On April 30th, composer and musician Ordnance Survey (aka Neil O'Connor) brings his acclaimed Nomos: Ó Riada Reimagined project to the inaugural SOUND! Film Festival in Donegal.
Inspired by the music of Sean Ó Riada, Nomos uses technology as a mode of expression so compositional processes are informed by sonographic representations - O'Connor hopes that this variation adds to the language of experimental electronic music in Ireland.
Below, he talks about his artistry and the background to the project.
As a composer, I have been involved in experimental & electro-acoustic music for the past two decades and have performed extensively in Ireland, Europe, Australia, Asia and the US. My work has been shown/performed at MOMA, New York, IRCAM Paris, Institute of Contemporary Art, London and has held residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art and EMS – Swedish Institute of Electro-Acoustic Music, Stockholm, Sweden. After studying Music at Trinity College, Dublin (M.Litt/PhD) under composers Donnacha Denheny and Roger Doyle, I worked with members of the Philip Glass Ensemble and the Bang on a Can Ensemble and largely worked with pieces written with traditional notation. Due to the lack of access to performance opportunities and the limitations of working with notation, I moved into an area that was somewhere between the worlds of contemporary and electronic music production.
Listen: Planxity Irwin Reimagined by Ordinance Survey
Ordnance Survey is a project I began in 2019, that brings together the use of modular synthesizers and collaborative links within the Irish musical landscape. The album Relative Phase (2019) was critically acclaimed both nationally and internationally and featured Sean McErlaine, Linda Buckley and John Mc Entire (Tortoise). Ampere (2020) featured musicians from traditional and temporary music including Donal Lunny (Planxty), Cormac Mac Durimida (Lankum), Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and The Crash Ensemble. Field Work (2021) was assembled, mostly at the home in Drumcondra, Dublin during the Covid-19 pandemic and use of field recordings made in and around Dublin. Further material included audio samples from the television archives and recordings made fifty years ago in West Kerry.
The basic pattern of the song remains in each verse, but the events, the ornaments, vary. This does not necessarily mean that the musician who does not use variations is a bad one; he is a passive holder of tradition. The musician who makes good variations is, on the other hand, a creative contributor to the tradition. He makes it grow and develop (Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage, 1962).
Sean Ó Riada (1931-71) built the foundations of Irish art music by extending traditional music via both classical and folk music. Ordnance Survey's Nomos: Ó Riada Reimagined (2022) uses technology to achieve such aims within electronic music. Using compositional processes within the field of Spectral Music, where musical decisions are informed by the mathematical analysis of sounds, a piece of software called a spectrogram was used and this allowed for sounds to be viewed as individual samples. Information from these samples were then used as the basis in forming the material for the album.
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Listen to Ó Riada Reimagined by Ordinance Survey
Pedal Steel guitarist David Murphy was invited into the studio to collaborate and add to the recordings. Nomos: Ó Riada Reimagined used such approaches, as Ó Riada quotes in his landmark 15-part radio programme Our Musical Heritage, as ‘a creative contributor to the tradition’. Much the same way Ó Riada attempted to add and extend toward the canon of traditional music, it is hoped that this variation adds to the language of electronic music in Ireland now and into the future.
Ordnance Survey Performing Nomos: Ó Riada Reimagined is at the Regional Cultural Centre Letterkenny on April 30th 2023, with Neil O'Connor presenting a workshop earlier that afternoon - find out more about the SOUND! Film Festival programme here.
