In a new album, a bodhrán shapeshifts again and again

Ian Nyquist’s bodhrán didn’t sound like a bodhrán.

He leaned over the black and white drum, holding up its frame with his left hand, while he hammered out an uptempo jig with the wooden cipín in his right.

For a few moments, the taut skin of the instrument produces the noises one expects: a deep, booming rhythm that rolls on and on hypnotically.

But, then, the noise starts to change. It becomes ringing bells, crashing cymbals, and clattering sheets of metal. It even resembles an echoing thunk like a PVC pipe struck with a stick.

Behind this effect was a small circular microphone fixed to the bodhrán’s frame, which was feeding the raw sound of his drumming into a piece of modelling software on his desktop computer.

The software mirrored each and every strike, thump and clack – but generating noises that the drum would alone be incapable of.

It can give the bodhrán the qualities of other instruments, Nyquist said, as he sat by the computer in his flat outside Dún Laoghaire on Friday evening. “Timbre, pitch. You can make something sound like bells or chimes.”

The idea of “uncanny instruments” intrigues Nyquist, he says. “Things that sit between bells or strings.”

On his seventh album, Gilded, the producer and composer has sought to harness the bodhrán to achieve that uncanniness.

The record, due for release in September, is based extensively around experimentations with the drum, an instrument that he long admired but hadn’t much experience playing before this project, he says. “It was something I’d always wanted to pick up and start learning.”

In learning, and connecting with it, he saw an opportunity to add something novel to a genre, he says. “The main thing was to push the boundaries of something that is a trad instrument, and find my own way of playing it.”

The Gilded Age

Nyquist sat on his couch on Friday evening, drinking a mug of calming herbal tea.

It wasn’t just calming, he said, laughing. “It’s called Sleepytime Extra.”

Nearby were a few of his synthesisers, some coat racks holding black cables and a field recorder, and a few minimalist posters from old gigs.

The window was open, letting in the sound of the nearby sea, squawking gulls and the occasional rattle of a magpie.

The sound of water is reassuring, he says. “I don’t know if this is a word. Sonogenic, like photogenic. Everything about it is just so calming and engaging no matter what state it’s in.”

A large amount of his work, which draws influences from neo-classical, ambient and electronic music, has focused on physical places: the sound of Dublin city, the Aran Islands, fictional landscapes without people.

“The stuff I’ve made in the past is more evocative of a sense of place,” he says. “I get a lot of inspiration from being out in the wilderness, tuning in with the landscapes.”

Gilded, rather than focus on places, draws its inspiration from an object: the bodhrán.

But he never really set out to make a trad album, he says.

Instead, it was a tapdancing video that sparked his imagination, he said “I was just online, browsing Instagram reels.”

The clip was a collaboration between two artists from the Ukraine – composer and sound artist Heinali, and tap dancer Volodymyr Shpudeiko.

In the video, from 2018, Shupudeiko improvises a dance on stage, with Heinali processing each of his taps through a modular synth until they become rhythmic and melodic passages.

It was mesmerising, he says. “Enough so that I thought, okay, I want to do something around percussion.”

Break with tradition

Nyquist spent the best part of a year learning how to play the bodhrán, he says. “It did take a while. But learning how to play it the way that I am on the album was a completely different story.”

Mirroring the sound of a piece of percussion through modelling software wasn’t necessarily a novel idea, he says. Plenty of musicians have done that. “But as far as I know, this is the first time anybody has used the bodhrán in this way.”

It felt great to be potentially pioneering something, he said. “But at the same time, on the flip side, I didn’t know anybody who I could reach out to.”

He played a few “research shows” while crafting the record, he says. “But if something went wrong, it’s all on me. There’s no one that I could call on for advice. So it’s been a pretty steep learning curve.”

Fortunately, the word "sacrilege" hasn’t been thrown his way by any veterans, he says. Still, “it is really intimidating to pick up this instrument that feels really old, and to play it in a way that is respectful”.

Liquid bodhrán

Across the 13-track album, Nyquist explores a lot of musical territory, like dark ambience, old Gaelic rowing songs, love ballads sung in the sean nós style, and pulsating, otherworldly dance.

“It goes beyond what somebody would associate with the bodhrán,” he says. “So I thought it was maybe important to bring the instrument back to what the instrument is, and what it’s traditionally used for.”

That led to a decision to give tracks names like the lead single “Jig”, or “Reel”. Very literal titles, he says.

These songs on the surface can sound like minimalist techno from the noughties, says Dan Callanan, the co-founder of the experimental Cork-based record label The Department of Energy, whose latest mixtape Ambient Harvest features work by Nyquist. 

“They sound like something that [Ricardo] Villalobos would drop at 4am and melt people's brains,” he says. “But equally the intention behind them is so rich because he’s drawing from actual traditional music.” 

Callanan said that on Saturday, to launch the “landscapes mixtape”, he and some friends held a listening party in a friend’s garden.

Nyquist was going to join, and Callanan asked if he could bring his bodhrán, while also requesting that another contributor, Sinéad Kennedy, bring her fiddle, he says. “They never met before, and goddamn, what they played. You could feel his bodhrán.”

There were no electronics, he says. “But he was making it sound like a talking drum. My friend [Dublin Digital Radio DJ] Cathy Flynn said it’s like ‘liquid bodhrán’.”

It could be called a spontaneous improvised performance, Callahan says, laughing. “But it was just like a session.”

Nyquist, though, didn’t step into this with a view of broadening the definition of trad music, he says. “It’s coming during this wave when people are bringing trad music into modern spaces. But it came out of pure experimentation.”

And that is what this record is ultimately, he says. “It’s the beginning of something that I look forward to exploring more of."