When we spoke to the Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds on the podcast earlier this year, it emerged there was a much larger body of work that was written with Talos’ Eoin French alongside ‘We Didn’t Know We Were Ready’.
The album is called A Dawning and is released on July 11th via OPIA / Mercury KX, and was written by the pair before French passed away, and finished by Arnalds after his passing.
“We made this album together,” Arnalds says. “Even after, while I was there working on some arrangements, I never felt like I was truly alone. Near the end, where we were saying how grateful we were to have met each other, he told me, ‘You know, I’m still gonna be there.’”
‘Signs’ is the second song from of this collaboration between the Cork artist and the Icelandic artist who became great friends in the the last few years of Eoin’s life.
The album is “a profound meditation on friendship, loss and experimentation.”
Remembering Talos live show
It is announced alongside a Remembering Talos show at the Cork Opera House on September 11th as part of Sounds From A Safe Harbour.
Tickets go on general sale on May 30th at 10am.
An artist pre-sale is available for anyone who pre-orders the album from Musiczone in Cork between May 21st and May 27th.
Listen to the podcast chat with Arnalds about Eoin:
“At its core, ‘Signs’ feels like a coming together, a curious meeting of creative souls. It’s filled with carefree experimentation and exploration. ‘Signs’ was the first song that Eoin and I wrote together. It was only shortly after we became friends and we were rather decisively paired together by our friend Mary Hickson at her music residency in Cork – she seemed very sure that we would get along musically. She was right, of course. It was the start of an incredible, inspiring, heartbreaking but heartfelt journey that took us places we could never have imagined in our wildest dreams. So it feels appropriate that it comes out as we announce this album that became the fruit of that journey.”
Ólafur Arnalds
A Dawning Tracklist:
1. Shared Time
2. Signs
3. Bedrock feat. Sandrayati
4. west cork, 12 feb
5. Borrowed Time feat. Alexi Murdoch
6. A Dawning
7. for Steph
8. We Didn’t Know We Were Ready feat. Niamh Regan and Ye Vagabonds
Album artwork by Eoin French.
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.
