A piece the late writer and broadcaster first performed in a Doolin hall in 2023 has been completed by Simon O’Reilly, Myles O’Reilly, Crash Ensemble and a cast of Irish musicians, and arrives on Claddagh Records on Monday October 5th.
Claddagh Records have announced Slí na Samhlaíochta (The Way of Imagination), a spoken-word album from Manchán Magan, who died in October 2025 at the age of 55. The announcement comes on what would have been his 56th birthday.
The record began life at the Hedge School Festival in Doolin in 2023, a small winter gathering in the west of Ireland built around collaboration and workshops. Magan was invited to close the festival with a spoken-word piece he had been developing around Tír na nÓg, the Otherworld, or An Saol Eile.
The festival paired him with Myles O’Reilly and artistic director Simon O’Reilly, who improvised an ambient score live in the room. Visual artist Crosby Dunkley ran a graphic narrative across a large LED screen behind them. By all accounts the atmosphere in the hall stayed with the audience long after the house lights came back up.
In the months after Magan’s death, Simon O’Reilly returned to the recording of that night and started to think about what it could become. With the backing of Magan’s wife Aisling and his brother Ruán, and with Myles O’Reilly driving the sessions, the idea turned into an album.
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It was recorded at the National Concert Hall during this summer’s Dublin heatwave, expanded with Crash Ensemble, vocalist Branwen Kavanagh and harpist Méabh McKenna. A week later the project went back to Doolin, where violinist Ultan O’Brien and double bassist Neil Ó Lochlainn finished it off.
On the day of release, the National Concert Hall stage a one-off live performance of the album under Simon O’Reilly’s musical direction, with Crosby Dunkley’s visuals. That show is already sold out, and will feature:
- Lisa O’Neill, Liam Ó Maonlaí, Crash Ensemble, Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Méabh McKenna, Myles O’Reilly, Branwen Kavanagh, Neil Ó Lochlainn, Ultan O’Brien and Simon O’Reilly, Musical Director.
Magan spent a career arguing that the Irish language preserves an older understanding of reality, one in which nature, imagination and the Otherworld are not separate things. He made that case through books like Thirty-Two Words for Field and Listen to the Land Speak, through live performances such as Arán & Im, through his The Almanac of Ireland podcast, and across dozens of television and radio programmes.
He had a rare knack for making dense material feel like an invitation rather than a lecture, pulling folklore, philosophy, indigenous knowledge and modern science into the same pot. For a lot of people he was the first door into Irish mythology, and that included members of indigenous communities elsewhere in the world who recognised echoes of their own ancestral ways of knowing, often ones that had come through the same colonial pressures.
He kept returning to forgotten words, sacred places and oral traditions, and to how those things still shape a relationship with the land and with each other. An album built from Mangan’s oral narrative, live strings and projected images is about a fitting afterworld missive from a giant of a man.
Slí na Samhlaíochta is out on Monday October 5th on Claddagh Records. Tracklist:
- Tracklist:
- An Saol Eile (The Other World) – 17:38:36
- An Craobh Airgid (The Silver Branch) – 17:48:10
- In am ar n’Gatair (Our Time Of Need) – 11:08:06
- Corrghuineacht (Crane-Magic) – 07:59:01
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
