The follow-up to 2025’s acclaimed Gilded turns raw material from an RTÉ summer solstice broadcast on Cape Clear into three finished pieces.
Ian Nyquist placed at number 18 on our 50 best Irish albums of 2025 list for Gilded, a record that took the bodhrán apart and rebuilt it as raw material for electronic composition, putting him alongside Róis, Lullahush and Bricknasty in a run of Irish artists finding new shapes for trad music. He’s back now with Solstice, Cléire, out now via The Equinox, his first release since.
The three tracks began as preparation for a live RTÉ Lyric broadcast this June, staged on the summer solstice from Cape Clear (Cléire in Irish), the southernmost point of Ireland, sitting out in the Atlantic off the Cork coast. Rather than treat the commission as something disposable, Nyquist built the material to hold up on its own once the broadcast was over.
“I was invited by RTÉ & Ambient Orbit to prepare some sounds for a live summer solstice broadcast from Cape Clear,” he says. “Some of the material from the broadcast has since grown into a short set of finished pieces which I hold very dear as a memento from that experience and my time on the island.”
That instinct runs through how he describes his own process more broadly, treating a place or source less as something to depict than as a set of conditions to respond to. “I found myself composing material as part of what felt like very defined pieces from the outset, so these released versions are a preservation of that initial response,” he says.
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The material itself was gathered well before the broadcast took place, found sound lifted from old cassette tapes, his own tape recordings, voice and field recordings, including fragments of shaker music built around a recording of Sister R. Mildred. Most of it, he says, ends up functioning as atmosphere rather than sitting up front in the mix, a way of building space around the more obvious musical elements without necessarily being heard consciously at all, something he attributes to having first shaped the pieces outdoors, live, on the island itself.
Solstice, Cléire tracklist:
- Like A Star On Some Foggy Morning
- Sister R. Mildred (I Never Did Believe)
- Cléire
Solstice, Cléire is out now via Bandcamp.
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.
