A Year in Music – 2023 – Boa Morte

Boa Morte (Cormac Gahan, Bill Twomey, Paul Ruxton, Maurice Hallissey)

How are you? How are things?

Great thanks, we’re all doing really well. You just have to watch the news to realise that we are very lucky, indeed privileged to live the way we do and, for us, to keep on making music.

Do you think it’s been a good year for music? What were your highlights?

Lots of great releases again this year. Albums are still trickling out that were originated during Covid, so I think we’ve seen a lot of new releases both last year and this year. All of us in the band contributed separate lists, with surprisingly little crossover!:

Bill: Lucretia Dalt’s ‘¡Ay!’ – even though it was released end of last year – and (the re-jigged) Black Country New Road’s ‘Live at Bush Hall’. Also, honourable mentions: Sparklehorse ‘Bird Machine’, Lisa O’Neill ‘All of this is Chance’ and Lankum’s ‘False Lankum’. I enjoyed the Billy Woods album ‘Maps’. A late runner for album of the year for me is the excellent John Francis Flynn album ‘Look Over the Wall, See the Sky’. Nearly forgot from earlier in the year Jonny Dillon’s ‘A New Directive From The Bureau of Compulsory Entertainment’.

Maurice: In rough order of preference I’ve been enjoying: ‘Maps’ – Billy Woods, ‘Gut’ – Daniel Blumberg, ‘We Buy Diabetic Test Strips’ – Armand Hammer, ‘trip9love…???’ – Tirzah, ‘I Inside The Old Year Dying’ – PJ Harvey, ‘Dreams In Splattered Lines’ – Wolf Eyes. Albums by Fatboi Sharif, James Holden, JEPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown, Deerhoof, Nappy Nina, Irreversible Entanglements and Sightless Pit amongst others…. Some live highlights for me were Daniel Blumberg at Rewire, Richard Dawson at Le Guess Who and seeing Matmos in the Roundy in Cork.  Currently reading and enjoying ‘The Black Maybe: Liminal Tales’ by Attila Veres.

Paul: I’ve been backtracking through the Neil Young archives and listening to the new Sparklehorse album ‘Bird Machine’.

Cormac: Kofi Flexx – ‘Flowers in the Dark’ (album of the year possibly, surprised it wasn’t on more lists), Modern Nature – ‘No Fixed Point in Space’ (a beautiful sounding record), Julie Byrne – ‘The Greater Wings’ (the title track is an absolutely perfect song), Ancient Infinity Orchestra – ‘River of Light’ (a tribute to Pharoah Sanders), Pharaoh Sanders reissue – ‘Pharoah’, Lisa O’Neill ‘All of this is Chance’. Having finally purchased the 2009 album ‘Alphabet 1968’ and the lockdown release ‘Oocyte Oil..’ (from 2020) Black to Comm delivered again with ‘At Zeenath Parallel Heavens’. Lots of great releases on International Anthem records again this year from Alabaster de Plume, Daniel Villareal (with Jeff Parker and Anna Butterss), and the sadly missed Jaimie Branch. Also greatly missed is Ryuichi Sakamoto and I’ve been going over a lot of his older recordings including ‘async’, ‘Playing the Piano’, the soundtracks, and the 2023 retrospective curated by Inarritu, ‘Travesia’ and the film ‘Coda’. Live music highlights included Alex Somers Liminal Soundbath at the Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival in Cork and Brandee Younger at the Triskel during the Jazz Festival.

Music seems to be on an endless cycle of comebacks – with goth making something of a resurgence this year.  What do you think about that?

It’s heartening that there are so many genres out there being re-invented and even amalgamated – lo-fi, slowcore, indie slacker, metal, math-rock, jazz and hip-hop etc and it’s refreshing that Goth never really went away. John Robb recently published his book ‘The Art of Darkness: The History of Goth’ and he hosted a great evening in UCC (thanks to UCC librarian Martin O’Connor) covering his life in music from the late 70s to now. The book traces the history of Goth from ancient roots to the modern day and its various cultural appropriations along the way, it’s a great read. Goth in musical terms is somewhat of a paradox as its difficult to define but you know it when you hear it and see it. I like the fact that these genres/movements may get amalgamated and mutated into something completely new.

Anyone you’d like to see reform/return?

Bands that I never saw play include These New Puritans (not sure if they’ve been touring recently) and The Blue Nile. Also maybe Tom Waits as I never caught him on his Irish shows in the past. Kate Bush too – reports suggest that those London shows she did were amazing.

Were you happy with how the album The Total Space was received?

We were really pleased with how the album turned out and with some of the gigs we did (belatedly) after the album release – especially a show at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork with staging by Peter Power which was probably the most ambitious event we’ve staged (huge thanks to Dobz O’Brien for putting on the show). Also, the album got some really excellent reviews and great radio play in the UK and Ireland and people who heard it really seemed to connect with it. We’re really indebted to everyone who has supported the album so far, come to the gigs, bought the album and posted on social media and those DJs and journalists who have played and reviewed our music. Doing the Paul McDermott podcast (To Here Knows When – Great Irish Albums Revisited) was really timely as it is a brilliant series and undoubtedly introduced new people to ‘The Total Space’ as well as to our first album (which was the main subject of the interview).  Unfortunately, because we can’t tour extensively it’s really difficult to get the music out to an even wider audience – and in fairness perhaps we can’t expect too much. With each album release though I’m always hopeful that it’ll suddenly just take off – but so far it’s been a slow (20 year) word-of-mouth process!

Anything else you guys are working on, have you started a new album?

Yes, we’re working on new material now – this is probably the part we like best out of the whole cycle of writing, recording, mixing, promoting… We’ve been recording new material in the band room and trying to determine what works and what doesn’t. I’d say we’ll take a break from playing live until we have a decent amount of new material. It would be nice to do something a bit different and we’ll see what comes out of this process!