Based in Cork, Ireland, composer, musician and sound artist Eamon Ivri has spent the past decade or so quietly assembling an eclectic, forward-thinking body of work in electronic music under various pseudonyms, in addition to performing and collaborating on the broader DIY scenes of his hometown and beyond.
From the dark, noisy techno espoused under the Lighght moniker, to deliberate and almost tactile ambience and soundscapes under the self-coined descriptor “gulch” as Mineral Stunting, to found-sound scrambles and chops manifested in Bless Interior Heart Awash With Flames, Ivri has become one of Irish electronic music’s most intriguing points of reference, praised by The Guardian as “a linchpin of non-conforming music” in Cork.
On most recent full-length PSALM015: In the Red Eye of the Evening released in April via UK label Phantom Limb, Ivri, in a rare excursion under his given name, creates dreamy, poignant melodies and tones woven with warp-and-weft density around field recordings, and the occasional excess of volume and distortion, in what he refers to as a collection of “digital pastorals.”
In the Red Eye of the Evening is a triumph in restraint: never quite settling on any sort of standard long-form ambient journey, but neither content to drift away into white noise, or any peaks and/or troughs of sonic manipulation merely for its own sake.
In this conversation, edited for clarity, continuity, and length, Ivri discusses the creation of the record, where it sits in the canon of music and aesthetic endeavor he has fashioned for himself under his various sobriquets, and the nature of creative process in the current social and political climate.
Talk to us about the recording and production of In the Red Eye of the Evening. What were the factors or influences that brought it about, and what about it inspired you to revert to your own name in releasing it rather than using a pseudonym?
Like with a lot of these things, it was done a long time before it came out. Some of the things I do, I end up releasing quite fast, and then some of them, I end up sitting on for a while. I think In the Red Eye of the Evening was actually totally finished in, like, 2022. I was like, “If I’m putting this out under my own name, [it’s] for no other reason than I want to.”
I have friends who release under their own names, and I’ve done a release [under my own name] before with my friend Claire Guerin, and funnily enough, we’re probably going to pick a band name for our stuff going forward. Regardless, I just…wanted to do something under my own name, and I was working on a lot of this music that draws from a lot of different places.
Honestly, I’m just gonna pull up some notes…
Off the top, what was the feeling behind it as you were putting it together?
A lot of the pieces are constructed from field recordings, voice note recordings, and just kind of built up bit by bit, piece by piece. Some of them then get a melody that goes through all of them, but then at the core they might be just me, looking at a length of field recording I’ve taken and just creating an arbitrary start-point and end-point, then leaving the recording itself to dictate the form.
There’s a piece on it, “Inhabited Vessel,” that was made quite intentionally. I knew I was going to do a table performance—literally a mic’d table—performing with a metal bowl and water in different little vessels, just talking as I was doing it. I did three performances, and on each one I’d be listening to the last one, reacting to my performances and then ending up having conversations, almost, with myself as I’m talking in an earlier recording and then I’m answering it. At one point, like, my cat comes into the room and I’m talking to him and he’s coming up to sniff at the stuff I have on the table… I did it because sometimes you just sit down and you go, I’m going to do a table performance and let’s see where we’ll end up—six minutes later: oh, this could be the basis of a piece, let’s keep adding to it.
Another one, I think it’s “Perdition,” is just me at the window of the bedroom in our house and chatting into my phone, just phrases that come into my head, then trying to like elongate them out and find some meaning, like going through an infinite-scroll timeline on my phone, picking out words at random, and then seeing how they relate to my own thoughts.
I’m in an interesting mode where a lot of the stuff I’m doing… when you have something come out and it’s work you’ve done years ago, but the work you’re doing at the moment isn’t really in the same realm, it can be weird. But to be honest, I’ve been working a lot in the kind of sound-spaces that that album has, both in collaboration with other people and just my own stuff. I think it’s maybe settling into my own voice with the music.
When I listen to that record, I go, “Oh, that’s me, and that’s me now,” even if those pieces were made quite a while back. I’m really happy to say, “Hey, this is my work right now, that is representative of it’…
[Ivri finds his notes given to Phantom Limb to inform the press release accompanying the album.]
So I have the words…
“Spectral shades of night intermingled with twilight, car headlight illuminating a patch of wet grass, person obscured by smoke, erased places, hypnotic, gurgle and shimmer, glimmer and fog, sea at night illuminated by searching lights; techniques I use, cut-up poetry, online reading infinite-scroll timelines, picking out words, erasing places, rejoining words, playing on phrases, getting into hypnotic space, leaving stuff emerge and grow. Field recording as a form of journaling, making notes to myself on field recordings from phone and zoom mic, just on my day to day, humming, singing, poetry on the spot.”
Why I sometimes have trouble, I guess, putting words on this is… I’m making by doing in the moment. I’m operating in a place where I’m confident that my own work is saying what I need to say and sometimes what I need to say is that I wanted to make a piece I really enjoyed. It sounds almost really banal when I put it like that, but I want to get into that “head-empty” zone where I’m just creating because I feel really happy and at peace, when I am creating.
Right before its release, you finished a whip-around tour of the UK’s DIY electronic outposts with Gadget and the Cloud, Declan Synnott, and Rising Damp. Talk to us about the temperature right now for DIY spaces and performance, and what you’re noticing.
Man, I don’t know, it feels like something that is so much bigger than you even if you’re embedded in it. Where we went in the UK, we went to three cities—London, Leeds and Glasgow—and you’re getting a tiny snapshot of these massive scenes.
It’s always really awkward to talk about DIY scenes when you’re talking about other cities because even if somebody brings you over, you’re not from there or you don’t live there. You don’t know what people are just doing in their day-to-day. There’s whole scenes within your city of DIY culture that you’re not aware of.
Talking with some people in London, they would say there’s not enough venues for the weird stuff just on the basis of how booked up the venues that already exist are. There’s cool things happening, obviously, in a space like Café OTO, and when I was over there, I went to a gig in a space called Hundred Years Gallery, which had some incredible experimental weirdness downstairs, and then I played a show with a friend in another venue called Spanners.
It’s tough. Like, say, for example, in Ireland, even though there’s people doing really cool things, having cool spaces, and allowing things to happen, [it] just doesn’t feel like enough. Cork is such a small city, and I’ve been to really cool shows in Dublin that I don’t know could exist in [current spaces in] Cork. But scarcity of places that allow good stuff to happen is happening across the board because we’re all affected by the present times in similar ways. I genuinely feel that every instance of somebody doing something cool is an exception to the rule and is more just a testament to the resilience of people wanting to make something cool happen for the friends around them, and not just on the city itself as some abstract concept.
When you see, like, “Oh, shit, this city has [had] a load of cool things happen this year,” I’m always very careful because the credit is purely on a group of friends who probably did everything against the odds to make something cool happen in their town for the people around them.
I’m lucky that there’s people like that in Cork, who will help me sometimes facilitate a weird noise show in PLUGD, I’m lucky that I have friends in Dublin who will do something weird and go, “Eamon, do you want to come up and play this thing that we’ve done?” And it’s like, “Absolutely.” I don’t think I’ve met anyone who goes, “Oh, yeah, our city has an amazing amount of stuff,” without understanding it is people who make that happen, not the city.
I [also] think Ireland has this special case where the weird music has a cross-Ireland scene. You hear about what your friends are doing, like throwing festivals like Open Ear. It’s great to see Willie [Stewart, Nyahh Records] and Natalia [Beylis]’s stuff being so well received worldwide. Even though they’re from Leitrim, they feel part of that scene that’s local around you because it’s a cross-Ireland scene, if that makes sense You’re just gonna end up knowing people through these things.
With that in mind, as well as the state of late-stage capitalism and the doubling-down on the neoliberal project, talk to us about the way forward from the current moment for you, or as you can see it or imagine it.
I’ve started to look at applying for funding and certain things because if it’s there, I should apply for it. But to me, I don’t know how much of it is a solution to this stuff.
To me, arts funding is like universal housing. It’s that idea that everyone should have the right to spend their leisure time however they see fit and they can do that better when they’re not having to worry about keeping a roof over their heads.
Artistic funding is much broader than just giving money to the arts. As artists, we’re part of the broader strata of society, we shouldn’t have to be in a privileged position to be artists. Literally everyone has and should have the right to be able to express themselves.
Cassette
You’ve released a number of projects under different monikers over the years. Talk to us a little bit about the role of these identities, I suppose, in enabling different aspects of your creativity.
Honestly, it depends. All of this, I think besides maybe one or two things that have just haven’t been released, is on my own page. Some of it is really practical in the sense of, “Oh, shit, I ended up making five things this year—I’d better put them out under different names so people don’t get tired, as silly as that sounds.”
With Lighght, I used to make lots of different stuff. Like Holy Endings, an album I did as Lighght, I’m happy that it came through that moniker, but I don’t know if it would come out onto that moniker if I made it now, and that’s fine. With Lighght now, I just want to focus on music that is very club-centered, it’s dance floor music, and that’s a wide remit within itself, as I’ve come to discover.
Maybe that’s what separates the output of Lighght from the other stuff right now. I started the moniker Mineral Stunting because I had In the Red Eye of the Evening finished and I wanted to take my time finding a place to put it out, but I was going to drive myself crazy if I didn’t do something, so I started doing that. And I was like, “Wow, I’m having fun doing it.”
Sometimes there just isn’t that deep a thought in why an alias exists other than “Oh, I really like that combination of words.” And maybe you can discover what it is in the process of working on it, which I think was definitely the case with Mineral Stunting.
And as you say, where Lighght’s imagery vacillates between the club and the dark, Mineral Stunting very much falls into the tactile, the tangible: Ambling Construct, “mineral,” “gulch.”
Yeah, I did an album called Stones and Mud, and I was like, “Wow, I’m really enjoying trying to define this space as I’m making it.” “Gulch” doesn’t really mean anything but it’s in this realm of, like, sound system ambient. Then, with Ambling Construct, leaning in the same sort of zone, not setting parameters on a page and going “Oh, I need to have this much more dissonance or this much more drums,” but just looking at what I do, and going “I’ll create something, a vibe, that’s a little bit different’.
Having an alias can create a framework for creating under that alias, even if you can’t put words on what the framework exactly is. Part of it is discovering what that framework is in the process of creating work.
There’s an album I did as Bless Interior Heart Awash With Flames. I was building it up for a one-off performance and I was recording in shops on my phone, just whatever music was playing on the speakers in shops and cafes, walking through shopping markets. I was recording onto an app on my phone called Koala, and I made loads, and I mean loads, of weird, chopped-up pieces on my phone with them.
The intention was to DJ them together, creating almost chopped-and-screwed versions of the songs, then use that as a building block. My point is, all this is happening under this alias I created for it because it made sense for me to do this under this name. But how I envisioned I was gonna perform it live, completely on CDJs, ended up being a lot of…not work, it just became unfeasible for the deadline, in the end.
I laid it out on my computer. I created one longform thing where I was performing over it with mostly singing, talking, going into duets with my phone, taking old voice notes, holding them up to the microphone, and trying to play them at the same time. I had a tin whistle, just putting that through it. It was this really noisy and weird thing, and it all happened under that name. The alias, just by existing, was this thing that I could explore this whole framework of stuff underneath. Honestly, nothing’s stopping me from doing it under my own name, or as an expansion of Mineral Stunting. It just didn’t end up as that, it just ended up as its own thing.
Can you discuss, then, maintaining that creative process against the backdrop of the current social or economic moment, for lack of a better term, and keeping that productive space around you, as things continuously change?
I want to be super hopeful about all of these things. Inevitably, there’s always going to be negativity because you’re up against it. No matter what you and all the people around you do, we’re just up against it in the world, whatever forces dictate things, like rents: “Oh, the artists really made this space great, now we can finally rent it off to someone who wants to pay some money for it.” It feels like it’s always fucking there, and you have people who make really cool shit happen regardless.
Another example is Unit 44 in Dublin, run by the Kirkos Ensemble providing an incredible space to let amazing stuff happen. I’m not overly negative on anything… it just feels like you’re in a shrinking pond constantly, like a shrinking lake, and like you’re trying to make the best of what’s happening in this space but it feels like you’re running out. People are running out of [resources], and it’s not their fault. And then sometimes it increases, and it goes back, I don’t know.
It’s tough to talk about because it’s tough to talk when the stakes feel high. People have a lot invested, and I don’t mean monetarily: I mean personally, on having cool shit happen around them.
