The Cork artist’s new five-part series Sub-liminal screens in Limerick, Dundalk and Cork this week ahead of new album A Shimmering in October.
Trick Mist has shared ‘Rattling Stones’, the second instalment of Sub-liminal, an audio/visual series, alongside the announcement of new album A Shimmering on Moot Tapes on Friday October 9th.
The premise is simple – Gavin Murray takes a portable speaker to an outdoor place that shaped one of his new songs, plays the song out of it, and films what happens. The music and the environment are captured together by field recording, so the wind and the water and the road end up inside the track.
Five videos, releasing incrementally between July and January. Number two just dropped.
‘Rattling Stones’ was filmed at Átha Ferdia , the river site from The Táin where Cú Chulainn and Ferdia fought each other to the death as friends. Murray uses it to draw a line between a neglected mythological landscape and the generations that the housing crisis has written off, with a heron standing in for transformation and a ritual meeting of fire and water in the river.
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The series is a collaboration with videographer and filmmaker Graham Patterson and field recordist Mícheál Keating. It’s funded by Louth County Council Arts Office.
“The project draws on the Irish mythological concept of liminality, traditionally an in-betweenness between realms. The settings share a sense of limbo, unease and ambiguity posing questions about the housing crisis, notions of progress, the environment and our mythology.”
The locations, mostly in Louth and Cork, take in a derelict site, Ardee bog, the Ardee link road, bathtubs in fields and the Magic Road.
Screenings this week
There’s a compiled documentary version of the whole series, and it’s being screened three times this week, each followed by a Q&A:
- Wednesday September 9th, Test Screen, Limerick
- Thursday September 10th, Roe River Books, Dundalk
- Friday September 11th, Test Site, Cork
See Trick Mist Instagram for more.
The album
A Shimmering is out on Friday October 9th via Moot Tapes, with the LP available to pre-order now. It’s Murray’s third album and his first since The Hedge Maze and The Spade in 2022.
It came out of experiments in what he calls abstract trad, digitally processing and expanding trad instruments and sean nós singing, and primal electronica, soundscapes that sound electronic but are made with acoustic instruments. Dan Walsh of Fixity and Niamh Dalton of Ana Palindrome both feature.
The organising idea is liminal space again, and the aim, in Murray’s framing, is to cut trad loose from the past and use it to tell cautionary tales about the future instead.
A Shimmering is released on Friday October 9th via Moot Tapes.
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.
