The Leitrim-based composer and sound artist Natalia Beylis has a new album called Lost – For Annie.
Released on May 24th, it’s the followup album to last year’s Nialler9 favourite Mermaids, an album inspired by a CRB Elettronica Ancona keyboard salvaged from a Leitrim recycling centre and an old family photo of her mother.
Lost – For Annie is a collage of field recordings, sound and music that is “asingular document of ecological activism, community engagement, and artistic expression that gracefully implies questions of how folk – human and otherwise – understand and cope with ecological and sociological changes.”
The album draws on improvised vocals, recordings of documentary-style interviews,solitary instrumental performance and manipulated sampled birdcall, in an attempt to capture the environs of the artist in the countryside of Leitrim.
It features a 19-minute title track, originally written to accompany a 2023 installation by visual artist Annie Hogg, which itself “explores the environmental destruction brought on by large-scale commercial farming, a phenomenon Beylis has experienced firsthand living surrounded by an industrial, monocultural forest”.
Three of the tracks on side two come from a 2022 multimedia work by Beylis, alongside artists Laura Gallagher and Kate Murtagh Sheridan titled Monumental Healing, which made in conjunction with a wider group of volunteers comprising The Leitrim Sweathouse Project. These pieces were “an attempt to understand the origins and uses of the many hidden (and now defunct) sweathouses scattered around the margins of populated zones in Leitrim. The wide-eyed fascination with these sites of healing and recovery, which fell out of use generations ago, is captured on track two ‘Interviews with Participants of The Leitrim Sweathouse Project’.
You can hear an excerpt below of the title song and pre-order on Bandcamp through Outside Time.
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, Cara Magazine, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, founder of Lumo Club, club promoter, event curator and producer of gigs, listening parties & events in Dublin.
