Trá Pháidín

Information

Trá Pháidín's music is of an ambitious breadth, embracing traditional Irish absurdity, jazz, folk and krautrock influences, whilst remaining tantalisingly beyond any one specific understanding of either the world around them or even themselves. More defined however, is their overall conceptual approach, focusing upon original Gaelic music and what lies beyond simply “conas atá tú?”.

Their new album, Cloch‘s Claí (which roughly translates as 'Stone & Wall') develops Trá Pháidín's established interests into more adventurous waters (and walls!) than ever. Based on the historical significance embedded into dry-stone walls, the album presents a satirical view of Éire’s relationship with her native tongue and the Gaeltacht. Constructed of ten tracks, each representative of a stone in a metaphorical stone-wall, Cloch ‘s Claí draws from styles of improvisation in Irish traditional music, exploring avenues of ornamentation and accompaniment in the tradition. As such, the arrangement changes in every performance, a new stone-wall articulated each time.

Inspired by Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht, the wall comes to embody a variety of themes scattered across the landscape and psyche of na Gaeltachtaí - tokenism, housing, gentry politics, ribbon developments and so on. The result is a music expressive of regional styles in traditional music, krautrock, free jazz, post-rock, minimalism and drone presented in a way that feels instinctively fluid and reflective of a hushed existentialism from the west of Ireland.

“ Moving through celestial abstraction, pulsating kosmische grooves and moments of eerie dissociation, their music transforms Connemara into a hallucinatory parallel version of itself” – The Quietus

“... a brilliantly diverse and highly original record incorporating elements of Irish traditional music, earthy psych, ambient, kraut, free jazz, post rock, field recording and just about anything else you care to mention.” – Klof

“An enigmatic but unstoppable force in independent Irish music” – Hot Press