The outcome of the email was the group, Throwing Shapes, and their eponymous debut album, due for release on 7 September, featuring their first single, “Chosen Talk”, a shimmering swirl of arpeggiated synthesisers and melodies plucked on the harp over rising horns and gentle hums.

Throwing Shapes fuses together McKenna’s experimental approach to the harp with Chaney’s blend of jazz and electronic music, and Quinn Redmond’s style of ambience, which draws from the Japanese genre of Kankyō Ongaku – or “environment music”.

They were contrasting artists with some shared ideas, Quinn Redmond said. “We were all drinking from the same well, but approaching it from different places.”

Conversations in space

The owner of Mish.Mash came out with water and another green pot of tea.

“I love the cups here,” Quinn Redmond said. “And they always match?”

“Not always,” the owner said.

“A mish mash,” McKenna said.

“Mish mash,” Quinn Redmond repeated quickly in a slightly melodious way, before explaining that he and McKenna started work on what eventually became their debut record over a two-day stint at a studio in Stoneybatter.

That was in the autumn of 2023, he says. “I had written out a few ideas.”

They were these “small brackets of sound” that the duo teased out in an almost conversational fashion, allowing single notes to ring out and build tension, McKenna says

She would strike a chord, she says, “and Gareth would wait as long as he wanted to play the next one”.

That call-and-response is what immediately introduces the album, with its opening track, “Calyx”. McKenna glides across three ascending notes, and is immediately met by Quinn Redmond striking a note on the piano, before they allow the sound to ring out.

There is a momentary silence, a faint wooden thunk, and then a burst of cymbals as Chaney’s soft, jazz-inspired drums propel the 13-minute song, creating a frame for the others to repeat their process.

The fun of tracks like that lay in stretching out the tension, McKenna says. “It was built by us really feeling when it was the right moment to move onto the next sentence.”

Once it was recorded live, they passed the work over to Chaney, McKenna says. “Ross went underground for a while, and I was wondering how it would turn out. I was quite protective of this stuff. But the first things that came back, and I knew: ‘Ross gets it.’”

Honouring and forgoing tradition

When the trio started to construct what became the album, Chaney was most excited at getting to work with a wire-strung harp, he says. “I’d never heard that sound before, and it was trying to retain its unique sound as much as possible.”

The wire-strung harp is sometimes referred to as the Gaelic or Celtic harp. The oldest one in Ireland is the Brian Boru harp, the national emblem. 

Dating back to the 15th century, it is made of oak and willow with 29 brass strings, and is held in Trinity College’s Long Room, according to the college website.

The strings of a wire-strung harp are highly tense, and produce bell-like notes.

Chaney didn’t want to alter that sound too much, he says. “I wanted to add textures, or highlight elements there, like its percussive elements. Magnify them.”

McKenna – alongside performing with the songwriter Maija Sofia – had been doing solo shows, experimenting with a pedal harp, different effects and synthesisers. 

But the number of hands she had – two – limited her, she says. “I was really hungry to reach a different form of sound, and it seemed quite elusive.”

With Throwing Shapes, she was entrusting its sound to Chaney and Quinn Redmond, she says. “The sound of the harp is live processed, shared out between the band, and the sound I always wanted to create is being created with each other.”

Choosing a wirestrung harp wasn’t exactly intentional, she says. “The morning of recording, the decision was made, because I actually physically couldn’t manage to get a pedal harp in.”

McKenna;’s approach to the instrument was to both “honour a tradition” and separate the instrument from that tradition, she says. “We had a session where we looked at it purely as a sound-making machine. There is something essential in the timbre of the instrument that is kinda electric.”

“It has a whole world within it,” she says, “and obviously, when you play traditional music on it, you are accessing this ladder that goes all the way down, of history and impact, and with melodies, you are carrying those stories.”

But the desire was to remove it from its “obvious sounds and associations”, she says. “And these guys are ‘noise’ people, so we could look at glitching and stretching things.”

Abstract shapes

The finished album, which is due for release on 3 September, is like a sprawling dreamscape that draws from ambient music, free jazz, and folk music.

It’s eight tracks, but intended to be played as a whole, both on the record and live, McKenna says. When they played their first gig in Anseo at the start of June, “we were shushing people, because the work is this whole movement”.

“People would go to clap, but we’d be like, ‘No, no, no, we’re still going’,” she says.

A lot of people were doing instrumental music around the time the group first started writing the record, Quinn Redmond says. But “it was all very, kind of, jam-based. I wanted this to be ironed-out.”

He wanted to write and record the album, and then deconstruct the finished pieces so that it could be fully played live, he says. “Rather than jamming around, trying to make it work, I wanted it to hit the ground running.”

Like the music of his influence, Satoshi Ashikawa, a pioneer in Japanese ambient and environmental music, the music of Throwing Shapes may seem improvisational in nature. 

But there is a structure to the work, he says. 

“That’s what I always loved: where something is so well composed to sound so natural, that people perceive it as being improvised,” Quinn Redmond says.

It isn’t necessarily trying to echo a natural place, nor the city, Chaney says. “What’s great about instrumental music is, in a way, it’s so abstract, so open to interpretation. Nothing is really prescribed.”