Faoin Talamh: An audio and visual rumination on artistic practice in ancient and modern Ireland.

The two artists behind Faoin Talamh are composer Oisín Murray (aka FunkLaden), who studies ancient Irish music and has absorbed his findings into his creative practice; and multimedia artist and musician Róisín Doyle, whose photography centres on impressions of the Irish natural world. They are both from Dublin and are graduates of Trinity College Dublin’s Music and Media Technologies MPhil Programme.

Faoin Talamh is Irish for “Undergound,” and the movement’s name is apposite for many reasons. As Murray highlights, it’s a reference to the “remarkable preservative power of the deep Irish boglands,” in which most of the original Bronze age instruments driving the twenty-minute performance were found. Visual artist Doyle drew on this same motif, using images of soil along with other elements of Irish nature, “animating the visuals to give the audience the illusion that they are being transported deep into the bog.”

Together, Murray and Doyle were able to evoke a feeling of underground exploration of a place such as Dúros – which was also the title of Faoin Talamh’s second movement – where the largest single discovery of Bronze Age artefacts ever found in Ireland was made. Doyle mentions that “Oisín described Dúros as a large dwelling place where they could have made music, like a cave, but also like a bog.” On the evening of the performance, with blackout curtains in a darkened room and with the screen the only source of any light, it did indeed feel as though we the audience were underground, excavating our way through ancient Ireland’s bogland, surrounded by the noises of the instruments buried alongside us.

MPhil in Music and Media Technologies

Discussing how their creative processes brought Faoin Talamh to Unit 44, Murray and Doyle both highlighted how Trinity’s MPhil programme was central to their current collaboration. “It’s in the Electronic Engineering department but it’s an arts course,” Murray explains. “The point of the course is it’s a technology course for artistic people, getting artistic people to use technology to the best ends for their art.” Indeed, the course was the reason Faoin Talamh exists, according to him. Both graduating from the course in 2023, it was at their end-of-year exhibition that the two decided to work together.

Murray’s MPhil research project, entitled “The Beaten Bronze,” focused on Irish Bronze and Iron Age Music, compiling recordings of both reproductions of actual artefacts and exact replicas of Irish instruments that are 2,000 plus years old. This enabled him to build digital audio samplers and use them to compose his own original music. He came up with this strategy after TCD’s Archaeological Society hosted a talk from Ancient Music Ireland. “I’d never heard of Irish Bronze Age instruments, and the co-founder of Ancient Music Ireland, Simon O’Dwyer, was playing them. These are incredible - the sound of them, they’re incredibly loud acoustically, even though they’re made of bronze,” he recounts.

The replica instruments comprising “The Beaten Bronze,” many of which were sourced from Ancient Music Ireland which is located in Galway, are adharcs or side-blown horns, and dords or end-blown trumpets, as well as Bronze Age crotals, the only known percussion instrument from the time period. One aspect that makes Murray’s project so fascinating is there are no written directions indicating the scales, styles or tunes that the lip-reed instruments might have played. Even the amount of time musicological researchers are given access to play them is usually very limited. Murray was therefore taking on a rarely-explored task of discovering how music might have sounded on these ancient instruments.

Meanwhile, in Doyle’s MA audiovisual research project, “Liminal,” she investigated the impact Irish nature and landscape has had on Irish artists, with an emphasis on 20th century artists Walter Osborne and Jack B. Yeats. She explored how to “digitally manipulate a photo while still bringing out the vivaciousness and verdant aspect of nature,” as a 21st century response to the 20th century techniques of impressionism and expressionism. Impressionism, she notes, is about going into nature, so she uses her phone camera to “catch a fleeting moment of nature as quickly as I can,” as a 21st century impressionist. The liminal space of the project, she explains, was that of “the space between nature and technology, of delving into the natural world via technology.” 

She started working in visual media less than two years ago, at the beginning of the MPhil programme but has been a musician for much longer. As with Murray, it was the programme itself that gave her the opportunity to gain new skills. “I always loved art and art history and loved going to art galleries. I always felt I would be good at it but I didn’t have the tools. But then one of our modules was called Visual Music, and I took to it like a fish to water. This was one part of the MPhil that didn’t feel like work to me. It was meant to be.”

Fusion of Sound and Visuals

When they saw each other’s projects they realised how their artistic practices could complement each other. In Faoin Talamh they have built on their MA research by combining both their artistic and academic work into an audio and visual rumination on artistic practice in ancient and modern Ireland, with Doyle’s photography of the natural world creating a series of pulsating tableaux which respond to the deep booming tones of Murray’s Bronze Age Irish horns. There’s a compelling mix of the old and new, which is complicated as these mediums, techniques and motifs are juxtaposed on top of each other, both literally and thematically. Faoin Talamh is, as Murray puts it, “very abstract, rooted in doing older Irish things in a contemporary way, using modern technology to create something that maybe looks old or traditional, but uses modern music production and video editing technology.”

This juxtaposition can be seen in the visuals as Doyle takes a wide variety of images – water, trees, earth, sky – and abstracts them through digital techniques. Using several Adobe computer design tools, she first introduces layers upon layers of images, then manipulates them to move in conjunction with Murray’s music. “Everything you see is a still image, animated through key framing,” she explains. “There can be as many as 50 images in one single movement, created from different images or even sometimes with the same image being layered upon one another multiple times.” (Image left, 'Táin')

Based on stories from Irish folklore and history, the twenty-minute audio piece is comprised of four sections: Cré-umha, Dúros, Táin and Fraích. Here, Murray wanted to compose music that is “at least to some extent authentic to the time period. Which sounds like a contradiction, but I didn’t want to do anything beyond the capabilities of the real instruments, or do anything the instruments aren’t physically capable of.” Murray became very resourceful in doing so, adopting innovative methods of music composition as many standard modern chords cannot be played on these instruments. This is because in these Bronze Age lip-vibrated instruments, the range of pitches is very limited. Rhythmic and timbral variation are instead “achieved by varying the emphasis on a note.” Rather than moving from one chord to a logical other, Murray’s process included selecting different pitches from the different samplers that often had no strong harmonic relationship, but complemented each other in other ways.

Much of the instrumentation intrinsic to the story and performance of Faoin Talamh were discovered in sacred burial sites and historic areas. To reflect on these origins, Doyle and Murray captured photography from key areas around Ireland. Doyle notes that she “took images from Caramore in Sligo, from when I was researching Jack B Yeats, and Oisin went to a few sacred sites, like Dowris, in Armagh, where a lot of the instruments were found.” They also added images from the heart of Dublin city, such as carved imagery on Clanbrassil Street and natural swirls akin to triskeles found on tree bark in Merrion Square Park. The imagery from Faoin Talamh highlights Doyle’s goal of encountering nature in unexpected places even in the 21st century: “I love that we can be in nature and we can have that same sense of reverence to nature across the centuries,” she enthuses.

Incorporating these elements into the narrative of Faoin Talamh, Doyle and Murray created a palimpsest of images and sounds. A fascinating example of this is in the third movement, Táin, which is highly influenced by the epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. Doyle explains that, “for the battle scene, there was two different types of imagery, square and circular, almost as if they’re two clans coming in, and then the colours changes on either side – green or pink – this idea of a call and response because there are two different kind of horns.” These sounds and images, then, build onto each other to create booming crescendos and quiet ruminations alike on the themes of ancient Ireland.

Faoin Talamh’s Artistic Space: Unit 44

A keen sense of both space and time is intrinsic to Faoin Talamh, and finding Unit 44 as a space for their debut performance was a further fusion of artistic interests. Describing itself as a “DIY space for music that can’t find a home anywhere else in Dublin,” the Stoneybatter studio used to be a hairdressers: consisting of a main space with a tiled chessboard floor and white walls, the full-width on-street window was blacked out throughout Faoin Talamh’s performance to give a more immersive experience. When organising the performance, Murray highlighted the challenges such a hybrid event posed: “It’s sort of tricky, because this is a space between an exhibition and a musical gig. I’ve put on gigs before so I decided to put it on like a gig but also screen this art piece. The guys at Unit 44 were so helpful. They do experimental art, I’ve been to shows there, electronica, dance, plays. There’s simply a room, a projector screen and a sound desk. It’s just meant to be a space for non-traditional art, to have somewhere to go, a completely not-for-profit art space.”

Following the screening, Doyle and Murray showcased their own live music, including Murray’s alternative arrangements of the movements in Faoin Talamh, and several of Doyle’s own compositions, which are “laments or folky, shamanic songs that I would write on the drum or sing a capella.” They were accompanied by friend and collaborator Tim Doyle, who also played two of his own songs. Adding to the Trinity connections, he is also a graduate of the MPhil. Murray adds that, “Tim was raised in the Irish tradition so he plays pipes and flute and fiddle, but he’s in also the same head space as us because experiments a lot. He’s the only person I know who’s plugged a set of oileann pipes into guitar peddles.”

As the screening came to an end and the lights turned back up on Unit 44, it was extraordinary to realise the journey we the audience had taken in such a short time. Beyond the black-out curtains we could hear a Dublin Bus passing by a near-by stop, a reminder of the Ireland we had left behind, if only briefly. We were just a thin curtain away from it all, but the experience had felt much deeper, more intense. Indeed this strange intrusion from the outside world highlighted to me the perfect mix of traditional and modern technology, the juxtaposition of ancient and modern Ireland, that we had just undertaken.

The Future of Faoin Talamh

Will future audiences get the opportunity to go on similar journeys? July 19th was a jumping-off point for further exhibits. Since then, Faoin Talamh has been to Another Love Story, a weekend music festival in County Meath, as an audiovisual installation tucked away in the woodland area. A black gazebo was fully covered in organic material, allowing the audience to be transported into the nature portal each night, with the audiovisual film played on a loop. All the music from the project came out on Spotify and other streaming sites on September 13th. “I want Faoin Talamh to become like a collective,” Doyle says, “along with other artists as well.” She envisages further live shows and establishing a collective based around the Irish language. “It feels like it’s maybe not just that solid audio-visual piece, it feels like it could be a lot more.”