Press Releases

• Feb 02 2018 The Gloaming's Live at the NCH out 3/2 via Real World Record

  THE GLOAMING TO RELEASE ‘LIVE AT THE NCH’ MARCH 2ND, 2018 VIA REAL WORLD RECORDS

  Since their formation in 2011, The Gloaming have sold out an unprecedented seventeen consecutive concerts at Dublin’s National Concert Hall (NCH). The band will return to NCH this March to play seven (already sold-out) shows (March 5th, 6th, 7th 8th, 10th, 11th, 12th), which will be their only live appearances of 2018. To mark this occasion, Real World Records will release Live at the NCH, a curated selection of six songs recorded live at the beautiful concert hall.

  Made of master Irish musicians Martin Hayes, Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh, famed sean nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, guitarist Dennis Cahill and avant-garde pianist/producer Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman), The Gloaming’s two studio albums have received raves from The Guardian, NPR Music, NY Times, Paste, Boston Globe and more.

  “There’s no questioning the bona fides of The Gloaming, or the abundant virtuosity and sheer beauty the group brings to every track. But what’s even more impressive is what these five collectively achieve… The Gloaming brings in harmonies, melodic ideas and textures that darken and expand far beyond “traditional Irish music.” In short, this is the rare album that might well transform the syntax of a whole style.” –NPR Music

  The group’s pianist and producer, Thomas Bartlett, is known for his collaborations worldwide including work with The National, St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens, Rhye, David Byrne, and many more. Bartlett selected the six tracks for this live collection after listening to two years of the group’s performances at the National Concert Hall. The six tracks chosen are: “The Booley House,” “Cucanandy,” “The Sailor’s Bonnet,” “The Pilgrim’s Song,” “The Rolling Wave,” and “Fáinleog”.

  The Gloaming’s Live at the NCH gives the listener a sense of their breathless, stunning live performances and showcases their unique fusion of traditional Irish music and post-rock, jazz, and other contemporary influences.

  “The Gloaming puts Irish music through prisms of jazz and minimalism….it’s meta-Irish, ruminations on a long legacy”
  –NEW YORK TIMES

  “The prime minister of Ireland showed up for The Gloaming’s first gig; that’s how big the supergroup’s formation has been for fans of Irish music.”
  –NPR MUSIC

  “Moving the music of Ireland in captivating new directions.”
  –THE NEW YORKER

  +++

  www.thegloaming.net
  http://bighassle.com/publicity/the-gloaming
  www.realworldrecords.com/thegloaming

• Mar 02 2018 The Gloaming Drop 'Live at the NCH' via Real World Records

  THE GLOAMING RELEASES ‘LIVE AT THE NCH’ TODAY
  VIA REAL WORLD RECORDS

  For review downloads, interview requests, St Patrick’s Day features and general coverage, please contact: leigh@bighassle.com

  Watch the recently debuted video for “The Booley House (Live at the NCH)” HERE

  —

  “The Gloaming puts Irish music through prisms of jazz and minimalism….it’s meta-Irish, ruminations on a long legacy”
  — NEW YORK TIMES

  “The prime minister of Ireland showed up for The Gloaming’s first gig; that’s how big the supergroup’s formation has been for fans of Irish music.”
  — NPR MUSIC

  “Moving  the music of Ireland in captivating new directions.”
  — THE NEW YORKER

  Michael Hann (The Guardian) on The Gloaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZh9imuoHHk

  An introduction to The Gloaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF2OdTtNZCI

  The Making of (2): https://vimeo.com/155411457

  The Gloaming at Royal Albert Hall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmq6k0D7w_0

  The Gloaming perform The Sailor’s Bonnet at Other Voices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w7cjXAtpJ4

  Since their formation in 2011, The Gloaming have sold out an unprecedented seventeen consecutive concerts at Dublin’s National Concert Hall (NCH). The band will return to NCH this March to play seven (already sold-out) shows (March 5th, 6th, 7th 8th, 10th, 11th, 12th), which will be their only live appearances of 2018. To mark this occasion, Real World Records released Live at the NCH, a curated selection of six songs recorded live at the beautiful concert hall, on March 2nd, 2018.

  Made of master Irish musicians Martin Hayes, Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh, famed sean nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, guitarist Dennis Cahill and avant-garde pianist/producer Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman), The Gloaming’s two studio albums have received raves from The Guardian, NPR Music, NY Times,  Paste,  Boston Globe and more.

  “There’s no questioning the bona fides of The Gloaming, or the abundant virtuosity and sheer beauty the group brings to every track. But what’s even more impressive is what these five collectively achieve… The Gloaming brings in harmonies, melodic ideas and textures that darken and expand far beyond “traditional Irish music.” In short, this is the rare album that might well transform the syntax of a whole style.”  
  – NPR Music

  The group’s pianist and producer, Thomas Bartlett, is known for his collaborations worldwide including work with Ed Sheeran, St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens, Father John Misty, David Byrne, and many more.

  He’s a writer on the new Eminem / Ed Sheeran  track “River,’ which is #1 in the UK, as well as the song “Mystery of Love.” which he produced for Sufjan Stevens / the film Call Me By Your Name, which was nominated for an Oscar in the best original song category this week.

  Bartlett selected the six tracks for this live collection after listening to two years of the group’s performances at the National Concert Hall. The six tracks chosen are: “The Booley House,” “Cucanandy,” “The Sailor’s Bonnet,” “The Pilgrim’s Song,” “The Rolling Wave,” and “Fáinleog”.

  The Gloaming’s Live at the NCH gives the listener a sense of their breathless, stunning live performances and showcases their unique fusion of traditional Irish music and post-rock, jazz, and other contemporary influences.

  ###

• Jan 15 2019 The Gloaming announce new studio album due out Feb 22

  THE GLOAMING ANNOUNCES NEW STUDIO ALBUM

  THE GLOAMING 3

  DUE OUT FEBRUARY 22, 2019

  VIA REAL WORLD RECORDS

  Listen to instant gratification tracks:

  “Athas (Joy)” and “Sheehan’s Jigs“

  *available on all streaming services on Friday, Jan. 18

  Album Pre-Order: HERE

  Cover art by: Shana & Robert ParkeHarrison

  —

  For review downloads, interview requests and general coverage, please contact:

  leigh@bighassle.com

  —

  “The Gloaming puts Irish music through prisms of jazz and minimalism….it’s meta-Irish, ruminations on a long legacy”

  — NEW YORK TIMES

  “The prime minister of Ireland showed up for The Gloaming’s first gig; that’s how big the supergroup’s formation has been for fans of Irish music.”

  — NPR MUSIC

  “Moving  the music of Ireland in captivating new directions.”

  — THE NEW YORKER

  —

  The Gloaming are delighted to announce that their new studio album The Gloaming 3 will be released on February 22, 2019 via Real World Records. Produced by Thomas Bartlett, it was recorded last autumn in New York at Reservoir Studios. 

  The album is available to pre-order now and by way of introduction, two new tracks “Áthas (Joy)” and “Sheehan’s Jigs” will be available on music streaming platforms from Friday January 18.

  The Lyrics of “Áthas (Joy)” are comprised of some of the last writings of the famed Irish Poet Liam O Muirthile and recall his journeying on the Camino de Santiago. The song is a mediation on the simple yet profound experience of that journey, the rhythms of the walk itself and the act of poetic composition as being one of open awareness and reception. It is also a meditation on life’s brevity and the necessity to free oneself from the stranglehold of artistic responsibility and material concerns and exist instead in the now, welcoming emotional up-wellings and the joyful or profound realizations they bring.

  “Sheehan’s Jigs” are three traditional tunes from the Sliabh Luachra area in the South West of Ireland. You could call them jigs or you could call them slides, and they come to us from the rich, warm and jolly playing of fiddler Denis Murphy. They are followed by the reel Maud Millar, collected by the famous Chicago police Captain Francis O’Neill from piper Barney Delaney sometime around 1900.

  The band are grateful to say has once again been provided by the artists Shana & Robert ParkeHarrison. The author Colm Tóibín has generously shared some thoughts which are included below, along with a full list of tour dates.

  The Gloaming are looking forward to performing this new music in some beautiful venues beginning next month. Please note that from 2020 the band will be taking a break. 

  —

  “There’s no questioning the bona fides of The Gloaming, or the abundant virtuosity and sheer beauty the group brings to every track. But what’s even more impressive is what these five collectively achieve… The Gloaming brings in harmonies, melodic ideas and textures that darken and expand far beyond “traditional Irish music.” In short, this is the rare album that might well transform the syntax of a whole style.”  

  – NPR Music

  The group’s pianist and producer, Thomas Bartlett, is known for his collaborations worldwide including work with Ed Sheeran, St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens, Father John Misty, David Byrne, and many more.

  He’s a writer on the new Eminem / Ed Sheeran  track “River,'” which is #1 in the UK, as well as the song “Mystery of Love,” which he produced for Sufjan Stevens / the film Call Me By Your Name, and was nominated for an Oscar in the ‘Best Original Song’ category and performed live at 2018 Oscars.

  Photo credit: Heidi Solander

  The Gloaming 3 by Colm Tóibín

  What you notice first in the work of ‘The Gloaming’ is the energy that comes from the clash and then the connection between tradition and innovation, between following contours that have been inherited and then creating a new tonal realm for that very inheritance. The music is nourished by diversity and range, it is open to the world, but it is also rooted in Ireland; it comes from a close study and deep knowledge of a tradition strong enough to be played with and enriched.

  In the music of ‘The Gloaming’, there is also a tension between complexity in studio work and arrangement and a sort of simplicity and directness in the way the music hits the listener’s nervous system. In the playing of Martin Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh there is always a melancholy undertone which becomes more forceful as the music lifts and entertains the possibility of joy, paying attention to the rhythm and the melodic line while offering homage to high and hard-won emotion. 

  Iarla Ó Lionáird’s voice has a force that is both haunting and tender. In the versions here of poems ranging from a lament by the seventeenth century poet Eoghan Ruadh Mhac an Bhaird to work by twentieth century poets such as Seán Ó Riordáin and Liam Ó Muirthile, Ó Lionáird has a lovely way of lingering on a note, taking his time on a phrase, varying the way he approaches a line ending. The stark power of his singing is tempered by sheer musical intelligence that is matched by the playing of Dennis Cahill and Thomas Bartlett (Bartlett’s restrained and inspired playing on ‘The Pink House’ is masterly.)

  When you listen to a track like ‘Doctor O’Neill’ on this album, what emerges is the brilliant intuition and unique tact of the band. Listen to Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh as solo player on a hardanger d’amore on the opening of this track being slowly joined by other instruments. The aim is control and subtlety, the maintenance of a single emotion, and then the release of a soaring energy. The ensemble offers a dynamic play between the instruments that, like so much of the music on this album, creates a rare and exhilarating kind of beauty. 

  – Colm Tóibín

  Photo credit: Heidi Solander

  The Gloaming  On Tour 2019 

  Feb 22 –  Utrecht, Tivoli Vredenburg

  Feb 25 –  London, Union Chapel

  Feb 26 – London, Union Chapel – SOLD OUT

  Feb 27 –  Paris, Théâtre de l’Athénée

  Feb 28 – London,  Union Chapel – SOLD OUT

  Mar 2 – Verona, Teatro Ristori 

  Mar 4 – Dublin, National Concert Hall

  Mar 5 – Dublin, National Concert Hall

  Mar 6 –  Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 7 – Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 9 – Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 10 – Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 11 – Dublin, National Concert Hall

  US Dates:

  Apr  6 – New York, Carnegie Hall – SOLD OUT

  Apr 7 –  Boston, Berklee Performance Center

  Apr 10 – Durham, North Carolina, Carolina Theatre 

  Apr  12 – Los Angeles, The Theatre at Ace Hotel

  Apr  14 – Santa Barbara, Campbell Hall 

  Photo credit: Heidi Solander

  Biography by Michael Hann, January 2019

  “We are always trying to allow the music to breathe into a more mantric and transcendent space,” Iarla Ó Lionáird says, and then laughs a little at his own presumption. “This is coming from a guy who hasn’t got a new age bone in his body. But I do believe that is one of the primal purposes of music: to manage mental states. In the case of The Gloaming it achieves a sort of heightened transparency and intensity and goes into a dream state. People want that. They love being taken there and they love dwelling in that place. And so do we.”

  Anyone who has seen The Gloaming perform will recognise the truth of that: four musicians and one singer caught in a moment, seemingly suspended in time as their music unfurls around them, its tendrils reaching out into every nook and cranny of the room. It’s Irish music – how it could be anything else with violinists Martin Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, guitarist Dennis Cahill, and with Ó Lionáird, one of the greatest contemporary sean-nos singers? But it’s also more than that: pianist and producer Thomas Bartlett steers the music towards a place where modernity and the old world become one. You can hear so much in the music of The Gloaming, despite its sparseness, because so much is there. As Hayes puts it, describing their third studio album, The Gloaming 3: “The journey of the band has been the journey of each musician finding their musical sweet spot inside the overall mix. In this recording we are all performing more deeply than ever from our areas of core strength.”

  On The Gloaming 3, the old and new, and the threads between the two, come together in the two songs that bookend the album: Méachan Rudai and Amhrán na nGleann. The former is a setting of a poem by Liam Ó Muirthile, who died in May 2018, the latter an ancient song Ó Lionáird has been singing since he was a boy. Both confront death; the former in a son remembering his mother, the latter in its meditation over a buried chieftain. “They’re siblings, except the first one is beautifully personal and yet it reaches into the universal. And the last one is oddly impersonal. It’s more to do with community and ritual. The ritual of death and of life: they’re both there. I find the first one to be more about life in a way, and the difficulty of letting it go, and the last one is about the mechanics of letting go.”

  In translation, the lyrics of Méachan Rudai are extraordinary, but when Bartlett set it to music he had no idea what it might be about from the words. When he and Ó Lionáird come together, he is dependent on the nature of the singer’s delivery to work out the journey the music might navigate. “I can respond to what is being conveyed emotionally pretty easily,” Bartlett says. “Iarla does talk me through things eventually, and the words of Méachan Rudai are just extraordinary. Iarla had recorded that vocal with very minimal accompaniment, then he went away and I built the whole song around that vocal, and when he came back he was astonished because again and again I had picked harmonic things that seemed to be responding very directly to things in the text, but I didn’t know what the text was: there’s a certain amount of intuiting what’s going on. It’s like Sigur Rós before: you can tell what Jónsi is getting at even if the words are gibberish.”

  “What was interesting about that,” Ó Lionáird says, “and probably instructive, is that when we were writing that – writing and recording it at exactly the same time – he was feeding off whatever energy I was expressing, and then he was sending it back to me in the way he was playing the piano, and the pressure and the power with which he played, and that just fed me more.” The result is an extraordinary and uncompromising recording, one that contains joy and sadness and nostalgia and pain and yearning, and a strange sense of ritual in its repetitions.

  It reflects, too, Ó Lionáird’s preoccupations over the last 12 months. “There was a lot of grieving in my life this year. This was an unusual year for me. My sister died in the spring, and then Liam Ó Muirthile died, and a bunch of other people. It was obviously on my mind. Maybe it’s not so much grieving as reaching a realisation: I think the songs on the record are very much about the realisation that occurs when you reach a certain age, that this is a very temporary situation and we need to reflect that as beautifully and as powerfully and as honestly as we can.That sounds very pious, but that’s where it’s at.”

  Another Ó Muirthile poem, Áthas (Joy), was recorded for perhaps even more personal reasons. “He actually sent that to my mother a few weeks before he died – he had worked with my mother as well. I really wanted to work on that song; I don’t know why. I thought I could do something with it. I spent the whole summer working on it.” It also contains the lines that perhaps sum up the whole ethos of the album, in which death becomes a way to celebrate life: “And I let grief itself / Show without shame / If that’s what I feel.”

  The first two Gloaming albums were simple affairs, the band gathering in a studio to record songs they had worked out while playing live. This time was different. Bartlett says only three of the 10 songs had been road-tested. So instead of The Gloaming playing as a quintet, Bartlett and Ó Lionáird got together in New York a handful of times to work out the songs, they assembled the band for three days in Bartlett’s Manhattan studio – where he shares space with Nico Muhly and Sufjan Stevens – to lay down the bulk of the record, before Bartlett spent a month knitting it together.

  But instead of losing spontaneity, The Gloaming gained something new from the process. “Rather than having these big chunks of music we knew had a particular shape and were set in stone, I was able to make more precise decisions about where the emotional turns happen and showcase Martin and Caoimhín in different ways to where it’s material we’ve all played together, so they have both developed exactly what they are going to do before we record. Whereas with this, I could think, ‘Now I’m going to get just Caoimhín playing this tune and I can build up around it.’ There’s a little more depth and specificity this time around.”

  It also helped Bartlett, as the producer, to make a record that’s reassuringly Gloaming-like without descending into a caricature of what has become a very distinctive sound. “That’s something I’m very aware of, skirting that line. And that’s part of why I felt strongly about opening the record with Méachan Rudai – something that comes out of nowhere and feels very different to what we’ve done before. Then the second track comes in and it’s so The Gloaming – I’ve given us the space to do that by having something so different in front of it.”

  There are little touches throughout The Gloaming 3 that signal its points of difference: from the single repeated note that opens the whole album to the integration of very untraditional instrumentation. “It was fun for me to be able to subtly reinforce different harmonic things,” Bartlett says, “not having to bash them out on the piano but have a voice over to the side. In that sense, this one felt very new for me.”

  But the heart of The Gloaming remains the accident of time and place that brought these five people together. The accident of Thomas Bartlett, as a child, being obsessed by Martin Hayes’ playing and as an adult dreaming of finding a new way to showcase it. The accident of him being elected their producer when taking a nap on the afternoon he first met the other four. The accident of the chemistry between the players, and the instinctive sympathy between them and Ó Lionáird, enabling words sung in a language that few who hear the group can speak to communicate their truths through sound.

  “They are going into some sonic world, an area where dots from all sorts of worlds connect,” Ó Lionáird says of his bandmates. “With The Gloaming it all has to do with when we happened and who was in the room. If it had been anytime else and anyone else I don’t think this conversation would be happening.”

  More on The Gloaming:

  LIVE AT THE NATIONAL CONCERT HALL OUT NOW ON REAL WORLD RECORDS

  Watch the special broadcast on RTÉ One: HERE

  *show attended by the President of Ireland

  Watch the video for “The Booley House (Live at the NCH)” HERE

  —

  Michael Hann (The Guardian) on The Gloaming:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZh9imuoHHk

  An introduction to The Gloaming:  

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF2OdTtNZCI

  The Making of (2):  

  https://vimeo.com/155411457

  The Gloaming at Royal Albert Hall:  

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmq6k0D7w_0

  The Gloaming perform “The Sailor’s Bonnet” at Other Voices:  

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w7cjXAtpJ4

  ++

  www.thegloaming.net

  http://bighassle.com/publicity/the-gloaming

  www.realworldrecords.com/thegloaming

• Feb 22 2019 Contemporary Irish/American musicians, The Gloaming, rele...

  THE GLOAMING RELEASES NEW STUDIO ALBUM

  THE GLOAMING 3

  OUT TODAY

  VIA REAL WORLD RECORDS

  Album available everywhere: Listen HERE

  For review downloads, interview requests and general coverage, please contact:

  leigh@bighassle.com

  —

  “The Gloaming puts Irish music through prisms of jazz and minimalism….it’s meta-Irish, ruminations on a long legacy”

  — NEW YORK TIMES

  “The prime minister of Ireland showed up for The Gloaming’s first gig; that’s how big the supergroup’s formation has been for fans of Irish music.”

  — NPR MUSIC

  “Moving  the music of Ireland in captivating new directions.”

  — THE NEW YORKER

  —

  The Gloaming are delighted to share their new studio album, The Gloaming 3, out today, February 22, 2019, via Real World Records. Produced by Thomas Bartlett, it was recorded last autumn in New York at Reservoir Studios. With ten sold out shows coming up in London, Ireland and New York City, the band is currently on tour.

  The band are grateful to say artwork for the record has once again been provided by the artists Shana & Robert ParkeHarrison. The author Colm Tóibín has generously shared some thoughts which are included below, along with a full list of tour dates.

  The Gloaming are looking forward to performing this new music in some beautiful venues, starting tonight in Netherlands. Please note that from 2020 the band will be taking a break.

  —

  “There’s no questioning the bona fides of The Gloaming, or the abundant virtuosity and sheer beauty the group brings to every track. But what’s even more impressive is what these five collectively achieve… The Gloaming brings in harmonies, melodic ideas and textures that darken and expand far beyond “traditional Irish music.” In short, this is the rare album that might well transform the syntax of a whole style.”  

  – NPR Music

  —

  The group’s pianist and producer, Thomas Bartlett, is known for his collaborations worldwide including work with Ed Sheeran, St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens, Father John Misty, David Byrne, and many more.

  He’s a writer on the new Eminem / Ed Sheeran  track “River,'” which is #1 in the UK, as well as the song “Mystery of Love,” which he produced for Sufjan Stevens / the film Call Me By Your Name, and was nominated for an Oscar in the ‘Best Original Song’ category and performed live at 2018 Oscars.

  The Gloaming 3 by Colm Tóibín

  What you notice first in the work of ‘The Gloaming’ is the energy that comes from the clash and then the connection between tradition and innovation, between following contours that have been inherited and then creating a new tonal realm for that very inheritance. The music is nourished by diversity and range, it is open to the world, but it is also rooted in Ireland; it comes from a close study and deep knowledge of a tradition strong enough to be played with and enriched.

  In the music of ‘The Gloaming’, there is also a tension between complexity in studio work and arrangement and a sort of simplicity and directness in the way the music hits the listener’s nervous system. In the playing of Martin Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh there is always a melancholy undertone which becomes more forceful as the music lifts and entertains the possibility of joy, paying attention to the rhythm and the melodic line while offering homage to high and hard-won emotion.

  Iarla Ó Lionáird’s voice has a force that is both haunting and tender. In the versions here of poems ranging from a lament by the seventeenth century poet Eoghan Ruadh Mhac an Bhaird to work by twentieth century poets such as Seán Ó Riordáin and Liam Ó Muirthile, Ó Lionáird has a lovely way of lingering on a note, taking his time on a phrase, varying the way he approaches a line ending. The stark power of his singing is tempered by sheer musical intelligence that is matched by the playing of Dennis Cahill and Thomas Bartlett (Bartlett’s restrained and inspired playing on ‘The Pink House’ is masterly.)

  When you listen to a track like ‘Doctor O’Neill’ on this album, what emerges is the brilliant intuition and unique tact of the band. Listen to Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh as solo player on a hardanger d’amore on the opening of this track being slowly joined by other instruments. The aim is control and subtlety, the maintenance of a single emotion, and then the release of a soaring energy. The ensemble offers a dynamic play between the instruments that, like so much of the music on this album, creates a rare and exhilarating kind of beauty.

  – Colm Tóibín

  The Gloaming  On Tour 2019 

  Feb 22 –  Utrecht, Tivoli Vredenburg

  Feb 25 –  London, Union Chapel

  Feb 26 – London, Union Chapel – SOLD OUT

  Feb 27 –  Paris, Théâtre de l’Athénée

  Feb 28 – London,  Union Chapel – SOLD OUT

  Mar 2 – Verona, Teatro Ristori

  Mar 4 – Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 5 – Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 6 –  Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 7 – Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 9 – Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 10 – Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  Mar 11 – Dublin, National Concert Hall – SOLD OUT

  US Dates:

  Apr  6 – New York, Carnegie Hall – SOLD OUT

  Apr 7 –  Boston, Berklee Performance Center

  Apr 10 – Durham, North Carolina, Carolina Theatre

  Apr  12 – Los Angeles, The Theatre at Ace Hotel

  Apr  14 – Santa Barbara, Campbell Hall

  Biography by Michael Hann, January 2019

  “We are always trying to allow the music to breathe into a more mantric and transcendent space,” Iarla Ó Lionáird says, and then laughs a little at his own presumption. “This is coming from a guy who hasn’t got a new age bone in his body. But I do believe that is one of the primal purposes of music: to manage mental states. In the case of The Gloaming it achieves a sort of heightened transparency and intensity and goes into a dream state. People want that. They love being taken there and they love dwelling in that place. And so do we.”

  Anyone who has seen The Gloaming perform will recognise the truth of that: four musicians and one singer caught in a moment, seemingly suspended in time as their music unfurls around them, its tendrils reaching out into every nook and cranny of the room. It’s Irish music – how it could be anything else with violinists Martin Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, guitarist Dennis Cahill, and with Ó Lionáird, one of the greatest contemporary sean-nos singers? But it’s also more than that: pianist and producer Thomas Bartlett steers the music towards a place where modernity and the old world become one. You can hear so much in the music of The Gloaming, despite its sparseness, because so much is there. As Hayes puts it, describing their third studio album, The Gloaming 3: “The journey of the band has been the journey of each musician finding their musical sweet spot inside the overall mix. In this recording we are all performing more deeply than ever from our areas of core strength.”

  On The Gloaming 3, the old and new, and the threads between the two, come together in the two songs that bookend the album: Méachan Rudai and Amhrán na nGleann. The former is a setting of a poem by Liam Ó Muirthile, who died in May 2018, the latter an ancient song Ó Lionáird has been singing since he was a boy. Both confront death; the former in a son remembering his mother, the latter in its meditation over a buried chieftain. “They’re siblings, except the first one is beautifully personal and yet it reaches into the universal. And the last one is oddly impersonal. It’s more to do with community and ritual. The ritual of death and of life: they’re both there. I find the first one to be more about life in a way, and the difficulty of letting it go, and the last one is about the mechanics of letting go.”

  In translation, the lyrics of Méachan Rudai are extraordinary, but when Bartlett set it to music he had no idea what it might be about from the words. When he and Ó Lionáird come together, he is dependent on the nature of the singer’s delivery to work out the journey the music might navigate. “I can respond to what is being conveyed emotionally pretty easily,” Bartlett says. “Iarla does talk me through things eventually, and the words of Méachan Rudai are just extraordinary. Iarla had recorded that vocal with very minimal accompaniment, then he went away and I built the whole song around that vocal, and when he came back he was astonished because again and again I had picked harmonic things that seemed to be responding very directly to things in the text, but I didn’t know what the text was: there’s a certain amount of intuiting what’s going on. It’s like Sigur Rós before: you can tell what Jónsi is getting at even if the words are gibberish.”

  “What was interesting about that,” Ó Lionáird says, “and probably instructive, is that when we were writing that – writing and recording it at exactly the same time – he was feeding off whatever energy I was expressing, and then he was sending it back to me in the way he was playing the piano, and the pressure and the power with which he played, and that just fed me more.” The result is an extraordinary and uncompromising recording, one that contains joy and sadness and nostalgia and pain and yearning, and a strange sense of ritual in its repetitions.

  It reflects, too, Ó Lionáird’s preoccupations over the last 12 months. “There was a lot of grieving in my life this year. This was an unusual year for me. My sister died in the spring, and then Liam Ó Muirthile died, and a bunch of other people. It was obviously on my mind. Maybe it’s not so much grieving as reaching a realisation: I think the songs on the record are very much about the realisation that occurs when you reach a certain age, that this is a very temporary situation and we need to reflect that as beautifully and as powerfully and as honestly as we can.That sounds very pious, but that’s where it’s at.”

  Another Ó Muirthile poem, Áthas (Joy), was recorded for perhaps even more personal reasons. “He actually sent that to my mother a few weeks before he died – he had worked with my mother as well. I really wanted to work on that song; I don’t know why. I thought I could do something with it. I spent the whole summer working on it.” It also contains the lines that perhaps sum up the whole ethos of the album, in which death becomes a way to celebrate life: “And I let grief itself / Show without shame / If that’s what I feel.”

  The first two Gloaming albums were simple affairs, the band gathering in a studio to record songs they had worked out while playing live. This time was different. Bartlett says only three of the 10 songs had been road-tested. So instead of The Gloaming playing as a quintet, Bartlett and Ó Lionáird got together in New York a handful of times to work out the songs, they assembled the band for three days in Bartlett’s Manhattan studio – where he shares space with Nico Muhly and Sufjan Stevens – to lay down the bulk of the record, before Bartlett spent a month knitting it together.

  But instead of losing spontaneity, The Gloaming gained something new from the process. “Rather than having these big chunks of music we knew had a particular shape and were set in stone, I was able to make more precise decisions about where the emotional turns happen and showcase Martin and Caoimhín in different ways to where it’s material we’ve all played together, so they have both developed exactly what they are going to do before we record. Whereas with this, I could think, ‘Now I’m going to get just Caoimhín playing this tune and I can build up around it.’ There’s a little more depth and specificity this time around.”

  It also helped Bartlett, as the producer, to make a record that’s reassuringly Gloaming-like without descending into a caricature of what has become a very distinctive sound. “That’s something I’m very aware of, skirting that line. And that’s part of why I felt strongly about opening the record with Méachan Rudai – something that comes out of nowhere and feels very different to what we’ve done before. Then the second track comes in and it’s so The Gloaming – I’ve given us the space to do that by having something so different in front of it.”

  There are little touches throughout The Gloaming 3 that signal its points of difference: from the single repeated note that opens the whole album to the integration of very untraditional instrumentation. “It was fun for me to be able to subtly reinforce different harmonic things,” Bartlett says, “not having to bash them out on the piano but have a voice over to the side. In that sense, this one felt very new for me.”

  But the heart of The Gloaming remains the accident of time and place that brought these five people together. The accident of Thomas Bartlett, as a child, being obsessed by Martin Hayes’ playing and as an adult dreaming of finding a new way to showcase it. The accident of him being elected their producer when taking a nap on the afternoon he first met the other four. The accident of the chemistry between the players, and the instinctive sympathy between them and Ó Lionáird, enabling words sung in a language that few who hear the group can speak to communicate their truths through sound.

  “They are going into some sonic world, an area where dots from all sorts of worlds connect,” Ó Lionáird says of his bandmates. “With The Gloaming it all has to do with when we happened and who was in the room. If it had been anytime else and anyone else I don’t think this conversation would be happening.”

  More on The Gloaming:

  LIVE AT THE NATIONAL CONCERT HALL OUT NOW ON REAL WORLD RECORDS

  Watch the special broadcast on RTÉ One: HERE

  *show attended by the President of Ireland

  Watch the video for “The Booley House (Live at the NCH)” HERE

  —

  Michael Hann (The Guardian) on The Gloaming:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZh9imuoHHk

  An introduction to The Gloaming:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF2OdTtNZCI

  The Making of (2):

  https://vimeo.com/155411457

  The Gloaming at Royal Albert Hall:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmq6k0D7w_0

  The Gloaming perform “The Sailor’s Bonnet” at Other Voices:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w7cjXAtpJ4

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