Lullahush: Irish Trad Rewired

Lullahush, the Ivor Novello Rising Star-nominated project of Daniel McIntyre, is distinctive within Ireland’s emerging vibrant music scene. Conceived by McIntyre, the project debuted in 2022 with A City Made of Water and Small Love, a deconstructed techno album that marked a striking first step. However, it would be a further two years before McIntyre began experimenting with traditional Irish music, with the three-track EP An Todhchaí fusing Irish folk tradition with provocative contemporary electronica to offer a compelling vision for how Irish music could be modernised without being diminished.

After briefly shelving Lullahush while relocating to Athens, McIntyre soon found himself drawn back to his Irish roots – the pull of home inspiring a return to the ideas explored on An Todhchaí with a renewed focus on what he described as “humanising the glitch”, paying deeper homage to Dublin’s geography and culture. The resulting Ithaca is a richly textured blend of past and present, organic and synthetic. In our exclusive interview, McIntyre recounts how he crafted fragmented samples and digitally manipulated narratives into a sonic landscape that is at once nostalgic and forward-looking. Plus, he shares a free sample pack of sounds used and produced for his latest album.

As a Dubliner, I'm presuming you were surrounded by traditional Irish folk music when growing up in and around the city’s pubs and bars?

Actually, not at all - I come from completely outside the tradition. In Ireland, people are almost put down on the list for a set of pipes from the day they're born with the expectancy that they'll be able to play them when they’re big enough, but I played in bands when I was a teenager and got into electronic music after listening to artists like Romare and seeing what they were doing with their respective folk traditions. It was around that time I began thinking that traditional Irish music could also lend itself to being treated that way and started diving into it a little.

Apart from the closing track, "Dublin", your debut LP, A City Made of Water and Small Love, doesn’t overtly reference Irish tradition. When did your interest in exploring that part of your identity begin to take shape?

The way I hear and make music is intrinsically Irish, so the sound I was making on A City… makes sense in that I was blending traditional material inspired by the landscape in ways that could create a true form of expression. Dublin itself has a beautiful coastline, so you're always hearing birds and waves, and my family’s from Donegal in the northwest which is right on the coast. When I was making my first album and finding my own sound, I was doing a lot of traveling with friends, going to different parts of the country and experiencing the tranquillity of all these beautiful places, but it’s a rough kind of beauty - a powerful heaviness, because the weather in Ireland can be pretty extreme at times.

You’re currently living and working in Athens, Greece. Was being away from Ireland the spark for wanting to create music that linked back to it?

It's kind of a cliché that you become more Irish when you move away and I perhaps felt that it was easier to look at this material and the sort of things I wanted to explore from a distance in order to articulate it. But even while making A City… I was starting to get ideas together. I was basically working on four different projects at the time and sent a couple of songs from each to Nathan McLay from the Future Classic label. He was the one who thought that some of the stuff I was working on with Trad music was the most interesting. With his encouragement, I took some of the ideas I'd collected, sat down and thought about what else could be possible without leaving any stone unturned in terms of exploring how I could reimagine the context.

Your first step, the An Todhchai EP, sounds like an experiment that only became fully realised on your latest LP, Ithaca?

With An Todhchai, it was a case of dropping in those ideas I mentioned and just seeing what happened, but the way the samples were used was quite provocative. With Ithaca, the songs became more of a personal expression or articulation of what was going on in my life alongside a sonic idea that wasn’t just about instrumentation and melodies, but expressing the breadth of my history in a way that would be unique. I started using samples on tracks like "Dónal na Gealaí" where I’d retreat into the privacy of my own mind until things started getting super weird. I’d listen to accordion players like Noel Hill talking about his approach to music and the space between the notes or sample Tony McMahon talking about the future of Irish music and look to find little audio treats, adding snippets of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from the 1922 novel Ulysses or The Voice Squad’s line about a Grecian Queen and think, okay, that’s got to go in there! All these ideas were stored in my head, but the beauty of Ableton is that I could grab and document them.

You mentioned that your objective was to create music that’s playful but serious. The playful element is all too apparent, but what was the serious element you wanted to highlight?

I guess the seriousness is about trying to treat my tradition in a way that serves it as opposed to just making some beats and thinking, oh, I’ll add some Trad on top of this to sound cool and slam things together that don’t wrap around each other in a way that elevates them. The artist Meitei is a really good example. His music’s super playful, but the attention to detail in the production and overall treatment of everything means that it deserves to being taken seriously. I think there’s really interesting things happening right now with what people are doing with Trad music, but it's all very serious and reverential, so if you're going to do it within an electronic context it's got to be able to stand up to that. Ireland is a relatively young nation and maybe it's taken a long time for our music to be recognised internationally or for us to have confidence in our own Irishness. A lot of the time, Irish bands were just an imitation of whatever was happening in the UK or America, but now we’re starting to embrace our culture and be more confident speaking with that accent.

You clearly have a fascination for analysing and dissecting sound. How much of your approach is analytical, as opposed to merely toying with sounds to produce a pleasing result?

I wouldn't consider myself super technical, I'm just very lucky to work with a friend that I met through the Red Bull Academy who’s amazing at all that stuff. He mixes and masters everything for me and treats what I do with a lot of respect. I’d probably go a bit insane trying to do all of that myself because it's not my skillset, but that approach allows me to try to make something that sounds interesting and do everything wrong in the knowledge that we can fix it at the end. Having said that, although I’ll often slam stuff on the master, I do like to spend hours working on a 10-second loop and sculpt the sound until it’s on its way to perfection. With that approach, I’m kind of mixing as I go, so when it comes to the full mix nothing integral is really going to change.

Most of the songs have various sung or spoken word segments. Was the music built around those vocal samples or were they layered into the production?

When I'm making stuff I've absolutely no regard for audio fidelity, so I can take anything from anywhere, which I find really liberating. The whole of public recorded history was at my disposal, so sometimes I’d build things around vocal samples and other times I’d be working on a track and realise it was the right place for a specific sample or piece of poetry. With this kind of project, I felt it was really important to be able to connect with the human voice beyond an academic production level, so it’s more about trying to drop samples in a space at the moment they’re needed or bury them quite deeply so you’re feeling the sample rather than hearing it.

One track I found quite fascinating is "Raglan Road" where I believe your 97-year-old great uncle recited a poem by Patrick Cavanagh. How did you get into that conversation with him to develop the track?

I actually asked my dad to try and record my Uncle Jack at some point and, fair play to him, one day he sent me a WhatsApp voice of him spontaneously singing. It sounded amazing, but at the same time I wanted to use that material respectfully rather than include it in a track just for the sake of it. I guess it took me a while to approach that piece and find a way to build an arrangement that complemented it, but by the time I’d sent it to Jack he was quite sick and wasn't really able to communicate about it. I did send it to his family though and they really liked it.

When trying to imbue a piece of music with a sense of meaning, is there a threshold you need to be careful not to cross at the risk of depersonalising it?

I think that's something you develop. I'm interested in the humanness of electronic music and how I can push something into a place of fragility and vulnerability. Although we've exhausted a lot of methods of expression, there's still a lot of potential within production to say what we want in a way that’s challenging, rewarding and valid. Samples can be used as an instrument or a voice, but it's really about thinking about the software you're using and its power for human expression. The vocalists I like most are not always the best singers, but it’s more important what it feels like and I think people can lose sight of that a bit within production. There’s a world where it’s all about fidelity, but I'm more interested in the sound of things breaking and falling apart because that’s a truer path to the soul of whatever you’re doing.

Download Lullahush’s Free “Ithaca” Sample Pack

And how do you technically deconstruct sounds so you can access and create those emotions?

Pretty much everything that I do in Ableton is the result of manipulation, re-pitching and getting into things on a granular level, so it’s definitely my instrument and all of my processes come from that. What I was trying to do with Ithaca was show what you could build out of a piece of audio. I didn't really use Ableton’s Drum Rack or samplers, I just shaped the audio waveforms on-screen, broke things apart and made chaos. You’ve got this sound and you re-harmonise it, pitch it down, process it a bit, do some granular stuff and there's your textures, but everything's built out of the seed of this one piece of audio until it all makes sense. That’s how the electronic stuff’s able to complement the tradition, because it shows what can be grown out of something.

Would you be interested in returning to Ireland and playing these songs in a traditional setting to quantify how your hybrid of old and new is received?

I did a big recording thing last summer and worked with some really good players, so I think that's the next step in developing my material live. Initially, I was just trying to grab samples, left, right and centre and add a little bit of playing, but now I'm interested in exploring how things can work from the ground up. I’ve been working with a concertina player from a family that has a Trad pub in Dublin called The Cobblestone, so I think at some point we're going try do a version of the album there and see how it goes down. In some ways, when you finish an album it’s like a graveyard – the music’s set in stone forever and electronic music has always been hard to play live in a way that isn't just track recreation, so we're trying to find ways to keep it breathing and moving. Ableton will play a big part in that; I’m working on using a ten-year-old APC controller and switching from Ableton’s arrangement view to clip view to see how many of the processes can be implemented live.

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Text and interview: Danny Turner
Photos courtesy of the artist