Exploring the musical dialogue of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh & Thomas Bartlett’s debut album

“Do you know the feeling you have when you experience a film that affects you, and you leave the cinema and you don’t want to talk to anyone?” asks The Gloaming’s fiddle player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh. “When you don’t want to go home, and you just walk around the streets until that feeling has been given the space it needed?” He pauses for a moment. “That’s something I really value, and I think we succeeded in on this album. To give a feeling— and then to leave the space for you to digest it.”

It is as perfect a description as you could hope to find for a record that’s so satisfyingly hard to pin down. Beautiful, spare and unendingly intriguing, the album draws inspiration from WS Sebald’s 1995 novel The Rings of Saturn (itself reviewed in the New York Times as being “like a dream you want to last forever”).

Largely improvised, these songs shimmer with aliveness and spontaneity, taking cues from the last Talk Talk albums: “On those records, there’s a feeling of things unfolding in a way that has more to do with the natural world and the way a plant grows than some musician making a decision,” says Bartlett; also, the spirit of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks: “I love that you can hear all the wheels falling off the carriage as they’re going,” says Ó Raghallaigh.

A year later, the pair were at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios near Bath, recording a piece for Volker Schlöndorff’s film Return to Montauk (September, 2016). Again, they had extra studio time on their hands. So, after playing like kids on each of the many synthesizers in the main studio, they moved to the smaller Wood Room to record. “There’s a real warmth and resonance there,” says Bartlett, adding, with a laugh, “I think at that point it seemed like, Oh, maybe we actually are making a record.”

It took another year for Bartlett and Ó Raghallaigh to reconvene, for the album’s final session in New York (October, 2017). Here, they recorded at Reservoir in Midtown, where Bartlett and his friend and collaborator Nico Muhly both have their studios; it’s also the workplace of Grammy-winning producer Pat Dillett, who mixed this album. The electrifying album opener, ‘Kestrel‘, was improvised here, initially as a soundcheck, when a fully-formed song fluttered into view.

Naturally, the prospect of playing these largely improvised pieces in a live setting is a juicy one. “The nice thing will be that since I’ve barely listened to this record since sequencing it, I’ll have just as little idea of where the songs go as when we recorded them,” says Bartlett, “So we’ll make different decisions but I think they’ll retain the same feeling.”

The kaleidoscopic possibilities of a tune were opened up to Ó Raghallaigh early. Growing up, the aspiring fiddler was taught in music lessons, “These are the notes of the tune, and then you tell your brain to come up with variations and be very clever.” That all came undone for him as a teen, when he played a simple tune over and over again until he’d exhausted all his clever variations— and there was nothing left. “Beyond that,” he says, “there was an experience I’d never had before, where ideas came from nowhere, through my fingers. Since then, I’m always trying to find ways in which I can cheat myself into a state of not being in control.”

“The challenge is, how do we find ways to embrace chance —and actually create the conditions for chance to thrive?” he asks. Evidence of his search, shared with Bartlett, can be found on the album Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh & Thomas Bartlett— a record shot through with joy, curiosity, mystery and wonder.

“And that’s not just in making music,” he adds. “That’s in everything you do. Make more place for chance.”

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh & Thomas Bartlett’s self-titled album is out on September 13 2019. Tickets for autumn live dates in Cork, Dublin, London and New York are on sale now.

Pre-order the album