Society of Sound: The Gloaming 3

Available now to Society of Sound subscribers, the album was also released last month on Real World Records.

The Gloaming is four master musicians and one singer, seemingly suspended in time as their music unfurls around them, its tendrils reaching out into every nook and cranny of the room. It’s undoubtedly Irish music – with violinists Martin Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, guitarist Dennis Cahill, and with Ó Lionáird, one of the greatest contemporary sean-nos singers. But it’s also more than that: pianist and producer Thomas Bartlett steers the music towards a place where modernity and the old world become one. The heart of The Gloaming remains, but there are touches throughout that signal its points of difference.

The first two Gloaming albums were simple affairs, the band gathering in a studio to record songs they had worked out while playing live. This time was different. Producer Thomas Bartlett says only three of the 10 songs had been road-tested. So instead of The Gloaming playing as a quintet, Bartlett and Ó Lionáird got together in New York a handful of times to work out the songs, they assembled the band for three days in Bartlett’s Manhattan studio – where he shares space with Nico Muhly and Sufjan Stevens – to lay down the bulk of the record, before Bartlett spent a month knitting it together.

Society of Sound subscribers can download here.